Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [89]
Meanwhile, I was fighting to stay in focus, to stay with her, and not to accept the invitations from my Voices to follow them into their world. It was taking all my energy to keep the two worlds apart, to keep the Voices away from her, to answer her from the other, objective, real-world part of my brain, to keep my answers to her relating as closely as possible to her questions.
And then it spilled over. I couldn't keep the two worlds apart. My Voices spilled over into my own voice.
“Come to hell with me, Dr. Doller,” I shouted, my voice echoing the chant in my own ear.
I was horrified. I had slipped. The Voices were going to punish me. Dr. Doller was going to punish me. Ever since I had first heard those Voices so many years ago, my sole aim had been to keep them hidden. I occasionally had let Dr. Rockland peep at the Voices’ world. But when I did so, it was with fear. In the hospital, I resisted speaking of them as best I could, especially with doctors. I never stopped fearing that to let a psychiatrist know that I was hearing Voices was to write myself a one-way ticket to a state hospital, or to death.
I watched Dr. Doller's face for the shock and disgust I was sure she would show.
But nothing changed. She kept right on talking and listening to me with the same tranquil demeanor, the same caring, curious look on her face. I had had many doctors listening to me before. But somehow with Dr. Doller it was different. It seemed to me that she peered right inside of me and sensed what I was feeling. As we parted, the Voices were still howling, yelling in my ear that Dr. Doller was a witch and that she was trying to kill me. But something deep down inside me—the real, well side of me— told me that the Voices were lying. Deep down inside me I knew that this was a woman I could trust.
Three South was a completely different kind of unit from any I had been on before. For one thing, patients couldn't just come and go from 3 South. They had to be interviewed, and they had to be accepted. The patients’ families had to be interviewed too to see how involved they would be in the patients’ treatments.
I found the interviewing process incredibly stressful. One day I came back to my unit in despair after one meeting. I was sure I was going to be rejected. I had been so nervous that I had lashed out at the interviewer.
“They aren't going to want me,” I told the mental health worker when I returned to my old unit. “I just told the guy interviewing me that he was the one who should be on antipsy-chotics, not me.”
When, to my surprise, 3 South accepted me, I still had a long wait to be admitted. There was very little turnover on the unit, and it was eight long months after I was admitted before a bed finally became available.
While I waited, I watched more of my life slide by. I spent my twenty-eighth birthday in the hospital. While I sat lifeless in the hospital, I watched the lives of my brothers move on. While I was in the hospital this'time Steven had graduated from college and Mark and Sally had gotten married. I knew I had agreed to accept long-term treatment, but when I faced the reality, I retreated into rage. What did they mean by long-term if eight months waiting for a bed was short? They were eating my life. My life was being swallowed up by endless days in the hospital.
Once on 3 South, everything moved at even more of a snail's pace.
On the other units, the emphasis had seemed to be on getting better and getting out. I had always felt pressured to show progress. Here it was exactly the opposite. Everyone kept impressing on me the importance of going slowly, of not expecting too much of myself.
In the past, I had felt that my problem—when I even accepted that I had a problem—was like a circuit breaker that had flipped off. All we needed to do was flip the right switch, find the right pill, adjust the thoughts in my head, and Presto! the problem would be solved.
On