Nov
27

Part One: When life hands you lemons, Juggle.

Several years ago, I cracked under the formidable weight of unfortunate circumstance and spent four days in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. I had been having what felt like one neverending panic attack for weeks, and showed up at the emergency room with a backpack full of books and my knitting, ready to throw myself upon the mercy of professionals.

Strangely, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would end up in the psychiatric ward—I was thinking of something more along the lines of the “exhaustion ward,” or the “tea and sympathy ward.” Sure, I had stopped sleeping and eating, and had cried myself into dehydration. Why yes, I had spent four hours the night before wandering the streets in my pajama pants, wishing for death. But when I was being wheeled to my room and noticed that Gee, we seem to be a long way from the main part of the hospital, and aren’t there an awful lot of locks on the doors? I panicked, assuring the nurse that I didn’t belong here, all I needed was an adjustment to my medication, and couldn’t they do that somewhere…brighter? Where the hallways didn’t smell quite so emphatically of urine?
To make matters worse, there was no room on the top floor—the floor for garden variety depressives and neurotics—and until a bed opened up (it never did), I would have to stay on the middle floor—the floor for people well enough that their rooms were unpadded, but crazy enough that…Well, crazy enough.

I was the only patient on the floor who was new to the inpatient mental health system, and most of the conversation amongst my floormates centered around the accommodations at other hospitals around town: which allowed smoking, which had the best snacks (St. Joseph’s), and which visiting hours were longest and most carelessly supervised. Among my fellow residents were a schizophrenic who sat near the television, swiping with her cane at anyone who tried to change the channel; a Hmong woman who roamed the common area, pushing an imaginary vacuum while mumbling fretfully in her native tongue; and my roommate: a chatty 80-year-old named Irene, with a distractingly silky mustache.
On my first night I got up to visit the bathroom and stepped in a puddle of Irene’s urine. She had fallen and broken her hip, and I ran wetly to the nurses’ station for help, wondering how, exactly, I had ended up where I was, and what would prevent me from revisiting this place in the future.

I met with a psychiatrist, who prescribed an antidepressant and a high dose of a new anti-anxiety medication, which I took for the first time at dinner that night. Within forty minutes I felt powerfully, blessedly well, able to access my logical faculties for the first time in weeks. I asked a nurse for a telephone. The telephones were kept unplugged behind the desk, so that we wouldn’t attempt to hang ourselves with the cord or beat ourselves senseless with the heavy black base. I found an empty jack and dialed the number of my best friend, who answered on the first ring.
“How are you?” she asked, and looking from the phone to my regulation gray scrubs and slipper socks, remembering the look of horror on the nurse’s face when she found the knitting I had packed to help pass the time—note to self: don’t pack knitting needles for stay in psych ward—I could not help but see the humor in my situation.
Or maybe that was the drugs.
“I’m better,” I said. And I really was.

I had asked early on for a pen and paper, and now I was newly determined to turn my stay into a wry journal entry. I spent a lot of time talking to my slipper-socked compatriots, and even got a little Scrabble tournament going. My friends and family had long since stopped agreeing to play Scrabble with me, no doubt due to my annoying habit of winning every game. But there in the hospital it was easy to coax people into playing, seeing as how they were heavily medicated. Of course I had to take every other turn for one of the women who kept bursting into tears and leaving the table, but I think we all had a good time.
And then I went back to my room and wrote about it.

I believe I owe my recovery to the decision to beat back my fear and sadness with the blunt stick of humorous narration. Laughing at myself was easier than wondering if I would end up like Irene, and after all, what is tragedy for a protagonist is comedy for a narrator. I am certain that when Lucy was desperately stuffing chocolates down her shirt she was terrified, and occupied entirely with the ’splaining she would have to do—but wasn’t it funny for the rest of us?

To Be Continued…

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |