Telling my entire story to my therapist, Miss Amanda, took five sessions. But I told it to her. Every last detail, no matter how awful or painful it was to dredge back up. I hadn’t expected the process to take as long as it did, but every incident I told her about brought up another two that I had long suppressed in the back of my mind. Miss Amanda hadn’t talked much and had instead let me tell my stories with minimal interruption. Cathartic wasn’t the right word to describe how I was feeling, but there was a relief to being able to verbalize every fucked-up thing that had happened to me and move past it.
The three-hour sessions had taken place once a day, and a couple of days had passed since the last one without any update from her. The attorney that they had assigned to me had said it could take a few days for any decision to be made, but that it was almost certain that Amanda’s report would get the judge to agree for me to be released from the hospital.
The attorney had remained coy about what exactly that meant. I assumed it would be foster care, or maybe some sort of group home. My parents had fallen out with basically all of their relatives over the years, for one reason or another, so I didn’t think they would have any desire to take me in. Especially since they are all more than aware of my incontinence.
I had spent most of the day laying in the hospital bed and watching TV. There just wasn’t much for me to do now that I had finished with the therapy sessions as well as the education assessments they had assigned to me.
It had been years since I had last made a concerted effort to get toilet trained. I had completely given up on the idea and had resigned myself to the fact that I’d need diapers the rest of my life. But now that my recover was basically complete, the doctors had said that they thought there might be some ways to treat my incontinence.