Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [72]
They wrapped me tight as a mummy, arms and hands at my side. All that was left uncovered were my feet and my neck and head. And there they left me, with a single attendant by my now helpless side.
I was laughing hysterically. But there was nothing funny about it. It was cold, freezing cold. My teeth began chattering frantically as if they were the Voices speaking. I was going to die a shivery Arctic death and the Voices were going to have the last cold icy laugh. My whole body was frozen.
Cold-pack protocol mandated a full two hours as this freezing mummy. The attending person sitting by my side regularly checked my vital signs on my feet or on my neck. I tried to refuse to let anyone take my temperature. It was my final effort.
As the sodium amytal began to take effect, and the shivering to wear me out, I did begin to calm down enough to complain. I had been bound with my elbow digging tightly into my side. Too bad. No one was going to unbind me before my two hours were up. I found myself thirsty. All I could have was sips of water or juice from a straw the attendant would hold to my lips. What if I had to go to the bathroom? That's tough. If I needed to go badly enough, I just had to go right where I was, and feel the warmth spreading out underneath me against the icy cold sheets.
When two hours were up, a decision had to be made. Was I calm enough to be unpacked? If not, an order had to be signed for an additional two hours. If I was deemed calm, then female staffers had to be called. The men were there for their strength during emergencies, but it was women who had to be there when I was un-cocooned. It was one thing I was glad of. After the two hours were up, I had usually recovered enough of myself to be self-conscious about what had transpired, and modest about my nakedness.
So two female staffers would have the honors of demummify-ing me. I'd be freezing, wet and cramped, and feeling embarrassed, degraded and demeaned by the whole process.
But the most amazing thing was how truly calm I felt. Never again, I'd say.
17
Steven Schiller Baltimore, Maryland, January 1986-March 1986
Visiting Lori in the hospital this time around had been so much easier than it had been the first time. It wasn't that she was better. If anything, she was much sicker than before. It's just that I had changed so much.
When she was hospitalized the first time, I was not quite seventeen, an awkward, lonely teenager just growing out of my baby fat. Three and a half years later some people had a hard time recognizing me: I had spurted up so that at twenty I was six foot three and lanky. The first time she was hospitalized I was in high school. This latest time I was in college.
When I set out for college in September of 1983, Lori had already been out of the hospital for six months. She and Dad drove me down to Baltimore. Dad and I sat in the front. She sat in the back, quiet and pensive, smoking heavily.
We hadn't exactly been hanging out while she was living at home. But as I was leaving for college she gave me a piece of advice.
“Enjoy yourself at college,” she said. “It's the best time you'll ever have. It gets a lot worse after that.”
It made me sad to think how true that must be for her.
When we got to Baltimore, I bounded out of the car, and leaped off to my dorm room without even much of a goodbye to my father or Lori. I wasn't really worried about what people would think of her. I was more focused on my new life and what people would think of me.
I spent my freshman year trying to adjust, trying to make friends. It was tough. Johns Hopkins is a very serious school, very scientifically oriented. And here I was, a political economics major, thinking I would prepare myself for a law career. I began thinking I'd made a terrible mistake. I've come to the wrong school. I'm not going to be a doctor or an engineer like everyone else here. This is all wrong.
But at the beginning of my sophomore year, everything