“As soon as I found out, I drank a ton of Gatorade and stopped taking the lithium immediately. That’s what you do to try to flush it through. I’d never called my doctor at home except when I found out I was pregnant. I called and left a message on his answering machine—‘I’m pregnant!’
“After baby number two was born, I had specific instructions on what to do. It was mainly to take my medicine to help me think clearly and to get some sleep. I had a lot of support where someone else took the baby during the night and I didn’t wake up. From the start she was on formula. Everything stayed even and fine because I had my doctor and I had the medication. I had no problems with her.
“I still have manic episodes but not as bad. There have been different bumps in the road. In 2002, in May, I decided I wanted to lose weight. I had gained weight because of one of my medications. I started out when I got married at a hundred and seventeen pounds, then I gained at least thirty pounds. I lost twenty pounds right off the bat, but I’ve stayed twenty pounds heavier than where I started.
“I hated my first doctor. He was someone who’d just been assigned to me out of the blue. I didn’t get to choose a nice psychiatrist before I had the baby. I picked an OB. Who knew? On December 9, I just quit taking my medicine altogether.
“You know what was really funny? In the first psych hospital, they had a deck of cards. Some of the cards were missing, so people had written ‘Ace of Spades’ or ‘Ten of Clubs’ on other cards to make it a full deck. There was this one guy who was real edgy and agitated, and I was giving him the cards to play with. I was explaining to him that this is not a full deck. And he said to me: ‘Don’t tell me I’m not playing with a full deck.’ This crazy guy said this to me!”
Then she laughs and sounds just like the cousin I have always known.
7
After I admit that I have to get some help and get as far as the gas station, where I fill up my car and am ignored by strangers, I can’t even pretend to keep my meager wits together anymore. By the time I make it to the ER, I’m crying so hard I can’t speak. An Aunt Bea–like woman seated behind the desk peers over at me, takes in my tie-dyed T-shirt, ill-fitting maternity shorts, and sneakers, as well as the fact that I’m dripping rain water all over the spotlessly clean floor, and doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. This hospital—the same one where I gave birth to the baby—is in what Realtors would call a “transitional” area. On any given weekend night, crime-related gunshot victims mix with drunken frat boys from the university and neurotic upper-middle-class Victorian house restorers from the nearby gentrified neighborhood. Here, a public housing project is a five-minute drive from some of the higher priced houses in Knoxville, the city that zoning forgot. Given the odd social mix, the grocery store just down the hill from the hospital is called the Fellini Kroger. There, a good friend once spotted a man wearing an apron covered in blood who was pushing a cart full of half-gallons of vanilla ice cream through the store on an otherwise dull weekday evening. It’s that kind of place.
During Aunt Bea’s appraisal, I fumble out my driver’s license and insurance card and fling them at her. She taps at her computer. “You had a little girl two weeks ago?” I nod. I don’t sit down. I don’t want to get the chair all wet. “What brings you here?” I give her a brief sketch between sobs, starting with the not sleeping and ending with the phone conversation I’d just had with my OB’s nurse practitioner, during which she told me to leave the baby with someone safe and get my rear to the ER with all reasonable haste. I almost empty the box of tissues on the counter next to Aunt Bea’s machine.
“Go sit over there,” she says, not unkindly, gesturing to the waiting room. The only other folk experiencing emergencies on this particular weekday afternoon are an elderly couple, the female half of whom has an unstoppable bloody nose, and a gentleman with a mullet and a NASCAR shirt whose injuries remain unknown to me. Snippets of songs are rattling around in my head, which they’ve been doing for the last couple days. It is nothing like those little earwigs we all get, the tunes that haunt your quasiconscious mind for a day or two before vanishing. This is a relentless mix of one or two lines from a half-dozen songs. It was like living with a car radio that randomly skipped stations for hours on end. I can’t turn it off. If nothing else sends you around the bend, this will. I still wonder if this was a side effect of simple sleep deprivation or a sign that I was about to crack up completely.
I cry while I wait, naturally, and wonder what the parking lot attendant must have thought of me as I handed him a damp wad of singles. Did he think I was visiting a dying relative? Or did he know that I had officially lost my shit and was about to check myself into the nuthatch? Were weeping women just part of his routine workday? Or was I special, somehow, young and puffy and a break from the monotony of older folks visiting even older folks or doctors rushing to the office? I’m sad that I don’t know. He did smile, however, which was nice.
Eventually I’m shuttled into a little room, where my blood pressure and temperature are taken. Unlike most women in Knoxville, the nurse is brusque and abrasive, like it’s her job to make sure I’m not trying to pull one over on my insurance company or just faking a nervous breakdown in order to spend a week in bed eating hospital food. Which probably is her job, come to think of it.
At her request I have to run through the last two weeks again. Over the next five days, I will tell this story so many times that I consider setting it to music and having it recorded, so that telling it is more interesting for me. If I were Arlo Guthrie, I would add some four-part harmony and a nifty chorus à la “Alice’s Restaurant.”
“My OB’s office sent me here,” I tell her. “I just talked to her.”
“Why?”
“I told her someone else should raise the baby”—despite the number of times I’ll say this, I never once manage to get through that phrase without coming completely unglued, which I do now; rivers of snot threaten to run onto my shirt—“because I just can’t do it.”
“Where will you be?”
“I don’t know. Gone.” And with that word, a plastic bracelet is slapped on my wrist. Should I lose my mind enough to forget my name, it is helpfully attached to the end of my left arm. I sign enough forms to make paper-company executives dance with unbridled joy at the profits. The humorless nurse makes me sit in a wheelchair, which is handed off to a younger, equally humorless nurse. I wonder how they get through their dreary days. Maybe there’s a mariachi band sequestered in a storage closet or the staff dips into the narcotics during coffee breaks.
I am led to an exam room in an out-of-the-way corner of the ER. A guard is posted by my door, which is to remain open at all times. He is armed and all of twenty. If I get up to pee, he waits outside the bathroom. I wonder what he’d do if I tried to off myself in my room. Burst in and shoot me, maybe. The guard tries conversational gambits like “Feeling a little sad, huh?” and “It happens, you know.” Every now and again, he’ll stick his head into the exam room and ask, “You okay?” I don’t know how to answer any of this. I don’t know what the etiquette is in these sorts of situations.
Spalding Gray’s doppelgänger is the first doctor I see, which echoes tragically in my memory after Gray’s own suicide. I hope for a witty, pathos-rich monologue that can give me some Down East perspective on what is going on. I get only deadpan, affectless questions. He and the nurses must have gone to deadpan school together. They certainly have emptied enough deadpans on me. I tell the story again—no harmonies, no catchy chorus. He asks if I’m on any drugs, legal or illegal. He asks if I’ve thought about hurting myself. I start to tell him about my shower that morning, but don’t. The shame makes me choke it back. He tells me about the Tower 4 day program, where I could sleep at home and come to the unit just for group therapy. The last place I want to be is at home, where the baby is and where I’ll have to be alone with her. “The nights are the hardest part,” I choke and proceed to sob too hard to continue. “Spalding” makes a couple of notes, o
rders a few blood tests, then leaves.
Another person—male, but tiny this time—comes in to draw blood. He’s trollish, which I don’t mean unkindly. He just looks like he should live under a bridge and not let any billy goats cross it. He’s a nice guy, who tells me all about his wife and his passel of kids. He keeps up a steady stream of words while tapping my deep, tiny veins, which have driven other lab techs to drink. He pats me on the arm when he’s done. “You’ll be okay,” he tells me. I want to believe him.
Two hours have elapsed since I’d talked to my OB’s office. After I hung up with them, I called Scott, who told me to bring the baby to his place of employ, The Bijou, a restored downtown-movie-
house-now-live-theater where he worked as the technical director. The office staff, which also includes a nurse from this same hospital who also moonlights at the theater, could easily take care of the baby. He offered to come home to drive us both where we needed to be. I declined, because my OB’s nurse practitioner had made it clear that I was to take the baby to him, then come to the hospital. Once I’d been given a plan, I couldn’t dream of deviating from it. (In hindsight, of course, there was no reason to do it that way—but I have always been very good at following instructions.) After I hung up with him, I called the postpartum doula, Kimberly, to whom my birthing doula had introduced me and with whom I had an appointment later that afternoon. The message I left didn’t make a lot of sense, but I did mention that I was on my way to the ER.
My set of operating instructions for the next few hours wrapped me in a blanket of toasty calmness. The crying and the song snippets stopped for a bit while I gathered the baby and chucked supplies into the diaper bag. I remembered to pack formula and an ice pack into an insulated lunchbag. I replenished the supply of diapers and wipes. I added a blanket, a change of clothes, and her toy lion, which she seemed to like, as much as you can tell with a two week old who can’t smile yet.
I strapped her into the car seat, grabbed my wallet, then walked out to the car, where I loaded the car seat. This was our first official solo car trip together. It felt like we should mark this occasion somehow, with balloons and champagne maybe, but these were not forthcoming. The thought passed as quickly as it came.
We drove. The baby didn’t make a peep the whole way; I cried softly. I’d like to say that there was something remarkable about that ten-minute trip. There really wasn’t.
I got to the theater. Scott met me by the loading dock and took the baby, car seat, and diaper bag. He told me to wait a minute, that he would run her upstairs, where many hands could make light work of babysitting, and go to the ER with me. I said no. That wasn’t what I’d been told to do. He asked if I’d be okay by myself. I said yes, that I wanted the baby to be with her daddy, the parent who could love her like I couldn’t. He relented. I drove away, with promises to call once I knew something.
It is here that I realize my car probably has enough gas to make it to the filling station and no farther. Then, another uneventful, short drive to the hospital, which is where we are now, in the small room with the exterior armed guard.
In my rush to get out of the house and due to my recent general dipshittedness, I’d neglected to grab something to do while I hang around the ER. Even on their best days, emergency rooms are not known for their lightning-like speed at handling cases that are not immediately life threatening, which is what I now am, since the guard had been posted. This delay is as it should be, of course. But, looking back, I realize that I didn’t even care that I had nothing to do but stare at the walls. So I stare. Occasionally, I close my eyes in some vain hope that I might fall asleep. I don’t.
I also don’t feel alone or lonely, really, just blank and empty. One of this Catholic hospital’s nuns pokes her head in and asks “Oh, you poor dear! Is no one with you?”
“No,” I say.
“Would you like me to sit with you?”
“You don’t need to,” I say.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“A blanket?”
“No, thanks.”
“A pillow, maybe?”
“Sure,” I say simply because I feel like I should take something from this wee helpful woman. “I might try to catch a nap.”
The nun—who is also locally famous for a series of commercials with Peyton Manning, a local sports hero, during which the nun plays basketball and football with him—finds a spare pillow for me, then turns out a bank of lights as she leaves. I still stare at the walls. Sleep doesn’t come. Quelle surprise.
A woman in a black dress swoops in and takes my hand. I have never seen her before in my life. Before she can explain who she is and why she is touching me, a nurse comes in to keep me up to date on the hospital’s plan, which hasn’t really taken shape yet. “Who are you?” he asks. Great question, I think. “I’m her doula,” the woman says. But she’s not—she doesn’t look anything like my doula, in fact. I would swear on the grave of Kurt Cobain that I’ve never seen this woman before. I begin to wonder if my mental state is much, much more fragile than I’d believed. I don’t say anything, just in case. The nurse leaves.
“I’m Toni,” my doula tells me.
Toni? Who the heck is Toni? But I don’t say anything.
“Cindy called me.” Cindy was the doula who was at the baby’s birth. “She couldn’t get away but wanted someone here with you. Kimberly will be here shortly.”
And, with that, my flock of doulas lands. For the next seventy-two hours, one of them would either be with me or on the phone with me whenever possible. It was, in a small way, like being gathered in angels’ wings.
The nurse breezes back in to update Toni and me. There is no free bed in Tower 4, the Psych Ward, which is where all concerned are convinced I need to go. There is, however, a free bed in the normal hospital. The catch is that someone has to stay with me until I can be secured in the locked-down Tower 4. And I have to sign yet another large stack of papers, which promise that I won’t be all sneaky and off myself while in the less-restrictive environment of a normal hospital. And if I do get past staff’s watchful eye, attempt suicide, and survive, I promise to absolve the hospital of any responsibility.
There’s just one problem with this whole plan: Scott has to be home with the baby. And we have no earthly idea who would be the best person to call in this sort of situation. We have no family closer than a six-hour drive. Our friends, while wonderful, have their own lives, besides which I don’t want my friends to know that I’m not perfect, because they’d then stop liking me. Scott, who has been kept up to date by Kimberly, who has to keep leaving the hospital to use her cell, starts to call around. A tiny panic ensues, with Kimberly dashing between my ER room and the rain outside. Then Toni, bless her, offers to stay until we can figure it all out. “That is,” she says, “if you don’t mind.”
Had my head been clearer—well, I wouldn’t have been in the ER in the first place had my head been clearer—I would have hugged her. I start crying again instead. I don’t deserve this kindness.
More paperwork and I am transferred upstairs to a regular hospital room, which is unlike any I’d seen before. It doesn’t have its own separate bathroom. Rather, there is a small, camp-style toilet that flips out from under the sink. It’s a wonder of engineering, all brushed stainless steel and clean enough to operate on, but nearly impossible to use unless you are under five feet tall or grew up in a dollhouse. The nurses urge me to take advantage of this elf-sized amenity so that I won’t be inclined to leave the room sans supervision.
My first nurse, a student at the university, is barely old enough to drink. Whenever Toni has to step out to use the regulation-size restroom or make some calls, the nurse sits down to have forced conversations with me. She knows my name from my work at the newspaper. At first, I assume our chats are because she’s just being polite or working on a research project. Then I realize that she’s watching me, to make sure I don’t do something tragi
c while my minder is away. Normally, I’m not paranoid, but after a couple of hours here, I know what it’s like to live under Big Brother’s thumb. This gets worse.
A comfortably round woman from Tower 4 comes in. Toni is asked to leave, which she does.
“Tell me what happened,” the woman says. “What led you here?”
And so I go through it again. No harmony, still, and no catchy chorus.
“Any thoughts of hurting yourself?”
“No.” I’m lying. What I should say is, “Not since I got here.”
“Personal history?”
And so I tell her. Most of my teen years were pretty bleak but I didn’t get any real help because I became very, very good at hiding it. I finally got some treatment when I couldn’t get on a plane in my mid-twenties. Through hours of therapy, my shrink and I discovered the problem wasn’t about the plane at all, but mostly a result of living with my mom, who had really come apart during my teen years and “wasn’t able to help me develop any self-esteem,” according to my student shrink. I’m still not certain how that related to flying, but the explanation gave me enough hope to pin some small faith in myself on my metaphoric chest. Later, that same shrink put me on Paxil after I showed up in her office one day, sobbing like I’d just seen my new puppy crushed by a semi, which I hadn’t. The drugs had helped. I’d been off them for a couple of years and hadn’t really had a problem. I wonder what that shrink would think of me now.
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