Upon her release from Ramapo Ridge, my mother seemed no better than when I last saw her. Somehow, despite her atrophied condition, my brother managed to get her onboard an airplane. Having left the frigid East behind, at the Rehabilitation Center, she performed well, eating meals, committing to a hefty regime of physical therapy. Even so, she was still plagued by a number of persistent, disturbing delusions.
“Don’t forget, Claire,” she called to tell me the day before her scheduled release. “There’s still the sexual problem.” I would eventually learn she had come to believe she was in possession of genitalia from both sexes.
My brother was instrumental in relieving her anxiety.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “No matter what, we will love you anyway.” This seemed to ease her mind, and the conversation on this uncomfortable topic thankfully ceased. Once she completed her two-week stint at the Rehabilitation Center, we set about looking for health aides to help her establish a routine in her new apartment in Los Angeles.
After five months of medical attention, our mother was ready to begin a new life.
13 Pan, Deanna, et al. “TIMELINE: Deinstitutionalization and Its Consequences.” Mother Jones, 24 June 2017. Web.
14 Seiner, Stephen J. and Bragg, Terry A. “ECT: A History of Helping Patients.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 1 Nov. 2017. Web.
15 Citrome, Leslie et al. “A commentary on the efficacy of olanzapine for the treatment of schizophrenia: the past, present, and future.” Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment vol. 15 2559–2569. 5 Sep. 2019, doi:10.2147/NDT.S209284. Web.
7
day-long obsession and torment
Summer 2011
Finally, my mother would be living in proximity to her grown children. John had found a spacious one-bedroom in one of Park La Brea’s seventeen Landmark Towers, the revolutionarily “X”-structured 1946 steel and concrete buildings that afforded views of the surrounding mountains and city to all of its tenants. My mother’s seventh-floor apartment boasted a stunning panorama of the Hollywood Hills, from the Pacific Design Center all the way east to the Griffith Park Observatory. This glamorous complex off of Third Street, with its teeming array of urban amenities, most prominently The Grove shopping and cinema complex, seemed the perfect housing solution. In Mid-City, Park La Brea had the added benefit of being roughly thirty-minutes driving time from either my place in Silver Lake or my brother’s home on the Westside.
The time of my mother’s arrival luckily coincided with my summer break. I was able to visit twice a week in order to get her settled. In no time, with the help of health aides—Filipina sisters Jaime and Vanessa—our mother became acclimated to her new surroundings. She took fitness classes at the Park La Brea Senior Center twice a week. No longer driving, she was still able to shop nearby at the Whole Foods at Fairfax and Third Street, pick up her prescriptions at the CVS and spend afternoons at the historic Farmers Market and Grove outdoor shopping center.
She had even begun to take computer classes two to three times a week. We would often spend Sundays together, first at the Farmers Market, where we could get dinner at Loteria, the Mexican restaurant, splitting a delicious Summer Salad with lots of jicama and avocado, before watching a movie at the cozy Park La Brea Theater.
While she no longer benefited from living across the hall from a best friend, over the course of the following year she would spend more time with her granddaughter upon whom she lavished small treats whenever she had the opportunity. Within a year, she appeared relatively well adjusted to living in California. For the first time since graduate school, I could visit my mother with some ease.
December 2012
However, the peaceful times were not to last. It was now the holidays. After a long absence during a busy fall semester, I finally had time to spend with Mom. She had been particularly understanding of my hectic schedule for these past couple of months. Whenever I had trouble visiting due to my nonstop teaching and the occasional writing assignment, she would tell me not to worry. That’s okay, darling, she would say. Finish your work. For eight weeks, she gave me a pass on our weekly visits. Living on her own, without close friends, my mother worked hard to stay occupied, filling her days as best she could.
Relations were visiting from out of town: her sister Anne from Texas had arrived along with her daughter, my cousin Lorraine. We were meant to get together that week at my mother’s apartment for tea after a short visit to LACMA, the county art museum with its sprawling hodgepodge of buildings and galleries just a few blocks from my mother’s apartment. Instead she had begged off, suddenly, complaining of a sudden bout of diarrhea. I had trouble believing that my mother was sick. My mother’s antipathy toward her family ran deep. I half wondered if she might be purposefully isolating herself. This was further confirmed when she began to impugn another family member, her cousin who had supported her during the worst of times, her relocation from Ramapo Ridge, and those difficult first post-divorce years when she tried to live close to her children.
“Stephan gave me diarrhea. He brought the infection with him from the hospital.” Stephan, who had joined us a few nights before for a family dinner in Century City after his rounds at Cedars-Sinai, was to blame for her present condition. “It’s his fault. He brought bacteria from the hospital with him,” she said, continuing her harangue.
It had been two days since our family get-together at her apartment had been called off. When I called to see how she was, I was surprised to learn that she still wasn’t feeling much better.
“Everything is a mess,” she confided in a heavy voice. “I have so much to do. I need to clean things. There’s so much laundry.”
I couldn’t conceive of what she was talking about. Why was there so much laundry? My mother owned two sets of sheets and two sets of towels. I felt confused by her circumstances yet didn’t offer her much help.
“Maybe I can visit,” I suggested. “We could get dinner or see a movie.”
“Not today,” was her response. I grew agitated. Why didn’t my mother want to socialize, even for a short period of time? She always welcomed my visits.
“Maybe when you’re feeling better we can do something,” I sniped.
She then complained about picking up her medication from CVS. “I had a terrible time getting my pills today,” she said in a strained voice.
Again, I failed to empathize with my mother, assuming this was the prelude to a lengthy conversation about a small annoyance, a difficult person working at a cash register or a neighbor who had stopped her on the way to the store or took up too much of my mother’s time bantering on an ill-considered topic, so I ignored it.
“Okay,” I said. “Call me if you want to do something,” and hung up disappointed.
December 22 and 23
The weekend came, and I began to worry. Why didn’t she want to see me? Usually I heard from my mother at least twice a week. This week I hadn’t heard from her once. I called to find out how she was. There was the mess still. And then she launched into something new.
“You mustn’t drive anywhere with your friend Monica.” How did we get on this topic? I wondered.
“What are you talking about?”
“That night at John’s,” she carped. “She was drunk. I saw her.”
“Why are we talking about this?” It had been a month since we had driven my mother to an early Thanksgiving party at my brother’s house. Monica was the designated driver that evening. I had had a few glasses of wine, while Monica had just one. She offered to drive my Prius home in the light rain. Unfortunately, the car skidded somewhat dangerously when she braked as a car ahead of her on windy Sunset Boulevard came to stop. Monica veered across the double yellow line to avoid a collision. Luckily, it was late at night, and there wasn’t any oncoming traffic on that particular patch of road. At the time, my mother took the whole ordeal in stride. Apparently it was now a cause for concern.
“Monica doesn’t drink,” I hastily countered. “S
he has an eating disorder. She can’t eat or drink, except in very small amounts.”
It was true. My friend, an astonishingly talented street photographer, who had lived with this disorder for decades, rarely consumed anything in its entirety. I tried explaining this to my mother.
“I saw her,” my mother snapped in defiance. “She was drunk.”
Was this true? Had my friend suddenly become a lush right under my nose? Had she consumed glass after glass of wine covertly in the kitchen that night as my mother suggested?
My mother warbled on some more about my friend’s bad qualities. “You mustn’t go anywhere with her,” she chided. Why did she have it out for Monica? Was she jealous of our ten-year friendship? “She was drunk,” she repeated. “I saw her.”
“I won’t take you to parties anymore if you are planning on sitting there and watching us hawkishly,” I said hotly.
“Fine,” she snapped. And I hung up, rattled.
Back here, again
That night I had a powerful dream. In it, my mother flew about her Park La Brea apartment on a broomstick, half naked. I didn’t want to see her this way. Swooping back and forth over the white-carpeted space, she was in prime spirits, laughing maniacally. Her partial attire and skin tone were the same impossible color, a surreal Barbie-pink. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t leave. Suddenly I felt the rounded hard end of her broomstick being rammed into the middle of my back. Helpless to stop her, I took several hard blows before I awoke, gripped by an overwhelming despair. This was the mother of my youth, unstoppable and out of control.
As the day came into focus, I sensed my mother was in danger of another relapse. I was devastated. She had only just recovered from her last relapse of a year and a half before.
“Mom is acting strangely,” I called to tell my brother. He confirmed my suspicions.
“She’s been calling me with strange worries too.”
I then confided in him my strange dream, expecting him to brush it off. Instead, he enumerated the countless dreams he had had over the years, finding himself alone with our mother in the New Jersey house where we grew up. Early on, shortly after our parents’s divorce my brother developed the ability to lucid dream. By acknowledging the fact that he was dreaming, he could control the outcome of these nightmares, making contact with the symbolic parts of his psyche. In these dreams, he would find my mother in her bedroom, a dark curtained-off space defiled by haphazard stacks of legal papers, strewn clothing, dirtied plates, and glasses. Mom? he would ask. Why am I back here? Invariably, the mother in his dream would provide him an answer to his question: arming him with the self-knowledge that freed him from whatever constrictions he might face in his waking life.
I suggested that something might have happened to her pills. John agreed to go over and check on her. I was grateful to him for taking the drive from Bel-Air to Park La Brea, a pleasant one, but only when traffic cooperated.
An hour or so after our phone call, my brother called from her apartment.
“She’s okay,” he reassured me. “The pills are all here. She’s not missed a day.”
I thanked him and hung up, glad to hear she was okay though I was still a bit uneasy.
Christmas cake
The day after Christmas, my mother was finally up for a visit. I arrived during the afternoon in time for some Christmas cake. It turned out she had opened a holiday pastry I had purchased the week before so she would have a gift for her health aides, the Filipina sisters who had assisted her through the transition to daily life at Park La Brea, helping her to buy her groceries and navigate her new environment. I was a little disappointed to see that they had yet to receive a holiday gift, but I tried not to dwell on this.
That afternoon my mother was dressed sweetly in a white peasant top. I was happy to see her in the light clothing, taking advantage of living in California with its enviable climate. In Chatham, New Jersey she would have been weighed down in heavy sweaters this time of year.
“Sit down,” Mom insisted as she slipped into the kitchen to get some plates and the cake.
Ordinarily, she struggled with her hand-eye coordination, a side effect of her medication. However this afternoon, I noted, she handled the knife especially well, cutting for us each a slice of the Belgian white-powdered Christmas cake. After a week of manic accusations, my mother was now surprisingly mellow, almost distant in her affect. Subdued, she had a slightly distracted look in her eyes. She did not speak much but was clearly enjoying the sugary dessert. I was relieved that she was in a calm mood. Seated at the white plastic-molded tulip table, taking in a panoramic view of the rippling Hollywood Hills looming in the distance, we ate in silence. I tried getting my mother to go see a movie with me, but again she declined.
“I still feel weak,” was her answer.
I left shortly afterward, still concerned but nonetheless grateful for the quiet time spent together.
New Year’s Day, 2013
For the remainder of the holiday season, I dated online while housesitting for a friend in Silver Lake, taking care of four semi-feral cats. Spending a good chunk of time on her couch, I watched a dizzying number of episodes of Homeland, discomfited by the amount of television I was capable of watching. I marveled at Claire Danes’s convincing portrayal of a highly functioning spy struggling with bipolar disorder, at the same time that my mother continued to avoid family activities.
Calling on New Year’s Day, I noticed a pronounced lethargy in her voice. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“No. I can’t sleep,” she admitted in a hushed tone. “There are people keeping me awake.”
What I had suspected for weeks was finally being voiced.
“I’ll be right there.” I promptly left Silver Lake for her apartment, taking the familiar route along the rutted back streets of Hoover and Temple, before turning onto Third Street, traversing the short fifteen minutes through Hancock Park with its empty sidewalks, and large single family homes in a hodge-podge of architectural styles, before reaching her place.
The first thing I did was check her seven-day pillbox. It was Wednesday, and she had not yet taken her a.m. pills. I could see that certain medication from the days before had also not been taken. This was when I realized that I did not know the exact amounts of her medication. I called my brother to find out what her required dosages were.
I learned she was required to take two hundred milligrams of Seroquel in the morning, and an additional two hundred milligrams at night. Four hundred milligrams of this powerful antipsychotic is a strong daily dosage. But after my mother’s last relapse, increasing the dose significantly was the only option left to us for her stabilization. Poking through the remaining pills, I made the unwelcome discovery that instead of two daily doses of two hundred milligrams, she had been taking only fifty milligrams at a time. This explained both her insistence that she was taking her pills and the confusion we felt about her escalating aggressive and paranoid behavior.
How did this come about? I rifled through her cabinets where I found the remaining prescription and my heart dropped. The label read Seroquel fifty milligrams. The Seroquel she usually took were oblong shaped and white. These were round and peach colored. Why did the pharmacist give her these? I checked the label for directions. Nothing stipulated that she should be taking eight pills per day. The package was dated December 22. Roughly when I noted my mother’s unusual behavior. “How long have you been taking these?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my mother said, pacing about the narrow galley kitchen in a confused, laconic state, unable to give me a clear answer.
The best I could do was to help her immediately get a new prescription with the proper dosage.
CVS Pharmacy
After my mother’s doctor called in a new prescription, I took the remainder of the prescription of fifty-milligram antipsychotic pills back to CVS. I told the pharmacist what had happened. I explained to him that my mother had been taking the wrong dosage for two weeks, and that h
er behavior was now very erratic. I didn’t state explicitly that she was having a psychotic episode. Only that her wellbeing had been severely compromised. The pharmacist went through his computerized files, and after reviewing the label on the bottle I presented him with, he agreed that something was wrong with the prescription.
“Perhaps we were out of the two-hundred-milligram Seroquel that day, and the attending pharmacist gave her this dosage until we could get more.”
I agreed that this was probably the case, but also pointed out that a second mistake had been made with the directions on the prescription.
“If this was the case, she should have been advised to take eight of these pills daily.”
He concurred and promised to look into the problem in order to ensure that this did not happen again. I contemplated suing this giant corporate entity for financial recourse. Knowing what I knew about my mother’s condition, I anticipated grave trouble ahead, months upon months of expensive healthcare. The out-of-pocket costs would run into the thousands. But I knew I didn’t have the economic resources to take such a measure.
Instead I cut a deal. The pharmacist would give me a discount on the new prescriptions for my mother if I handed over the incriminating evidence of this tragic mistake in the form of the poorly labeled prescription bottle and the remaining pills. It was a pathetic attempt to extract some form of compensation, a $100 discount on my mother’s new prescriptions, which included Haldol, the Cogentin she took to keep her from shaking, and post-hysterectomy hormones. In the scheme of things, no real compensation at all.
A Room with a Darker View Page 14