Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [110]
During the seminars we learned that one in three people would do better on clozapine than on other antipsychotic drugs. Those people who suffered from the most severe types of side effects of antipsychotics—the stiff and twitching limbs—would also get relief from those symptoms. No one was claiming to us that clozapine was a miracle drug. At the same time, they were emphasizing its dangers: About one in one hundred people who took it risked dying from it.
We hesitated. At first we weren't sure who to offer it to. One obvious case was a woman on our unit who suffered badly from side effects. But I wasn't sure about giving it to Lori. No one was promising that it would definitely help people like her, and I hesitated to risk her life on a bet.
In psychiatry there have over the years been many new drugs that have been touted, but which in the end proved to be not much different from the old ones. So I was always skeptical.
Still, by the time the first person had been on clozapine for about a month, I was convinced that it was worth a try for Lori. We had begun to see dramatic results with this other woman. From a stiff, withdrawn, catatonic person, she had become more open, conversational and insightful. Lori was desperate to start a new medication, any new medication, and I agreed to go along. All we needed to do was get her parents’ consent.
26
Nancy Schiller Scarsdale, New York, February 1989
The longer Lori was in the hospital, the harder I found it to visit her there.
As soon as our car pulled in through the front gate, I would begin: “I'm not going in, Marvin. I'm going to stay in the car.” Marvin was stolid.
“You're going in,” was all he said. He realized, I think, how badly I needed to vent my anxieties.
“I'm not going in, Marvin. I just can't take it anymore.”
When we pulled into a visitor's parking spot, and Marvin turned the engine off, I would sit crying in the cold, dark car. Over and over I sobbed that I was not going in, that I couldn't go in. Marvin didn't say much. He just kept repeating that I was going in, until finally some of my tensions and fears dissipated. I dried my eyes and reached for the car door.
As I walked from the car to the hospital, I kept repeating to Marvin over and over again that I couldn't go through the door. On the landing I said I wasn't going up another floor. Outside the locked door of her unit, I said I was turning back.
I was so tense that the littlest thing irritated me. The wait outside the door for someone to let us in seemed interminable. When the door finally opened, I resented the routine they put us through. We felt like two dummies standing there while they searched through my purse and the bags we brought looking for dangerous materials.
“I know all this already,” I wanted to shout. I knew not to bring in anything glass, or any plastic bags, or wire hangers, or anything made of sharp metal. Especially when the staff member was new, I just wanted to scream: “I've been doing this for years, don't you understand. Years. I know all this better than you do.”
Once we were inside, the visit itself was so painful for all of us.
Sometimes Lori would seem almost well, and it would be the most eerie and frustrating thing. She could carry on a conversation. She seemed like she was with us. Those days, Marvin and I would leave, half seriously discussing with each other the possibility that she was right, perhaps she did not belong here.
But in some ways, those near-well days were the most frustrating for us. She looked so normal that we kept forgetting she was not. When she told us how she had hit a screen, or knocked over furniture, we would yell at her to express our frustration. When we looked at her hands and realized she had been punching things or destroying things, we would yell at her as we would have yelled at our normal daughter.
“How can you do this to yourself?” I shouted at her, when she told me she