“Most people who take Zoloft for several years find they need to increase the dosage. Let’s double the amount you’re taking.”
“No, that’s way too drastic,” I said. “I’ve had trouble with large dosages before. Just bump me up from fifty milligrams to seventy-five.”
“They don’t make a seventy-five-milligram pill.”
“Do they make a one hundred fifty? Give me that, and I’ll just break it into two.”
“If we’re going to make a change, let’s make it significant,” he insisted. “I’m writing you a prescription for one hundred milligrams.” Reassured by the acoustic guitar chords that rippled from the speaker on his desk, against my better judgment I agreed to give the double-potency pills a try. It was tough to argue with a jazzy version of John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” complete with faux flamenco flourishes. “Call me in a month with a progress report,” he told me, as he escorted me to the payment desk.
Oh, how I paid for my suggestion. Exactly as before, the drug at first enveloped me in a deceptive calm before summoning up a seratonin cyclone that battered every nerve-ending in my body. I was simultaneously hyper-caffeinated and drained of every last drop of energy, wielding just enough strength to lie lifelessly on the bed but too jittery to do so. The most humdrum occurrences suddenly seemed fraught with danger. A visit to the Food City produce department with its seductive leafy greens and round ripe shapes felt as unnatural as crunching broken glass beneath my shoes. The fluorescent lighting saturated the store in merciless uniformity, plunging all into a clinical blandness without shadows. The aisles had the gall of metaphor as they swept me toward an inevitable fate at the romaine lettuce bin. The sheer number of items that each blink of an eye took in troubled me with essential questions about separateness and individuality. When the checkout clerk spoke to me as my lettuce, bananas, cat food, and batteries silently rode the conveyor belt, I thought so hard about making an appropriate response, I barely heard what I was responding to. “No coupons today,” I answered, with a hopeful smile. Before the Zoloft could completely immobilize me, I cut back to fifty milligrams.
I phoned Dr. Rick at the end of the month and reported my poor reaction to the increase. Rather than clucking sympathetically, he barked at me. “You did this without asking me?”
“I didn’t know I needed your permission.”
“You should have called me up immediately and I would have prescribed another drug to see you through the transition.”
“I don’t even like taking one drug that alters my brain chemistry,” I told him. “I’m certainly not going to take two of them.”
“I’m not saying you did anything wrong,” he replied without much conviction. “I just wish you had let me do my job and help you out.”
Doing one’s job and job security were both iffy issues in the psychiatric field. Shortly after my conversation with Dr. Rick, I received a letter in the mail from the director of Psychiatric Services—Werner Klemperer, or something like that—informing me that due to skyrocketing health care costs, recent decisions by insurance carriers to deny coverage of previously supported mental health services, and the ever increasing difficulty of recruiting seriously silly therapists, Psychiatric Services was regretfully closing its doors. The letter signed off with a postscript inviting me to drive fifty miles to Okemos for the pleasure of continuing my relationship with Dr. Rick. Instead, I asked our family doctor in Lowell to renew my prescription.
It would have taken more than Zoloft to blunt the emotional impact of the cold April afternoon when Linda rushed me out to the barn. “Something terrible has happened to one of the turkeys,” she told me, as we hurried through the wet grass. “I don’t know what happened to her. I think she’s in a coma.” I had been working on my music column for The Beat and was in one of my usual stupors, running phrases over in my mind and wondering why none of them sounded any better than the CD I was reviewing. Heavy clouds hung low in the slate-grey sky. We hadn’t seen the outline of the sun for over a week.
I still wasn’t particularly engaged as I followed Linda through a wooden gate to the old cow stanchion that we had converted into turkey quarters. I had never developed the same close rapport with the turkeys that I had with our geese. I took pleasure in their repertoire of sounds, from classic gobbles to doggy yips, liked the way they would cluster around me when I stepped into their pen and showed them off to visitors with tongue-in-cheek earnestness. But I always thought of them as “the turkeys.” It was all but impossible to tell them apart. Their coloration was essentially identical, and the subtle differences we noticed seemed to change from week to week, such as a few extra bristly feathers flecking one bird’s knobby pink head.
I half expected to find the stricken turkey up and about and happily pecking at her plastic tub of scratch feed—the victim of nothing more serious than a nap. Instead, she lay stock still where Linda had left her on an elevated bed of straw against a fieldstone wall, her neck ominously limp and outstretched. I couldn’t see any signs of trauma at first. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I made the shocking discovery that her entire head had turned a smooth shade of featherless black, as if it were encased in a snug leather hood.
“She looks burnt,” Linda told me, as I gaped at the turkey in dis-belief. “I found her in the outside pen next to the fence. One of the girls was standing over her making crying noises, like she had done something to her and was ashamed of herself.”
The turkey’s breathing was so labored, I expected each breath to be her last. But when I noticed her eyes, or the puffy slits where her eyes should have been, I forgot about her breathing. I touched her face and was startled to find that the scabby flesh felt hot. Linda poured a trickle of water on the injured area. The air was cold enough that wisps of steam curled up from the bird’s head. I turned away.
I retreated through the Dutch door facing our neighbor’s gravel road and walked the perimeter of the turkey pen, searching for a clue to what could have happened. Our neighbor had complained of strange cars driving down the road at night and turning around just before they reached the house. Two miles from us, another farmhouse had burned to the ground, and I’d heard gossip at the feed store that arson was to blame. I scanned the remnant of last season’s weeds on both sides of the fence for matches, a Zippo lighter, a can of lighter fluid, a charred patch of dirt, or anything that might have suggested arson—if that’s an appropriate term for setting a turkey on fire. Mostly I was just killing time, hoping that the turkey would have quietly passed on before I returned to the barn.
“We’ve got to get her out of the cold,” Linda told me. “We’ve got to get her into the house.”
The turkey gurgled as I picked her up. I carried her across our property past a cluster of tiny rock-topped graves in back of our house marking the resting places of a rabbit, a duck, a canary, and a parakeet. Linda threw open the basement door. Unable to see my feet, I ran into a mound of unwashed clothes while walking well out of my way to dodge a collection of empty birdcages. Inside the largest of the three bunny-exercise pens, I placed the turkey on a nest that Linda hastily prepared from a bedsheet peppered with holes, courtesy of Stanley Sue. Under the sheet was a plush sheepskin sleeping mat that neither of our cats had taken to.
Our turkey was nearly unconscious, barely clinging to life, and we did what little we could for her. Linda dabbed her head with Betadine. Using a syringe, I coaxed her beak open and got her to take a few swallows of water. Linda phoned Marge Chedrick, a DNR-accredited animal rescue volunteer whose residential backyard concealed recuperating geese, ducks, squirrels, chickens, a white peahen, and a one-winged blue heron, all behind a stockade fence. Marge suggested we hang a light bulb a foot or so above the bird for warmth during the night. “She’ll move away from it if she gets too warm,” she told us. But our turkey showed so little awareness of her surroundings, I doubted if she would be inconvenienced by anything as trivial as a sixty-watt lamp.
During dinner we picked at our
plates while our parrots ate voraciously. Taking advantage of our subdued mood, Stanley Sue and Ollie lorded it over their shell-shocked owners by demanding one variety of food after another and throwing corn, toast, bits of enchilada, and tapioca pudding to the floor with exuberant wastefulness.
“One of the other turkeys had blood on her beak,” Linda told me, as Stanley Sue mimicked gagging when I presented her with a spoonful of pinto beans. “It was the same one who looked guilty about what happened.”
“Why would she attack another turkey?”
“They get real territorial this time of year. When they find a spot in their pen where they want to sit, you have to just about pick them up to make them move, especially if they lay an egg. Maybe she was sitting in a spot the other one wanted.”
“That would explain the turkey we lost last year,” I said, trying to wrest the spoon from Stanley Sue’s grasp. She had fastened her beak on the handle just below the bowl of the spoon and was doing her best to dump the beans on my pants. “Something really went after her, and it was probably the same turkey that pecked the one downstairs.”
“But why would a turkey sit still and get pecked to death? I still think there’s a firebug in the area and somebody burned her head.”
“But why would anyone bother to set just the head of a turkey on fire? She’s not burned anywhere else, if that’s what’s wrong with her. And why would she sit still for that, either?”
Only one thing seemed certain out of all of this. It was silly to keep referring to “the turkey in the basement” when we finally had a way of positively distinguishing her from the others. Being awarded a name under such dire circumstances didn’t constitute much of an honor, but at least whenever we referred to her from then on—posthumously or not—we would call her Hazel, the name Linda suggested.
Around 10:30 P.M. we trooped downstairs for the final time that night to say our good-byes to Hazel. Her head felt hotter than ever when I brushed a finger pad against her face. I was tempted to give her another drink of water, but she was blissfully unconscious, and I didn’t want to awaken her to a world of pain. She raised her head slightly off the sheet when Linda draped a calico blouse over her body, then she sunk back into oblivion.
The next morning I lay in bed exhausted by a long, repetitive dream. Stanley Sue had escaped from a bamboo cage into a thickly forested version of our backyard. She kept flying within arm’s length before taking to the trees again whenever I approached too closely. As I tried to put the dream aside, Hazel’s injury came crashing back like a steel door blocking my release. At least, I thought, the gravely injured turkey would have died quietly while we slept. In stocking feet I walked down the bare wood basement stairs for an official check on her status before delivering the news to Linda. But the poor bird was alive and breathing, making a watery noise resembling a drinking straw chasing liquid around the bottom of a glass. She had rotated a quarter of a turn during the night and had managed to throw off Linda’s blouse. Then I saw something else that made me turn and bound back upstairs.
“Linda!” I called from the living room. “Linda.” She was just getting out of bed. “Come down and look at this,” I told her.
“What?” Her voice was tinged with dread.
“Just come here and look,” I hollered, as I trotted back to the turkey.
As Linda stood warily at the bottom of the basement stairs, I held out an object at arm’s length. It was oval shaped, exaggeratedly pointed on one end. White, almost beige, and spattered with brown speckles. It was the egg that Hazel had laid during the night, in a totally unexpected affirmation of life. Upon hearing Linda’s delighted laugh, the turkey surprised us by struggling to her feet. I raised a water dish to her chest and urged her head down until her beak met water. She took a couple of swallows, then sank back to the floor.
“Maybe she’s going to be okay,” Linda suggested, though we both knew Hazel’s chances for survival were almost nil. The black scab that covered her entire head had sealed up her eyes, except for two small openings that expelled a milky substance. Using cotton balls, we carefully dabbed her eye slits dry without holding any hope for the damaged tissue behind them. I could see that she was totally blind. She couldn’t even detect the light from the bare bulb I waved in front of her. More immediately alarming was the sound from her nasal cavity indicating she had come down with a respiratory infection. The infection could kill her within a day or two unless we treated her with an antibiotic; that was usually the way it went with birds. Unfortunately, it was Saturday, and Dr. Fuller’s practice was closed, as was Dr. Carlotti’s.
But Linda got an answer when she phoned Dr. Colby, the vet who had treated Bertha. The receptionist balked at the idea of the doctor seeing or even discussing a turkey. “Dr. Colby just doesn’t have any time this morning,” she told Linda. “I’m very sorry about your turkey, but there’s nothing we can do for you.”
As I sat frowning into my oatmeal, a drastic change overtook me. Shucking my well-studied philosophy of life, I decided to take action for once, and confrontational action at that. “She may not be willing to see Hazel,” I told Linda. “I wouldn’t want to move her anyway. But she’s going to give us an antibiotic.” The fact that a turkey, of all our animals, had motivated me to assert myself was one of those ironies that I just had to accept. But I found it impossible not to fight for Hazel. She exhibited a will to live that I lacked on the sunniest, Zoloft-inflated day, and the least I could do was cop the chemicals she needed.
I fumed all the way to Colby’s Animal Clinic, barely hearing NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon over the drone of my interior monologue, as I practiced what I was going to tell the vet. The steep green hills, winding curves, and rain-filled air conspired with a construction crew setting up orange traffic cones to keep me from organizing my thoughts. The best opener I could come up with—“Exactly why is a common meat-production turkey any less deserving of your care than an AKC registered pure-bred champion Jack Russell terrier?”—seemed to lack the proper sting. But striking a tone of justifiable outrage was what really mattered, I told myself.
Just past the village of Hubbs, I overshot the gravel road that led to Colby’s Animal Clinic, turned around in a convenience store parking lot, crossed a culvert bridge barely longer than my car was wide, and navigated the brush-choked driveway to a boxy farmhouse on the edge of a horse pasture. A side door marked CLINIC opened straight into a vestibule, where a knee-high accordion gate blocked me from continuing into the family’s laundry room. A handwritten sign directed clinic visitors sharply to the right and down a precipitous flight of stairs.
Except for the college-age receptionist who had taken Linda’s phone call, I was the only person in the pine-paneled waiting area when I presented myself unannounced. If only to spare herself prolonged contact with a man demanding medicine for his pet turkey, the receptionist raised the hinged section of the front counter and ushered me inside the sole examination room.
Before I had a chance to inventory the glass display case packed with Beanie Baby animals, I heard the scrape of footsteps behind the wall as Dr. Colby came through the door from the adjoining lab. “What can I do for you today?” she asked with politeness, smoothly concealing her annoyance.
I faced her with rising indignation and mental fingers poised to clutch a rational argument as I suddenly found myself fighting back tears. I lost further ground as I struggled with the truth that the emotional outpouring wasn’t in defense of the grey parrot whose head I had rubbed each night for years, the green parrot who snuggled against my neck in between bites to my shirt collar, the cats that rolled on my carpeted floor or cement slab as I bounced baby talk off them, the dove who loved to perch upon my head and coo at me, the fat black rabbit who sat on my lap licking my hand when I wasn’t petting him, or even the goose Linda and I had nursed through a deadly illness on the porch—but of a turkey that until two days ago I couldn’t have picked out of our group of three.
“It’s about
our turkey,” I answered, my voice starting to crack.
“I’m sorry,” she told me in a way that suggested she regretted my visit more than my turkey’s ill health.
“She’s been injured. Either pecked very badly by the other turkeys, or someone burned her head.”
“I see.”
“That’s okay,” I stammered stupidly. “It’s her respiratory infection I’m worried about. If we don’t get her on antibiotics, I’m afraid she’ll die.”
Looking at me steadily, Dr. Colby asked, “And what would you like me to do for you?” as if I’d ventured into the tire center in the middle of town by mistake. I reminded myself that this was the same vet who wouldn’t let us have deworming pills for our cats unless we brought in a section of the worm. Either she suspected us of hoarding deworming pills, or she was collecting feline tapeworm segments for mysterious purposes of her own.
“I’d like to get an antibiotic for my turkey.”
“How much does she weigh?”
While I thought about it, I looked down at her arm. A fresh scratch joined a myriad of hairline scars revealed by the fluorescent light. “Well, she’s big. Turkey-size big.”
She nodded wearily, turning her back to reach for a bottle of medicine. “It’s important that I get an estimate of weight in order to calculate the dosage.”
Comparing Hazel to a sack of black oil sunflower seed, I told her, “More than twenty-five pounds, less than thirty.”
“So between twenty-six and twenty-nine pounds, you think. I’ll prepare a broad-spectrum antibiotic to give her orally twice a day—if you can do that,” she said with a questioning look.
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