Life in Rewind. Terry Murphy Weible

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      Of course, recapturing the good feeling he’d once had at Clemson was out of the question. He called Rudy, but couldn’t commit to plans that involved leaving the hotel room. He remembers one of the guys from the team, Brad Thompson, stopping by to see him, but he never managed to make his way back to campus. And after spending two weeks mostly watching television, ordering food and taking Zeus outside for brief walks-he packed up his car and went home.

      Back at his father’s house, Ed could only motivate himself to work sporadically, and only in so far as he wanted to ensure his father’s safety. He would carry all of the heavy tools and equipment up and down the stairs because he didn’t want to risk Bob getting hurt. His activities became increasingly more limited, to the point where he was staying in the basement watching movies and cartoons and playing video games nearly all the time. When Ed did venture out to someplace like the local mall, one journey would turn into a series of subsequent ones throughout the week, as many as 16 times back and forth, to ‘erase’ the initial journey.

      Rewinding and erasing an event made sense to Ed because if one action-whatever it was-moved him forward in time, doing it again precisely kept time in place-in his mind. There is absolutely nothing logical about this way of thinking-and there is no clinical explanation for Ed’s specific rewinding manifestation-but this is how OCD manifested in his mind…his obsession over the number of times something happened was connected to time in his mind…he was compelled to ‘erase’ the event by repeating it-and in performing this ritual he believed this kept time from moving forwards.

      Between his last visit to Clemson in 1993 and the summer of 1995 there were periods of time when the severity of Ed’s OCD seemed to wane before rebounding into greater obsessive and compulsive rituals. His brother Tom came home from the service, giving him a greater sense of family and bringing with him a sense of calm and relief. Life was far from perfect for Ed, but now it was at least manageable and ordinary. But OCD was the dark shadow lurking in the corner-it never completely went away-and every time it showed its face it became harder to dismiss.

      High school friend Jason Peters recalls a trip with Ed to Emerald Square City Mall in North Attleboro, about an hour and a half from home. Ed seemed fine the whole day, until he accidentally dropped his keys in the mall’s car park as the two were about to head home. When Ed reached down to pick them up, his hand brushed the ground. This started a chain-reaction of touching obsessions, and the need to touch and retouch the car park an even number of times to erase the event.

      Ed didn’t want to inconvenience Jason, or embarrass himself, and he fought the desperate urge to continue touching the ground, though he hadn’t reached that elusive magic number of touches that felt right. He forced himself to get back into the car. But he remained quiet on the way home as he counted backwards and forwards, visualizing his hand touching the ground, hoping this would satiate his seemingly uncontrollable mental demands. But halfway home Ed succumbed to the anguish that plagued him and told Jason to turn back-he didn’t tell him the real reason, because that would’ve been humiliating. Instead he said he’d dropped his driver’s licence back at the car park at the same time he’d dropped his keys, and had to go back to get it.

      Jason turned the car around and, when they returned to the spot, Ed got out of the car and began acting as if he were frantically searching for his licence, while he touched the spot in the car park over and over until he reached the number of touches (an even number, of course) that would placate his anxiety. The number was always different, so he could be in one spot for four minutes, or four hours. Fortunately he was able to accomplish the touches he needed to make in just a couple of minutes as he ‘frantically searched’ for his driver’s licence. It wasn’t until years later that Ed admitted the ruse to Jason.

      The need to walk backwards and retrace his steps was also becoming much harder to suppress, and consequently more difficult to hide. ‘We’d go into public places and Eddie would have to walk down the stairs backwards,’ recalls Jason. ‘It got pretty bad. I had an idea of what was going on, because I had seen a television programme about OCD, but the other guys just thought he was acting crazy, and would make fun of him.’ Jason recalls some of their friends doing impersonations of Ed’s behaviour when he wasn’t around, mimicking the backwards walking and tiptoeing across tiles. They weren’t being malicious-they were just young guys having fun-but when Ed’s rituals started to include wearing the same clothes over and over, which of course he couldn’t even attempt to hide, they teased him about it to his face.

      In 1995, Ed invited his friend Kevin Frye’s cousin, Donald, to live with him when he needed a place to stay. Ed thought it might be good for him to have the company and, hopefully, a distraction from his repetitive behaviours. But the OCD had already created in him the need to manage the perfect placement of everything in his world. It didn’t matter if it was a bar of soap, a magazine on the table or a box on the floor. His world was already becoming an ‘OCD Holy Ground’, and the meticulousness with which he monitored his belongings-protective over them as if they were his children, not wanting them moved, or so much as touched-was extraordinary. ‘I can look at the markings and placement of things, and I can see, within millimeters, if something has been moved,’ says Ed.

      In the bathroom, Ed would look at the seams of the tiles, gauge the gap between the seams, and know if Donald had touched his shampoo or soap in the corner of the shower. Ed would become agitated by disruption of his space and the idea that another person had actually touched his things. Each tiny infraction was magnified a thousand times, and it caused actual physical discomfort best described as that feeling you get from sharp nails scratching a chalkboard, creating waves of nausea.

      OCD, unchecked and untreated, can splinter into a multitude of manifestations-a sufferer who is afraid to enter a room with tiles on the floor can suddenly find herself with contamination issues. A student who has to write his name on a piece of paper without erasing, and rewrite it countless times until it is perfect, may suddenly be unable to enter a mall with his friends without having to exit through the same door they came in. Perhaps a housewife who can’t leave her home without checking the lock 20 times is suddenly burdened by intrusive sexual thoughts. There is no logical, or predictable, path of progression of the illness.

      Donald’s presence triggered the force of Ed’s need to have everything in his world in its exact place. At this point, in the summer of 1995, he was still able to venture outside, and so he made a trip to the chemist’s to buy four sets of bath products for Donald, hoping it would prevent him from using his. But of course, in the ordinary sharing of one’s bath and shower things get moved, touched and used. Ed’s anxiety escalated. ‘Everybody saw my behaviour as controlling, but anybody who knows who I really am as a person knows that’s the last thing I want to do,’ says Ed. While the two men remained friends, they did eventually agree to end their shared living arrangement. ‘That’s why I started living in a hell all by myself, because I didn’t want to be a burden to anybody,’ recalls Ed.

      By the autumn of 1995, Ed spent most of his time alone in the basement as his checking, counting, hoarding, rewinding and contamination issues began to meld into a conglomeration of rituals that would lead to his eventual solitary confinement. He was not yet fully immersed in what would become his OCD ‘sanctuary’, however. It was on one of those rare days that he felt OK that he decided to invite Donald to eat out at a restaurant about 25 miles from his home. Don drove and, after an uneventful, quiet lunch, decided to use the airport roundabout on the way home, a detour from the path they had taken to get to the restaurant.

      While Don vaguely remembers the incident, Ed recalls, with absolute clarity, yelling and pleading with Don to go another way, or be let out of the car. But Don was in a hurry to get to work, and didn’t understand СКАЧАТЬ