Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [60]
“What did I do wrong?” she asked. “Lori seems so depressed I think she must be mad at me.”
Again Eddie Mae called me in. Had I done anything off-limits, like confiding my personal history of mental illness to this patient? I told her I hadn't. And I lied about my moods.
“It's nothing,” I said. “I'm just tired.”
But mostly I did fine. So well, in fact, that after I had been working there for about a year, I decided to apply for a job at New York Hospital. That would be the ultimate, I decided, the real proof that I was okay. After all, if I were a mental health worker in the same hospital where I had once been a patient, I must be all better, right?
Meanwhile, Rye Psychiatric, which had been sending patients out for electroshock treatments, had just begun doing them themselves, and I volunteered to assist. It was something new to learn, of course. I had another motivation too. I knew, because people had told me, that I had had twenty electroshock treatments at Payne Whitney. But I couldn't remember any of it. And of course I blamed the electroshock for my loss of memory. I wanted to see the treatment used on other patients to see what had happened to me.
I found it very upsetting.
First we had to make sure the patient ate and drank nothing after midnight. Then, around the time of the scheduled treatment, I would help connect the electrodes to their temples, and watch while the doctor gave anesthesia. The patient lay, covered, on a bed. Then the doctor would administer the current by flipping a switch. The whole thing reminded me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her three friends find the little man behind the curtain flipping switches to make thunder and lightning go off.
My job was to help hold the patient down. For when the jolt of electricity went off, the patient would have a seizure, and arch up from the bed. Then, as the seizure subsided, their toes would curl. That was a sign that everything had gone well.
I couldn't stand watching it happen. I couldn't stand thinking this had happened to me, not once, but many times. It made me feel so helpless and out of control.
So pretty quickly I moved to the recovery room, where I found the job less scary. As the patients revived from the anesthesia, their faces were flushed and they were disoriented. It was my job to reorient them.
“You are in Rye Psychiatric Hospital,” I told them softly. “You've just had ECT. You're fine. Today is Tuesday.” I would keep talking to them in a low voice as they gradually came to. Then, because they had already gone so long without eating, I would feed them snacks, first juice, then half a sandwich. As they gradually began to feel better, I would help them with their shoes and escort them back to the main building.
I enjoyed helping the patients, but I hated mentally putting myself in their shoes. Every time I thought about it, I got upset.
Still, in many ways, my own experience had made me empathetic with patients in a way that many other people weren't able to be. I knew I wasn't a trained therapist. But I was a good listener, and I gave good feedback.
I found myself growing close to some special patients. Carla was a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl, very sweet and likable. She seemed like the kind of girl who should have been excited about just starting out on her life. But instead, she seemed kind of lost, as if she didn't know where her place in the world was. For some reason she clung to me, following me around, seeking me out, wanting to talk to me whenever she was able. And I in turn got swooped up by her. She seemed so innocent, so sad. I could see myself in her in some ways.
When she talked about trying to kill herself—she had tried many times—I could understand how she felt. She needed help, and I could offer the same kind of support that had been offered to me over the years.
“It would be a tragedy if you killed yourself,” I told her. People had said that to me all the time, and so those were the exact words I used with her.
“There are people who