What are your phobias?

I'm glad you said it first, because I was starting to feel silly after reading everyone elses! I have always had the omg-what's-under-the-bed fear, and I find myself still battling it Same with the closet, only the closet one has gotten worse because now I have a giant walk-in closet, and that's where the entrance to the attic is. Ugh.

P.S. The entrance to our attic is in the master bath, just near the entrance to the shower. Like I didn't have enough shower phobia going on already.

Premiered at the IFP Los Angeles Film Festival in June, information about wannabe amputee syndrome--what doctors now refer to as Body Integrity Identity Disorder (B.I.I.D.)--was made available only through a handful of stories more likely to be told around the campfire than in the newspaper.

In May of 1998, 79-year-old Philip Bondy paid John Ronald Brown, a former doctor who had lost his medical license because of botched sex-change operations, $10,000 to amputate his leg at a clinic in Tijuana.

Brown buried the limb somewhere in the Mexican desert; Bondy later died of gangrene in a San Diego motel room.

In October of 1999, an anonymous 53-year-old Milwaukee man severed his own arm with a homemade guillotine, placed it in a plastic bag, and stashed it away in his freezer. After calling an ambulance, he informed doctors that if they reattached the arm, he would just chop it off again and sue the hospital.

That same month, an unnamed legal investigator in California begged doctors to surgically remove both of her legs. They refused, prompting her to tie each limb in a tourniquet, pack it in ice, and wait for the gangrene to set in. When the painful procedure failed, she told reporters that she planned to lie on a train track until the job was done.

A friend of Gilbert's read about the motel room corpse, the one-armed man, and the double amputee in Carl Elliott's Atlantic Monthly article "A New Way to Be Mad," and told the filmmaker a tale that, in its nearly archetypal depiction of bloody underground ritual, could have been an urban legend: People were hacking off their own limbs on purpose. "I couldn't believe what she said," insists Gilbert, a cheerful blonde who initially seems far too ebullient to have made a film about such a bleak topic. "But then I went onto the internet, and there were all kinds of amputee wannabes out there. I was repulsed and disgusted. I couldn't believe that people would do this, and I had to know why."

She's still trying to answer that question. "The doctors don't understand it; no one understands it," says Gilbert, whose film (premiering locally at the Heights Theater on September 18 and 20 as part of the Central Standard Film Festival) doesn't provide any easy resolutions. "What fascinates me is that none of these people know each other; some of them have never even been on the internet to see that there are other people like them out there, and yet they all say the same thing, sometimes even in the same language--that they needed to remove a leg in order to feel whole."

I ran across this last night and it so gave me the willies that I don't have words to describe it. I'm not putting the people down, I'm just saying that the idea of it, just gave me the total willies - cold sweat sort of thing.

There are pictures: http://citypages.com/databank/24/1188/article11487.asp