Ice Cube

Today’s post is a short essay I wrote a few weeks ago in a writing group I do every week. It’s about a way to handle triggers that I learned about many years ago when I was in an outpatient program following a psychiatric hospitalization. Next week I hope to write about the new residential treatment center for children and youth that’s coming to Sacramento.

I tugged open the freezer door and slid out the top drawer and scooped little ice cubes into my plastic cup. The ice cubes from Panera had melted, though it wasn’t a hot day, and my iced tea was decidedly not iced any longer. Our new refrigerator makes ice cubes in two sizes. The small ones are shaped like little rectangles, longer than they are wide. The big ones are perhaps three times the size of the small ones and are cubes with rounded corners. The current crop of ice cubes was originally dispensed into the drawer that holds them perhaps three months ago, when winter was upon us. I turned the ice maker off then because the drawer was full and nearly overflowing and our need for ice was on a reciprocal arc with need having reached a nadir of zero.

But now it is spring and the weather variable, more hot days than cool since climate change has caused the global temperature to rise and disturbed the pattern of wind and rain and snow that has existed for millennia. So I expect to be using ice more often now.

I feel fortunate to have an ice maker. A broken ice maker is a first world problem for me and I might grouse and complain and put off arranging for a repair because I know it’s going to be expensive but that’s all. It is also a problem for someone in crisis who is overwhelmed, enraged, triggered, ready to leap off a cliff lured by the siren song of self-harm and suicide. For them, ice might be a life saver. They might have learned the trick of plunging their face into a bowl full of ice and water and keeping it there for thirty seconds while they hold their breath. The body responds to this combination by triggering the mammalian dive reflex. This reflex slows the heart rate and redirects blood to the brain and heart, switching the nervous system out of the fight-or-flight reflex. It’s a technique that’s taught to people who live with extreme emotional reactions to things like people with PTSD, or borderline personality disorder, or panic attacks, or bipolar disorder. It’s a great idea. Just one problem. There’s rarely an ice bath around when you need one and so you are reduced to deep breathing and focusing on the way the light strikes a crystal vase or maybe just cursing and pacing and fleeing the scene if you have the misfortune to be triggered among a crowd in an art gallery as I have been.

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Having a freezer full of ice no matter the season might be reassuring to folks who need it to trigger their mammalian dive reflex. They might let the ice maker keep on churning out ice long past the point where the drawer is full. They might get a second freezer for the garage to keep ice in and invest in a special bowl for their ice baths, one that’s deep enough so that the ice water doesn’t spill over the edge when they plunge their face into the water. They might get nervous when they left their home, afraid to get too far from the freezer and the ice, too far away to feel the freezing water trip the reflex that saves them from gasping sobs or berserker rage or panic so bad you lose the feeling in your limbs and your vision narrows and you crash the car from a fainting spell.

While it’s been years since I needed an ice bath (I only did it twice largely due to the lack of access to an ice bath when it was needed), I don’t let the ice drawer get completely empty. You never know when disaster will strike and devastation lay waste to your ability to cope and all you want is a bowl of icy water and a heart rate under 100.