Coming Undone

by Terri White

  Later, I go to the AA meeting, thinking it’ll be one mark in my favour with the doctors. It’s held in a small side room opposite the break room. Inside are eight other people from the ward and a woman who’s come in from the outside world to tell us her story. I’m the only first-timer in the room and I’m given an information leaflet that I squeeze into a ball in my hands.

  The woman from the outside begins talking. There’s a small window above her head that looks out onto the street, the sky, a building nearby. The glimpse of the world is intoxicating and my head spins.

  She’s like me, kind of. She had a good job, friends, but as she drank more and more, she ended up in situations that I’d lived too. Blacking out, upsetting those she loved, falling down the stairs, breaking a bone, almost getting arrested. My teeth start to lightly clatter as my face bristles and throbs in recognition; the voice in my head saying that I don’t belong here gets a little quieter. Every excuse I’ve come up with, every way I’ve rationalised starts to feel slippery between my fingers. She speaks of how much better her life has become. How happy she is, now that she’s committed to the programme and submitted to the higher power.

  Others are invited to share their stories. James from the ward starts to talk. He’s tall, grey-haired, wears glasses. In his khaki shorts and sandals, you’d take him to be an off-duty estate agent or ad sales guy. He turned up in New York a handful of days ago, running from another city he didn’t want to be, or couldn’t be, in any more. He had no money, nowhere to stay and just a bagful of clothes. He went to a bar and hooked up with an older man he wasn’t attracted to, just so he’d have somewhere to sleep. They stayed up doing pills for a couple of days. It’s not clear if it was the drugs or the hook-up that sent him spiralling but he ended up in the emergency room and then here.

  His family are down south, but he isn’t so welcome after multiple relapses and addictions and arrests. He has nieces and nephews who need to be sheltered and shielded from his behaviour. He nods as he recounts this, while tears fill his eyes. He has spent decades hustling for money, booze, drugs, a roof over his head. Decades being passed around and used, using others. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar and medicated for some time, but he always goes back to the drugs he gets off the street; the prescriptions are never enough.

  I think of my own niece, the love of my life: what I owe her. How much I don’t want to let her down. I keep listening. I don’t speak in this session, but I put my hands in the palms of others when everyone stands to say the serenity prayer at the end. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. The girl like me smiles and says, ‘Keep coming back.’

  CHAPTER 26

  It’s the next afternoon and TV hour again. I’m seated four rows back. The man in front of me – a grey-haired, middle-class dad – starts to jerk backwards and forwards, the legs of his chair scraping in quick movements along the floor, like a man standing up, pushing his chair back, then changing his mind. Over and over again at speed. It takes me a moment to work out what’s happening, until his head snaps back and forth and one of the other patients shouts, ‘He’s having a fit!’

  We call out to the nurses who, for pretty much the first time ever, aren’t standing there watching us. They run over and lay him carefully on the floor. We’re all sent into the other room, where we try to look through the window, but can’t quite see what’s happening. Some minutes later, he’s wheeled past us, an oxygen mask on his face.

  The rumours circulate. He died, right there on the floor. He had a seizure brought on by ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy). He’d had a stroke. He was in a coma. When he does return to the ward some days later, his eyes are empty and deep.

  He’s not the only one undergoing ECT. The hospital, I’m told, are ‘bringing it back’, advocating it as a course of treatment for depression which doesn’t respond to medication in those patients who are the hardest to reach. One patient, a forty-something New Jersey wife and mother, has it every other day. She is bright, funny, sharp. She tells me her husband is something in the mafia, a mob boss. He controlled her for decades. They have two kids. She loves them; he controls them. Their marriage hit trouble; she sank into a deep and ever deeper depression until eventually he found her hanging from the light fitting in their bedroom.

  ‘He didn’t call an ambulance.’ She laughs. A friend saved her, got her medical attention. In the months since she’s been sectioned he’s been to see her just a handful of times. She speaks to her kids on the phone but they rarely visit. She’s torn as to whether it’s for the best. For them, for her. She suspects it’s for the best for him.

  She is taken off for her treatment in the morning while we’re still asleep. As we eat breakfast, her unconscious body is wheeled past the break room. Heads swivel left and right to look as the gurney is wheeled past, wheels creaking. She’ll join us a couple of hours later, sore, a little quieter than normal.

  One day I ask her: ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answers. ‘They tell you it won’t, but it does. But mostly it’s the headache afterwards.’

  ‘And do you feel better?’

  ‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘They told me I had to have it to even begin the conversation about getting out as I felt just as depressed as I ever have done. But I still feel the same. I tell them I don’t so they don’t keep me in here forever.’

  There’s the tall, intimidating brunette, who has a young daughter out in the world and another baby brewing in her belly. Her daughter sometimes comes to visit, her small eyes round and terrified as she clings to the woman who brings her in. The brunette’s fuzzy black hair is pulled back into a rough ponytail; she has brown, smudged circles under her dark eyes, tattoos on her arms. She dresses every day in jogging bottoms, pyjamas and vests. She tells me that she’s been addicted to drugs, to heroin, and has suffered multiple breakdowns. She’s worried about her daughter, having watched her own mother spend almost her entire childhood in a long-term institution in upstate New York. Her childhood memories were of her mum getting hospitalised, being gone for months, then years, coming back for brief periods before needing to go away again. She is painfully, excruciatingly aware of history repeating itself and is determined to do better, be better, get better. This determination is the only possible way I can explain the treatment she is exposing herself to: electric shock therapy while five months pregnant.

  ‘Oh God, how can that possibly be safe?’ I gasp at her as she rubs her belly. ‘When you get shook, when your bones get shook, doesn’t the baby get hurt?’

  She shrugs and shakes her head at the same time. ‘No, the doctors told me it was perfectly safe.’ In here, she is safe from heroin, a drug that has followed her around for years. She’s tried everything to leave it behind, over and over. It’s impossible to tell where the mental illness ends and her drug addiction begins.

  Almost every single person on the unit has a substance abuse issue. Drinks, pills, heroin, meth. I wonder what comes first: the booze, the drugs, or the madness? Do the addictions drive them crazy or are they simply trying to keep the hell at bay by whatever means necessary?

  And everyone has their own story to tell. So much worse, it seems, than mine.

  The fear is what connects us. The patients from different countries, of different ages, generations, backgrounds, lives outside of here. The fear that we’ll stay locked inside for weeks, months, years. Forever. Apart from Daniel.

  He doesn’t want to go. His life outside is chaotic. Moving between homes of relatives, shelters, the streets. Getting access to his medication and taking care of his mental health is almost an impossibility. In here, he’s part of a community. He has a structure, a role. He matters.

  At night, the supper trolley is brought out – snacks, sandwiches, fruit and yoghurt to tide us over until morning. And every night, the same thing happens. Louise, the woman I’d sat across from at breakfast on the first morning, who barely
speaks a single, solitary word, walks into the break room, strides up to the trolley, takes a tuna-fish sandwich and sticks it down her pants, pulling her drawstring trousers tight over them. She walks around with it tucked in there all night. I can still hear her:

  Sway, sway, shuffle, shuffle, rustle, rustle.

  Mob Boss Wife shares a room with her and tells me that every night when they go to bed – at least two hours after the arrival of the supper trolley – Louise gets undressed, takes the tuna-fish sandwich out of her knickers, unwraps it and eats it, slowly and methodically, licking each finger as she does.

  CHAPTER 27

  We hear the screaming before we see where it’s come from: the guttural howling ringing out on a loop. Each cycle abruptly halted with a sharp intake, then swallow of breath before it begins again.

  We exchange glances across the table – mine as the new girl, unfamiliar with what could have caused the screaming, panicked, searching, looking for answers. Those with a little more time under their belt have a knowing look born of knowledge and experience. They have seen this before. Everyone cranes their necks to look out into the corridor. There, with a member of staff either side, is a thirty-something Asian-American woman, who is currently baring her throat to the ceiling, digging her socked feet into the polished floor in vain. They’re pulling her towards the door by the nurses’ station that I haven’t seen anyone go through yet.

  ‘I’m gonna sue you,’ she shouts between screams. ‘You are so going to regret this!’ She attempts a laugh before screaming again.

  ‘Where are they taking her?’ I ask.

  ‘Seclusion,’ says Daniel. ‘The padded cell.’

  Seeing my alarm, he pushes his glasses up his nose and collapses into laughter.

  ‘What?!’ I say.

  Sarah rolls her eyes, puts a palm on the table and shares what sounds like part-truth, part-horror, part-mythology: ‘If someone’s not … cooperating, or has properly lost it, they get taken to isolation for a day or two.’

  Apparently in the room there is no bed frame, no desk, no TV. Just a mattress on the floor. Whoever is in there is on twenty-four-hour watch. A member of staff, sentry-like, sits on a plastic chair in the corner, their back against the wall. They say the walls, the floors, the doors are all white. I think about what it must be like to be inside that bleached, blank room, the proximity of one person whose only job is to watch you. Do you try to make conversation with them, stare past them? I can barely imagine how thin the minutes and hours would become, stretching out for eternity in there.

  Apparently, The Screamer will be kept in there until the ‘episode’ passes.

  It passes by the next day, when she pads through the communal space in front of the nurses’ station. She’s no longer screaming, but she’s clearly furious, her jaw hard and square. It’s phone hour – the time when friends and family can call one of the two payphones or, if you have a telephone card, you can call them. She waits in line, people eyeing her warily, pretending not to listen, but desperate to hear who she can possibly be calling and what she can be saying. It turns out that she’s calling her lawyer. And it’s a good lawyer. She’s telling him that he needs to get her out, right now.

  If you disagree with the hospital’s decision to commit you, you’re able to appeal their decision. There is a hospital ‘courtroom’ where cases are heard every few days. I had been told about the process when I asked about my options. I’d also been told that it usually results in people being kept in for longer. It delays everything and also shows the doctors that you are unable or unwilling to accept the reality of your problems and their help. I decided, without much thought, through a fog of fear and panic, that I wouldn’t appeal. That I wouldn’t fight. I’d be a good girl – a role I knew how to play to a tee – until they decided I could leave.

  And in this sense, oddly, the rhythm of the hospital suits me. I’ve always been a good girl. Excelled at it, in fact. I’d been born with, or at least had instilled at an early age, a desire to please, to be given approval and the warmth of attention. People could feel it radiate off me. It gave me a neediness that made my mum’s skin itch. I needed her, specifically. She felt it whenever we were in the same room, my eyes, always pleading and hopeful, turned towards her as she did her best to deflect. Men felt it. Saw my need and along with it compliance, if not a willingness to be coerced with ease. They knew part of me would likely be grateful, that calling me ‘special’ would quell the desire to fight. That being the first person to tell me I was worth something would wrongfoot me enough to blur the lines of what was wrong and what was right and was this love?

  The days and nights in the hospital are simple and structured in a straight line around one thing and one thing only: being a good girl and getting the fuck out of there. The days always begin the same way: I wake up, though I have never really slept that well – an opened-every-ten-minutes door, writing on clipboards and constant low lights making sleep impossible. The first night I’d woken up pretty much every time the nurse pushed the handle and moved their upper body inside. Startled, fingers gripping the starched sheets, as I remembered once again where I was and what they were doing. They weren’t an intruder, leaning in, bringing in danger, violating the safety of my space. They were there to keep the danger out or at least keep it down, tightly locked inside me. Their job was to stop it coming out of me and smothering me as I slept. There were no curtains on the windows, just the wire mesh, which blocked out next to no sunlight. I’ve accepted this as my new reality, submitted to it with speed and ease.

  But this woman isn’t. She is fighting. Hard. Rumour on the ward is that she’s a high-powered exec in a big tech company. She has a huge job, a six-figure salary and, frankly, they’ve fucked with the wrong person. Word is that she came in feeling tired and burnt out, signed some forms she hadn’t read properly, and before she could say ‘court order’ found herself being escorted up to the eighth floor. Stories like these are common – the woman who turned up in the emergency room suffering exhaustion, asking for someone to soothe the edges; the one who couldn’t sleep and wanted to be helped under. Who’d presented themselves to doctors and nurses on their very last nerve. Who’d been ‘tricked, duped’, into staying a night or maybe two – for a rest – and were now locked up in here with us, the mad ones, desperate to escape from the prison they’d found themselves in.

  Everyone rolls their eyes as she rants and raves on the phone, clearly trying to ensure that her feelings reach the nurses, which may then reach the doctors.

  ‘They’ll just keep her in for longer,’ say the old hands. ‘She’d be better off just doing her three days and getting out.’

  In the meantime, with the screaming stopped and her hearing not until tomorrow, she joins us for an art class. We sit around the square table in the art room – which is a room full of supplies nearest the locked double doors. There’s a pile of paper in the middle of the table, paints, charcoal, pencils and pens. We’re told to paint or draw whatever we feel. I paint a woman with almond eyes, towering bulbous hair and fire and darkness all around her. Her smile is a slash of red. The Screamer is talking softly to Jean, murmuring in her ear, softly drawing. Jean has been in the ward the longest. She’s in her sixties, her short grey hair curling at the nape of the neck. She wears sweatpants and a sweater, both grey. When she’s not in class, she walks the halls – one end to the other – over and over and over. She doesn’t so much walk as shuffle.

  The sounds of her slippers move down the polished floor, moving at exactly the same speed and with the same rhythm, for hours. The sound of Jean shuffling soundtracks the day: behind the TV, behind the chatting staff, the patients sparring, is Jean. They say that she’s been here for several months, if not years. That either her husband died or left her or she never had one. That she has kids or none. That she only speaks when it’s absolutely necessary. When it’s necessary is during the colour therapy group.

  ‘What colour are you today?’ asks the group leader.r />
  I say I’m red, feeling it’s violent and vivid but not anything alarming enough to add on any more days. Jean’s next. I wonder if she’ll answer at all. I realise that if she does it will be the first time I’ve heard her voice.

  ‘Jean?’ comes the prompt.

  ‘Black,’ she says. ‘Black.’

  My heart breaks. I wonder what has made her so sad. So alone. Where the only life she feels able to live is one where she gets up every morning, showers, puts on the same clothes, puts on her socks, her slippers and shuffles inch by inch, step by step, up and down the hospital hallways. Where she doesn’t speak, breathe, utter a word for the majority of her day. Her thoughts, her fears, her regrets, every feeling, every emotion kept inside, under her skin and between her bones. Those things had to snake and swim inside her, in the gaps, but they never came out, she never gave voice to them. I think how lonely she must feel: here and out in the world at large. I try to picture her walking down the street, in Trader Joe’s, on the subway, but can only ever see her the same way: shuffling, sliding down the polished floor, hands stiff as boards by her sides.

  Later, there’s scent class: a clutch of perfumes, of lotions and potions – the point, we’re told, is to connect us with our senses. A useful stop on the journey to self they are trying to help us on. We sit crowded around the table, lifting bottle necks and nozzles to our noses to inhale deeply. We have to use words to describe what we smell and how it makes us feel. I pick up a generic bottle and ramble something about ‘life’ and ‘energy’ and ‘lightness’, one eye on the member of staff patrolling the rec room. Because in every class, in every session, is a member of staff, clipboard rested against their gut, scribbling down what each of us are doing.