How My Friend Diane Slept Eight Hours for Fourteen Nights in a Row. After Two Years on Buspar.

She is 71. She has waited tables since 1969. She had her first panic attack at booth nine three years ago carrying a tray of four entrees. Last Sunday we hiked Soldiers Pass at sunrise and at the high point of the trail she put her hand on my arm and told me she has not had a wave in nine weeks. Here is what an 88-year-old former Carmelite nun told me in a coffee shop that ended the two years she had spent on Buspar.

Diane. Day forty-three. Morning at her house off Schnebly Hill Road.

My name is Sarah. I am 72 years old. I have survived three cancers, one breast in 2009, one ovarian in 2014, and one in my colon in 2019. I should be dead three times over. I am not, and so I pay attention now to things I would have walked past at 50.

I am writing this because of my best friend Diane, who I have known since 1985, and because of an 88-year-old former Carmelite nun named Sister Mary Catherine who has been reading palms out of a converted Airstream parked behind a turquoise gallery on the south end of Sedona for the last twenty-six years, and because of two stones on a leather cord, and because Diane slept through the night last Sunday for the fourteenth night in a row.

I will get to the bracelet. First I need you to understand Diane.

Diane is 71. She has worked in restaurants since she was 16. She started waiting tables in 1969 at a diner in Phoenix and she has been on her feet six days a week, ten hours a day, for fifty-five years. She married twice, both times to men who drank, both times she did the leaving. She raised one daughter alone, a girl named Kim who is now 44 and a hospice nurse in Tucson. Diane has never been a woman who needed much.

Three years ago, in the middle of a Friday night dinner rush at the steakhouse where she had worked for sixteen years, Diane had her first panic attack. She was 68. She was carrying a tray of four entrees and a sparkling water. Her body convinced her, with no warning of any kind, that she was about to die in front of the table of six at booth nine.

Her pulse went to 122. Her hands shook so badly she set the tray down on an empty four-top and walked into the kitchen and out the back door and stood in the parking lot for forty minutes before she could go back in.

She finished the shift. She did not tell anyone.

The next Friday it happened again. By the end of the month she was having them three or four times a week.

What two years of "doing the right thing" looked like for her.

Her GP in Cottonwood ran the workup. Heart was fine. Thyroid was fine. He told her this was generalized anxiety disorder, late-onset, that this was common in women in their late sixties, and he started her on Buspar.

The Buspar did not stop the panic attacks. It dulled them. I would rather be in bed all the time, she told me at brunch in the eighth month. The pill makes the room blurry. The waves still come. They are just blurrier waves.

She tried Lexapro for six weeks. The SSRI made me dead inside. I really, really miss feeling things, Sarah. She came off it. The attacks came back inside two weeks. She went back on Buspar.

She tried HRT. HRT didn't touch it. She tried Estroven without telling her doctor. Estroven gave her torso weight and a new fear about her liver. She tried magnesium. Ashwagandha. The Calm app. Headspace. An EMDR practitioner in Flagstaff. Three months of acupuncture. A sound healer who had set up a tent at the spiritual festival in March.

The attacks did not stop. She kept working.

One Sunday morning over coffee on my back porch, looking out at Cathedral Rock the way I have looked at it every morning for five years, she said the sentence I had heard once before in my life, in 1990, from my own mother the year before she died:

I had promised myself in 1991 I would never let another woman I loved say that sentence to me without doing something about it. And in September of last year, with Diane sitting two feet away from me on my back porch, I had still not done anything. I was 72 and three cancers in and I had run out of ideas.

Then the coffee shop on the Thursday morning in October.

The sentence I overheard from one table away.

I had gone in for a cortado. I sat at a small two-top by the window. A young woman maybe 26 came in behind me, carrying a manila folder, her eyes red. She sat at the next table. An older woman who had been sitting there the whole time put a hand on her wrist and held it for a moment without speaking. The older woman was 88. I learned her age later.

The younger woman opened the folder. She started talking quietly. I caught fragments. Doctor said. Two years. The pills make me feel. I do not know who I am anymore.

The older woman listened without interrupting. When the younger woman had finished she did not say anything for almost a full minute. Then, in a voice that was clearer than I expected for an 88-year-old, she said the sentence that cut through the room.

I was sitting one table away with my cortado halfway to my mouth and I stopped moving.

The conversation went on for another fifteen minutes. The younger woman left with a piece of paper and her eyes were still red, but the line of her shoulders was different.

I asked the woman behind the counter who she was. The barista smiled. She said, That is Sister Mary Catherine. She has the Airstream behind the turquoise gallery on the south end of town. She does palms. Most tourists think she is a quirky local. She is not.

I went home. I did not tell Diane. I sat with the sentence for three weeks.

I went back to the coffee shop on the third Thursday. Sister Mary Catherine was at the same table. She looked up at me when I walked in. She gestured to the chair across from her. I sat down.

She said: "I wondered when you would come back."

I did not ask her how she had known I would. I had stopped asking questions of that kind after the second cancer.

What Sister Mary Catherine told me about Diane.

I told her about Diane. The fifty-five years of waiting tables. The panic attacks at booth nine. The Buspar. The Lexapro. The Estroven. The I think I just need to accept it on my back porch in September.

Sister Mary Catherine listened without moving. When I finished, she said, very quietly:

"Your friend has been on her feet in a room for fifty-five years and she has been absorbing what walks into that room for fifty-five years. Nobody taught her how to put it down. She has been doing the work that women in my novitiate did at the altar, except she has been doing it at booth nine, and nobody has taught her that the work has a practice."

She told me she had entered the Carmelites in 1955 at 19 years old. She had been in the cloister for thirteen years. She had left in 1968 during the upheaval after the Council. She had not lost her faith. She had lost her vocation. The two are not the same, she said. The faith is what you keep. The vocation is what is given to you and can be taken back.

Inside the cloister, she said, the older sisters had taught the younger sisters something the modern Catholic Church no longer teaches, and which the modern medical system has never known. They had taught the practice of holding.

The sisters who worked the infirmary, who tended the dying, who sat with women in childbirth at the village clinic the order ran, had been taught from their first month in the order to wear two stones on a leather cord against the inside of the left wrist.

I asked Sister Mary Catherine where the practice had come from. She said the Carmelites had not invented it. The Church had carried it because the medieval infirmaries needed it. The Dominicans had it. A monk named Albertus Magnus wrote it down in Latin in 1250. He prescribed Black Tourmaline for women who wake in the cold hours and cannot return to sleep. He had learned it from his grandmother in Bavaria, who had learned it from hers, who had learned it from a woman who had carried it down from a tradition older than any of them could name.

She said the practice was older than the Church. Nine civilizations had reached for the same two stones independently of one another.

Sister Mary Catherine said: "Knowing converges when the thing is true. My novitiate sisters knew this with their hands at nineteen. Sloan Kettering does not know it now."

What the men with instruments measured a hundred years later.

I am the woman who has survived three cancers and has been in oncology waiting rooms for fifteen years. I asked her, because women like me know the value of a measurement, whether anyone had ever measured what the stone did.

Sister Mary Catherine smiled at me the way a woman who has been in the cloister smiles at a question she has answered before.

She said: "In 1880, a French physicist named Pierre Curie discovered piezoelectricity in tourmaline. He later won the Nobel Prize. Japanese researchers measured the charge in 1986 at 0.06 milliamps, continuous, never depleting. CSIRO in Australia describes Black Tourmaline as a natural dynamo, permanently emitting negative ions and far-infrared radiation."

She paused. Then she said: "These men measured what my novitiate sisters knew before they knew their own names in religion. They did not discover it. They confirmed it."

She lifted her own left wrist. There was a leather cord against the inside of it, with two stones. One glassy and black. One matte and black. She had been wearing them the entire time. I had not noticed them three weeks earlier at the coffee shop because I had been listening, not looking.

She said: "I have worn this cord since I was 19. I have worn it through thirteen years of cloister and fifty-eight years out of it. I have sat with eleven women in their dying. I have sat with three women in childbirth, two in cars in parking lots, one on the floor of a hospital chapel. The cord did for me what it has been doing for women in nine civilizations across ten thousand years. It held me so I could hold them."

The pair on the inside of the left wrist. The way the Carmelite infirmary sisters wore them.

I asked her where Diane could find such a cord.

She shook her head. "The cords my sisters made in the infirmaries are not made any more. The order does not carry the practice. But there is a young American woman in Brooklyn who has remembered. My niece in Phoenix found them. They are called Veylor. They are the only company I have seen that has put the practice into a bracelet I would put on a Carmelite novice."

I ordered the cord for Diane that evening from my back porch with Cathedral Rock turning red in the last light of the sun.

What happened to Diane in six months.

It arrived at her house off Schnebly Hill Road four days later. Two stones. One leather cord. She put it on the next morning before her shift at the steakhouse.

Day four. She got through a Friday dinner rush without a wave. First time in three years.

Week three. She slept five hours straight for the first time. She called me from her kitchen at 6 AM to tell me, crying.

Week six. She picked up her phone when Kim, her daughter, called. She had not picked up Kim's calls for two years because she could not hold a conversation in the dining room without the wave climbing.

Week nine. She came off the Buspar. She had tapered it with her GP in Cottonwood, who did not understand what had changed but agreed to taper her down when she asked.

Week fourteen. She started hiking with me again on Sundays. We had stopped three years earlier because she could not get through the trail without a wave hitting her.

Last Sunday. Six months in. We did the seven-mile loop at Soldiers Pass at sunrise. She did not stop once. Her breathing was even. Her face was in her face. At the high point of the trail, where you can see the whole valley open toward Bell Rock and beyond, she stopped and put her hand on my arm and said:

I cried on a rock at the high point of the Soldiers Pass trail at 7:14 in the morning. I have survived three cancers and I do not cry easily.

I cried because the woman I had been about to lose had come back.

What other women like Diane are reporting.

Sister Mary Catherine's niece in Phoenix has been keeping a quiet list of women who have come to the practice through her over the last two years. She let me see the numbers last month. One hundred and forty-seven women between 60 and 78 who have worn the cord for at least ninety days.

These are not clinical numbers. They are what one hundred and forty-seven women told a 53-year-old physical therapist in Phoenix at the ninety-day mark. But that is enough to know this is not coincidence.

What two years of the medical model cost Diane.

I sat down with Diane at brunch last Sunday after the hike. I asked her to add up what two years of doing what her doctor told her had actually cost her. Not the years. Just the dollars.

Her GP in Cottonwood never offered her a refund. He never offered her the practice either, because nobody had ever taught him that there was one. The severance happened a hundred years before he went to medical school.

The thing nobody else will say to you.

You have been let down a lot.

You are not afraid of being scammed. You are seventy years old. You are past that.

You are afraid of one more letdown. You are afraid that if this one does not work either, you will sit on the back porch of your best friend and say the sentence my mother said in 1990 and Diane said in September, and the woman across from you will not know what to tell you, because she has run out of ideas too.

So I want to give you what Sister Mary Catherine gave me in that coffee shop:

I emailed them in November before I gave one to Diane, because I needed to know before I asked her to put it on. The refund goes through inside a week. The makers do not keep money from women they did not help.

Her GP in Cottonwood does not refund. The pharmaceutical industry does not refund. The wellness industry does not refund. Veylor refunds. That tells you who is confident in what is in the bracelet, and who is just confident in the prescription pad.

What other women in the group are saying.

What I want to say last.

I am writing this from my back porch in Sedona with Cathedral Rock catching the first light at 7:18 in the morning. I have survived three cancers and so I pay attention now to things I would have walked past at 50.

If you are 65 or 70 or 75 and you have been told that what you are feeling is generalized anxiety disorder, when what is actually happening is that the post-war American medical project severed two generations of women from a practice the Carmelite sisters were quietly carrying inside cloister walls until 1968 and that the village midwives in nine other civilizations were carrying outside the Church for ten thousand years before that, I want you to hear me.

You are not anxious. You are unprotected. They are not the same thing and they never were.

You have been doing the work for forty or fifty years. Nobody taught you that the work has a practice. Nobody taught you how to put it down at the end of the shift. The pill the doctor gave you does not put it down. The pill turns the volume down on the woman who has been holding it.

You can spend another two years on a prescription that does not stop the waves and start to say to your best friend on a back porch that you think you just need to accept it.

Or you can put a leather cord on your wrist tonight and find out by Labor Day whether the woman you have been afraid you were losing is coming back.

Sister Mary Catherine gave me the sentence in a coffee shop because she had been the woman in the parking lot once. I am writing this on a back porch because I am the woman in the coffee shop now. You are sitting one table away from a sentence that has been waiting for you to hear it.

Your body knows what your mind has been told to forget.

Yes. I am ready for the practice.

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