Photography by David Torrence
LaJuana Lester was diagnosed with lupus, which doesn’t usually strike 15-year-olds. Then the disease began to affect her brain, which was even more unusual. She showed signs of delirium, and then—oddest of all—she stopped speaking, moving, reacting. Dr. Suzanne L’Ecuyer, staff psychiatrist at Ranken Jordan Pediatric Specialty Hospital, lifted one of the girl’s arms and felt resistance; when she released her hold, the arm stayed where she’d lifted it.
LaJuana was catatonic.
Her parents didn’t know what to think. Their cheerleader, volleyball player, A’s-and-B’s student had frozen in place—no animation, no personality, no reactions. She wasn’t even eating on her own; they had to insert a feeding tube.
L’Ecuyer was confounded: She could try benzodiazepines for the catatonia, but they might make the delirium worse. Drugs for delirium might make the catatonia worse. She called Dr. Jeff Levine, who’d been her attending physician when she did her residency at Yale–New Haven Hospital. He has board certification in internal medicine and psychiatry; if anyone would know how to solve this riddle, it would be Levine.
“Treat the catatonia,” he said. “It’s all the same process.”
LaJuana woke up a bit with the benzodiazepines. She even started eating on her own. But when L’Ecuyer asked where she was, she said the grocery store. And then the drug’s effects started to weaken. She was still mainly unresponsive, and her thinking was chaotic, with bursts of agitation. When a fuzzy little chinchilla came through for pet therapy, they could hear her screams all over the hospital.
L’Ecuyer researched frantically. She found only one promising idea: ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, once known as shock treatment. But using ECT on a 15-year-old would require a court order.
She wrote letters, made calls, scheduled consultations, went before a judge. An independent evaluator reviewed the case. It took more than a month, all told, but LaJuana was approved for ECT.
After her third treatment, her mom, Loris Gill, pronounced her “pretty much back to her old self.” After the fourth, LaJuana was chattering, doing her homework, and asking when she could go home. “Even though I’d known her for a month, I felt like I was meeting her for the first time,” L’Ecuyer says.
Now LaJuana’s playing volleyball again, studying hard, and trying to fathom what she’s told happened to her. She remembers virtually nothing, says her father, LaJuan Lester. “She’s not as amazed as her parents are!”
LaJuana told her father, “It was sort of like a dream, and then I came out of it”—and found out it really happened.
