A toolbox for overcoming hurdles — mental and physical
Sarah Mlynek, diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar disorder as a teenager, has faced a half dozen orthopedic surgeries as an adult. [Herald-Tribune staff photo / Thomas Bender]
A mother whose insight into mental illness came from her own parent. An uncle with a polio-withered leg who never let his handicap get in the way. A psychiatrist who knew the power of words were as important as the right medication. A husband, gone too soon, who set an example of self-acceptance and security.
Were it not for the enduring legacies left by these key figures, each of whom appeared at a critical moment during her 59 years, Sarah Mlynek's life might been very different. As she looks back on her life's considerable challenges – both mental and physical – she credits them with giving her the tools to survive.
"Yes, I have had had some hard challenges and some very difficult things to deal with," says Mlynek, sitting in a wheelchair, recovering from the six surgeries she's had over the past six years. "But you build your strength on how you cope, and sometimes it takes someone outside of you to make you realize what's really important."
As a child, Mlynek was by nature anxious, fearful and moody. Her father's work took the family from Philadelphia to Argentina to Canada to, ultimately, a suburb of Detroit, an itinerary which only served to exacerbate her "school phobia." Family summer vacations at a lake in upstate New York — where she became close to her maternal grandmother and admired her uncles' ability to win sailing regattas and adoring friends despite his braced leg, offered a welcome respite.
As her senior year of high school approached, her grandmother, who had suffered several "nervous breakdowns" became suicidal and was institutionalized. Combined with her own overly ambitious goals for success, she teetered on a psychological cliff.
"I was on this career track in my mind – advanced placement courses, extracurricular activities, this feeling of do, do, do," she says. "It was just too much, I was exhausted."
In November of her senior year, she suffered a severe psychotic break. Hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and diagnosed with a rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, she remained catatonic for more than a month and a half. Her parents, who "had an understanding about mental illness that was special," hired private duty nurses who gave her compassion and attention, even when she was completely unresponsive.
"Eventually I thought, 'I can't just lie here,'" Mlynek recalls. "The drive to not settle for that was still there."
A change in medication gave her enough stability to leave the hospital and return to school after three months. With stoic determination, she graduated with the rest of her class, but was subdued, withdrawn and estranged from many of her classmates.
Still "wanting to do the career thing," she enrolled in the local community college, intending to study politics or law. But in a humanities class, she discovered art history and architecture and music and realized that was where her passion lay. But her continuing mercurial mood swings made school difficult, and eventually she dropped out and took a sales position at a department store.
"I was stable, but my mind was always rapid cycling," she says. "I'd be up one minute and then my mind would just turn on me and tell me bad things about myself. Every day, 10 times a day, up and down. It was very, very hard."
Three years later, just before a Christmas vacation trip to the condominium her parents had purchased in Boca Grande, her psychiatrist prescribed Lithium, a drug she continues to take to this day. Mlynek went from struggling through one art class a semester to taking four classes at once while also working in an art gallery.
"I couldn't believe how much better I felt," she recalls. "It made all the difference."'
So did regular talk therapy sessions—at first as many as three a week — with her psychiatrist, whom she would see for the next three decades.
"I always tell people, yes, you need medicine," she says, "but you also need to be able to cope. You have to work to train your brain to handle situations, to know how to deal with things so you don't go into a tailspin."
At 39, while working in a bookstore, she met a man who worked in IT for Kmart; he was 40, also never married. When she moved upstairs to work in a museum shop, she feared she might never see him again. So one day on her lunch hours, when she suspected he would be there, she ran downstairs, stuck out her hand and said, "Hi! Remember me?" They were married soon thereafter.
"He was probably the most secure person I've ever known and I found that very attractive," Mlynek says. "He was loving and had a great sense of fairness and justice. I didn't feel I had to prove myself with him. I could just be. For the first time, I accepted myself. I really feel I was probably cured after being married to him."
They spent an idyllic decade together, enjoying things they both loved – museums, theater performances, restaurants. Since neither drove, they took the bus everywhere; sometimes they'd stay at a B and B just 20 minutes from their home so they could walk to the theater every night.
Then her husband was diagnosed with head and neck cancer; within six months, he was dead. Three months later, Mlynek lost her mother. The lessons each had taught her – her mother's stoic drive, her husband's gratitude and self-acceptance – helped prevent a mental backslide.
When her father decided to move to Florida, Mylnek, adrift from much of a support system, came to care for him. But her challenges were far from over. In 2010, she underwent foot surgery for a congenital defect; within a year, the other foot also required surgery. Those adjustments forced a knee replacement in 2015 and a fall and complications dictated emergency hip surgery, followed by a freakish accident shattered her other kneecap. Meanwhile, doctors discovered the decades of Lithium had left her with Stage 3 kidney disease.
Only recently has she able to move from an assisted living facility into a downtown Sarasota condominium. To cope with her physical limitations, Mlynek has relied on what she learned in conquering her mental health challenges – the need to get her mind off herself.
"Mental illness can be such a narcissistic thing," she says. "You're too close to yourself. That's what brews the darkness and makes it stronger. It takes getting outside of yourself to realize what's really important."
Though she's always been open about her physical challenges, it was only when a nephew was recently diagnosed with depression that she felt an urgency to "come clean" about her mental health history, even though her disorder has not presented a challenge in her life for many years.
"I want him to know what I've gone through and that it's something in our family, but that people do get better and have good lives," she says. "I come from a long line of stoic people and there are positive things about that, but it doesn't help people move forward and it doesn't help the stigma of mental illness. It feels good to acknowledge it. I would hate to have my life end and never have come out about my mental illness. That would really bother me."
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