by Terri White
‘When will I take the Valium?’ I ask.
‘What?’ she snaps. ‘No. There needs to be a specific doctor here to administer that and he’s only here on Tuesdays. If you want your scan today, you need to do it without.’
I nod, embarrassed, hand to my throat as it tightens. After waiting a while, I’m taken downstairs and given a gown to change into and a locker to place my clothes and shoes in. I sit, holding the gown around me, wishing I’d brought socks for my bare feet which are trailing on the cold floor. I’m taken through to the room with the MRI machine, the technician comes in, tells me that it’ll last about forty-five minutes, that the noises the machine makes may be loud and disorientating but I need to lie completely still so that the scans, the pictures, are taken properly, can be read. I lie down. My head is strapped in place, I’m given earplugs and closed in on both sides. The technician leaves the room and his voice comes over the speakers:
‘We’re going to start the machine now and you’ll move inside.’
The surface I’m lying on slides inside the scanner slowly, and my breath quickens, trebles in speed.
‘Now you’ll hear some loud noises.’
A throbbing, clanking, banging noise starts pulsating through the machine and vibrating into my body, shaking my eyeballs loose.
I try to keep calm but the roof of the tube I’m inside is just a couple of inches away from my face. I’m being buried alive, trapped, I can’t move my body; my breath hits the ceiling and bounces right back down at me. The noise is so loud I feel like I’m consumed by it.
It’s the sound of a workman’s drill meets a round of live ammo, mixed with European house music that you can only hear at five a.m. when your brain is scrambled and your pupils full. Just one more second, I tell myself repeatedly. I don’t work out how many seconds there are in forty-five minutes. Although the scan is done in three parts and they offer to let me out between each section, I say no: I want this over as soon as possible. The tears pool under my static head.
The next day, I receive a call from the doctor’s office, calling me in. She tells me that not all of my scans came out entirely clearly but that they can see what look like lesions on my brain. The world stops entirely for a moment, just a millisecond before it bounces and catches up with itself, carrying on as it did before, leaving me behind this time. I’m googling as she speaks. The results: multiple sclerosis.
She tells me not to panic, that she’s going to refer me to the MS specialist centre, but that there are other things that can cause these lesions: Lyme disease, Parkinson’s and other autoimmune disorders. But none, nothing at that moment, seems as bad as MS. As losing my ability to walk, to swallow, to care for myself. I’m alone in the world: how does someone who has no one to care for them survive this? My appointment’s a week away – at one of the best centres in the world – and I spend the week googling feverishly, looking for stories of successful recovery. I drink even more than I do usually and panic three times daily that the Xanax isn’t in the bottom of my bag at all times.
I go to the centre with my friend. I’m given the same examination by a new doctor – a hammer to the knees and elbows, a grip and a grab – and she asks me to join her at the desk. She says, ‘Look, there’s nothing conclusive in your scan: some of them are blurred; there are lesions, but who knows what they’re from. The only way to diagnose if it is MS – and there’s no indication currently that it is – is to see you over a period of time, so we’ll monitor you and do a follow-up scan.’
The relief rolls off my shoulders. I feel liberated and free, like I’ve been given my life back. A few months later, I’m given another scan. The doctor leaves a voicemail. I call her back. Nothing necessarily to worry about, she says, but there’s something behind my eye they’d like to take a look at. She asks me to go back in. I delete the message; I never go back.
A week later, I overdose.
CHAPTER 24
Day One in the psych ward. 5.30 a.m. Low, steady voices wake me. I haven’t actually been asleep that long, having woken in panic every time the night staff did their bed checks, every ten minutes.
One of the voices I hear now has a thick, sharp accent. I open my eyes, trying to work out where I am and who’s speaking. The voice sounds foreign, definitely non-American, possibly European. My eyes begin to focus on the wall I’m facing; through the mesh I see the city, made from shadows and false light, under the still-dark sky outside. I take a breath and turn over to see to whom the voices belong. There’s an elderly woman with white tightly cropped hair sitting in the bed next to me, the bed that was empty when I fell asleep. She’s being washed by a nurse, her nightgown pulled down. Her breasts, lined, wrinkled and brown, rest on the white sheets. She offers up an arm to be washed, and then the other, the white hairs on her arm standing up for inspection under the yellow strip-light over her bed.
I watch out of half-closed eyes. I don’t want either of them to see me watching. I don’t want to talk, make polite conversation with a new, mad, topless woman. I’ve only been here a handful of hours and still can’t believe this is now my reality. I shut my eyes tighter, desperate to make them go away, but the hum and the hard consonants crash into my peace. I turn back over, pull the blanket up to my chin and will myself to sleep, the only place I can escape and be free from the insanity all around me.
A couple of hours later and I’m awake again. The woman next to me is sitting up in bed, reading, her nightie pulled up now, her breasts safely encased inside her bra. She peers at me over the edge of her reading glasses as if she’s only just noticed me. She’s in her seventies, has a strong, chiselled jaw, pronounced eye sockets, strong, arched nose, nostrils like almonds. She’s tanned, speckled and sprinkled with brown marks that the sun has given her body. I’ll soon see that she walks with a slight stoop, her legs swollen and coarse, a layer of softness over her thighs and stomach that dances when she walks, swaying slightly side to side.
‘Hello,’ she says, offering her handshake, overjoyed to hear that I’m also a foreigner when I reply. She’s an artist, she’s called Ana. She splits her time between San Francisco, New York and Berlin. She eyes me carefully. ‘Are you a reader?’ Yes, yes I am. She seems happy. ‘Oh, thank heavens I’m sharing with you,’ she says, and then: ‘Ugh, I bet everyone in here is crazy.’ I laugh, feel a momentary lightness as I do. Buoyed by her recognition – I’m not like them. I’m like her. Normal.
She doesn’t want to come with me to breakfast, but I feel I must go. It’s what sane people do and I’m conscious of the Note Takers. I put on the hospital gown, the socks, my hair, the bits of make-up I’ve been allowed to keep. I look in the mirror above the sink in the bathroom and try to work out if I could smash it and use the pieces against, on, myself. I could smash it with a chair, with my fist, with my head. How much could I pull out and use in the right place before they came in and here and got me? Not enough, I think. Not enough.
I take a deep breath, walk out into the hallway, join the steady stream of people moving towards the corridor where the food trolleys are parked. I hold the back of my gown together, try to keep the heat out of my cheeks as the other patients look at my New Girl Gown and Just Admitted Socks.
‘Hi,’ says a nurse. ‘Terri? As you weren’t here in time to order your breakfast, you’ll just have to take what’s left over.’
I wait until all the other patients have taken their trays – their names called out one by one, surnames only – and have cereal, milk and juice. Taking my tray, I walk into the dining room (cum therapy room, cum meeting room) and look around nervously. Small groups sit together, nothing outwardly noticeable binding them into their gangs. They look up as I shuffle into the room in my socks, then look at each other. No one makes eye contact with me, to let me know it’s OK, they get it; they’ve been here too. But then I spot a woman on her own. Brown hair, unbrushed and knotted like rope, that keeps falling in her eyes as she blinks it away, never moving it away, out, with her fingers. The dark circles swallow her
eyes, her T-shirt is stained and her soft belly rests over the waistband of her jogging bottoms. I walk over to the table.
‘Hello, how are you?’
She stares.
‘I’m Terri,’ I say by way of an introduction that she definitely didn’t ask for.
‘Would I be able to sit down?’
She doesn’t respond. I nod at the chairs.
‘Can I?’
She looks away. I take this as a yes and sit down, the whole room going back to their conversations once I open my carton of milk. She never looks up again, pushing her spoon into her mouth before she’s finished swallowing what was last put in there.
After breakfast, we form another line (there is a lot of queueing in psych wards). We have our temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken, one by one, sitting in the plastic chair opposite the nurses’ station. We then queue up again to get our meds. Once you hit the front, the nurse checks your wristband and your medical forms and gives you your medication in a small paper cup. Just like in the movies. You have to swallow them as they watch, stick your tongue out in proof. Just like in the movies. I’ve been prescribed Prozac and propranolol. I will tell the doctor that I feel better immediately. I don’t. I don’t feel anything. Not a single tremor or tickle. But I need him to believe in my transformation: the epiphany of medication, the pharmaceutical salvation that he’s charged in with, clasping it in his hand like an unsheathed sword.
I panic at how I’m coming across. I know that I can seem cold, hard. Judgemental and superior, even. And at times, I am all of these things and worse. I’m trembling with nerves and fear, the twisting and spinning of my guts. But I need to make sure none of this spills out. If I let my brain and body go, they’ll never be reconciled again.
I’ve read those awful stories in the paper: those people who threw themselves under trains, surviving while the train kept them together, falling to bits as the car is lifted off them. But the cuts, the incisions which severed, chopped me up, couldn’t be seen to the naked eye. So, for now, all of my effort has to be spent ensuring that it stays this way. Falling apart here and getting fixed isn’t even an option. I can’t allow that to happen. I won’t.
Later that morning, I meet with the doctor. It’s Friday. I realise this is the last chance to get out before the weekend. In my notebook I’ve written, in pencil, ‘WHAT’S THE PLAN?’ The conversation goes like this:
‘So, how are you feeling?’
‘Oh my God, so much better!’
‘Really?’
‘Oh God, yes! I think I was just stressed and drinking too much and I feel so much better already! What a wake-up call! I’m so grateful for this experience!’
The doctor nods, doesn’t talk and writes. ‘There’s an AA meeting in the hospital tomorrow. It’s not arranged by the hospital, we just allow them to host meetings here. I think it could benefit you to go.’ A pause. ‘What do you think?’
‘Um, sure,’ I say. ‘If I’m still here. But what I really wanted to talk about was going home.’
The doctor shakes his head. ‘Nope, you won’t be going home before the weekend.’
I swallow hard.
‘Well, Sunday is day three. And I was originally told that I’d be here three days. So, can I go home then?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Doctors aren’t here on the weekends – no one’s discharged then.’
‘Monday?’ I counter, eyebrows raised, face strained, ready to flinch at the next rejection. I can feel my escape slipping further through my hands, an eel wriggling and slipping through the gaps between my fingers; I can’t hold on to it.
‘You need to concentrate on working on yourself, on really getting better,’ he says. I don’t know what he means. Aren’t I already better?
It’s explained to me, very slowly, in very specific terms by the doctor, that it’ll go in my favour if I participate in the entirely voluntary group sessions. The piece of paper on the wall breaks down exactly what and when they are, along with the allotted times for breakfast, TV, lunch, telephone calls, dinner. Each segment is witnessed and marshalled by a member of the ward staff. They stand off to the side taking constant notes. I wonder of what. Whether we’re joining in? Looking happy? I spend my time joining every group going, convinced that this is my way out, smile slapped across my face. The nurses, attendants, stand and they write and write and write. They look at their watches, look at all of us, write and write some more. Pages and pages. They’re constantly observing. I long to spend all my time in my room lying down but I know the isolation will go against me. That it’s a sign of depression, of not committing to treatment.
So, I decide: I will wake every morning in plenty of time for breakfast, a meal that I’ve never eaten. I will shower. I will do my make-up. It’s important that they can see me taking part in my usual rituals, not that they know what my usual rituals are. I’ll smear the foundation over my face. When it’s completely covered, I will paint on my other features: the liquid eyeliner, while being careful not to have a shaky line (I imagine the notes – This morning, Terri had wobbly eyeliner. She looked full nuts. Keep her in another month. No, two!). Instead, a thick, steady line from the corner of my inner eyelid to middle, pause, lift off the liner, place it back on exactly where I stopped and draw to the exact point my eye stops. I will then find a point, at an angle, two inches away, draw a dot and join the lines, before colouring in the thick lines. Then I’ll brush each lash of each eye, top and bottom, with black mascara. My lipstick, red, will be painted on – first the outline of my mouth, then I’ll colour in until it’s a red mass of flesh in the middle of the white. I’ll practise smiling. Does it look more natural if I show my teeth or keep my mouth closed? (New note: Terri was smiling like the Joker when she took her breakfast tray. Must be mad. Another two weeks! Hell, three to be safe.)
The final part of my daily ritual – when I’ll attach my hair, erect, fat, sticky.
I can’t work out if this will be putting myself back together each day or simply painting the façade afresh, like the houses on the island of Mykonos that are painted every year to cover the damage from the sun and the sea whipping off the white and showing the brown layers underneath.
Whether I’m continuing the sideshow, and what that sideshow is and why I’m performing it is, I decide, not ultimately what really matters. The priority is getting the hell out of here as quickly as I possibly can, and if that means painting myself up like a clown, I’m all for it.
My performance can begin.
CHAPTER 25
The next morning. Seven a.m. Ana is already awake when I open my eyes. She’s smearing make-up up, down, under and over her face. Following the curves and contours of the front and sides of her skull. I ask how she is, invite her to come to breakfast with me.
‘Aaagh, I can’t,’ she says. ‘This place … crazy people drive me insane.’
I smile. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’
‘You are not mad,’ she says, matter-of-fact. ‘Why are you here?’
I tell her about the drinking, the pills, the overdose – the slippery path that saw me stumble until I fell down this particular hole. How I don’t know how to get myself out. She’s nodding. ‘You’re a perfectly sane person who just loves to drink!’ she says, both reassuring and offending me. ‘Like me,’ she continues brightly and then tells me her story. After several weeks of insomnia – and three straight days awake – she’d brought herself to the ER, desperate to get something to help her sleep. Somehow, between admitting that she drank several glasses of wine each day and battled crippling, crushing insomnia, that she hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours, she’d been told she couldn’t now go home – to any one of her homes, including her ‘very large’ apartment on the Upper West Side.
‘Did you sign some forms?’ I ask.
‘Maybe … I don’t know!’ she says. ‘I was just so tired and wanted to sleep. But now they won’t let me out. They say I’d have to appeal. I’ll just do my three days.’
‘But what if they won’t let you out after that?’ I say, articulating my deep fear. I am really testing the water for my own path forwards. Trying to work out the likelihood that I won’t be able to get out. Aware that my own day three is tomorrow.
She shrugs. ‘I’m going to get my friend to break me out.’ I can’t tell if she’s joking.
To the right of the nurses’ station, opposite one of the two payphones, is the TV room. Well, technically, actually, the TV corner. It’s a continuation of the corridor, with enough furniture in it to arguably constitute a room. Erratically stocked bookshelves, five rows of plastic chairs three deep and a dust-coated TV mounted onto the wall. Around it, at the allotted, agreed TV times (briefly in the morning, the afternoon and then for a longer stretch at night) listed on the schedule that is stuck onto the walls, sit most of the other patients.
As soon as it’s the scheduled hour, we take our seats. All necks, faces, ears, eyes, minds directed up into the corner, through the TV screen, through the cables and wires to a reality happening somewhere other than here. No one speaks. Everyone simply stares up.
CHUNG-CHUNG.
The opening bars of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The noise that had resonated around every apartment I’d lived in for the last few years. Every day, every night, I’d sought comfort in the dark, in the stories of women who had been pared and pillaged like me. Each episode saw them, faces bruised, bodies smashed, hearts emptied out, getting justice. I would watch episode after episode, my heart hammering every time The Bad Man paid for his Awful Crimes. The victim, the woman, walking straight-backed, proud, resilient into her future. Made whole again by the destruction of the one who’d tried his best to bloody her beyond redemption, to ruin her forever.
The TV shudders on the bracket. It amazes me that this is considered acceptable entertainment for a room full of psychiatric patients. We watch episode after episode: stories of rape, murder, abuse, unimaginable cruelties visited on the weakest, most vulnerable. Everyone sits unflinching, unmoving, as crimes are committed, justice served.