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.