Madness (35 page)

The psych ward people come down and talk to us. The woman says, very earnestly, that I have to learn to take my illness
seriously,
and I tell her I
do
take it seriously, but in this case I just want to go home. She tries to talk me into coming upstairs with her, but I'm having none of it. Finally I talk my way out of the emergency room and ride home with Jeff, my forehead on the window, watching the trees flash past.

"I'm really sorry about that," I say.

"You're damn right," he says.

"Really," I say. "I know that was shitty."

We ride home in silence.

New medications, increases, decreases. I am trying in my muddled way to manage this—I take whatever meds Lentz tells me to take, I try to keep track of my swinging moods on my mood chart, and the rotation of friends and family comes to my house every day—my mother or father in the mornings, Megan or my aunt and uncle in the afternoon, sometimes other friends. The schedule changes every day, and every day I'm surprised again when someone shows up, and I apologize for needing them there.

When they leave, the agitation grows, and I pace from room to room, trying to escape the thoughts, the powerful impulses to run away, hurt myself, do something dangerous and extreme. These states scare me, and I know I am crazy, and I don't know if it's going to stop. The hope I felt in the spring eludes me now, seems like a lifetime ago, and at night I curl up in bed, pressing my head between my hands.

One night, when Jeff joins me there, curling his huge body around me, I tell him, chattering wildly, that I can't take this anymore, not the side effects, not the mood swings, not the terror or manic elation or dull, pressing pain. Screaming in bed, I rock, my body clenched into a fist.
I can't take it, I can't live like this anymore,
and Jeff rubs my back,
I know, I know,
he says,
we'll go see Lentz tomorrow, okay?
I gasp and howl in response,
What the fuck for? He's just going to change my meds again. And then the side effects will get worse, and he'll change the meds again, and the side effects will change but they won't go away. Jeff,
I gasp,
I cannot take it anymore, I want to be dead—

Don't say that!
Jeff sits up and starts to cry.

The magic words. I'm not supposed to say them, never say them, never say them to Jeff. If I say them, I might believe them, and then what?
No, no,
I say, uncurling my body and taking his face in my hands and wiping it off.
I didn't mean it. I swear I didn't mean it. I'm sorry, honey
—I smile brightly.
See? I'm right here. I promise.

Promise me you won't go away.
Jeff falls face first onto the bed, his arms wrapped around himself. I rub his ears. He likes that. His mother did it to him when he was little. It makes him feel safe.

I promise,
I say.
I swear.

Sometimes I believe, with every fiber of my being, that I truly can't take it, that I've reached the end of my rope, I've had it, I'm done.

I'm not done. I will never be done. It will never go away.

I will never go away,
I tell Jeff, and we are quiet, wet-faced, snotty, and I rub his ears.

At the front desk of the emergency room, Jeff says, "My wife has bipolar," and immediately they press the button to open the door and Jeff ushers me in. Here's a trick: if you ever want to get into the emergency room fast, tell them you're bipolar or schizophrenic. Works every time. They take my vitals—my pulse is
racing, my blood pressure is about twenty points higher than it usually is—and show us to a room, assuring us that the doctor will be there soon.

We're sitting in the triage room—well, Jeff is sitting, and I'm in the corner, having crawled on top of a cabinet behind a tangle of medical equipment, agitated and talking a mile a minute until the doctor comes in, at which point I snap my mouth shut and become mute.

"Why are you up there?" the doctor asks me, baffled. Jeff and I stare at him. Finally Jeff says, "Because she's
crazy"

The doctor raises his eyebrows. "Ah," he says, still not quite getting it. He asks me a series of questions—what brings me in here today, am I suicidal, do I have a plan. With every question, I look at Jeff. He repeats the question to me, and I nod or shake my head. In this way, we establish for the doctor that I'm nuts and need to be hospitalized. The doctor disappears and is replaced by someone from the psychiatric staff. The man walks in, takes one look at me, and says, "Would you feel better if the lights were off?"

"Yes!" I shout, then shut up again. He switches off the lights and takes a seat.

"Tell me what's going on," he says, and Jeff does.

"This happens every summer," he says. "Around June, she gets hypomanic, in July she's manic, and by August she's gone completely around the bend. It happened again this year. It started with her working around the clock and not sleeping. Then the anxiety set in, about a month ago. She's seen her doctor a bunch of times, and he's been trying to switch her meds fast enough to keep up with the episode, but obviously it hasn't worked. In the last week, she's been afraid to leave the house, just running around being compulsive for days, talking constantly, and then today I came home and she'd been cutting."

The man is writing on his clipboard. "Is she suicidal?"

"Yes."

"Does she have a plan?"

"She says she doesn't, but she's lying."

The man looks at me. "Does all this sound about right?"

"I don't have a plan," I say.

"She's lying," Jeff says.

"The point is that you're not safe to be at home, is that right?"

I nod. By the time we get to the hospital, I'm no longer under the impression that I'm sane. Once I've started cutting, I know I'm not likely to stop until I've done some serious damage, and I don't want that any more than anyone else does. The last place I want to be is the hospital, but I'm not stupid. I know when it's time to go in. I am so terrified of myself and of the vast, frightening world, that the psych ward, with its safe locked doors, sounds like a relief.

"All right," the man says, and then suddenly we're interrupted by another doctor, who walks in the room and switches on the lights. I flinch and shade my eyes. The second doctor goes through the same questions as the first doctor—what brings me here today, am I suicidal, do I have a plan—and Jeff goes through the same answers—she's having an episode, she's suicidal, she has a plan. Satisfied that the psych staff has it under control, the doctor leaves, and the first doctor switches off the lights again.

"Sorry about that," he says. "Well, listen. You've obviously done everything you can at home, and we don't want to make you wait when you've already made a serious effort to stay out of the hospital. Give me a minute and I'll get you upstairs." Soon he comes back to get us and escorts us up to Unit 47, where they know me well.

And then all of a sudden, it's day. I open my eyes and squint in the white light pouring in through the windows. I assess the situation: I am in a room. Upon further consideration, I am in my room at home. I am in bed, probably my bed, unless they've moved
someone else's bed in here, though I can't imagine why they would do that, so, I think, very groggy, probably not.

My head feels like it's wrapped in cotton batting and weighs a ton. I'm clearly drugged. I have no idea what day it is, or even what season of the year. I dimly remember a hospital, but I can't remember if I was in it yesterday or if I am remembering the last time, or the time before that. I wonder how long I've been gone. Surely somebody around here knows.

I crawl out of bed, unsteady on my legs. I make my way down the hallway, holding on to the wall. I wander into the kitchen and stand there in my gross pajamas, weak, filthy, hungry, cold. Looks like summer. The afternoon light spills in through the long wall of windows. All is white light. I begin to get confused, my mind spooling out in front of me, and then I snap out of it and look around the room.

There they are, lounging around. Megan and my mother are having a chat at the kitchen table. My father is making a turkey. Christi and Jeff are paging through
Vogue
and discussing the importance of the excellent handbag. (Jeff has exceptional taste.) My aunt and uncle are reading the paper. Everyone looks up and sees me and stops.

The front door opens and Ruth comes in. She stops. There is a long silence. No one knows what to say, because they don't know yet if I'm totally mad or suddenly sane, or what strange sequence of words will come rolling out of my mouth this time. We wait.

"I brought éclairs," Ruth finally says, absurdly. She gestures vaguely with a bakery box.

I think this over, weaving side to side. "Okay," I croak. I look at my husband. "Hello," I say. I think a minute more, looking at the assemblage of people in my living room. "How long was I crazy?" I ask no one in particular.

Jeff shrugs, turning a page. "Couple of weeks."

"What day is it?" I try to shake the fog out of my skull.

"Saturday."

"What month?"

"August. Do you remember the hospital?"

"Sort of. When did I go in?"

"Last month. They changed your meds. You got zapped."

"Oh," I say, and fall over. Ruth comes over and picks me up. She gives me a plate with an éclair. I look at it for a while.

"Now sit down," she instructs.

I look at the chair she is holding out. "Right," I say. I sit.

"Now eat," she says.

I take a bite. Everyone sighs in relief. I'm back. Time begins again.

That's what madness looks like: a small woman in baggy red pajamas sitting on a kitchen chair, her feet dangling above the ground, trying to figure out how to eat an éclair while everyone she knows and loves watches her closely, as if she's a rat in a cage, to see what will happen next.

And soon I will go upstairs, peel off the filthy pajamas, get dressed, and come back down to sit with them. They will know I am well as soon as I laugh.

I always do.

I wake up, roll over in bed, prop up on an elbow, and start tossing back pills like they're candy. Twenty-one of them—they add up to 450 mg of Wellbutrin, 600 mg of Lamictal, 800 mg of Tegretol, 200 mg of Geodon, and a handful of supplements that are supposed to improve the mood. This, of course, is only the latest combination of meds, and will doubtless be adjusted and readjusted soon. In about an hour, I'll take a milligram of Ativan, a tranquilizer that will help (a little, anyway) press back the raging anxiety that hits the minute I get out of bed.

There's a cup of coffee with Jeff and we get our day all planned: what we'll do, when we'll be home, how long I'll be alone, what's stressing me (or us) out, any tasks that will take me out of the house, what we're having for dinner. We get the schedule straight so there's no room for me (or him) to go spinning off in the tornado of thoughts that can kick in when there is too much unscheduled time.

Time for the mood chart. I open my notebook. First, on the left side of the page, is the column that reads
T
R
E
A
T
M
E
N
T
S
— so I record what meds I took and how many, and check off if I've gone to therapy. In the middle of the page, I make any relevant notes—that I'm sick, on vacation, someone's died—whatever external factors might be contributing to my moods. Then I note
the number of hours I slept last night. Then I rate my level of
I
R
R
I
T
A
T
I
O
N
and
A
N
X
I
E
T
Y
.
Typically, I'm not irritated, and I'm pathologically anxious. But there you are. Then come the moods: there's
D
E
P
R
E
S
S
E
D
first, then
E
L
E
V
A
T
E
D
, each with several options:
Without Impairment, Significant Impairment but Able to Work, Significant Impairment and Not Able to Work,
and
Psychosis.
Personally, I have always wondered how many people are sitting down to do their mood charts while in
Psychosis.
So if I am
E
L
E
V
A
T
E
D
and write on the chart that I am
Fanfuckingtastic!
and write down
YES!!!
next to
Able to Work,
I would still note that there was a degree of impairment—the idea is to be something milder, like
happy
or even
fine.
And if instead I am
D
E
P
R
E
S
S
E
D
,
and write that I am
in despair,
and that I am
Not Able to Work
...you get the picture. The ideal day is when I am
Without Impairment—No Symptoms.
So far, I haven't written that more than a few times, but lately, the impairment is mild, and I'm able to work. Which is more than good enough. It's fanfuckingtastic, if you ask me.

Then I make a few notes in my journal—what's up with work, goals small and large—and do whatever amount of talking myself down off the ceiling I need to do. I try to Change My Thoughts. I Shift My Perception. I Choose Peace of Mind. And as stupid and cheesy and self-helpy as all that sounds, it
does
help—I change my thoughts from bracing for a terrible day to expecting a lovely one; shift my perception from seeing myself as a fuckup to seeing myself as capable and doing my best; and choose peace of mind over rigidity, terror, and all the rest. And they tell me to keep a mood chart. So I do it.