Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [38]
The most arrogant outrageous thought is that there’s a point in thinking.
There was a little sand in my gearbox.
A small thing wrong can make a big thing go completely wrong.
It wouldn’t make sense for God to set up a universe where He had to keep track of every sparrow and step in and fix things with miracles. Better to have billions of sparrows and check in less often.
Part of what happens when one goes crazy is that there’s a grammatical shift. Thoughts come into the mind as firmly established truth. There is no simile or metaphor. There’s no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact.
It would possibly be tolerable to feel like or as if one was on fire or like the CIA might be after you or like you had to hold your breath so that you could be compacted and smuggled to a neutral site in Mongolia to wrestle India’s craziest crazy. But there’s no like or as if. It’s all really happening, and there’s no time to argue or have second thoughts.
Without prelude or explanation, I’m in four-point restraints in my boxer shorts on a gurney in a side hall of the hospital where I once trained and currently still work. I’m HMS alum, HMS faculty—I actually teach Introduction to Clinical Medicine and the Newborn Exam—and I didn’t even get into McLean’s?
“Don’t worry about me,” I explain to strangers passing by. “The police way overreacted. As soon as my doctor gets here they’ll undo these silly restraints. Do you know that in a well-run hospital, restraints are almost never necessary?”
Without being too self-centered and petty, I couldn’t help wishing that they had either let me get some clothes or not taken me to the hospital where I was on staff, or if they had to take me there, why couldn’t they have put me in a quiet little room somewhere, anywhere but the hall, please?
A nurse whose kids I had taken care of for years passed by looking afraid and like she might cry. “Don’t worry,” I tried to tell her. “This will turn out okay.”
It’s probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well. Fourteen years earlier, I’d fought my way back from being crazy with a lousy prognosis to write a book and go to medical school, finish an internship and residency. Now I was married with two kids, locked up in a windowless room, again. I was being treated with Haldol instead of Thorazine and weighed about 180 instead of 130. Long run, short slide.
In a totally unscientific survey of RNs done right around the time of my fourth psychotic break, I was named the number one pediatrician by Boston magazine. Truth is stranger than fiction.
I had prayed and God said things would be okay and I assumed it meant okay without my having another breakdown or having to go to the hospital. God was a lot less wordy than the voices. He also neglected to say anything about my marriage, which was unlikely to be improved by my hospitalization and not being able to work for a while.
I had a memory of throwing rocks that I had grabbed from an aquarium at my wife right before I tried to go through the window. That wasn’t like me. We had seen two marriage counselors at that point, and I should have had at least a clue that things might not work out no matter how little she or I wanted to get divorced.
During my first break, the content of my delusions involved questions of human existence that went back to the beginning of time. This time it seemed largely about the advantages of free-market economies. Nuclear war would be averted and the Berlin Wall would come down if I emerged victorious. Anyway that’s what I was told. It boiled down to me against the Russian Bear. The hopes and fears