She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [64]
In their journals that day, Celeste recorded notes from a class on how suicidal thoughts begin, drawing a diagram that led from stress to anxiety to suicidal ideation. Meanwhile, Tracey attended a class on relapsing addictions and the twelve-step problem so integral to AA. “Relapse begins when you start thinking about it,” she wrote.
Still, Tracey spent much of the day dreaming about being alone with Celeste. Her preoccupation caught the eye of a nurse who noted on her chart at nine that evening that Tracey paid an unusual amount of attention to her new roommate. “Patient is having trouble maintaining her boundaries with her peer,” the nurse wrote, adding that she’d cautioned Tracey against excessive touching.
Finally alone in their room that night, Celeste took off her shirt and lay on her stomach. On the bed, Tracey stroked and rubbed her bare back. “We’d been kissing,” says Tracey. “It was foreplay.”
When Tracey noted fine hair on her lower back, Celeste’s face took on a pained expression. “That’s from the chemo,” she said, claiming she’d had ovarian cancer and had taken chemotherapy to treat it. Celeste’s pain further endeared her to Tracey.
As they were becoming more intimate, a night nurse walked in and discovered them. She ordered them to stop and told Celeste to get dressed. She then explained that touching a peer was strictly forbidden. That night, the nurse’s notes on Celeste’s chart said: “Patient was cautioned about appropriate touching and boundaries. Patient stated that she didn’t know that ‘massaging wasn’t allowed,’ and was very apologetic.”
“We knew if we were caught again they might separate us,” says Tracey. “From that point on we were more careful.”
“Celeste didn’t want to play by the rules,” says Samantha, one of the patients. “From the beginning, she ordered people around, and she refused to attend sessions. She told us her husband was paying cash and she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want.”
For many, Timberlawn was a last resort. With its strong reputation, patients often waited for months to be accepted. Others, those without insurance, saved money to pay for care they hoped could turn their lives around. “It’s a place, if you’re serious about working, you’re going to get the opportunity to take a good look at yourself and make changes,” says Samantha. “It’s a place where you can get real help.”
In group sessions, Tracey peeled back the layers of her pain. At times she cried. “She spoke her mind,” says Samantha. “She was out there, in the open.”
Celeste, on the other hand, skipped groups whenever possible, and when she did attend, sat off by herself, acting as if she had no need to be there. On the rare occasion when the group leader cajoled her into the discussion, Samantha never saw what she believed to be a window into Celeste’s soul. “I never saw any real emotion. It all seemed canned,” she says. “I thought she hid behind a mask.”
The PTSD program focused on cognitive behavioral therapy, a theory that function could be improved by reason. Desperate patients seeking help came from as far away as New York and California. A major tenet was that as adults such patients often fell into one or a combination of three groups: perpetrators, victims, or caretaker/rescuers. Within days of Celeste’s arrival, Tracey’s therapist, Susan Milholland, worried that her patient had become her roommate’s rescuer.
It was as if Celeste had patched Tracey into the role Kristina filled at home—her entourage and staff. When Celeste wanted something, Tracey ran to the nurses’ station to ask. The day a nurse reprimanded Celeste for wearing a tight sweater with a revealing neckline, Tracey sprang to her defense. During her sessions with Milholland, Tracey worried about Celeste, not concentrating on her own therapy. “Patient defensive in response to encouragement that she focuses on her own issues not peer’s, going on and on with repetition about what her roommate needs,” Milholland wrote in her chart.
In her journal,