The Quiet Room

by Lori Schiller

  Miraculously, he couldn't do it, no matter how hard he tried. Finally he got up from on top of me and helped me get dressed to walk back to the hotel. As we crossed the field, he kept telling me to say that I loved him and hold his hand. I was repulsed and frightened and angry. He wanted to kiss me, but I felt like throwing up.

  As soon as I spotted the hotel, I began to run. “See you tomorrow!” he shouted at me as I bolted.

  Back in my hotel room, I took off every single item of clothing and threw them in the trash. Over and over I bathed myself, taking shower after shower and bath after bath in the hopes of cleansing myself. I felt gross and dirty and filthy.

  I was in one piece physically, but scattered into a zillion pieces psychologically. My head reeled with the punishments my Voices and my wild imagination wanted to inflict on Mohammed. I would pin him to a tree and castrate him. Or force him to cross a field full of land mines.

  Terrified, I decided I needed to talk to Dr. Rockland. I sneaked down to the reception desk. The people could barely speak English. It took what seemed like hours to place the international call. Then I heard the phone ring. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four … and then his answering machine picked up. I was so nervous all I did was say my name, and that I was in trouble.

  I returned to my room to hide. I was still hearing crazy Voices, and I was afraid Mohammed would return. My flight home wasn't scheduled till Saturday. I spent the next three days in my room in tears, afraid to leave. When the phone rang, I wouldn't answer it. When someone banged on the door, I wouldn't open it.

  That was the beginning of the end for me.

  I went back on the Thorazine while I was still in Morocco, but I stopped being diligent about taking it. I hated taking it. It literally made me sick. It made me feel dopey and heavy and on the verge of being comatose. And the Thorazine had so many side effects that I wound up taking more and more medicine to counter them, and all the drugs whirled around and around in my brain like a hurricane.

  After I got home, I began to feel reckless. In addition to the Thorazine, Dr. Rockland had prescribed Nardil, an antidepres-sant. It was a kind that belonged to a family called MAO inhibitors—Dr. Rockland explained it to me in one of our endless safe conversations about medicine—that required a special diet. No cheese, no chocolate, no caffeine, or else the blood pressure gets out of control. I began showing up at Dr. Rockland's office after a big meal of double-cheese pizza, Diet Coke and M&Ms, which I would proudly disclose to him.

  I began to feel bolder. I careened up the winding Old Mamaro-neck Road at top speed. Sometimes I drove off the road, but who cared? Life was awful. Life on the edge was no worse. I hated being sick, hated being myself, hated every hour of every day. What difference did it make?

  When Dr. Rockland suggested the hospital again I was furious. I told him I would definitely kill myself before I went back in that place. He told me he thought I already was trying to kill myself.

  It would just be for a short time, he promised me. Just for a week or so, just to “adjust my medication.” I would feel better, he said. He tried to be soothing. Mom and Dad chimed in. Just a short stay, they all said. Nothing like the last one. You aren't sick like you were the last time. You just need a little help.

  So finally I agreed. I signed myself back in to New York Hospital. Within a week of my admission, Mom and Dad brought me a letter—from New York Hospital. They were offering me the job I had applied for before as a mental health worker. Sure I'll take it, I thought. Why not? After all, I'm already here. And I laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Part IV

  The Quiet Room

  16

  Lori New York Hospital, White Plains, New York, November 1985—February 1986

  So here I was back again and everything seemed so familiar.

  The first unit had been an intermediate-stay unit; this one was for acute care. Both units had a long and a short hallway that joined to make a kind of a T-shape with a glassed-in nursing station at the junction of the T. Each unit had its own dining room. Each had a music listening area with smoking allowed in the back. Each had a day room with a television set and a card table for games and puzzles.

  Both men and women were housed on the same unit in separate rooms. Each person had his or her own bed, dresser, an armoire for storing clothing, and a bed table with a reading light. I jumped the waiting list and was given a single room of my own. No roommate could put up with me because my status was always close to the lowest possible one on the unit.

  Status! Ha! I knew for sure that I wasn't a rookie anymore. When I was first hospitalized, I thought status meant married or single, or how much money you made. Now I knew all the lingo. Status meant the level of privileges you had earned by your behavior. The highest level—O.U.—was Open Unit, which meant you could come and go as you pleased after checking in. At the other end of the spectrum—the one I knew a lot about— was CO., or Constant Observation. That meant some jailer always had to be within arm's length.

  I knew lots of other new words too. Nice, romantic-sounding words like “elopement.” Here it meant to run away. “Danger! Elopement Risk!” read the signs on the doors to the unit, warning everyone to be careful to lock up behind themselves.

  Yes, I was a savvy veteran, all right. But it wasn't a good feeling. I saw patients around me I recognized from my last stay. I didn't want to be like them, living a lifetime of bouncing in and out of the hospital.

  I had boldly convinced everyone around me that Lori Schiller was never going back into the hospital. That it was a one-shot deal for me. I believed that myself. So the second time around wasn't going to be any fun. All those admitting people would be sorry. I would make them sorry.

  This time I wouldn't listen to these doctors and nurses who had gotten me into this fix. This time I would listen to the Voices. They would be my allies. They would protect me and keep me safe. They would guide my behavior and help me to understand my mission.

  From the first, my days in the hospital were long and dreary and painfully empty.

  For much of the time, I was considered too much of a danger to myself and to others to be allowed to wander freely. So every day I watched as my fellow patients left for music group. Or to go to the library. Or on a group walk to the formal gardens on the grounds. Or on a pass to White Plains to shop or go to the movies.

  Fall turned to winter. The days outside grew shorter. I watched the leaves fall from the trees, saw people go from sweaters and caps to full-blown winter clothing, all without breathing a mouthful of outside air or looking straight up at the blue sky.

  Every day I awoke early. Sometimes I was first in line for breakfast. Sometimes I burrowed deep under my covers contemplating my long day ahead. Either way, I wished the day away. After breakfast, we all lined up to receive the little cups that held the pills that were supposed to make us better. Next was a community meeting at 8:30 A.M., where everyone—doctors, social workers, nurses, mental health workers and patients—talked about such mundane things as how much money the unit had earned at a bake sale last week, when a certain nurse was going to be leaving the hospital, or the announcement of a weekend trip to Nyack for a street fair.

  After the community meeting my long, disturbed days really began. I had no attention span for TV. No one particularly wanted to talk to me, and I certainly didn't want to talk to them. So I paced. I'd begin by walking up the short hall, then down the long hall. Around and then back. Up and down, up and down. Everyone else was leaving the unit for activities. My activity was pacing.

  When I got tired, I headed for the day room and my cigarettes. After puffing for an hour, I'd get bored again and resume my walking. I'd walk to the bulletin board and study the notices for five minutes as if they were the most fascinating things on earth. Then I'd walk away, pace some more, and return to the bulletin board for another five minutes as if I were mesmerized by the notices. Then back to the day room for more cigarettes.

  Just as I put my tenth butt
out, it was time for noon medications, followed by lunch. I swallowed my pills, snarfed down my foot-long hot dog and was back in the day room smoking my after-meal cigarette all in twelve minutes flat.

  The afternoons dragged on as if they would never end. Three afternoons a week, I met with my psychiatrist. Because of a hospital rule that doctors couldn't see private patients in the hospital, I couldn't see Dr. Rockland anymore. I didn't like the doctor I was assigned instead. He didn't understand me. I didn't care if I understood him or not. So our sessions were a dreary waste of time.

  At 5:00 P.M there were more medications, and my day brightened a bit. For after the late-afternoon medications was dinner, and then by 6:00 I could go to the window, and begin anticipating my parents’ arrival.

  When they came, which they did nearly every day, they brought me packs and packs of bubble gum. They brought me chocolate. They brought me sweatshirts and sweatpants in a variety of colors. They brought me little windup toys that I had a passion for. And they brought me themselves, and love and reassurance.

  Just after visiting hours, the staff put out snacks. It always seemed a particularly touching gesture. So many of us were aching from our visitors—or absence of them. It seemed like a way of consoling us. “Your visitors have left and gone home,” the snack table seemed to say. “One day, you too will go home.” The snacks served their purpose for a lot of us. It changed the focus from intense to casual. I started in on the cherry Italian ice, moved on to a bowl of Cap'n Crunch, and then packages of Sugar Wafers and Oreos.

  At 9:00 P.M., it was time for the last medication of the day. After that, most patients fell almost immediately asleep. Not me. I stayed up until 11:00 so I could pig out on “midnight” snacks. What a pathetic existence, I thought to myself.

  The next day was exactly like the one before, including all the same feelings, Voices and overpowering fears. The only difference was that at lunch they served spinach quiche.

  The only thing that punctuated the bleakness of my hospital day was ray rage. I became really furious after Christmas in 1985 when I was transferred to an intermediate-care unit, where the sicker patients were housed.

  I had been conned. Dr. Rockland had tricked me into going back into the hospital to have my medication adjusted. It all sounded so simple. Take away one pill, add another, home again just like that. But one week had become two weeks, two weeks had become two months, and now they were settling me down for an even longer stay. I was a captive.

  I fantasized about beating the crap out of Dr. Rockland. He lied to me. Psychiatrists weren't supposed to do that. My Voices became extra-vindictive, fueling the fire of my already sizzling rage.

  To make matters worse the staff of the new unit was unsympathetic.

  Some of the nurses and mental health workers, of course, truly seemed to care for me. At night, Jean, a nurse, and J.J., Gladys and Danny, who were mental health workers, always seemed to be like a team on my side. J.J. was an enormous black man, truly huge. He was kind to me even when I ripped his favorite sweater right down the middle in one of my struggles.

  He and the others were always sympathetic. One night I escaped and was found shoeless in a snowdrift. When they found me, the four uttered not one word of reproach. Jean made sure I was warm. Danny tried to figure out why I had bolted. J.J. was reassuring: “You know you won't be in the hospital forever,” he said. And Gladys slipped me a Scooter Pie that she had swiped from the kitchen.

  But most of the others seemed cold, indifferent and hateful. Everyone, it seemed, had simply decided I was a problem that had to be solved. So everyone was extra tough with me. One of the nurses sitting supervision at my door almost seemed to hate me.

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she barked in my door when I was sitting on my bed one day crying. “You're acting like a chronic mental patient.”

  Another woman, a social worker, seemed to delight in lording it over me. I tried explaining to her how badly I wanted out of the hospital.

  “Well, if you're hearing voices, you belong in a hospital,” she said coldly, in a snippy, social worker voice.

  For his part, my psychiatrist had decided that I could control my behavior but had chosen not to.

  “You're not cooperating with your treatment,” he said.

  I fought them every way I could. Underneath, far from where even I could become aware of it, the Voices and I were collaborating on a secret mission: to act up so badly that I would be kicked out of the hospital. For just as the last time, I firmly believed I was not sick, and did not belong in a hospital.

  The problem was, as I let the Voices gain power over me, I lost all power of my own. I started out not wanting to control myself, and ended up not being able to.

  Impulse became action.

  At first, I was simply provocative and rude.

  At community meetings, I would spray the room with my hostile comments.

  “Who's going to miss that big cow anyway?” I'd say when a nurse's departure was announced. “Big deal. A load of stupid cookies and brownies for $37.50. Who cares?” I'd respond to the bake sale announcements.

  After a while, my behavior escalated to violence. I threw a backgammon set that other patients were playing with across the room. I banged on the walls and windows. I overturned furniture. I was constantly trying to escape.

  Once I ran away to Dr. Rockland's office. It was early evening but the sky was already dark and there were no stars. Someone going in or out of the unit was careless; the door was open a fraction of a second too long, and off I went, down the stairs, down the halls, and then outside the hospital. The ground was cold under my feet. I had no shoes on. The staff had taken away my shoes as a precaution against just this kind of escape. Luckily, I didn't have far to run outdoors. Dr. Rockland's office was just in the old 2 North Annex.

  When I arrived, I thought I was in luck. For there, still working, was Dr. Rockland's secretary, Elaine. She was a friend of mine and I was glad to see her. My whole body was trembling. She gave me a cigarette.

  I thought we would keep on sitting and talking until Dr. Rock-land arrived. After all, it was what we had done so many times in the past. When Dr. Rockland was late for sessions, many was the afternoon I sat chatting with Elaine while she offered me coffee and candies to make up for his tardiness. I could trust Elaine, I thought.

  How wrong I was. She was just like the rest of them. She called the unit. Almost immediately, they came from the unit to carry me back like an animal. Why did Elaine turn me in? I was only trying to get help. If I could only get to Dr. Rockland, he would tell them I was fine and didn't need to be in the hospital anymore. He had put me in here, and he could get me out. I felt like Elaine was a traitor. My Voices were harsher.

  “Witch! Bitch! Sorceress!” they shouted at Elaine as the burly staffers lugged me up the stairs and back to the unit.

  My Voices egged me on, but they never seemed satisfied. I was never good enough for the rude chanting demons in my head. The only thing that really seemed to placate them was when I hurt myself. At their orders I twisted the cord of my lamp against my neck to try to strangle myself. I unscrewed a light bulb during the dark night hours when no one could see and hid it in my room, intending to break it and cut myself with it. I tried to stab myself with the point of a tiny charm that my father had brought me from one of his trips to Hong Kong.

  Finally the Voices commanded me to stop taking my medicine. It was poison they told me. So dutifully I lined up for my daily dose, popped the pills in my mouth in front of the nurse, and then walked away. Around the corner, I spit them into my hand. “Cheeking,” it was called. My idea was to save enough pills to do myself in later.

  Without my medicine the Voices went wild. After five days I was nearly out of control with madness. The staff found my stash, realized what I had been doing, and immediately switched me to liquid medication.

  Liquid Thorazine, the medicine they used against my Voices, burned deep grooves in my tongue. I hated it an
d so did the Voices. But the Voices knew what to do. The very next occasion, I dutifully poured the cups of medication into my mouth—and then spit the whole mess into the nurse's face.

  The Voices howled with laughter. And I wound up in the Quiet Room again.

  The Quiet Room.

  I first made the acquaintance of this place back when I was in the hospital the last time. The other patients made grim jokes about it. They called it “Hotel California”—the hotel you could never check out from.

  The thought frightened me. Where was this place? What did someone have to do to get there? Then one day I saw someone, one of the staff, sitting on a bar stool looking through the window of a closed door. He didn't seem to be having a particularly exciting time, or to be even particularly interested in what he was looking at. The next time I walked the hall, there was no bar stool, no person, and the door was ajar. I peeked my head in. All I saw was a room, empty except for a green vinyl mattress on the floor. The window to the outdoors was covered with a heavy, industrial-quality mesh. Between this mesh and the window was a fan. In the corner of the ceiling there was a mirror tilted so that the person on the outside looking through the window had a complete view of the inside of the room. So this was the Quiet Room.

  The Quiet Room was supposed to be a safe and tranquil place, a place where patients could be alone, free to relax and calm themselves down during or after a crisis, or hopefully before one occurred. Some people liked it. It made them feel safe from whatever was tormenting them. Some people walked in there voluntarily, and stayed until they felt in enough control to come out.

  Me, I was usually carried there. I hated it. It was almost a routine. I'd hear the Voices, would feel the need to do something, would immediately carry out some destructive act, and be sentenced to the Quiet Room. One or two staff members escorted me there, down the long hall past the other patients, who looked on at my humiliation. I was agitated and jumpy, on the verge of losing control. I struggled with the staffers, trying to keep from having to go back in.