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.

The Phoenix Airport

I think we circled in and out of the airport departure zone four or five times before I decided to get out of the car and enter the airport.   I had never had treatment before, of any kind, in-patient or out-patient, so I was beginning to doubt that shipping myself off to Arizona was the best decision.  So were my parents.  But somewhere deep inside I knew I had to get out the car.  I could always leave, right?

By the time I landed in Phoenix, I had decided that going to Remuda was not a good idea.  What was I getting myself into?  I’m not a Christian.  This is not going to work.  I could do this at home on my own.  As soon as I got of the plane, there was a burly looking woman holding a sign with my name on it.  How did she get through security?, I thought.  No one get through security anymore.  In retrospect, I’m pretty sure Remuda pays the airport for permission to access arrival gates directly so that they can head people off before they change their minds and bolt.  It’s a good thing they do, because seeing that woman really through a monkey wrench in my plan to get the hell out of dodge.  Still, I told her that I was not going with her, that I would be renting a car, driving to the Ranch myself, and taking a look at it before I signed anything.  Then I went into the bathroom and called my mother.  Thirty years old in a bathroom stall calling my mother.  I guess I hoped that she would tell me that it was okay to hop the next plane home.  She did not.  Instead, she convinced me to go with the burly lady to the Ranch.  I could always leave, right?

Before Admittance

To begin, a little background:  I am thirty years old.  I spent the month of August driving across the country with my mother (of all people) from Portland, OR to my childhood home in Northern Virginia, essentially leaving behind everything I held dear at the time:  my teaching job, my impossibly cute apartment in its impossibly cute surrounding neighborhood, and all my impossibly interesting city friends.  I actually thought my life was that good, and I really only expected it to get better.  Although I was leaving my awesome city life behind, I had plans to move to Thailand at the end of August (after a brief visit with my family – and I emphasis brief ) where I would plan my January wedding and live off my fiancé’s grant money (he has been funded by a very generous organization to study Thai language),meaning I would do nothing but pick out flowers, go to the gym, and get massages.

Needless to say, things did not go according to plan.  When I arrived at home, my family members seemed alarmed by how thin I had become.  I ran a marathon in December of 2009 and had not stopped running since.  This, coupled with my terrible eating habits, developed out of an insatiable desire to be the thinnest girl in the room, had finally taken its toll on my body.  When I stepped on the scale at home, I was alarmed to see that I had dropped to roughly 90 pounds, although I would never have admitted any of this to my family.   I loved to run, and it made me feel great, especially if I was hungry.  How could anybody who ran so much be unhealthy?  At any rate, somehow, after many hours of tearful urging, my family convinced me to get a routine blood panel at a local clinic.  I figured I could ask the doctor about the pain I had been having in my Achilles tendon, which was limiting my running distance, and get the stupid blood panel.  In retrospect, I was probably just a little concerned that my labs might reveal something bad.   Just a little.  Somewhere in the back of my mind.

A few days later, the doctor called me at 9 o’clock at night to inform me that I was severely anemic and could drop dead at any moment, which frankly, scared the shit out of me; it scared me enough, in fact, to tell my parents about the results, even though I knew that it might cause some level of over-reaction.  True to form, before I knew it, my parents had rushed me to the emergency room where I was admitted to the hospital for a blood transfusion.  It was in the hospital, after days of iron injections and tests to rule out internal bleeding, that I decided to seek treatment and delay my trip to Thailand, along with my wedding.  After a few days of research on my parents’ part, I ended up at Remuda Ranch in Wickenburg, Arizona, the Hilton of treatment centers, the kind of place where, according to their website, people recover from their eating disorders by doing yoga, riding horses, completing ropes courses, and praying a lot (okay, that one didn’t sound so good).  But I was in.  Sort of.

If you don't believe me, check out this website:  www.remudaranch.com/