Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [115]
And gradually, I did begin to recognize other people as friends. As I got better and my status went up I was allowed to go to activities. I was offered a choice: I could go with a staff person, with an escorted group, with a fellow patient or by myself. These days I would wait for ten minutes for another patient to get ready so that we could both walk over together. I wasn't afraid to call other patients my friends.
I was even starting to take a more active role in the unit. I was elected secretary of patient government for 3 South. It wasn't a big deal. All the patient government did was handle things like plans for outings, or tie-dying T-shirts, or raising money for our activities. But to me it meant everything. Not only did it mean that I was taking on more responsibility, but it also meant something I never would have believed possible: People liked me and respected me.
I even switched roles a bit. No more running away for me. When one of my fellow patients confided in me that she planned to run, I tried to talk her out of it. When she did take advantage of an open door and tried to bolt, I ran after her, grabbed her and brought her back.
Slowly, old feelings began to unlock. My mind began to be able to distinguish myriad complex emotions where none had existed before. All the powerful feelings had always been there in my heart; it was as if there had been no spot in my brain to register them. My mind had been a slippery surface that only the most violent of emotions—fear, anger, hatred, fearsome love-—could puncture. Now that rock-hard glacial surface was melting, leaving scrabbly little footholds where feelings could take hold and grow. For years I had swung between powerful poles of emotions. I had hated Dr. Fischer. I had loved her. I feared her. I craved her. Torturing swings between two equally unacceptable poles. Only the work we had done together had kept me from being torn apart in those currents.
Now I was beginning to feel other things. My heart could feel other possibilities, and my mind could see that those other possibilities existed. I might like Dr. Fischer. I might look forward to seeing her. I might be annoyed with her. I might disagree with her. The gunk draining from my brain was unclogging whole areas of me that been petrified in poisonous resin for so long that I had forgotten they had ever existed. Our work together took on whole new possibilities.
But before we could take advantage of these possibilities, something happened. Dr. Fischer announced that she was leaving the hospital.
Leaving the hospital? All I heard was that she was leaving me. I knew she had been a postdoctoral fellow. I knew that it was her training she had been doing at New York Hospital, and that it wasn't a permanent post. But I had never realized that she would leave the hospital before I would. I had never thought of her leaving at all. She was so important to me. I needed her. How could she leave me?
We kept on meeting, kept on talking. She kept on advising me on my recovery.
“Go slow, Lori, go slow,” she said. She worried that I was growing too impatient to be well, too impatient to show progress. “We're moving at a snail's pace,” I complained.
“Then move like a wounded snail,” she said. “You'll only cause yourself problems if you try to move on to the next level before you've gotten used to this level.”
We talked about her departure. We talked about what it meant to me. All the old feelings came flooding back. She was leaving me because I was no good. She had finally gotten sick of me, just as everyone else had gotten sick of me. She was turning her back on me because I was a loser who would never leave the hospital. We talked about my feelings about myself, about her, about being abandoned, about—eventually—being on my own.
For the most part, we managed. She tried to get me to focus on the