Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [79]
It became a kind of a game. Quietly, just as in the hospital, I was trying to push the edge, just skirting the danger zone.
Then that summer I tipped over the line. Once again I decided to stop taking my medicine. Despite my growing new awareness of my illness, deep down I still equated taking medicine with being sick. If I stopped, I thought, I'd get well.
Of course I didn't get well at all. I got much sicker. At first I just began to feel a little weird. Then the voices started dancing about, popping in and out more and more. They got louder. I started to panic. The staff at the day hospital began to sense my agitation and question me. I told them I was fine. I wasn't.
Then one day the Voices became too strong to resist. Inside the day hospital were pots of blooming roses. The Voices ordered me toward them. “Take that fucking rose plant and kill yourself with those thorns. Now!” I didn't feel like I had a choice. I followed those directions, and tore up my arms with the rose thorns.
When the day hospital staff found me, bloody among the blooming roses, they summoned the doctor in charge. He felt I needed to be rehospitalized. He tried to convince me to sign myself in—to move from being a day patient downstairs, to an inpatient upstairs.
“It will only be for a short while, just long enough to adjust your medication,” he said.
Ha! I had heard that one before. No way. I wouldn't do it. I had the doctor in a bind. I had tried to hurt myself. I was clearly in a mood to do it again. He couldn't let me go. But I wouldn't check in.
He sat me down outside his office, under the watchful eye of some mental health workers. From the doorway, I could hear him trying to solve the problem. He tried Dr. Rockland. No luck. Dr. Rockland was on vacation and couldn't be reached. He tried my parents’ home, but there was no answer. My dad was on business in Chicago. Finally, many phone calls later, he did track my father down.
He put ray dad on the phone with me. Daddy pleaded with me to admit myself voluntarily.
“Lori, it's for your own good,” he said. “You need help.” I didn't believe him. Hadn't he and Dr. Rockland convinced me before to go back to New York Hospital for a “short” stay that stretched on for months? I left him with no choice, Dad told me. He gave the approval to commit me involuntarily.
And involuntarily it certainly turned out to be. I put up a hell of a fight. Immediately, as soon as the decision was made, mental health workers appeared to carry me from the day hospital, and the freedom of the outside world, to the locked inpatient hospital upstairs. I struggled, and yelled, and writhed, but nothing worked. They stripped me down, gave me an anti-crazy shot and put me in seclusion.
Another hospital. Another Quiet Room. And not even surroundings I recognized. St. Vincent's was so different from New York Hospital. It was grungier. The rooms were different. I didn't know any of the staff. The protocols were all different too. We weren't allowed to receive phone calls directly, for example. All calls had to come through the nursing station. And patients weren't even allowed to handle matches. Staff walked around with lighters hung from their necks to light patients’ cigarettes when they asked.
As soon as I had quieted down, I began telling everyone around me that I was leaving soon. The patients all laughed at that. They had heard that before. But I meant it. And this time I knew how to do it. With medication newly running through my blood and my brain I calmed down enough to carry out my plan. I followed every rule, obeyed every order. And every time anyone asked, I said the Voices were gone, I felt better, and had no intention whatsoever of killing myself.
It worked. I was in and out of St. Vincent's Hospital in nine days flat. Back I went to the day program as if nothing had happened. Still, I stayed furious