Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [84]
Mom and Dad were livid. They let me come home for that week, but they weren't happy. Dad roared at me.
“So this is what you do with the money I've been giving you?” Mom just shook her head that I would be so stupid as to add drug addiction to my other problems. The week I spent at home was pretty tense.
Futura House accepted me back on one condition: no more drugs. I accepted the condition, but things got worse anyway. I was beginning to understand how sick I was. But I was far too overwhelmed by my secret symptoms. I kept encouraging myself to hang on a little longer but I didn't know how long I would last, and I didn't know how to communicate my suffering to anyone else. My anger was returning. I was screaming for help, but the language I was speaking no one seemed to understand.
I played sick games with myself. Late at night when it got warmer, I went outside Futura House in shorts and a T-shirt, but no shoes. I walked to the curb, put my Walkman on my head and turned it up full-blast. Then I closed my eyes and crossed the street, one foot in front of the other. Cars zoomed by honking. I imagined hearing the drivers yelling and cursing. Smiling slyly, I finished my crossing and opened my eyes on the other side. My record was six round trips. Then I got bored with the game.
My violence was escalating. I smashed a window. I punched in my closet door. At the Thursday weekly meeting, the staff made things very clear to me: one more incident and I was out.
At nursing school my performance grew more and more erratic. I wanted desperately to succeed. But no matter how hard I tried to stay in control, I found myself doing wildly inappropriate and even dangerous things.
I couldn't even handle bed making properly. My first patient was a woman who had had surgery just the day before. I went into her room, introduced myself cordially as a nursing student and asked her to please get out of bed, as I had to change her sheets. She didn't want to climb out of bed so soon after surgery. She resisted. I persisted.
I knew she had had the surgery. I knew she was in great pain. I also knew that I had to make her fucking bed if I was going to pass this part of my nursing rotation. I finally helped her out of bed and seated her in a chair nearby. I tried to make her bed as quickly as possible, but in my haste I caught my finger in the guardrail and blood oozed out everywhere. I never did get reprimanded for making the poor lady move. Instead, I wound up in the emergency room for bandaging and a tetanus shot.
I did all kinds of crazy things. Instead of washing my hands for twenty seconds as instructed, I scrubbed for two minutes by the clock. I went into a geriatric's room, and tried to cheer an old lady up by borrowing her cane and tap dancing like a fool around her room. I walked out of an anatomy and physiology exam because I didn't know where the parts of a dissected cat belonged. I faked patients’ blood pressure because the Voices were screaming so loud in my ears that I couldn't hear anything when it was my turn to take a reading. I was clever, though: I always wrote something close to the last reading on the chart. If the last true reading was 110/80, then I'd write 110/70.
In the first semester, I had just managed to pass my exams. This semester, I couldn't pass my exams, because I wasn't really taking them. I gave that job over to my Voices.
While I was sitting before my examination paper, I would hear the Voices whispering. “Pick B! Pick B!” they'd say. I believed everything the Voices told me, and knew that under their command I could do no wrong. I raced down the sheet answering question after question according to their instruction. I would finish a fifty-minute, fifty-question test in five minutes, hand in the paper and waltz out of the room confident I had aced the exam. Later when I got back a paper with a failing score, I was crushed. The Voices were fakes! They had deceived me and let me down.
Still, I couldn't study well