The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [118]
When I was finally released from the hospital, I bore little resemblance to the dynamo of assertion I had been on my first release. I had nothing but a feeling of extreme fragility and vulnerability and a little hope that some day things would be different.
I didn’t adjust well to being fragile and vulnerable. Virginia or my parents or anyone else could break me inadvertently. Just a slight bit of human clumsiness and snap.
I was once again completely financially dependent on my parents. There were the hospital bills, and the prospects of my being able to handle any sort of job in the near future seemed slim. Dale said at least a year.
I was cramping Virginia’s style, the farm’s style, everyone’s style. And for what were all these people going out of their way? A hollow, shaky shell that didn’t know what to think about anything.
We got a little apartment in Vancouver. Dale said it wasn’t such a hot idea to just head right back up to the farm. Virginia still kept saying, “This time we’re going to do it right.”
My mother and Virginia took care of most of the arrangements. I just sort of dragged along.
Taking Thorazine was part of doing things right. I hated Thorazine but tried not to talk about hating it. Hating Thorazine probably wasn’t a healthy sign. But Thorazine has lots of unpleasant side effects. It makes you groggy, lowers your blood pressure, making you dizzy and faint when you stand up too quickly. If you go out in the sun your skin gets red and hurts like hell. It makes muscles rigid and twitchy.
The side effects were bad enough, but I liked what the drug was supposed to do even less. It’s supposed to keep you calm, dull, uninterested and uninteresting. No doctor or nurse ever came out and said so in so many words, but what it was was an antihero drug. Dale kept saying to me, “You mustn’t try to be a hero.” Thorazine made heroics impossible.
What the drug is supposed to do is keep away hallucinations. What I think it does is just fog up your mind so badly you don’t notice the hallucinations or much else.
My father sent me an article in Psychology Today on an experiment with schizophrenics to evaluate the effectiveness of Thorazine. The conclusion was that patients who before their illness had been well socialized, able to make friends and function effectively on a social level, actually recovered more quickly without Thorazine than with it. People who had been all fucked up before their illness benefited from Thorazine.
I was so fucked up on Thorazine at the time that I had a great deal of difficulty figuring out to which group I belonged, but I knew I hated Thorazine.
I managed to cheat on the Thorazine some. Very whimpy unheroic cheating. I deliberately misinterpreted what some nurse had said and skipped a few days. I felt great. My mother and Virginia both remarked on how fast I was recovering and how chipper I was getting. The spirit of our little apartment jumped a hundredfold. I wasn’t cramping anyone’s style any more. I even got chipper enough to tell them why I was so chipper. They were a little worried about that, but I was so obviously in a good state of mind they almost started questioning Dale’s judgment.
When I went to see Dale that week it was far and away the nicest visit we’d ever had. He said I was making a remarkable recovery, I was putting on much-needed weight, color was coming back into my face, I was in better shape than he had ever seen me. If I just stuck with his regimen and kept improving, I could maybe visit the farm for a few days in a couple of weeks.
He was so pleased. I was so pleased. Virginia and my mother and all my friends were so pleased. In this atmosphere of seemingly unanimous, universal pleasedness, I told him I didn’t need so much Thorazine. I told him, in fact, that at least part of the reason everyone was so pleased was that I had stopped taking it and I was sure I could recover much