Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [105]
I didn't care. I had tried everything else. Nothing had worked. If there was a new drug, and someone was being given it, I wanted to be given it too. I didn't see what I had to lose.
I told Dr. Doller I wanted to be started on clozapine.
25
New York Hospital, White Plains, New York, January 1989
When Lori asked to be started on clozapine, I had to think about it really carefully. I wasn't sure that it was a good idea. The drug was just becoming available to us on an experimental basis. It was possible that it could offer Lori some relief from the voices and other hallucinations that were tormenting her. It was also possible that it could kill her.
Was the drug worth the risk? I thought back over our work together. When Lori first arrived on the unit two years earlier, I was young. I was single. I loved my work. So I was often on the unit late into the night, chatting with my patients or simply hanging around the nursing station.
One winter evening I was just walking out after a long day, when I passed the unit dining room. Mealtime was long over, and the room should have been empty. But there was Lori, all by herself, pacing around and looking uncomfortable. Some instinct made me stop.
“What's wrong, Lori?” I asked.
“My father's out of town. He's in Chicago,” Lori answered.
I waited. That fact in itself didn't seem particularly upsetting to me.
“It's snowing,” she continued. It was, indeed, a very bad day, all stormy and blowing. “I'm worried about him.”
“Maybe his plane will be delayed,” I suggested.
She began to cry. “His plane is going to crash. It's going to happen because I am going to make it happen. I am going to make it happen because I want it to happen.”
It was heartwrenching. She was suffering so. Here was something I could relate to easily. There was nothing bizarre about what she was feeling. She was worried about her father. What's more, she was angry with him, angry because he was away, angry because he wasn't there to visit her, angry because she was worried about him.
In thinking about that she began—as many people do—turning her feelings into fantasies of horrible disasters. And because she was fantasizing disaster, she began to believe she was creating it. It's a very primitive fear, this fear of the power of our own thoughts. It's one of the reasons many cultures have superstitious prohibitions against saying things out loud. Locked away in her own world, Lori just didn't have any way of putting her thoughts and emotions in perspective. This was something I could help her with.
“Of course you're worried,” I said. “It's a bad night, and you love your father and you want him to get home safely. You are worried about him, but you are also angry with him.”
“I'm not angry with him,” she retorted.
“Sure you are,” I said. “You have to remember that it's normal to feel angry, but that your thoughts can't harm anyone. Your worry and your anger aren't going to make the plane crash. You don't have that power. But you do have the power to influence the direction of your thoughts. You are saying that you are worried, but it is your own thoughts taking you in the direction of thinking about plane crashes. You can take your thoughts in some other direction if you want.”
Then I took her out of the room, out onto the unit, and pulled one of the nurses aside and told her what I had told Lori, so that she could reinforce the message. “Can you spend some time with her, talk to her a little bit for a while.”
That was the kind of incident that might have escalated. If I hadn't been walking by, she would have eventually become so tormented inside she would have thrown something or broken something. But it was also something that was pretty easily defused.
As for Lori, she was immensely relieved. I hadn't done much at all, but what I had done had taken away a tremendous amount of suffering from her. She felt like I had done something magical. Simply