The Quiet Room (33 page)

Some of my actions became wild, the kind of out-of-control acting out that I had renounced while working with them. As the Voices chanted, “Four stabs to the abdomen!” I tried to stab myself. I only used a plastic fork, but it made a nasty puncture wound, and got my status lowered in the bargain.

Some of my actions were whimsical, as I acted out little private jokes. When Dr. Fischer went on vacation, she gave me a handful of pennies, one for each day she would be gone to mark off the time—for me to think of her thinking of me. Instead of carefully laying them aside, each day I swallowed one. It made me feel closer to her. That got me multiple trips to the hospital medical clinic for X-rays and nasty-tasting medicines.

But slowly, behind all the depression, the conflicting medications and the outrageous behavior, the new medication was doing its work. Gradually, subtly, changes began creeping up on me. People began remarking on my changed demeanor. I was less impulsive, they said, and more thoughtful. I was looking brighter, more alive, they said. My parents said they saw beginnings of the sparkle back in my eyes again.

Even I could not ignore it. The most striking thing I felt was a new sense of calm. For the first time in years, I slept. I slept not only through the night, but for part of the next afternoon. No medication on earth had given me that feeling of relaxation before Tfelt less restless too. The feeling that I was going to crawl out of my skin began to abate.

My head felt strange. It was as if it were draining out from he imUfe My head had been filled with sticky stuff like melted rubber or motor oil. Now all that sticky stuff was dripping out leaving only my brain behind. Slowly I was beginning to think more clearly.

And the Voices? The Voices were growing softer. Were the Voices growing softer? They were growing softer! They began moving around from outside my skull, to inside, to outside again. But their decibel level was definitely falling

It was happening. I was being set free. I had prayed to find some peace, and my prayers were finally being answered.

April 20

I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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I want to live
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April 26
Wednesday, 6:20
P.M.

My birthday. 30 years old. Never felt better. I'm hanging in there real tough thinking of PACE (Positive Attitude Changes Everything). I'm going to have a great, great life fulfilled with warmth and love and happiness and health, and consistent growth. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ME.

The thing that frightened me most was the possibility that the clozapine's effects would wear off. After all, that's what had happened with each other new medication I had tried. A brief flurry of improvement, then a crash. Anxiously I waited.

My head kept clearing. Thinking was less of an effort. The scrambled-eggs unscrambled, the mixed-up spaghetti strands of thoughts unraveled. The compartments that had come unhinged, flinging their contents into a wild unruly heap in my brain, creaked shut. Thoughts presented themselves to me one at a time in more or less logical order.

When the Voices reared up and roared, it was as if they hit a glass shield, crashed and fell away. I could hear their cries and complaints. But now I was hearing them as if from far away. Their noises were muffled and remote. They were shouting, clamoring, angrily protesting their own demise. But dying they were. Clo-zapine was standing between them and my brain. Denied the nourishment of my thoughts, they were perishing.

Even my body kept on coming alive. Increasingly people were remarking on the way I looked. Animated, they said. Alive, they said. My face began taking on expressions other people said they had not seen in years. Emotions—subtle human emotions, like curiosity, interest, sympathy, humor—began registering again. My dad said even my walk was different. When I was sickest, I had a walk he called my zombie walk, my motionless arms at my sides, my feet shuffling down the hall. Now I was actually walking like a real person, arms swinging, head up, my body relaxed and a jauntiness in my step.

But the biggest change was in the return of something I hadn't realized was missing: I began to feel connected to other people.

For as long as I could remember, it had been the Voices who had seemed real to me. Other people had seemed far away, distant, as if they inhabited another planet. Their very presence frightened me. I felt alienated from other people, alone. I could never quite decipher other people's meaning or intent. When they intruded on my space I backed off, disturbed by their encroachments. I was suspicious or afraid of people who said they were trying to help me.

For most of my time in the hospital, I had done my very best to isolate myself from the other patients. I had spent as much time as possible at the far end of the long hall where the stereo was. I wanted to be near nothing but my music. When another patient came down the hall toward me, it was as if an enemy were invading my territory. Immediately, without even a word, I would pack up my tapes and leave the area, feeling that some peace had been taken from me.

As I got better, I began to share my stereo space more willingly. Other people ceased to feel like intruders. Something in me was growing that enabled me to reach across the air that separated us, and feel that we were all just people. I even began to be able to lend out some of my most precious possessions—my Walkman, my tapes, pretty pieces of clothing. Something in my brain was reaching outside itself, stretching away from the inner world of Voices and faces and toward the outer world of friends and family.

And gradually, I did begin to recognize other people as friends. As I got better and my status went up I was allowed to go to activities. I was offered a choice: I could go with a staff person, with an escorted group, with a fellow patient or by myself. These days I would wait for ten minutes for another patient to get ready so that we could both walk over together. I wasn't afraid to call other patients my friends.

I was even starting to take a more active role in the unit. I was elected secretary of patient government for 3 South. It wasn't a big deal. All the patient government did was handle things like plans for outings, or tie-dying T-shirts, or raising money for our activities. But to me it meant everything. Not only did it mean that I was taking on more responsibility, but it also meant something I never would have believed possible: People liked me and respected me.

I even switched roles a bit. No more running away for me. When one of my fellow patients confided in me that she planned to run, I tried to talk her out of it. When she did take advantage of an open door and tried to bolt, I ran after her, grabbed her and brought her back.

Slowly, old feelings began to unlock. My mind began to be able to distinguish myriad complex emotions where none had existed before. All the powerful feelings had always been there in my heart; it was as if there had been no spot in my brain to register them. My mind had been a slippery surface that only the most violent of emotions—fear, anger, hatred, fearsome love-—could puncture. Now that rock-hard glacial surface was melting, leaving scrabbly little footholds where feelings could take hold and grow. For years I had swung between powerful poles of emotions. I had hated Dr. Fischer. I had loved her. I feared her. I craved her. Torturing swings between two equally unacceptable poles. Only the work we had done together had kept me from being torn apart in those currents.

Now I was beginning to feel other things. My heart could feel other possibilities, and my mind could see that those other possibilities existed. I might like Dr. Fischer. I might look forward to seeing her. I might be annoyed with her. I might disagree with her. The gunk draining from my brain was unclogging whole areas of me that been petrified in poisonous resin for so long that I had forgotten they had ever existed. Our work together took on whole new possibilities.

But before we could take advantage of these possibilities, something happened. Dr. Fischer announced that she was leaving the hospital.

Leaving the hospital? All I heard was that she was leaving me. I knew she had been a postdoctoral fellow. I knew that it was her training she had been doing at New York Hospital, and that it wasn't a permanent post. But I had never realized that she would leave the hospital before I would. I had never thought
of
her leaving at all. She was so important to me. I needed her. How could she leave me?

We kept on meeting, kept on talking. She kept on advising me on my recovery.

“Go
slow, Lori, go slow,” she said. She worried that I was growing too impatient to be well, too impatient to show progress. “We're moving at a snail's pace,” I complained.

“Then move like a wounded snail,” she said. “You'll only cause yourself problems if you try to move on to the next level before you've gotten used to this level.”

We talked about her departure. We talked about what it meant to me. All the old feelings came flooding back. She was leaving me because I was no good. She had finally gotten sick of me, just as everyone else had gotten sick of me. She was turning her back on me because I was a loser who would never leave the hospital. We talked about my feelings about myself, about her, about being abandoned, about—eventually—being on my own.

For the most part, we managed. She tried to get me to focus on the emerging subtle feelings, rather than the powerful, terrifying ones that used to engulf me. Don't turn those feelings back onto yourself, she said. Feel them. Feel the real feelings underneath. Feel that I would miss her. Feel that I would remember her. Feel that I would feel sad that she was gone.

But the closer and closer we came to her date of departure, the harder it became to hold on to the new feelings, and the more seductive the old ones became. The old feelings and patterns were still stronger than the new. I began avoiding her, refusing to come to sessions. Dodging her when I saw her. When I did manage to come to sessions, I would sit in stony-faced silence. I knew that one day we would say goodbye and that would be it. I didn't want that day to come. I wouldn't let her leave me. I would leave her first.

The thought gave me an idea. I would kill myself in honor of her leaving. I wanted to be special to her. How better to make myself special in her memory. If I killed myself just as she was leaving, she would never be able to forget me.

Proudly I brought my idea to Dr. Doller. She looked at me with a half smile on her face, her head tilted in her quizzical, listening pose.

“Lori,” she said. “No one could ever forget you—just the way you are.”

And for the first time, something in me heard her, and was proud. Maybe there was another way. Maybe I could make Dr. Fischer remember me by living, not by dying. Maybe I could make her remember me by being the best patient she ever had. By taking everything she had taught me and putting it into practice. Maybe I could make her not only remember me, but be proud of me.

Still, I faced the end of June with dread. I couldn't bear to see her go. And when, finally, we sat in her office—the office I had struggled so hard to be able even to enter—I couldn't picture never being able to come here again. She had been such a big part of my life for so long. She had come so close to me, done so much to save me. I didn't want to die for her anymore, but how could I live without her? We agreed that we would exchange letters for as long as I wanted to. Finally I could no longer hold on, and tears spilled out over my cheeks. This was it.

We walked back to the unit in silence. As we approached the door where we would finally part, she turned to me.

“Would you like a goodbye hug or a goodbye handshake?” Before she could offer her hand I grabbed her. I gave her the biggest, most heartwarming hug I could muster. It was nothing at all like all the fantasies that had been brewing in my mind all these years. It was nothing like the kinds of hugs the torturing Voices had urged on me in sessions. It was normal. It was friendly. It was a warm, kindly, enveloping bear hug. And then she was gone.

Who would fill the place in my life that Dr. Diane Fischer had left behind? Even Dr. Doller somehow didn't seem enough. But still, where else would I turn? I was hurting so badly I had to talk with someone. Later on that afternoon I met with Dr. Doller. I cried out my pain and loss, trying to explain to her just how big a hole in my long days Dr. Fischer was leaving behind. But as I spoke I realized that while I had lost a friend, I had not lost my only friend. I looked up at Dr. Doller and saw that she had tears in her eyes too.

Gradually my daily life in the hospital changed. My room had furniture in it again. They had taken it away to reduce my stimulation. Now it was back. I could put my things in my dresser and offer a chair to my guests just like any other patient. The bodyguards were gone. No one was stationed outside my room. No one accompanied me to the bathroom. No more room-care plans, eating solitary meals on solitary trays in my solitary room. I was getting up, getting dressed and going down to the cafeteria to eat with everyone else.

There was no discussion of my being discharged immediately. I was doing well, but no one wanted to jeopardize it by letting me go too soon. I needed to make sure my medication was at a therapeutic level before I left. I still needed other medication for my other symptoms. After I had been on clozapine for a while, Dr. Doller put me back on lithium and slowly my moods began to stabilize.