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My little Rachel

When Rachel turned 2, she began to periodically wake up shortly after midnight, screaming uncontrollably, her body rigid, her little soul inconsolable. The first time it happened, we had her in the car on the way to the emergency room when she suddenly stopped crying and seemed fine. We were not the first parents to get this kind of baptism into the world of night terrors. Still, to us, it was uncharted waters. And it was scary.

Little did we know her night terrors were just a precursor, a nasty appetizer to the grotesque main course.

Rachel had her first panic attack on the school bus one afternoon in the fall of seventh grade. She felt trapped and began hyperventilating, something she’d never heard of, much less experienced. The rapid breathing made her arms and legs begin to tingle, then they felt like they were being stuck by a million little pins. Finally they went numb altogether. Her heartbeat raced; she got dizzy. She was convinced she was about to die.

The driver stopped the bus, got Rachel out and laid her on the sidewalk while a bus full of children watched. Her friend, Caroline, comforted her and called her father to come get them. He called Jane and we both rushed home from work. Of course the panic attack had passed by then, but its memory would haunt Rachel.

Her next panic attack was only a few days later, in school. The symptoms were the same — loss of control, a feeling of constriction, out-of-control breathing, racing heartbeats — a sense that she was about to pass out or die.

By the time I got to school to pick her up, she looked gaunt, frail and vacant. Physically, she looked nothing like she had two weeks ago. I’m sure she hadn’t lost weight, and I guess she was always a little on the pale side. But what I saw that afternoon, and would see hundreds of times more over the next few years, was the lifeless, hopeless look of a dying kid, a skeleton of a life.

Rachel stopped sleeping over at friends’ houses. She became frightened at night and insisted Jane and I stay awake until she fell sleep, no matter how long that took. She wanted our bedroom door to remain open, so she could see the lights on in our room. Of course, all that made sense to me. I’d lived with those same fears as a child. As her anxiety progressed, though, she would insist I lie on the floor at the foot of her bed until she fell asleep every night. And I did.

This was her normal. If she didn’t have full-fledged panic attacks every day, she didn’t have a single day that any kid would call good.

We took her to child psychiatrists and counselors. When the counseling yielded no results, they began to introduce medicines they felt certain would do the trick.

They were wrong. But we had to do something. Parents, dads particularly, want to be able to fix things. I needed to fix Rachel.

Jane and I had to arrange our work schedules so somebody was always home. We’d drive her to school, pray with her and watch her get all the way into the school before we’d drive off.

Almost without fail, within an hour or two, she would call from the clinic’s office, needing us to come pick her up.

On my days at home, I’d try to get a little work done, but really what I was doing was waiting for the phone to ring. I’d shower with the phone on the other side of the shower glass so I could not only hear it ring, but I could see who was calling.

Every morning was the same. “Please God, let today be the day the phone doesn’t ring. Please let her be able to...”

And the phone would ring.

“Hey,” Rachel would say, in a frail voice I’ve never heard except on those calls.

“Hey, Sweetie.”

“I have anxiety.”

“You know I’m only 10 minutes away. Do you think you can take your medicine and stay in the clinic for a few minutes, then go back to class?”

“I’ll try.”

“Call me if you can’t. I’ll come get you.”

Twenty minutes later, maybe an hour, she’d call back, and I’d go pick her up, having shed another little piece of hope.

At night, I would lie in bed and pray for the umpteenth time for God to show up and be the God I expected him to be.

I’d spent 30 years following God and trusting my life to him. I know God isn’t a genie there to grant my wishes, and I know that suffering is part of life. But this was my little girl. She was depending on me to fix her. And I was depending on God. From the best I could tell, we were both failing.

One night I laid in bed wrestling with what my next prayer would be. I’d tried them all, over and over. I hadn’t lost faith in God, but I was bled dry of the kind of faith that once had me convinced my prayers mattered to God.

In near defeat, I said: “Heal Rachel; don’t heal Rachel, I don’t care. You decide.”

Of course I cared. But out of an exhausted frustration, those three words — “I don’t care” — were part of my short, angry prayer.