Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [113]
27
Lori New York Hospital, White Plains, New York, March 15, 1989-November 6, 1989
The first day I took clozapine, I felt like I was stoned. An obscure feeling entered my body.
I had been waiting for this for so long. This was my last hope. Was this it? Was this the cure I had been waiting for? Anxiously I watched myself. Puzzling sensations were surging through me.
I started out on a very low dose, 25 milligrams in one small yellow tablet at bedtime. As the days went by, gradually, very gradually, the dosage was increased. Twenty-five milligrams. Fifty milligrams. Two pills at bedtime. Then one in the morning and two at night. Up and up I went, 100 milligrams, 150, 200, 250 ... all the way up to 700 milligrams.
I could barely bring myself to acknowledge any changes that might be occurring. My own emotions were warring within me. I wanted desperately for this medicine to work. I was almost willing it to do its job and free me from my tormenting Voices. Yet I was terrified at the same time. For all I knew, these pills were placebos, and the effects I was feeling were only the product of my own fierce desire to be well.
What's more, I wasn't actually sure I was feeling better. Different, maybe, but not altogether better. In fact, in a lot of ways I felt much, much worse. One of the patients who was supposed to get clozapine before me had been taken off all his other medications, and had flipped out. Dr. Doller didn't want that to happen to me, and so she got permission to start me on clozapine before I had stopped taking the Prolixin I was on. So at the same time as I was increasing my clozapine dose, I was decreasing the Prolixin. The two medications dueled in my body and gave me strange, unpleasant feelings. My chest and throat were tight. I felt like I was smothering.
My emotions too were unchained. In preparation for the clozapine, Dr. Doller had taken me off lithium, my mood stabilizer. Without its help in blunting the swings of my feelings, I plunged into a deeper depression than I had felt in a long time. I felt tearful and weepy, out of sorts and remote.
Something about my depression, my anticipation, my anxiety, my hope, my anguished fears for the future combined to overload all the restraints that Dr. Doller, Dr. Fischer and I had so painstakingly built over the years.
Some of my actions became wild, the kind of out-of-control acting out that I had renounced while working with them. As the Voices chanted, “Four stabs to the abdomen!” I tried to stab myself. I only used a plastic fork, but it made a nasty puncture wound, and got my status lowered in the bargain.
Some of my actions were whimsical, as I acted out little private jokes. When Dr. Fischer went on vacation, she gave me a handful of pennies, one for each day she would be gone to mark off the time—for me to think of her thinking of me. Instead of carefully laying them aside, each day I swallowed one. It made me feel closer to her. That got me multiple trips to the hospital medical clinic for X-rays and nasty-tasting medicines.
But slowly, behind all the depression, the conflicting medications and the outrageous behavior, the new medication was doing its work. Gradually, subtly, changes began creeping up on me. People began remarking on my changed demeanor. I was less impulsive, they said, and more thoughtful. I was looking brighter, more alive, they said. My parents said they saw beginnings of the sparkle back in my eyes again.
Even I could not ignore it. The most striking thing I felt was a new sense of calm. For the first time in years, I slept. I slept not only through the night, but for part of the next afternoon. No medication on earth had given me that feeling of relaxation before Tfelt less restless too. The feeling that I was going to crawl out of my skin began to abate.
My head felt strange. It was as if it were draining out from he imUfe My head had been filled with sticky stuff like melted rubber or motor oil. Now all that sticky stuff was dripping out leaving only my