*I have started compiling the story of my illness and it’s role in my returning to faith. This is page 1.

It was a sticky night in late August, 2009. The streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan were quiet, but I was not. Terrified and confused, I was crying for no reason, and I couldn’t stop. Panicked, I called my friend Stacy, a counselor. I don’t remember the conversation, but minutes later, I was walking through the thick air with her to the hospital – my hospital. Hours and several milligrams of Ativan later, I lay still in my stall in the psychiatric ER of Mt. Sinai Medical Center, empty and alone.

After several hours, paramedics came to take me to a different ER, because it wasn’t just my hospital, it was my Emergency Department – I was a resident physician in the Emergency Medicine program of Mt. Sinai. I remember begging the paramedics to roll me to the ambulance the long way around so that my colleagues wouldn’t see me – broken, maybe crazy. Alone. afraid. A failure. I arrived at the Columbia Hospital Psychiatric Ward on the morning of September 1. My life, though I didn’t know it, was shattering, never to be the same again.

I was in the hospital for almost a week. I remember my friends visiting me, looking at me like I was dangerous. I remember an old classmate, Emma, then a resident physician at Columbia, visiting me and bringing books. I still have her copy of The Friday Night Knitting Club. Mostly, I remember my mom, fresh in from California, having to bring shoes when I was discharged because my MBTs had been stolen. And, oh yeah, I was no longer Rebecca with no past medical history. Now, I was Rebecca, that girl with Major Depressive Disorder. It was a long walk home.

My mom stayed with me for a couple weeks and my hospital gave me the rest of September to recover. The only problem is, I didn’t. I just kept getting worse. I had been discharged into the care of a woman psychiatrist who told me after three weeks, “You are not getting better because you’re not trying hard enough.” I may not have much memory of my psych rotation in medical school, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to say stuff like that. Those first few weeks were a blur. Pictures of me from that time show my eyelids drooping and my face looking drugged.

I did not get better, but after a month I went back to work anyway. Even though I was supposed to be rotating on a different service at that point, my hospital did me a kindness and kept me in the ER, thinking a familiar environment would make things easier. I don’t remember large chunks of Fall 2009, but I do remember my first day back in the hospital. I got in a yelling match with my resident supervisor in the middle of the ER and then just stalked out. Like I said, I had gotten worse, not better. I have always been a rule-follower and a little bit of a kiss-up. Yelling at my supervisor in private would have been the most out-of-character thing I’d ever done, but no, we were surrounded by patients and doctors. Like I said, I walked out. And, as you may have guessed, I never returned. On October 28, 2009, I flew home to live with my parents in California, an absolute, utter failure.

Having to move home because I lost my job, my career, at age 27 was mortifying. I can’t say whether I would have avoided friends, though, because they avoided me first. My job wasn’t the only thing I lost in Fall 2009. Over the next three years, I can with confidence say I lost everything except my mom. I gained a psychiatrist named Dr. K, a medication list that barely fit on a page, and a memory that leaked like a sieve.

Dr. K was a young woman, probably only out of residency a handful of years. She cared deeply about me – I reminded her of her brother, who also lost a career due to mental illness, and her main goal was to get me back into residency within two years. Unfortunately, I believe her regard for me blinded her with respect to the appropriateness of my care. As time went on and I continued to worsen, she put me on stronger and stronger drugs, switching them quickly and adding multiple ones at once, so there was no chance of knowing what was making a difference and what wasn’t. In 2010, she put me on a medication called Nardil, an MAOI. I gained 90 pounds on my 120-pound frame in three months. My hair fell out. My back, which had started bothering me in residency, flared into intractable pain. My well-meaning, in-over-her-head psychiatrist prescribed Percocet, giving me however many I wanted. Along with the 90 pounds, I gained a Percocet addiction as well.

Things were dark. Even without all my new problems, I was spending my days weeping uncontrollably or else walking about in a fog of medicine. I learned what it was to despair. I started going back to church with my family at some point in that first year. I, a self-confessed Christian since age four, had only sporadically gone to church through college and medical school. In my fourth year of medical school, I stopped all together. I had never lived like a Christian, anyway. I would love to say I came back to God immediately and everything got better, but all I could do was rage at him. I yelled my less poetic version of “How long, O Lord!” into the night, wondering how he could let such darkness exist in my heart. Little did I know that I was exactly where he wanted me. Little did I know that, from the moment I knelt in front of the couch with my mom at 4 years old and confessed Jesus as my Savior, I was being pursued.