The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

by Penelope Rowe

  For the first two weeks, I remained hidden away in my room, lying on the bed. When I had to leave it—to go to the medication station, for example—I crept down the hall, brushing the wall, not making eye contact with anyone. Once the medication started to bite, I found the confidence to go to the common room where I joined other patients who were lying down under rugs. I had a visit from an older woman one day, and she asked me:‘Do you have anything in common with these people?’

  ‘We’re all sick,’ I snapped.As she walked past the common room she said, ‘Why are they all lying about like that? They should be in their rooms if they want to lie about.’ It was no good trying to explain that it was a small step towards recovery to even emerge from our rooms.

  After three weeks, I was judged ready to go home. Although I felt very apprehensive, I needed to get back to work to earn some money. I asked the doctor who was discharging me for a medical certificate for my employers.

  ‘Please don’t say I’ve had a breakdown, have depression, anything like that.’

  ‘Why not? It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’

  I think the wording we finally agreed upon was something like ‘a stress-related illness’. I sent this down to the man from Head Office who had interviewed me for the job. He rang me a few days later and said: ‘I received your medical certificate but I’ve put it away with my own papers. Don’t ever tell anyone else here.’ He retired soon afterwards.

  Two years later, I did tell someone in the company. This must have been passed on. When the MD was in town for a visit he took me to lunch. He asked me directly to tell him what sort of illness I had. I should have said it was none of his business but he was the boss and I was precariously poised in a not very important job that anyone could have done so I had to show due respect. He returned to Head Office and a few days later I received a letter saying that my job description had been revised and the position was to be readvertised. I was at liberty to apply. The writing was on the wall and I resigned. This was well over twenty years ago. Nowadays, any employer who tried this on would be taken to the cleaners—I hope.

  I left the hospital comforted that I was not some theatrical pretender. I had an illness that had a name. It was bipolar disorder and although it could not be cured, it could be controlled. At the same time I was terrified of a recurrence of the illness. How could I, and my family, go through such a time again? How could I know then that what I had experienced had been mild compared to what was to come?

  For the next few years, however,my life seemed to take an upward turn. My divorce had come through and I found a roomy, airy, sunny flat for the girls and myself. And, most amazing of all,I was being asked out on dates! The marriage breakup and the depression had robbed me of my confidence and self-esteem, but this affirmation that I was an interesting, sexy, attractive woman was very exciting. I was back on top of my game. The only problem was my medication. I was extremely sensitive to whatever I was tried on, the side-effects too severe even before I had reached a therapeutic dose. This meant changing drugs time and time again, but it was nothing compared to the threat of falling ill again so I persevered.

  It was serendipitous that, just after I resigned as an office manager, SBS TV advertised for sub-editors in the sub-titling department. There was a fairly rigorous selection procedure, but I was lucky enough to be one of those selected. I was at SBS for about six years. It was a temperamental, stimulating, interesting environment. I worked closely with people from all over the world whose language skills were astounding, and many young writers who were just starting to make names for themselves were also sub-titlers—among them Kate Grenville, Sue Woolfe, John Tranter and Gerard Windsor.

  Around this time, too, the man entered my life who became my lover, my friend and, for the last twelve years, my husband. He has seen me through every breakdown with patience, gentleness and love, emotionally supporting both the girls and myself. We call him DD. He was prepared to wait for years before I shared a home with him because he understood from the start that bringing up my family had to be my priority. He accepted my illness and his response was:‘Well, that’s part of the package, isn’t it?’Without his love I might well have succumbed. I will never be able to repay him, but I tell him ‘thank you’ all the time, and I thank him again here.

  Chapter 6

  It isn’t important to come out on top. What matters is to be the one who comes out alive.

  —Bertolt Brecht

  Penelope: In about 1988, I was busily writing in my spare time, keen to pick up the threads of a process that had been interrupted by my marriage breakdown. I was selling short stories and starting on a second novel.At the same time, I was seconded to a production department at SBS and also did voice-overs and on-screen presentations. It was all great fun—the only problem being that, due to the trycyclic antidepressants, my mouth was very dry and became parched under the stress of the countdown or the microphone. I tried all sorts of remedies. Water was no use at all. Finally I devised a method of tucking chewing gum to the side of my gums to stop the click-click sounds that I otherwise made. I’ve been doing that ever since.

  Then I was asked whether I’d like to write, co-produce and present a travel show. Of course I would! Every week was a frenetic race to put the show together. Some mornings I left home at 4.00 or 5.00 a.m. to be ready to go on location out of Sydney. We always borrowed footage for overseas stories, as neither the SBS budget nor my home commitments allowed anything else. Some nights when I crawled home I thought I’d die of exhaustion, but the girls were there full of their day’s adventures and nothing took precedence over my life with them. We always sat down together for dinner, with the phone off the hook. It was the one hour of the day we could all be together in tranquillity.

  The day we put the show together each week always left me on a tremendous high, and I should have been more aware of this but I had never felt better in my life. I was flying. Phoning, writing, editing, filming—it was the best job in the world. One day the head of the department stopped me as I dashed off somewhere. ‘You’re really cooking with gas these days,’ she said.Yes, and it was fabulous.

  Out of the blue, I decided to go to Grace Bros on Broadway, a store I had never been to in my life, to buy some ribbons and head combs. I had this great project in mind. When I arrived home I showed the girls how I was going to weave the ribbons through the base of the combs in all sorts of complicated ways to create the effects I wanted. I mused that I might set up a small business selling these artefacts but until then I gave them away to everyone I met. I would sit up into the early hours concentrating on this activity, totally enthralled.

  On top of this and the travel show, I decided that the flat really was a disgrace. It needed to be cleaned from top to bottom. A real spring-clean. I bought a feather duster.

  ‘What’s that thing?’ asked Harriet.

  First of all, I was going to give the bookshelves a thorough going-over. For no good reason, I decided to do this in the middle of the night but I decided that the duster was quite inadequate for such a workout. I took out the vacuum cleaner and got busy. I was only wearing underpants as it was a hot night. The noise of the vacuum brought the children from their beds. They couldn’t believe their eyes. I was never one for housework. What’s more, I was singing at the top of my voice because I felt so good. I have a frightful singing voice— I never sing.

  We were three months into the travel show when this elation started to wane. It was replaced with a sort of compulsive energy that was making me tired and irritable and anxious. I couldn’t stop the frenetic pace I was going at, although I wanted to for it had ceased to give me pleasure. One morning I was sitting in make-up getting ready for a shoot when the make-up artist stopped what she was doing.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said. ‘You’re sick. Go home.’ I looked at myself in the mirror and only then did it strike me. I was hollow cheeked, there were black rings under my eyes and the eyes themselve
s were dead. I started to tremble. The make-up artist rang a taxi and took me down. ‘I’ll ring you tonight,’ she said. ‘Get some rest.’

  I remember that, once home, I went into the bedroom and fell face-down on the bed. My mind was blank. I think I went to sleep. Later I rang my psychiatrist and arranged to see him the next day. After listening to my latest exploits he decided to stop the trycyclic medication and start me on lithium.

  Lithium has been the treatment of choice for bipolar disorder (or manic-depressive illness, as it was called then) since it was discovered accidentally about 55 years ago by the Australian doctor, John Cade. I was to start on it at once and have my blood levels checked every few days until a therapeutic dose had been achieved. I swallowed the first tablets but soon discovered I could do nothing but sit slumped in my armchair, hour after hour. I had fallen off the high wire of exhilaration into the grasping, suffocating arms of melancholy. There was no question of being able to work.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ callers would ask as I stared blankly at nothingness. I could only shake my head. I wasn’t thinking. As I recall, I would see an object and say to myself: ‘That is a chair.’ ‘That is a table.’ ‘That is a bed.’That was the level of my comprehension. I wouldn’t call them thoughts. I remember it became very restful to say my phone number backwards and forwards in my mind. I’d spell my name, pausing after each letter, seeing a pattern rather than the letters forming in my mind. Did I think I would forget who I was if I didn’t repeat it over and over? I think so. I also stared at a coloured, round, stained-glass window that was high up on the wall. I would move my eyes slowly from pane to pane over and over again. My mind was seeking calming rhythms that would soften the sharp cutting wing of fear that had entered my brain, just as it had years before when the children were younger.

  After about three days, I started to feel the effects of the lithium and they were not good, not good at all. My doctor encouraged me to keep building up the dosage, as the blood test showed I was nowhere near a therapeutic level. But it was becoming nightmarish. I had to leave the safety of the flat to go for the blood tests. The place was only a few blocks away, but I had to cross a busy road. I was alone the first time it happened. I stood at the curb and tried to put my foot down on the road but that brought on such an attack of giddiness and loss of balance that I nearly fell. Furthermore, as I looked from side to side for traffic, I found that by the time I looked one way I had already forgotten what I had seen the other way. I staggered down the road quite a distance to where there were traffic lights and on the green I held on to a light pole and stepped on to the road. Halfway across, a truck came belting around the corner and if I had not stepped back it would have hit me. The driver screamed abuse. I still don’t know if I was so slow that the lights had changed. When I got to the other side, I sat on the footpath, crying. Finally, pulling myself up by the pole of the traffic light, I continued on to the pathologist. I had to climb up two flights and when I came to the first landing I had to stop and rest. When I went to move again, a horrifying thing happened. I didn’t know which way was up and which was down. I clung to the balustrade until I heard someone coming. When he was level I managed to ask the way to pathology and he pointed me up. So I made it. The blood test only took a minute. I remember the agonising thirst I had and the dry, dry mouth. I saw a tap and a sink in the room. I did not make the necessary connection and didn’t think to ask for a glass of water. Then I had to make the journey home again.After that, one of my loyal band of friends always took me.

  But the horrors kept mounting. ‘I want to go down to the turnpike,’ I kept repeating increasingly irritably, but no one knew what I was talking about. I meant the bank. If I tried to walk I staggered and swayed like a drunk, and eventually I had to crawl if I needed to move. Taking a shower became almost impossible. I sat under the spray but the tiles and the floor of the bathtub seemed to undulate in a seasick-inducing motion and I had to squint my eyes against the silver-white glare, like runnels of mercury, that came off the white tiles. Water rained down on me but I could not moisten my dry mouth. I would put my head back and let the water run onto my face,my lips, my tongue. It had about as much effect as an eyedropper of water on a Sahara sand dune.

  At this time—and this happens whenever I am deeply depressed—I believed I could feel my brain getting hotter and hotter and swelling out of control at the back of my head, under my skull. I feared my skull was about to explode and my brain would be exposed, pulsate for a minute then disintegrate into a pulpy, rotten, pink-grey froth.

  During that experimental time with the lithium, I thought I had reached the limits of despair. I hardly recognised the children. Crawling on all fours had reduced me to an infantile state or, worse still, an animal that had no defences against the waiting predators before they pounced and pronounced a death sentence.

  I was aware of how upsetting all this was for the girls. They were much older and more aware now than they had been during my first breakdown. Jessica was in her Higher School Certificate year. They wanted me—needed me—to be a normal mother. They made demands, they were angry, they couldn’t understand. I couldn’t even talk to them. My wonderful friend and partner, DD, came each night, tried to reassure them and cooked us dinner. I didn’t eat anything.

  Then the predators I had been waiting for finally made their entrêchat to centre stage. It was at one of the evening meals that I first noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a small brindle cat. Every time I turned my head to see it properly, it disappeared. My behaviour was commented on. ‘There’s no cat,’ they said. I didn’t believe them. Otherwise it meant I was seeing things. The brindle cat stuck around for weeks. A shrilling, shattering sound like a thousand cicadas started up in my ears and wouldn’t go away. A putrid stench like rotting potatoes was always in my nostrils. All my senses seemed to be ganging up to deceive me and I battled silently against insanity.

  Jessica, one week old.

  Jessica’s first birthday.

  Jessica, already a cat and hat lover, aged two.

  Jessica, aged three.

  Publicity photo taken when Penny’s first book was published. Harriet (four), Claudia (one), Jessica (five), 1976.

  The three sisters loving chickens to death, 1978.

  Claudia, Harriet and Jessica at Narrawallee for Christmas, 1984.

  Tricky teenage years, 1986.

  The four of us in January 1992, just before another depressive episode.

  Bachelor of Communications. Jessica’s graduation in Bathurst, 1992.

  Jessica on the job as a reporter in Melbourne, 1994.

  What Women Want programme. Deborah Mailman, Libby Gore, Jessica, Sarah O’Hare, 2001.

  Picture © Jim Lee/Picture Media.

  Celebrating Jessica’s graduation. Master of International Relations, 2003.

  Jessica and Peter’s wedding, 2004.

  Picture © Cameron Bloom.

  Penny with her brother in the city, aged about six. ‘I can still remember the little raffia bag.’

  Gawky and gangly, Penny doing what she loved best— looking after babies. Penny was at boarding school and then university when they were growing up.

  Penny in Surfers Paradise, 1960.

  Penny’s debut, Sancta Sophia College, University of Sydney, 1964.

  Publicity shot for SBS show, Travelling. By the time this photo appeared in The Bulletin a few weeks later, Penny was very ill in hospital.

  Penny’s self-administered ECT. Winter swimming at Nielsen Park.

  Master of Criminology. Penny’s graduation, 2004.

  One day I was sitting listlessly in my chair when I happened to spread my hands out in front of me. There was something that had been worrying me. The hands were trembling, but it was not the tremor that troubled me. That was always there because of the lithium. Could it be true that my hands had shrunk? They couldn’t have, could they? I tried to ignore it. I decided I wouldn’t look again until later. In a little while I checked again.Yes
, they were smaller. Definitely. The fingers were slimmer, daintier, the nails tiny baby arcs of shiny translucent plastic. And in my mouth was the sharp metallic taste of silver paper on amalgam.

  One afternoon, a friend brought in a plate of sandwiches, covered in Glad Wrap, and tried to persuade me to eat. She cut the sandwiches into smaller and smaller segments, lifting them to my lips, saying ‘open up, open up’, as if I were a baby I wanted to obey her to show her I appreciated her gentle ways, but how could I? For what was on that plate? I could not distinguish between the wrapping and the contents of the plate but they were all part of the one thing—I knew it was membrane, clear, soft membrane, baby skin, polished, stretched, treated baby corpses that had been skinned and hung on hooks to tenderise. How could I be expected to eat this? I suppose my friend eventually went away and I was left to return to the glass panels in the window.

  My doctor was still determined to push on with the lithium, but I actually thought I might die from the side-effects. Each day we spoke on the phone and finally my conversation was so confused and inarticulate that he called me in. He asked me to walk as straight as I could, heel to toe, heel to toe. He had to grab me as I started to tumble over. Then he told me to close my eyes and touch my nose. I poked him in the eye. That did it. He decided that the toxicity of the drug was too much for me to stand and I would be taken off it and restarted on the trycyclics.

  The despair! It would mean weeks of waiting to see if or when the drugs would kick in. I didn’t know if I was capable of waiting. Suicide seemed the only possible escape from the pain. I was assailed by more and more persistent delusions and hallucinations. I couldn’t stop listening and watching for tiger-moths in the sky. Any object in the sky was a potential tiger-moth and I found the idea unutterably sinister. Any ordinary aircraft became a trick, a tiger-moth masquerading. I can recall, relate, the tension of anxiety stretched to breaking point but I cannot relive the intensity. In depression, the body is in an acute, personal, mental hell of suffering that has no physical face, let alone a comparison for a well person. To be tortured by what is not real—sinister and unwanted delusions and hallucinations—is to lose yourself, become an unbeing. It is the only time it might be excusable to say I became my illness. But then and only then.