Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [21]
Looking at my Lori sitting hunched over in her hospital gown, it was hard for me to believe Lori Winters's story. My Lori looked so tiny and harmless, and so frightened by the horrors surrounding us.
Bellevue Hospital Medical Center is a big public hospital that, in the middle of the night, is a magnet for society's outcasts, the homeless, the pushers, the addicts, the prostitutes. While we were sitting there, a man was carried in on a stretcher, blood oozing from a knife wound in his side. He lay there screaming, his cries nearly drowning out the shrieks from a woman in labor—a teenager, it seemed—lying in the crowded corridor.
It didn't feel real. It felt like a scene from a bad movie. This was no place for my daughter, who was cowering there whimpering for shame and fear.
Just then Lori's psychiatrist arrived. Lori Winters had called him too, and he had driven down from his home to see what needed to be done. He apparently was familiar with hospital bureaucracy, and had come prepared for a long night: He had a pillow under his arm.
When Lori Winters saw him, her face darkened in anger. “How could you do that,” she lashed out. “How could you turn your back on her like that?”
She was speaking so loudly that I think she wanted me to hear, and to step in. But I didn't think quarreling was going to do us any good right then. The important thing was to get Lori the help she needed. I wanted to put the whole thing behind us as quickly as possible.
In my mind, the most important help she needed was to make sure that nothing of this incident ever came to light. As a psychologist, I knew she could carry a psychiatric label for a long time— if not forever. I didn't want my daughter to be stigmatized by some temporary rash act. I thought that whatever had been bothering her had passed, and that she could leave the hospital now and come home with me right away. But the hospital personnel refused to let her go. Attempting suicide was a serious act, they said, and they wanted her to stay for a few days in the psychiatric ward for observation. That was absolutely out of the question. I didn't want anything on Lori's record that could come back and haunt her in her later life.
We needed to negotiate, and fast. Nancy and I left Lori in the care of Lori Winters and went out to talk with the hospital people. If she had to stay in the hospital, I wanted them to let her stay overnight in the medical unit, not the psychiatric ward. We were out in the hall arguing with the staff when a friend of mine just happened by, a physician I knew from my country club in Scarsdale.
“What are you doing here?” Nancy called to him. Actually, he seemed more surprised to see us than we him. He had an office at New York University Medical Center, and had just finished up with some of his own patients. But what reason could I have for being in a city hospital emergency room in the middle of the night? Hurriedly I explained to him the situation. He left me and went off to talk to the physician on duty. I don't know what he told her, or what strings he pulled, but soon after, the paperwork arrived for me and Lori to sign, admitting her overnight to a medical ward.
“It's better this way, lovey,” I said. “This way you can put this whole thing behind you, and no one will ever need to know you were here. It will all be over.”
I didn't see Lori's problems as serious. She didn't need to stay in a psychiatric ward. She wasn't mentally ill. She just had a few problems. She was having a difficult transition out of her teens into womanhood, making the complex and stressful leap out of college into business, from the security of her college campus into the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan. She was just having some trouble dealing with those changes. I didn't want to believe it was anything more than that. This was no more serious than other phases in her life she had gone through—like being a vegetarian, or losing too much weight, or getting depressed over her date to the prom. Those things had passed, this one would too.
When our kids were