Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [103]
The nurse on duty was sympathetic. We went to the window where I heard the sounds.
“I don't hear anything, Lori. I don't see anything out there either. You're hearing things, Lori. It's not real.”
I got more and more agitated. “It's a baby out there. I can hear it. Why can't you hear it?” I demanded to be taken outdoors to look, but the staff refused. It was too dark and cold out there, they said.
Too cold? Couldn't they understand? That was just the point. It was ten degrees outside. How could they leave a crying baby out there in the snow? I decided to take matters into my own hands. There were pay phones on the units that patients could use to call home or their friends. I called the police instead. I insisted they come and investigate the crying baby.
When he heard where I was calling from, the officer on the phone grew skeptical.
“Are you staff or are you a patient?” he asked.
“I'm a patient,” I said. “But I'm not one of the crazy patients. I'm completely sane, and I hear a baby crying, and you'd better get down here before it's too late.”
He asked to speak to the nurse in charge, who explained that I was hallucinating. When she hung up, she turned to me.
“Lori, there's no baby out there, but if it will make you feel better, we'll get hospital security to come and check around for you.”
Of course no one found anything out of the ordinary.
Despite all the progress I had made, how could I go out and live in the world when I couldn't tell what was real from what was not real? How could I face the world locked in a mind that had a life of its own?
What's more, even my body was not my own. For under the influence of the medications I had gone from porky to really obese. At five foot three, I weighed nearly 170 pounds. I felt like a beached whale when my weight had swelled to 130 pounds from my customary 115. At 150 pounds I looked like one. At 170 pounds I refused to peer into the mirror for fear that this blob would look back at me.
I tried to lose weight by starving myself. I didn't eat solid food, and kept myself full by chugging down Diet Cokes. Every Wednesday morning, weigh-in day, I dressed in the lightest clothes I could find and presented myself without shoes on.
But somehow I never lost weight. When I zipped up my jeans, I broke the zipper. My blouses gapped. The sweat suits my mother brought me to wear in lieu of real clothes were great in the winter, but in summer I sweated to death in them. In a family—and a world—that valued thinness and saw fat as a failure of will, how could I explain that the medications had taken over my body the way the Voices had taken over my brain? How could I walk around with this sign of my illness stamped on every line of my body?
How could I go out and live in the world when I had no life?
I knew that in conferences they were talking about halfway houses for me, ones like Futura House, where I could live under supervision. But increasingly I heard talk of a state hospital. I knew New York Hospital wouldn't keep me forever. My worst fears looked like they were about to come true. The state hospital that everyone had threatened me with when I was “bad” was now looking more and more like a possibility, even though I had done my best to be good.
I couldn't live in a state hospital. I knew if that was my only alternative that sooner or later I would kill myself. For real this time. Others seemed to sense it too. One evening, when I was talking to Sorin about killing myself, he grew very serious.
“If you decide you have to kill yourself,” he said, “in the last second before you act, picture my face. Listen to me giving you one last plea not to do it. And know that someone really cares.”
1-21-89, Sat., 8:25 P.M.—I can't tell from which direction the sounds are coming from. It's eerie, real spooked out, and scary—threatening. I've got to get better already. I need new medication or something. I've got to come up with a prayer for me so I, too, can have a miracle.
There was only slight hope left.
It was a new medication. I had heard buzzing about it in the hospital