You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| Chapter Nine Three Stories of Personal Transformation In this chapter you’ll meet a few folks who put the energy of their consciousness into the immaterial world beyond the senses and repeatedly embraced a possibility until it materialized into their lives. Laurie’s Story At age 19, Laurie was diagnosed with a rare degenerative bone disease, called polyostotic fibrous dysplasia. In this debilitating condition, the body replaces normal bone with a cheaper, fibrous tissue, and the skeleton’s supportive protein scaffolding becomes uncharacteristically thin and irregular. The atypical growth process associated with the syndrome causes bones to swell, weaken, and then fracture. Fibrous dysplasia can occur in any part of the skeleton, and in Laurie’s body, it manifested in her right femur, right hip socket, right tibia, and some of the bones of her right foot. Her doctors told her the disease had no cure. Fibrous dysplasia is a genetic condition that usually doesn’t manifest until adolescence. In Laurie’s case, she spent a whole year limping painfully around her college campus with what turned out to be a femoral fracture, before any sign of the disease surfaced. She was shocked to hear she’d broken a bone, because she hadn’t suffered any trauma. Other than one foot being anatomically larger than the other, Laurie hadn’t seen any evidence that anything was wrong with her until that point. She’d lived a relatively active youth filled with activities like running, dancing, and playing tennis. At the time she began limping, she’d even begun training as a competitive bodybuilder. After the diagnosis, Laurie’s life changed overnight. Her orthopedic surgeon warned her that she was fragile and extremely vulnerable. He insisted that she walk only with crutches until he could schedule her for surgery first a bone graft, followed by the insertion of a Russell-Taylor femoral nail down the bone shaft. After hearing that news, both Laurie and her mother spent an hour crying in the hospital cafeteria. It was like some sort of nightmare Laurie’s life, as she knew it, seemed to be suddenly over. Laurie’s perception of her limitations—both real and imagined—began to dominate her life. To avoid additional fractures, she followed the surgeon’s orders and dutifully used the crutches. She had to quit the marketing internship she’d recently begun with a major Manhattan 195 product manufacturer and, instead, began filling her days with medical appointments. Her father insisted she see as many orthopedic specialists as possible, so her weeping mother drove Laurie from doctor’s office to doctor’s office over the next several weeks. Each time she saw anew doctor, Laurie would patiently wait fora different medical opinion, only to receive the same bad news again. In just a few months, ten surgeons had weighed in on her condition. The last physician she saw did have a different opinion He told Laurie that the surgery the other doctors had recommended absolutely wouldn’t help her, because inserting the nail would strengthen the diseased bone only in the weakest location and would actually cause more fractures in the next most vulnerable area above or below the nail. He advised Laurie to forget about surgery and continue using crutches or a wheelchair—or simply become sedentary for the rest of her life. From then on, Laurie remained still most of the time for fear she might break a bone. She felt powerless, small, and fragile, and she was filled with anxiety and self-pity. She did return to college a month later, but stayed largely cooped up in an apartment that she shared with five other women. She cultivated an impressive ability to cloak a severe and mounting clinical depression. Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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