by Jessie Close
It’s the end of the day, and I feel overwhelmed and keep having suicidal thoughts. I know where there is a swimming pool just down the lane, and I could take an overdose and go there and drown. It isn’t the Creature telling me to do it. Rather, it is a vision that keeps replaying over and over in my mind. I keep seeing myself dead, and I look free. I took a Neurontin, which helped, and then I took my bedtime meds, which helped even more. By the time bedtime rolled around, I was almost happy, except that I was having an olfactory hallucination. All I could smell was dog crap. Everything smelled like it. Why does my mind torture me this way?
Glennie invited me to accompany her to a screening in Manhattan of The Stepford Wives, which was about to open nationally. Before the screening, there was a party in an expensive restaurant. I didn’t notice the restaurant’s name, but the interior was a maze of screens covered in black fabric, and it was noisy. After a few minutes, I couldn’t take it. I bolted for the exit but couldn’t find it. I felt trapped amid those screens, but finally spotted a door and burst outside, gasping for air. I needed a cigarette and found a stoop where I could sit and smoke. I allowed myself to look up at all the tall buildings, and as I was doing that, I spotted David Shaw, Glenn’s future husband, coming toward me. He’d left the party, too, and sat on the lower step of the stoop near me without saying a word. Maybe he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he knew there was no need to say anything. Just having him there calmed me, and I felt grateful for his compassion. After a while, the rest of the partygoers came outside, and we walked to the theater. By the time we got there, I couldn’t wait to get back to Glennie’s country house that night.
After spending two weeks at Glenn’s, I boarded a flight to Denver with Woofie in my arms. Calen was waiting at the airport baggage claim. He’d driven to Boulder to visit his brother at college and had decided to pick me up at the Denver airport. It was a ten-hour drive to Bozeman, but neither of us was dreading it. I wanted to be with him, and I could tell something was bothering him. I also wanted to talk to him about something that was bothering me.
What am I supposed to do now?
Doctors had given Calen a long list of instructions when he’d been discharged. They’d told him that he needed to stick to a daily schedule, which included getting plenty of sleep. Mania and depression often seep in when you get tired. The doctors had suggested that he walk away from other people the moment he began feeling overwhelmed. I’d seen him abruptly leave the room while my father was in midsentence. Dad had hurried over to tell me, thinking he’d said something wrong. I’d assured him that Calen had simply been following doctors’ orders.
I’d left the hospital with my own list of dos and don’ts. I’d also been given Dr. Vuckovic’s private telephone number so that I could check in with him once a week. But there were questions that doctors couldn’t answer about returning home from a mental hospital—questions that only someone who had already walked in those shoes could tell me.
“Was coming home scary for you?” I asked as we were exiting the airport’s parking lot in his truck. The Rocky Mountains rose before us, and I could still see snow on their peaks, even though it was nearly summer.
He thought before answering and said, “Yeah, Ma. It still is at times.”
Calen lit a cigarette, and I bummed one. For a while, we traveled in silence, enjoying the open road, smoking and being together.
“What’s bothering you?” I asked.
“It’s Katie,” he replied, referring to his girlfriend.
He said Katie had accused me of faking my mental illness to get attention. She’d said I’d checked myself into McLean because Calen had been there. I was a copycat.
I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. Why would Katie attack me? Even worse, did my own family, friends, and others who knew me in Bozeman think I was faking it? My already fragile confidence began to crumble. What is it about mental illnesses that makes people suspect you’re faking it to get sympathy? If I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and gone into a hospital, no one would have thought I was simply trying to get attention. I would have been greeted when I got home by well-wishers, cards, flowers, and a refrigerator crammed with home-cooked meals wrapped in aluminum foil. Instead, I was going to be met with skepticism and disgust. I imagined the whispers that would be mouthed behind my back: “Why doesn’t Jessie just snap out of this and pull herself up by her bootstraps? I’ve been depressed, and I didn’t need to go to a hospital because of it.”
“Do you believe I’m faking it?” I asked.
“No, Ma,” he said. “What Katie said was stupid.”
As we drove north, Calen told me that his relationship with Katie was in trouble. All relationships are tough. Throw two people with mental illnesses together, and it becomes a formidable challenge. Add a third, and we became quite the trio.
The closer we got to Bozeman, the more anxious I started to feel. But as soon as we pulled into the driveway at my house and I saw Mattie, all thoughts of Katie disappeared. I gave my little girl a big hug. Noah and his girlfriend had already packed their bags and were ready to leave, but I wanted to thank them for moving into my house so that Mattie could stay in her own bedroom while I was in the hospital. I put my arms around Noah for a hug and spontaneously began to cry. He pulled away. I was stunned and felt rejected. He clearly didn’t want me hugging him. At first, I thought it was because his girlfriend was there, but after thinking about it I decided it was something else. I was one of those “crazy” people now, because I had been in a mental asylum. That hurt.
Mattie quickly filled me in on everything that she was doing while helping me unpack. She was a teen excited about life. I was almost fifty-one, feeling beaten and weary because of life.
That night, a girlfriend stopped by and we spent more than an hour sitting in the kitchen talking. During that entire time, all she did was talk about herself. I’d been gone for seven weeks, but she hadn’t asked me one question about what had happened at McLean. It was the elephant in the room. I realized that this was how things would be. Awkward.
Because of my medication, the Creature remained dormant, but I still found myself being tormented by frightening thoughts and imagined fears. I became convinced that an evil spirit lived in our basement. It was real to me, and I refused to go down there.
Another night, as I started to go upstairs for a shower, I suddenly froze. Something evil was waiting for me upstairs. I instantly retreated and telephoned Glennie, breaking into tears as soon as she answered. She reassured me that it was okay, there was nothing upstairs waiting to pounce. She began coaxing me up the staircase, one foot in front of the next, while talking to me on the phone.
Getting well was not an overnight process.
I felt better on Geodon than I ever had and was confident I would eventually be able to live a “normal” life. But that’s not what happened. I began feeling exhausted. When I became feverish, I thought I might be getting the flu, but I couldn’t sit still or bear to lie in bed. The muscles in my arms and legs began cramping.
The Neurontin that I was taking to control anxiety didn’t help. When my hands developed a Parkinson’s-like tremble, I made an appointment with my family doctor, and she decided to run a series of tests, including a creatine phosphokinase (CPK) test to see whether my muscles were leaking creatine into my bloodstream. A CPK test helps doctors discover whether muscle tissue is being attacked or damaged.
As soon as my doctor read the results, she slapped me into the Bozeman hospital. Normal CPK values range from ten to 120 micrograms per liter. Mine were at seventeen thousand per liter! I had developed neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS), a life-threatening neurological disorder that was being caused by Geodon. My muscles were literally coming apart. The medicine that was helping me feel normal was also killing me.
My family doctor called Dr. Vuckovic, and he immediately took me off Geodon. I couldn’t stop crying in the hospital. Why was getting well so difficult? Because of my raging CP
K count, I wasn’t weaned off Geodon. Dr. Vuckovic had to order me to stop it cold turkey, and that night in the hospital was one of the most horrific nights of my life. I’d only suffered shaky hands and afternoon nausea when I’d stopped drinking alcohol. Stopping Geodon made up for it.
I became physically ill, but the most terrifying reaction came after I finally drifted off to sleep. A monster, with blood dripping off his huge fangs, appeared at my bedside, glaring down at me, jarring me awake. My entire body was shaking. The monsters hiding in my basement were running free in my head.
I once read a quote by US Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote in a legal opinion: “It must be remembered that for the person with severe mental illness who has no treatment, the most dreaded of confinements can be the imprisonment inflicted by his own mind, which shuts reality out and subjects him to the torment of voices and images beyond our powers to describe.”
What I saw that night is beyond my powers to describe. From then on, I tried to sleep with my eyes open, because I was afraid to close them.
Alarmed by my poor physical health, Dr. Vuckovic asked me to return to McLean for a tune-up. I felt like a failure: physically ill and mentally drained. I knew I couldn’t make the trip east on my own. Although Mark and I had separated, he offered to take me. He told my friend Liza that he still loved me. I was too ill to resist, and I still loved Mark, too. I’d come to believe that love isn’t something that only happens when you live together; in fact, not living together seems to renew stale love.
Our flight back east was a blur, although I remember hanging onto Mark’s arm as we moved through crowds at the Denver airport. It was as if I were lost in a netherworld. At any second, I could turn a corner and see reality, only to have it wash away seconds later. Monsters.
McLean Hospital had a room with two beds ready and allowed Mark to stay in the room with me. Love renewed itself; he was my husband, after all. We made love, cuddled, slept in one of the beds. Dr. Vuckovic spoke to Mark as though he were my husband; I’m not sure what they talked about, but Mark was sympathetic to my plight.
Dr. Vuckovic replaced the Geodon with clozapine, a different antipsychotic medication. I began feeling better but was concerned about getting sick again. Everyone reacts differently to antipsychotics. What might kill one person saves another. Seven days after checking in, I was discharged. My new drug was working.
Mark got me back to Bozeman, and we talked about whether the two of us should make another try at saving our marriage. He began coming over, mostly to make love, but that didn’t last.
Having gotten me through one of the worst periods of my life, Mark had simply had enough. My moods still ran me, and he saw that. Even though I wanted to be with him, I also realized that having a man in my life was a complication that I couldn’t handle. I needed to focus on my health, and that meant staying away from men and booze. I began attending AA again.
Calen and Katie also broke up. I’d liked her when she’d first arrived because I thought she was good for Calen, but it was time for her to leave.
My mother told me that the tenants renting my old farmhouse on the edge of Bozeman were moving out. It was where I’d raised my boys and written my novel. After Tom and I divorced in 1989, my mother and Glennie had purchased the farmhouse from us and brought in renters. I loved that house and asked if Mattie and I could move into it. Mom said yes, but Mattie didn’t want to move. I had uprooted my daughter from one house to another ever since she was a baby, and she wanted to continue living in downtown Bozeman until she graduated from high school.
I decided to bribe her with what had become the coin of the realm in the Close family—a dog. Mattie had asked me for a Chihuahua puppy, so I agreed to get one if she moved with me into the farmhouse. We picked out a Chihuahua-Yorkie mix from the classifieds. Our new addition was named Cinder-Ellie. I got the better end of the deal; Mattie was in school all day while I was at home with Cinder-Ellie, and our new pet became my constant companion. Somehow, her name evolved into Snitz.
Mattie and I settled into the farmhouse. Tom had converted a chicken house behind it into a one-bedroom apartment, so Calen moved in there to be nearer to us.
I was getting better, but I began rubbing my skin again, picking at it until a bloody scab developed. Dr. Vuckovic asked whether I was also cutting myself.
I said, “I don’t do that!”
I was insulted, but he explained that rubbing my skin raw and cutting myself are forms of self-mutilation. Dr. Vuckovic suspected comorbidity—more than one illness. It was possible that I had a “cluster B personality disorder”—most likely borderline personality disorder—as well as bipolar I disorder with psychotic features.
Geez. Wasn’t one diagnosis enough? I looked up “borderline personality disorder” and noted that two symptoms of the condition are impulsiveness and an intense fear of abandonment.
Dr. Vuckovic then threw me a curveball. He said my rubbing and picking might not be related to borderline personality disorder at all. It could be stemming from trichotillomania, which usually manifests itself in hair pulling.
What was he telling me? That I had three illnesses?
I began to relax when I remembered what one of his colleagues at the hospital had told me. He’d drawn a line on a board and written the words mental illnesses underneath it. That line represented hundreds of different disorders, many of which bled into each other. It was a stew pot. My brain was somewhere on that line.
Apparently realizing how hopeless this all sounded, the good doctor reminded me that I was doing remarkably well. I was able to live on my own and function at a high level. It was time for me not only to understand my limitations but also to take charge of my life. It was time for me to control my illnesses—whatever they were or however many there were—and stop letting them control me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I was sober now and stable, but I missed the old me, the wild, manic me, who enjoyed drinking in bars and driving too fast down the highway, causing the car to jump from the road into an open sky. I was in mourning, at least in the beginning, for my old self. I also mourned the loss of Calen as he had been before he became sick. Calen had been a bright spirit, charming and energetic, hard to pin down. Everyone loved Calen; he had been the leader of the pack and the charmer of teachers and friends. Who was he now? Who was I?
With each day that passed, I mourned less and less. I slowly realized that Calen and I were the way we were meant to be. I accepted the fact that I had a severe mental illness and that it would always be part of my life because it was part of me. The medications helped control my moods. The pills caused the Creature to remain in hibernation. I wished like hell the pills would kill him, but I could still feel him there and knew he always would be present. Thankfully, his terrifying eyes were closed.
There was no medicine that could protect me from the everyday realities of life, however. There would be days when I would feel sad, just as everyone else does. There would be days when I would feel happy, just as everyone else does. What made my days different was that I had to be on guard for red flags that could warn me that I was about to slip into a manic spell or slide into a bottomless depression. I couldn’t risk either one. I couldn’t risk waking the Creature. I had finally arrived at a place where I took no chances with my medication. I knew I had to take it no matter what, no matter how good I felt. I had plenty of evidence of what would happen if I stopped.
I had always been a night person. I understood that the word lunatic is heavy with stigma, yet I liked that word. I liked how it sounded rolling from my tongue. I’d read that it came from the old French word lunatique, which is from the Latin word luna, meaning moon. The ancients used to believe that the moon causes intermittent insanity in some people. Perhaps it does.
I have always felt a pull from the moon. I have stood outside on warm summer Montana nights and stared at that glowing orb and felt its influence over me. Even in winter, I could feel the full moon before see
ing it creep from behind the snow clouds.
I was drawn to the night for its promise of solitude, for its lack of confusion. It’s possible to feel the quiet at night. But my therapist had told me that I could no longer stay up late at night. I’d promised him that I would turn off the light at 1:00 a.m., and I kept that promise. I would switch it off and then switch it back on. Technically, I wasn’t lying, but I was manipulating my environment, and for a while I thought I was being clever.
When I finally realized that staying up late every night put my mental stability at risk, I began taking my medication at 7:00 p.m. and going to bed at ten. It wasn’t easy, but I was changing habits. I began to learn to write in the mornings and afternoons.
Recovery comes in baby steps, and when Tom invited me to have dinner at his house with his wife, Kathleen, a woman I genuinely liked, I felt anxious. I still loved Tom and probably always would, but I’d given up any thought of our ever being together. I wasn’t anxious about being jealous because he had moved on. I was anxious about being in any social situation, even with people I knew well. I still had feelings of inadequacy and failure, not because I had done anything wrong but because of my broken brain. They call it self-stigma!
Tom invited me because Calen had a new girlfriend, and he wanted all of us to meet her. One of Calen’s previous girlfriends had introduced them. She was already there when I arrived at Tom’s house. Megan MacNichol was tall, strawberry blond, and cute. I liked it when we shook hands, because she had a confident grip. During dinner, I learned that Megan had her own recovery story.
Four years earlier, on March 12, 2002, Megan had been a carefree twenty-year-old Montana State University student driving home for spring break. Her best friend, Rebecca, was with her, along with Megan’s yellow lab, Baker.
It was snowing hard, and the girls got caught in a Montana whiteout while driving on a two-way road. Snow was blowing so hard and so thick that it became nearly impossible to see. Megan had slowed her car to fifteen miles per hour when a truck burst through the white sheet, coming right at her. It was a semitrailer going sixty miles per hour. Megan didn’t have time to react. It slammed into her car, completely crushing the driver’s side, pinning Megan inside. Neither Rebecca nor Baker was harmed, but Meagan was bleeding and pinned behind the steering wheel.