Imprisonment

Perhaps imprisonment is not precisely the right word to describe my circumstances at the Ranch.  After all, every time I likened my experience there to incarceration, one of the nurses would remind me that I had come to Remuda voluntarily, that I could leave at any time.   I suppose technically the nurses are right.  Remuda is not a prison in the traditional punitive sense of the world, but it does naturally create feelings of confinement in its patients, not unlike a prison would create in its inmates.  Furthermore, at the Ranch, patients’ freedoms were directly connected to good behavior – meaning obedience, adherence to the rules – in the same way an inmate’s behavior affects his privileges during incarceration.

The privilege system I speak of consists of three different levels:  red, yellow, and green.  Red is the lowest level and the most difficult deal to with; green the highest and the most tolerable.  Everyone comes in on red status, which more or less means that you are not allowed to do anything on your own.  On my first day, I was given a red bracelet with my name, my date of birth, and a list of allergies.  For the first three days after admittance, you are not allowed to make phone calls, flush your own toilet, leave the lodge, or attend any therapy sessions or classes.  In other words, you have to sit on a couch all day long with nothing to do and no one to talk to.  Television is not allowed until 7 o’clock.  Only self-help books or religious texts are permitted.  There is no Internet.  Cell phones are confiscated.   Standing for extended periods constitutes excessive exercise.  To make matters worse, all the people on yellow and green status spend most of the day outside the lodge attending activities.   The monotony is punctuated only by meal and snack times, which happens more often than you might expect:  3 meals, 3 snacks a day, 2 hours between each.    

Not only are entertainment and exercise forbidden, but nursing staff are required to monitor patients at all times, which means that every time you turn around someone is reminding you of something else that you can’t do.  For a thirty year old, self reliant individual such as myself, this was particularly difficult to handle.  For the first time in my life, I was made to feel like a criminal for flushing the toilet after using the bathroom as if my flushing was more likely a cover-up for forbidden activity, despite the fact that I only throw up when violently ill, than the result of 30 years of living in polite society.  My luggage was searched thoroughly as well – for what, I didn’t know.  But I assumed the nurses were looking for diet pills, alcohol, ipecac, anything that might obviously relate to eating disorders.  No, rather they were looking for dental floss, alcohol based face cleansers, tampons, anything that I could conceivably use to kill myself or get drunk.  It remains unclear to me how anyone could actually terminate his/her life with a strip of dental floss.   I did find out though that some girls were swallowing tampons to fill up their stomachs.  Go figure.  At any rate, I suppose I understand now why they wouldn’t let us call home for three days after arrival. 

First Dinner

I don’t remember what meal was served that first evening, at 5:30 p.m. exactly - “the early bird special” I would call it later – but I do remember that I was really hungry to eat it.  I hadn’t eaten much of anything the first day, and my eating pattern at that time consisted more or less of one meal a day, and that meal was dinner.  Every day I looked forward to dinner, salivating almost, to let myself eat, though in this environment being hungry was something to be ashamed of, at least if you were classified, as I was, as a “restrictor.”  Bulimics are allowed to be hungry, but the majority of the girls seemed to dread the call to meals.  They crowded around the medicine window to get anti-anxiety pills.  They paced back and forth.  They practically vibrated with fear.

At Remuda, there are three tables for meals.  A monitor sits at each, surrounded on either side by patients each of whom have been seated in a complex pattern according to their “Ranch age.”  The longer you had been in, the “older” you were.   “Younger” patients are seated closer to the monitor and “older patients” further away.  The monitor is there to ensure that every girl finishes her food in the allotted time period – 30 minutes for meals, 15 minutes for snacks – and refrains from using food rituals at the table.  Food ritual is catch phrase they use at Remuda to classify any and all behavior that falls outside the norm as Remuda defines it.  There is a long list of possible food rituals, none of which we were allowed to do.  Among the myriad forbidden behaviors are the following:  putting ice in milk, cutting food into small pieces, peeling grapes, eating food one by one, eating food in a particular order.  We were required to keep our elbows on the table at all times and to turn our pocketed sweatshirts inside out, though depending on who was monitoring your table at any given time, the rules would change.  

You can imagine how awkward it was for me sitting down to a much anticipated first meal, hungry, looking forward to some real conversation with the other girls, only to find that meals are not a pleasant experience at the Ranch.  They are highly regulated, tense, exercises in restraint and for most of us, withdrawal from the addiction of food restriction.  What is more, the first three days, I was put on the “gentle diet,” mostly soups, jellos, and juices to get my stomach accustomed to eating again.  Little did they know, of course, that I would eat pretty much anything (hot wings, beer, chili) just not very much of it.  I was, therefore, very disappointed by the prison fair that lay before me.    The other girls had larger meals that they had chosen themselves:  spaghetti and meat balls, baked chicken and rice, hamburgers.   There was virtually no conversation.  A few girls may have asked me where I was from and exchanged a few words with each other about the day’s events, but other than that, it was silent.  Girls cut their food into tiny pieces and slowly, painfully, put each bite into their mouths and chewed.  It was excruciating to watch.  Being hungry and bereft of conversation to distract me, I scarfed down my soup and jello in a matter of minutes, and then had to sit there and watch the remainder of the painful proceedings.  I thought finishing my food quickly was a good thing, that it would somehow prove I didn’t need to be at the Ranch after all; however, finishing too fast is just as bad as finishing too late.   It’s all about pacing.  No wonder all the girls had been silent.  They were concentrating.  They were counting the minutes, counting the bites, trying not to go outside the parameters of this imprisonment.

The Exam

After what seemed like an eternity sitting at the table in the main lodge, pretending to fill out informational forms, trying to avoid eye contact with my fellow inmates, I was ushered into a back room for a physical examination.  They had me strip down naked, change into a gown, and then predictably step on a scale, the numbers of which were carefully covered.  Then they drew blood, asked me informational questions about my health history, and hooked me up to an electrocardiogram machine.  The machine, it was soon determined, was not working because it had run out of printer paper.  As I lay there, naked, covered only by a thin sheath of fabric, a parade of nurses moved in and out of the room, each one fussing over the machine, attempting to load new paper, failing, calling reinforcements.  I wanted to assure them:  “it’s okay.  We can do this later.  I’m sure no one will notice.”  But I knew there was nothing I could do.  I was silent, or maybe I was crying softly.  I can’t remember.  Finally, they got the machine loaded and going, completed the test, and I was allowed to put my clothes back on.

Welcome to the Ranch

After admissions, I am driven to the Ranch proper.  Had I not been about to enter a rehab center, I might have thought it was beautiful.  Just outside small town Arizona, Remuda Ranch is situated on at least 10 acres of undeveloped desert countryside.  There are horses and beautiful stucco buildings.  The Ranch itself looks like a grand lodge of the sort one finds at a National Park with Western landscape paintings and bronzed deer head mounted on its walls.   When you enter, there are two sides to the Main Lodge, each named after a type of horse (Appy and Paint) and each complete with tables and chairs, for eating of course, and several couches for lounging and watching TV.  I am lead to the right, through a door to the Paint side.  I am petrified.  There are girls at the far side of the room having some sort of meeting and then a single, thin, blond-haired woman dressed in a navy athletic suit.  Please, I think, just give me something to do, somewhere to go, so I don’t have to interact.  But the burly woman just sits me down at one of the tables, facing the blond girl, and hands me a red folder of papers to fill out.  I avoid eye contact.  I fill out my forms.  I pray someone will come get me soon.

I try not to stare at the women having the meeting at the far side of room, but I want to size them up.  I wonder how I compare to them.  I catch sight of a young woman, perhaps 20, who probably weighs 70 pounds.  Her legs are the size of curtain rods.   Crap, I think.  I’m the biggest girl here.  I imagine groups of girls gathered in corners discussing my arrival:  “What is that girl doing here?” I imagine them saying.  “She’s the size of house.”

Suddenly the meeting has broken up and the girl with the curtain rod legs is standing in front of me.  Her head seems really large.  She asks me where I am from.  I learn soon hat this is the requisite ice breaker that everyone asks when you first arrive as if they’ve  all been trained to welcome the other girls by an administrative staff.  I’m not sure how to answer.  “Virginia, originally,“ I say.  Then the girl does something that really surprises me:  she smiles wide and chirps, “Welcome.  If there’s anything you need, just ask.”  What is this place?  I think.  Welcome?  Welcome!  This is a rehab center for God’s sake!  Who wants to be welcomed??!!!  “Okay,” I say without much enthusiasm. 

The Admissions Office

I was dropped off in downtown Wickenburg at an official looking admissions office, several miles away from the Ranch proper.  A woman whom I would never see again ushered me into a small office where I was visited briefly by a high level administrator/psychologist (Sam, I think) whom my parents had persuaded to speak with me.  Although I had every intention of asking normal, straight-forward, intelligent questions that would convince him that I certainly was not suited for such a crazy, cult-like treatment facility, instead I started babbling on about all my greatest fears in such a way that probably left him convinced that I couldn’t get to the Ranch fast enough.  I asked him if I would be the biggest girl there.  I asked him if I was “sick” enough for such a high level of care.  Keep in mind, I had just left the hospital day before.  I asked him if the Ranch was going to make me fat.  In essence, I asked him every question that every deranged girl with an eating disorder had asked him before.  I know now what I was really asking him was, “Can you please give me a reason to turn around and go home?”  Of course, no wise-minded business man would give his client a reason no t to pay him.   Furthermore, my crazed, fear-driven, completely predictable line of questioning would have made it professionally irresponsible for him to do anything but get my ass signed up as soon as possible.

Naturally, Sam attempted to respectfully reassure me that Remuda Ranch was a good match for me (not that I was convinced) without making me feel like he had my number.  Then the woman who had greeted me initially and who was, for some reason, still in the room, placed what seemed to be a hundred-page document in front of me and asked me to sign.  I realized, then, that these people had duped me.  I had fallen into their trap.  I was exactly where they wanted me.  They weren’t even going to take me to the Ranch until I signed 45 days of my life away.  Well, sort of.  I could leave any time I wanted to, but they weren’t going to make it easy for me to do so.  Because I wanted to send the message that I was a clear-headed intelligent adult, I insisted on reading all the paperwork before I signed.  I have no idea what the paperwork said, but I pretended I knew, and they probably knew I was pretending.

The Van Ride

The burly lady who met me at the gate helped me carry my bags to a white van emblazoned with the Remuda Ranch logo.  She told me that I could sleep or talk on the phone during our hour and a half ride to Wickenburg , whatever would make me most comfortable.  When I didn’t fall asleep or make a pick up my cell phone, she started to talk.  She talked about her grandchildren, the history of the landscape, and God’s role in the universe.  I wondered again what I had gotten myself into.  I am not a religious person and frankly, religious people freak me out.  When I find out that someone is religious it’s like finding out that he/she believes in aliens; I begin to doubt their mental stability.  Of course, there is a brand of religious that is more or less innocuous, the brand that while believing in God, still embraces evolution and sex before marriage.  Then there is the other brand, the scary brand, the brand that home schools its children and thinks Darwin is a phony.  If the burly woman’s belief system was at all representative of the belief system at the Ranch, then the religion I would be up against would not be light-hearted at all; it would be the religion of cults and secret societies.  It would be the kind of religion that takes you by storm and leaves you thinking that you can communicate with God and that the second-coming is upon us. 

Oh shit, I wondered, could this whole thing be a cult?  Are they going to attempt conversion?  Dear God.  I’m going to come out not only fat, but a Bible thumper to boot.