Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [41]
At any given point there are several million people in this country who are psychotic. As a matter of law they are exempt from being judged responsible for their actions while crazy. They are also 99 percent invisible. Most won’t get better enough to be as well as they were before. Many won’t really get better at all, just another part of life to not look at if you don’t want to get depressed. I’ve read studies indicating that 90+ percent of the homeless are mentally ill.
Things do not even out.
Jane at age fifty-five
(Photo by Michael Cullen)
chapter 10
Coming Home
Drinking a little every day, I had come to live in a small space where my feelings were very big and scary.
It was the day before Christmas, 1985. I was thirty-eight and seven-twelfths years old. I wanted to come home from the hospital under my own steam. I took a taxi most of the way and walked the last half mile. The third-floor window I had tried to jump through had been repaired, but there was still glass and broken sash in the bushes. I had three Christmas ornaments I had made in art therapy in my pocket. I have them still; regardless of how “good” the music or painting is, the arts have been a lifeline and the heart of the matter for me and Kurt and many other people.
When I was getting ready to leave the hospital I would look at my hands like they were someone else’s. It was the damnedest thing how they shook and trembled. I had always had a mild intention tremor, but I prided myself on doing medical procedures well. I needed at least an approximate sense of where my fingertips were and what they were up to.
The first time I managed to speak up and ask a question at an AA meeting, I asked, “How long does the shaking last?”
“You drank a long time, you’re going to shake a long time,” said a gravel-voiced woman named Hope.
While I was still in the hospital I had to sign something about my disability insurance. “Too bad it doesn’t really insure against disability,” I thought. My father sincerely said it was a good thing I had disability insurance, and I wanted to yell at him. How would anybody be able to tell if a writer and an icon was disabled?
Before, I’d been seeing twenty or thirty patients a day. I thought it was keeping me sane and at the same time proving to the world that I was cured and making me a living. I thought things were fixed and okay forever. Right before all hell broke loose on the commune, I had thought that things were all right and fixed forever.
Jane defied the odds long enough to see several more grandchildren born. When asked, I regretfully told her that stage-four ovarian cancer wasn’t a curable disease. She said that none of us knew the future and that something else might kill her, like getting hit by a truck. When I was in the hospital wrestling the Russian Bear and standing up for free markets, my mother’s cancer came back and no one knew how to tell me.
She was in the hospital being operated on again when they told her that I was in the hospital. I had just finished opening Christmas presents when they told me her cancer was back.
I cried. It was a bad December for the home team. We didn’t deserve to be having things going so badly. Would it have been that hard to stagger my mental illness and my mother’s cancer by a couple of months?
——
I looked out from a home that I somehow owned. There were two cars in the driveway. I had been to medical school and done an internship and residency. For the moment, anyway, I had a valid license to practice medicine in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Work wasn’t eager to have me back like tomorrow or the next day, but no one was saying I was done forever. I was related to the person who had done all the hard work that made the house, cars, et cetera, possible, but it was a complicated relationship. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see patients again but guessed that maybe I could