Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [87]
On Tuesday, December 15, 1987, I arrived on 3 South—one of New York Hospital's long-term units—in time for lunch.
But even though I was starving, I refused to eat. Instead, I went straight to my room. I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was tense and upset and on the edge of tears. As I walked through the halls on my way here, I had seen the other patients staring. I knew that they were laughing at me and relishing my discomfort.
In my room, I unpacked my belongings. I covered my single bed with the pink comforter my mother had brought me. I put the boxes with my three hundred cassette tapes on the floor. Into the closet went the tons of clothes—in three sizes—that had been bought to accommodate my increasingly porky figure. I lined my windup toys on my desk. My parents were always on the lookout for new ones. They knew that I could fill hours of my empty day fiddling with these little children's playthings. I had a lizard with a wagging tail, a set of teeth that chattered, a walking pig that wiggled its tail and ears and snorted, a walking hamburger, a cackling witch and a psychedelic slinky.
But even the sight of my familiar possessions didn't reassure me. Everything about this place frightened me. This wasn't just a new hospital unit. I had seen plenty of those. No, this was the end of the road. This was the place I was going to learn to live— or die.
Months earlier, when I had awakened from my suicidal slumber on that first night in the hospital, I had begged to be allowed to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep forever, I told everyone. Let me sleep or let me out, I ranted. I wanted to finish the job. 1 wanted to die.
Once the intensity of my suicidal urges had passed, however, the staff offered me a different choice. I could be discharged immediately as I wished. Or I could sign myself into an extended care unit. There I could plan on a stay of at least a year, maybe longer. There, the doctors would make every possible attempt to find a medication that would help me. At the same time, though, I would have to learn to help myself. I would have to undergo intensive therapy. I would have to begin to acknowledge that I had an illness. I would have to begin to learn to control my illness on my own. No more in-and-out. No more revolving door. Go or stay, the choice was mine.
Everyone waited expectantly. I was well known at the hospital. Many of the staff had been around me during my first and second stays. They knew how vigorously I had fought each time to leave. No one could believe it when this time I chose to stay.
What no one realized—not even me—was that the hospital's ultimatum had spoken to a tiny gleam of insight that had begun glimmering in me. Even while I had been fighting my hardest, little cracks had begun appearing in the steely armor of my denial. Toward the end of my last stay at New York Hospital, their threats to discharge me had panicked me into realizing that I might need help. Those months living in the halfway house, spending lonely afternoons in a pastry shop watching the rest of the world live their lives, had convinced me that I was different from other people. The three-times-a-week lessons Dr. Rockland had given me for years were at last having an effect. Perhaps he was right, I admitted grudgingly. Perhaps I did have an illness. And if I did have an illness, perhaps they were right. Perhaps I did belong in a hospital.
I considered the first option. Down the road, I saw a discharge to a halfway house, another few months of misery and despair, another suicide attempt, another hospitalization—in other words the wretched half life of a chronic mental patient. I knew I couldn't take that. 1 realized what really lay down that road: death. Not the amorphous welcoming, relieving death of my sick fantasies, but real death. I had failed again this time but sooner or later I was going to succeed. This last attempt had come too close.
So when the doctors handed me the choice to go or to stay, something snapped inside me. This