Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [33]
What was wrong with her? We still didn't know. No one was telling us. Did they know? We didn't know that either. All we knew was that they kept trying all the drugs they knew of, and nothing seemed to help. The names of the drugs rang in our heads: They tried lithium for her mood swings. They tried Thorazine and Haldol for psychiatric symptoms. They kept boosting the doses higher and higher. They gave her enough medicine to fell a cow. But nothing was working.
The hospital seemed to be getting irritated with Lori. Why wasn't she responding? And we were getting more and more irritated with Payne Whitney. For one thing, it seemed they were always changing doctors on us. Payne Whitney was a teaching hospital, an offshoot of New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center, and we kept being seen by earnest young students doing their rotation through a psychiatric clinic.
First there was a young man. Then a tiny young woman. Then another man. Then another woman. Every time they changed, we had to start all over from the beginning: Yes, Lori had seemed normal through most of her childhood. Yes, sometimes she seemed depressed. No, she had never had trouble functioning. Look at her college record! Yes, her troubles seemed to have begun in late college. If we were being put through this agony, we thought, what about Lori? And what were they doing to help her?
Then one day in early July, we met with a young woman. Lori's case was a difficult one to diagnose, she told us. Because of Lori's cycles of racing energy followed by deep despair, the doctors were considering that she had a bipolar disorder, which was another way of saying manic-depression. That made sense to me. I myself have pretty abrupt mood swings, from elation to gloom, although nothing that had ever been debilitating.
But then the doctor dropped a bombshell. Lori, she said, was hallucinating.
Hallucinating? I began to cry.
“I don't understand it,” I said. “I don't understand what's going on with her, and I'm afraid.”
Marvin was calmer. He didn't believe it. He didn't want to believe it. I think he felt Lori was letting her imagination run away with her, and that with a little encouragement, she could control it.
Still, we were both devastated by the news, and by the doctors’ apparent inability to either figure out her symptoms or control them. So when the doctors proposed giving her electroshock treatments Marvin and I went along. We were willing to try anything. And electroshock, they assured us, was nothing like the horror that had been portrayed in the movies. It was a very mild current. Sometimes it provided enough stimulus to the brain to jolt it out of whatever was causing these wild swings. They brought us the papers. We signed them.
They wouldn't let us be there during the shock treatments themselves, so I never knew what happened or what they were actually like. But when I saw Lori in the evenings, she seemed much more subdued. Maybe she was just tired and out of it. But the evenings when she had been treated she always seemed so far away. After six treatments she seemed to be getting better, and she was allowed to do without the full-time nurse. One night we were even allowed a pass to take her out to dinner. But very quickly she relapsed. They shocked her six more times. Then six more after that. It went on and on, July, August and then into September. Altogether she had twenty treatments. Except for the lethargy on the days she had the treatment, we saw no lasting effects.
Payne Whitney, it seemed, was running out of tricks. It was a short-term facility. At first we had taken that as a hopeful sign. She was going to check in, get treated and get out. We never thought of the alternative: That she would not get better. That psychotherapy would not work. That drugs would not work. That electroshock would not work. That she would not return home. That she would be moved someplace, to a longer-term