Former Marine speaks candidly about his OCD

Dale City, Va. - Shannon Shy was convinced he had just heard a gunshot.

Or was it a two-by-four falling onto concrete? After five years of trying to deny it, Shy's obsessive- compulsive disorder was about to make Oct. 23, 1997, a living hell.

Now a retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Shy was driving toward Camp Lejeune in Jackson-ville, N.C., when he heard that fateful sound. So he circled back and saw somebody walking down the side of the road.

Was that a gun in his hand? Shy asked himself.

"I didn't know what to do," Shy said from his Dale City home last week. "I was slamming my fist on the steering wheel."

So, Shy called the police non-emergency line but couldn't reach anyone. Finally he flagged down an officer, who eventually assured him that there was no gunshot, no shooter, no bullet-riddled body on the side of the road.

It was at that moment -- a moment eerily similar to countless other days that forced unnecessary delays to work -- that Shy sought help for his condition.

SCARY THOUGHTS

The day after the incident with the police officer, Shy went to the library and looked up everything he could about OCD.

He learned that people with OCD can have violent thoughts about their own children. And unfortunately, the more he thought that that can't be me, the more he envisioned hurting his then 5-year-old son, Alex, and 1-year-old son, Andrew.

"I would go into my room thinking beautiful thoughts and [instead] I would imagine kicking them in the head," Shy said.

Distraught, he called his wife and told her he was going to get a hotel room that night. She convinced him not to do it and when she got home, gave him a big hug and told him something he knew deep down inside: that he was never going to hurt their children.

"We sat there and hugged a little bit," said his wife, Debbie, who was Shy's high school sweetheart. "He broke down and I said 'We will get through this together.'"

SWIMMINGLY

Fast forward more than a decade.

Now a civilian attorney with the Department of the Navy, Shy is dealing with the condition well. He is off medication and his three children are the subject of much parental bragging.

In fact, Shy will be the keynote speaker at the 17th annual Conference of the International OCD Foundation from July 16 to 18 in Crystal City. During his talk, he will discuss his recently published book, "It'll be Okay, How I Kept Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder from Ruining My Life."

The St. Louis native writes in non-clinical ways about memorable moments throughout his life and how OCD began to affect him after Alex's birth in 1992. He documents the typical actions of someone with OCD, like locking and re-locking doors, as well as his incessant fear of people drowning.

If Shy saw someone get into a body of water and he lost track of that person, he would go to the lifeguard and tell him what just happened. Are you telling me that someone drowned, some inevitably asked.

"No," Shy would say, "just wanted to let you know what's going on."

As long he mentioned it to someone of authority -- whether it be a swimmer he lost track of, a log on the street or a suspicious sound -- Shy would immediately feel better.

TOUGH LOVE, TOUGH MAN

In his book Shy also cites a few incidents with his father that while not clinically connected to his condi-tion, he still felt important enough to document.

Shy grew up poor, but just how poor he didn't realize at the time. Trash tended to pile up next to his house because his father Albert -- who was in and out of work often -- couldn't afford the trash pickup bill.

And the family had to dig a trench in front of its house where their broken septic tank leaked raw sewage.

One typical winter day, the then-11-year-old arrived home from spending the night at a friend's house. Unbeknownst to Shy, he had left a chair next to the furnace,a clunker of an appliance that rattled the house when it came on each morning.

The foam on the chair had caught fire before his father, who was at home all day, noticed it and put out the flames.

To make an example out of his son, Albert dragged him upstairs, pointed out the chair in front of his co-workers at a local service station and told him he could have burned the house down and killed his family.

To this day, the incident was an extremely embarrassing one for Shy, who called his father his Superman. Shy greatly admired him despite the fact that he wasn't always a very responsible parent.

Albert was a car guy who suffered numerous accidental injuries and refused to wear a coat on cold winter days even after suffering a heart attack.

He was a man's man, teaching his only son -- Shy had four sisters -- how to hunt and fish.

A RELEASE

When Shy first began to see a psychiatrist for his OCD, he was very defensive and terrified that his condi-tion would ruin his chances of becoming an attorney and destroy his family life.

For the previous five years, he hid his condition from his family in St. Louis, his children, his friends and co-workers.

His mother died well before his symptoms became apparent and his father passed away in 1998 without knowing, as well.

But Shy soon realized that opening up about OCD was pivotal in turning his life around. And thanks to the publication of the book in 2009, he gets letters from people thanking him for helping them get through their issues.

"I got a letter that said, 'Finally, not a doctor trying to sell a book,'" Shy said. "I wanted people to be able to draw their own conclusions [about OCD]."

With the upcoming symposium and Alex to start college at West Virginia University this fall, life for Shy, it seems, is as good as it gets. Or at least a lot better than it was a decade ago.

"I was always an overachieving kid," Shy said. "I was captain of the football team, the wrestling team. ...I graduated in the top two percent of my high school class. When OCD hit me, I was like, 'What happened to that normal, regular, outgoing guy?'"

"Ever since I have known him, my nickname for him was the Nike guy, because he would just do it," Debbie said. "... When he set his mind to do it, he accomplished it and accomplished it very well. With this part of his life, he was not in control of it, and that was very frustrating [for him]."

Staff writer Kipp Hanley can be reached at 703-530-3904.