Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [45]
But in between these acute episodes, I usually could muster an adequate response to whomever was addressing me. When anyone—doctors, nurses, my parents, other patients—spoke to me, I learned to focus on the very end of their statements or questions, and respond to that. Usually I could manage quite an appropriate response. And then I would go back to the Voices.
Even though the Voices were far more intense in the hospital than before, in some ways they were less frightening. When I was in high school and college, they had sneaked up on me, blasting out of the airwaves almost without warning. By now, they had become almost familiar. I hated them. I suffered from them. But they seemed almost a normal part of living. I knew them. I understood them and they understood me.
When I got out of the hospital, the Voices were much softer, much less frequent than before. In the hospital, the doctors told me that it was because of the medicine I was taking, that the medicine was helping to fix whatever it was wrong in my brain. I knew better. I knew that this was just another sign that being in the hospital made me crazy. Wasn't it obvious? When I was in the insane asylum, I heard Voices that made me insane. When I got out, I felt better.
Still, I was so far from being the old Lori everyone knew and loved that I was constantly caught up in a storm of self-hatred. I was fat. I was ugly. Everyone hated me. My friends hated me. My parents hated me. They told me they loved me, but I knew they were lying. They hated me because I was a pathetic loser. I knew my brothers were afraid of me. I knew my mother was ashamed of me. I knew my father was disappointed in me. I was no longer the star my parents could show off to their friends. No more guitar. No more straight As. No more entertaining our friends with the Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. I wasn't sick. I was just a loser. Everyone wanted me to go away. Or die.
It was part of the deal everyone made with me on my discharge that I would continue to see a psychiatrist three times a week. Whoever I chose, they said, would help me work out the problems I was having, and would explain everything to me.
In the final weeks of my hospitalization, I chose the psychiatrist I would be seeing. My dad had always told me to go right to the top, try for the best, seek out the most professional help. So I chose Dr. Lawrence Rockland, the unit chief of 3 North, the unit where I had been hospitalized. While he and I hadn't been really directly involved when I was in the hospital, I used to see him walking through the unit, or coming to meetings. He was always friendly, saying hello when passing by, and taking extra time to touch base with me, and show interest in my condition and progress. I knew he was the boss, so he must be the best.
When I approached him with the idea of being my shrink, he was surprisingly enthusiastic. I didn't know the doc real well but I liked that he seemed to be the epitome of a descendant from the world of Freud, a cigar-smoking professional from the old, traditional days of psychiatry. He was bald, in his fifties, with a great sense of humor. He reminded me of ray dad.
I wanted Dr. Rockland to help me but none of our sessions ever seemed to make much sense. What did I have to say to a psychiatrist? I was fat and felt kind of fuzzy, but otherwise I thought I was just like everyone else. The Voices were bothering me, of course, but I thought everyone knew that. I even thought most people heard them too. They were a normal, if troubling, part of existence.
I tried explaining that to him. The Voices had been around for quite a while, I told him. Even though I despised their presence, they had nothing to do with an illness. I was really quite sane.
He listened respectfully to my explanations without saying anything. When I had finished, he would rise from his chair, and go to his dusty textbooks filling