Am I crazy? I think. Could you have all the symptoms of a disorder except one—one big one—and still have that disorder? I don’t know, maybe. I get off the phone and sit there a minute, not knowing what else to do. If it’s not Hashimoto’s, then what? How else to explain what the last year has been like? I think about trying to find the name of the endocrinologist Peter is seeing so I can ask him these questions myself, but I’m not Peter’s wife anymore and even if I was, the doctor is not going to speak to me without his permission.
Anna, now home for the summer, tells me Peter is awake at all hours of the night, walking up and down the stairs, talking on the phone, sometimes even in and out of the house. I assume it is work stress, since that was what often kept him from sleeping when we were married. There were many nights he would get out of bed and just go into the garage office to work, rather than staying awake all night worrying about getting something done the next day.
All summer, our kids have been coming back to my house early from their weekends at Peter’s because he stays in his bedroom most of the time. When Anna asks him why he doesn’t want to hang out with them, he says he’s sick, can’t seem to shake this cold he has. She has told him he needs to see a doctor, but he doesn’t answer. And then there’s the mouse.
He has trained a small white mouse named Snowball to respond to voice commands. Anna told me her dad even bought a book about training mice, and now sometimes takes Snowball with him to work if he is going back to the office at night. When Peter calls to the mouse, she will climb up his arm and sit on his shoulder. He has become obsessed with her. “Evan and I were sitting on the couch just talking and Dad came in and went to pick up Snowball and play with her, like we weren’t even there. It’s totally weird,” Anna tells me. “We just looked at each other and started laughing.”
In fact, Peter and I were on the phone a few weeks ago after he returned from a last-minute trip to Florida, and he started telling me about Snowball.
“She was so pissed at me for going away,” Peter said. “I called to her and she wouldn’t come. She always climbs up my arm when I call her. But when I first got home she just ignored me.” Peter was laughing the way he used to laugh about the funny things our children did when they were babies. That night on the phone I tried to laugh too, tried to see the humor in the mouse story, but it felt like my ex-husband was losing his mind. I asked some questions about Snowball, but what I really wanted to ask Peter was if he felt connected to reality. Ask if he was hearing voices or seeing things. Twelve or fourteen months ago, we wouldn’t have been having a conversation about an angry mouse. Peter would not have made a spur-of-the-moment 3,000-mile trip to Florida without telling anyone, just to look at a vintage sports car he doesn’t need. Drugs were not on my mind that night, psychosis was. Mania and borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia were. But drug addiction can look a lot like mental illness. The heavy use of drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, especially when injected, can cause psychotic symptoms such as disorganized speech, incoherent thoughts, lethargy, and antisocial, dangerous, or erratic behavior. Long-term substance abuse can also cause what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) calls “substance-induced mental disorders,” and those include delirium, depression, anxiety, and dementia.
It was not far-fetched, at that moment, to think that a mental illness like mania, combined with a lack of sleep, chronic stress, the coffee and Monster energy drinks, the sugar and fast food, the fear of slowing down, might have been the reason Peter had two car accidents in the previous month—one serious enough to take the Tiguan out of commission for at least six weeks. He was on his way home from a concert in L.A. when it happened. “It was a minor accident, I wasn’t even going fast,” he told me. I had wondered, though, if it was a minor accident and he hadn’t been going fast, why was it going to take six weeks to repair?
The weekend after our meeting with Evan’s college counselor was another one where Peter spent the entire day in his bedroom. Anna and Evan left early and drove back to my house Sunday morning. They told me Peter left his room only to walk into the kitchen to a pan of brownies he had baked. He took one from the pan and walked back into his room without saying a word to either of them. Evan would have stopped going up there months ago, but Anna continues to want to be there. She is only home for the summer and wants some time with her dad while she’s here, so Evan heads up to Peter’s with her, the two of them believing each weekend their dad will start feeling better and start acting more like his old self.
Monday night I call Peter to ask why he was in his room all weekend. He sounds rushed and irritated when he answers, probably wishing he hadn’t. “The kids are upset,” I say. “They don’t understand what is going on with you. They didn’t see you all weekend. What’s the point of wanting them up there if you’re going to ignore them?”
“I told them I was sick,” he says, exhaling loudly. “I left a brochure about Hashimoto’s on the counter.”
“You left a brochure on the counter?” I repeat, making it a question, as if that will transform the statement into something that makes sense. “Look, if you need to rest because of this, why can’t you just talk to the kids about it? They are worried, Peter. They love you.”
I hear him sigh. “I love them too,” he says, and then the phone is silent for several seconds. “What do you want me to do, Eilene? Tell them I’m very sick?”
I feel my stomach drop and adrenaline kick in; my heart is suddenly beating fast. I thought Hashimoto’s wasn’t uncommon? Wasn’t serious? I lower my voice and say, gently, sensing an opening for some kind of confession, “Are you? Are you very sick Peter?” The phone is silent again for a few seconds. Oh my god, I think. It’s not just Hashimoto’s; it is something else.
“Yes,” he says, more softly. “I am.” He isn’t at home. I know because of the noises I hear behind him, other voices, scraping chairs, music. “What do you want me to do?” he asks, not really looking for an answer, just exasperated.
I’m not sure what, exactly, I want him to do. I want him to be healthy again, but I don’t know how to get him there. “If I had as much money as you do,” I say, “I’d check myself into the best clinic I could find and figure out what the hell was wrong with me.” At this moment, more than any other, I am so close to the truth. I am millimeters from it. One changed word—clinic to rehab—and maybe the jig would have been up, the game over. Peter would realize I had finally found the last piece of this puzzle I’ve been trying to solve, the one depicting a needle and a spoon and an elasticized tourniquet. But I can’t locate that last piece; it’s right in front of me but I can’t see it. “I’m trying, Eilene,” he says, finally. “I’m doing the best I can.” He hangs up before I can say anything else.
Research has shown that when we are faced with evidence that doesn’t fit with the way we see the world we often dismiss it, instead we cherry-pick information that supports what we do believe. This phenomenon is called confirmation bias, a psychological term, essentially, for wishful thinking. Once I formed my conclusion, that Peter was behaving oddly and losing weight because he had Hashimoto’s disease, I looked for information that confirmed it and rejected anything contradictory. Even if I had known enough about drug addiction to recognize Peter’s symptoms for what they were, I probably would have dismissed them because I had already decided something else was true.
Mary Forsberg Weiland, ex-wife of Scott Weiland, the front man and lead singer of the band Stone Temple Pilots who struggled with addiction, was diagnosed as bipolar at twenty-three, which appeared to fit her symptoms. At that time, she and Scott were in a relationship that eventually led to marriage. In a 2011 interview, she said her diagnosis had been based largely on her feeling “angry and jacked-up all the time.” Mary blamed her arrest in 2007—for setting fire to Scott’s clothes in the driveway of their home after a particularly vicious fight—on an imbalance in her
bipolar medication. Yet after the couple divorced, Mary found she wasn’t so jacked-up and angry anymore. In her memoir, Fall to Pieces, and in our conversation, she describes a pattern of mistreatment by Scott. “One day I’d be dealing with a wonderful, loving person and the next day I’m dealing with someone I don’t even recognize. I didn’t understand what was happening.”
Mary and I talk about how easily Peter and Scott were able to spin complex webs of lies that somehow made sense, at least to each of us. Even after she and Scott divorced, he continued to lie about everything, she says, even lying about why he was in drug treatment. “I wanted to believe he was going there to get sober. But Scott went there to hide; he didn’t really intend to clean up,” she says. “He’d go there, get a lot of rest and attention, not have to take out the trash or watch the kids.” And then he would relapse, over and over again.
“Did he make you feel like you were crazy?” I ask. Peter was certainly able to make me feel like I was, even though it was his behavior that was crazy.
“Oh my god, yes,” Mary says. “Once we split up, I felt fine, I felt normal again. The doctors realized then that I had been misdiagnosed. I wasn’t bipolar at all. It’s that I was married to an addict.”
Tonight, sitting in front of my computer, I am well into my own denial, unable or perhaps unwilling to connect the dots. I’ve been attempting to answer emails but am too tired, so I just put the iMac to sleep and then pull my fingers through my hair looking for loose strands, a nervous habit I have. When I look down, there is a pile of hair on my keyboard, but it’s not strands I’ve pulled out. They are strands that have simply fallen out. “Jeez,” I say out loud. “I’m so stressed, I’m losing my hair.”
I turn off the lights in my office and get ready for bed. I’m under the covers reading a book when Evan walks in. He lies down across the foot of the bed and stretches, a long, full-body stretch. “Hey,” I say, “It’s almost eleven. Are you going to bed soon?”
Evan rolls over and props himself up on an elbow, facing me. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for Dad to call—he texted an hour and a half ago saying he would call in ten minutes. I texted back and asked if he was still going to call to say good night, but he hasn’t answered. I’ll just text him that I’m going to bed and we can talk tomorrow. Good night, Mom,” Evan says. He gets up from the bed and gives me a hug.
I watch my son, once my baby, walk down the hall to his room. He no longer has the body of a boy—it’s bursting into that of a grown man. I know in another year or two he will look completely different; he will be completely different. Tonight, that thought makes me teary-eyed, both for what I can’t have again and for what Evan doesn’t have now—time with his father, which he needs. If Peter is going to call in ten minutes, what happens that he suddenly can’t?
I turn off the light and feel the tears coming, so I bury my face in the pillow to keep Evan from hearing. I don’t know where to turn for help or what to do. “Life can only be understood backwards,” Kierkegaard wrote, “but it must be lived forwards.” If only I were looking back right now.
■ EIGHT
July 8–10, 2015
IT’S TWO MONTHS LATER, eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning in July. I hear Anna come in the front door and go to her room. A few minutes later, she taps tentatively on the door that separates my office from the kitchen, in case I’m on the phone. “Can I come in?” she says softly.
I get up and open the door. “Hey,” I say. She hugs me. “What time do you have to be at work?” I ask. She has a summer job at a store in a nearby mall.
“At two,” she says. Her eyes are red, as if she’s been crying. I offer to make her a lunch salad I know she likes, and she stands at the counter as I start assembling it. “Is something wrong?” I say. “Did you guys have a nice time with Dad last night?”
Her face collapses. In the space of ten seconds, she goes from saying “thank you for making me a salad” to an eruption of sobs, trying to talk but barely able to get the words out, shaking with the force of—what? Anger? Fear? Sadness?
“What?” I say, leaving the salad to walk around the counter and hug her. “What is it, Anna? What happened?” After a few minutes, I grab the tissue box and hand it to her. She leans against the counter across from me and blows her nose.
“Mom,” she says. “This is so fucked up. Everything with Dad is completely messed up. He was so mean to Evan; he yelled at him. He was so nasty to both of us. I don’t know what’s going on with him, but he was being a total asshole.”
She is furious. “Evan wanted to take Dad to the hospital because he was really sick. And Dad yelled at him, said that he should leave him alone, that he should stop. Evan came downstairs to my room and told me he thought we should call an ambulance. He was really upset. But what good would that do? Dad would just refuse to go. I was so pissed off about it that as soon as I got up this morning, I went for a run and then left. I didn’t even say goodbye,” she says. “Dad probably doesn’t even realize I’m gone.” We stand there, staring at the salad ingredients on the counter, and then the front door opens and closes.
Evan walks into the kitchen. As soon as he puts his keys down Anna starts crying, then she hugs him. “I felt so bad for you when Dad yelled at you last night. I’m so angry at him, I didn’t even try to talk to him this morning. I just left.”
I can see that Evan has no intention of crying, of breaking down the way his sister has. Something about him is hard and determined, as if his skin is thickening while we stand there. Peter’s words, whatever they were, however they were shouted, hurt him, but he says nothing.
“What happened?” I say. I’m looking at Evan, but he is steely-eyed and I can’t read him. Anna steps away and wipes her eyes, then answers for him, telling me that she and her brother had gone to get some dinner because Peter was sleeping and there was nothing to eat in the house. When they returned, Peter was awake. He walked into the kitchen looking very sick. “And then he started going off on us, just yelling at us, and it didn’t even make sense,” Anna says, looking at Evan. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Evan says. “Dad started yelling about people at work that are driving him crazy, just complaining about everyone and everything.”
He continues. “I went into his bedroom afterward to make sure he was okay and he was sitting at the edge of his bed not saying anything. All of a sudden, he just bends over and throws up. I don’t know what it could have been because he hadn’t eaten while we were there. But it was dark, almost black, and thick. And then he just threw a washcloth down over it. So I said, ‘Dad, I am calling an ambulance. I’m taking you to the hospital’ and he started shouting at me. He said, ‘No! Leave me alone!’ and then he said, ‘You’re just like your mother. She’s always nagging me to see a doctor and that’s what is making me sick.’ ”
I am silent although my mind is going through a kind of triage reasoning. Black vomit, sleepiness, irrational anger…those are symptoms of…what? Vomiting is not a symptom of Hashimoto’s. So what does it signify?
I don’t yet know the vomit is something called hematemesis, blood that has been exposed to the stomach’s acid, causing it to thicken and darken. It’s often described as resembling coffee grounds. Doctors at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta describe it in the textbook Clinical Methods as a sign of “acute intestinal bleeding, usually from the upper gastrointestinal tract.” With hematemesis, the loss of blood can be substantial.
“In one small study,” the doctors wrote, “all six patients with hematemesis had lost more than a quarter of their red cell volume.” The most serious complication of this kind of hemorrhage is tissue hypoxemia, which is what happens when the body’s tissues aren’t getting enough oxygen (delivered to them by blood). The human body can tolerate up to about a 15 percent loss of blood volume, but if it continues, the person hemorrhaging will start to get thirsty and feel faint. Accor
ding to the textbook, when blood loss hits 40–50 percent, a “complete loss of the ability to compensate occurs with shock, impaired flow of blood to vital organs, tissue hypoxemia, lactic acidosis, and ultimately, death.” Peter had always suffered from gastrointestinal problems—he ate Tums as if they were candy. Opioid and amphetamine abuse makes stomach problems much worse. But I don’t know any of this yet. All I know is that last night Peter vomited something dark and thick. And he yelled at Evan, to whom he has rarely raised his voice.
“Then,” my son continues, “when Dad walked back to his room I shouted down the hall ‘I am only doing this because I love you.’ ” Anna starts to cry again. I feel tears burning on the inside of my own eyes, but force them back.
“Did Dad say anything else?” I ask.
“He yelled back, ‘I know, I love you too.’ ”
I put my head in my hands. I do not know what to do with this information. Go up there myself and confront him? Call the police to check on him? And with my luck, they will bang the door down, walk in, and he’ll be eating lunch. Peter will call me as soon as they leave and read me the riot act. “You called the fucking police? Because I have Hashimoto’s? Because the kids aren’t getting enough attention from me? Are you fucking insane?”
Anna walks away from Evan to get a tissue and leans against the counter, her hands folded across her chest. “It’s like…” she says, crying, and the words sound like she’s wrestling each one of them out. “It’s like he doesn’t love us anymore.” I put my arms around her.
“No,” I protest. “Don’t say that. He loves you guys more than anything else in the world.” Maybe I’m not very convincing because I’m not convinced myself. Does he? He used to, but what about now? If he loved them and wanted them at his house, why is he ignoring them? Why is he shutting them out?
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