by Trisha Cull
The big shot guy says, “Hey, whatcha got there? Are you stuffing a million dollars into that bag?”
Oh, the irony.
And everyone laughed.
April 18, 2010
In the line at the grocery store just a while ago, I was overcome with a wave of dread.
I have been feeling like the therapy is losing its spark. I think this is because I feel something has died since talking openly about my feelings for Dr. P to Dr. P. He was smiling at first when we breached the subject. I smiled too. Only afterward did I feel stupid about it all, not that I was being ridiculed, no, but that there was perhaps an element of condescension in it, a bit of bravado. But maybe I am just reacting badly because I naturally believe that other people regard me with ridicule.
April 21, 2010
I have been having Technicolor dreams, and I wake up feeling more tired than when I went to bed.
I must have looked like shit today in the therapy group because no one seemed surprised when I said I hadn’t slept or eaten in a couple of days. No appetite.
The room felt askew, tilted. When I went to speak the anxiety was so intense I felt myself twisting into a knot, physically, my jaw clenched, my hands were shaking, couldn’t breathe. The standard. I fear I may soon be regarded as a lost cause. I was feeling better a week or so ago, wasn’t I? I don’t remember now. The mood fluctuations are still so unpredictable.
I have to start eating better. Bought yogurt, bananas and Happy Planet Extreme Green smoothie. I’m going to have some combination of these for dinner.
Must get back to the gym, running. I don’t know why I keep putting it off.
It’s just that everything has lost its lustre.
I have to get the hell out of here.
Eleven
The Dr. Scott Journals
The months drag on. Just before Christmas 2010, I move into a new little hovel on Fort Street, next to Christie’s Pub. My new place is a one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors, a little kitchen, living room, and a bathroom off the bedroom. There’s a little cubby in the living room, two-feet-cubed, where I set up the rabbit beds and litter box. They settle in right away, seem to like the enclosure, piss and shit everywhere to mark their territory.
I once again take up painting in oils, making broad impressionist strokes in bright colours across large canvases, a circus tent glowing gold from within, ochre background, a trapeze wire spanning the top section of the canvas with little colourful flags flying from it, and on either side of the tent, I paint in my bunnies, Marcello on the left, Caravaggio on the right, immortalizing them forever.
I email Dr. P constantly, send him three or four emails between sessions, declaring my love for him. He is a patient professional, rarely emails me back except to offer information about appointment times.
I get high, puke my guts out. My bulimia is still there, always present in my life. Bulimia, from Greek, means, “ravenous hunger.” I have not lived in a single one of my thirty-something places in Victoria where I have not binged and purged.
Early in March 2011 I send an email to Richard:
March 15, 2011
Hi Richard,
Just thought I’d drop you a line to say hello. I was thinking about you today, about our picnic in the park and having coffee at Serious Coffee. God that was such a strange time. You were so generous and giving. I’ll always remember that.
Hope you are well,
Trish
March 16, 2011
Hi Trisha,
It’s nice to hear from you. I think good thoughts about you all the time. I’m glad you remember me as “generous and giving.” I remember always struggling not to appear as voracious as I felt. I wanted everything.
I have been plowing forward with what I believe to be the best plan for the long term, which you may recall is to bury myself in work, painting for myself and also painting maps for actual near-term money. (In theory, I’ll be able to sell the paintings I do for myself at some point.) I almost showed a tiny painting in New York this month, but I didn’t have time to let the paint dry to ship it and the deadline could not be moved.
I haven’t been going to rock shows or to Le Pichet as much. Those were my two main vices. I’m trying to put together a budget to go to the Netherlands. Well, and everywhere...
Love Richard
I see Leigh on and off in the following months, unable to break free, caught in my own epiphany of non-existence.
I look for Dr. P everywhere: in traffic, downtown, at movie theatres. I go to movies that I think he might also like, hoping to see him there with his wife. I want to meet her, to size her up, gauge her beauty and elegance against my own. I become shallow and consumed, start walking along Fort Street at five o’clock, hoping he’ll drive by and see me walking, that he’ll stop and offer me a ride.
Preposterous.
On July 1, 2011 I move into another little apartment on St. Patrick Street in Oak Bay, one of Victoria’s most upscale neighbourhoods. The rent is $200 more a month, but I have my disability cheques and have obtained weekend employment back at the University of Victoria in the Residence Services Office, back in the same office where I met Leigh a decade ago.
It’s a good job for now. The weekends are quiet and I work alone, have time to write and read. Students come in having locked themselves out of their rooms, and I give them spare keys and update the computer system accordingly. It feels like backtracking though. I am still, or rather once again, a clerk in an office, and my mood swings violently from one hour to the next.
My apartment is a standard box-style one-bedroom with a galley kitchen. It’s carpeted throughout. Marcello and Caravaggio love it, can get traction on the rug. They tear around, chase each other from the living room to the bedroom and back again, sprawl out like rag dolls on their tummies on the living room carpet. They are the centre of my world. I feel like I would die without them.
My living room window looks onto a little grassy yard and hedges. The street is beyond the hedges. Across the street is a little deli called De’lish, which serves the best Americanos in town. I get up around noon every day and stumble over there for my morning coffee, go for long walks along the ocean, McNeill Bay, breathe in the salt air, marvel at the glittering green sea.
I sense a shift.
The air becomes lighter and sweeter here, and I am developing a sense of hope, beginning to feel like a normal person again. Perhaps the regime of new meds is working. I am employed part-time, live in a cute apartment in a good neighbourhood, the sea close by.
I have not cut in months. But as time goes on, my obsession for Dr. P grows. I see him twice a week now, for an hour each time. I become more and more convinced that some sort of romantic relationship is possible for us. This belief in the romance is my greatest sickness these days, but I can’t see it.
One day, when I am healthy, I tell myself I will not need a man to make me happy and whole. I will walk along the ocean with a sense of levity, breathing in deep and easy, in love with myself and the world around me.
When I say, “I love you,” he simply replies generically, thoughtfully, strokes his eye with his baby finger: “There are many different kinds of love, Trisha.”
“But I really love you,” I say.
One night while I’m at work, Dr. P and I exchange a few emails. He advises me of his vacation schedule, that he will be gone for eighteen days, returning in the new year: January 3, 2012.
I send him a couple emails in which I depict a lavish and elaborate scenario of our possible future together, of the kind of love I half-believe is transpiring between us though he has given me no definitive reason to believe this is true. I am obsessed and cannot accept that there is not a possibility of a future for us.
November 28, 2011
Dear Dr. P,
Eighteen days and five hundred years.
J
ust stay.
We’ll have tea and oranges.
I want a long-term, sustainable, enduring kind of love. The kind marriages are made of. I would not let you down or leave you once the first amazing flourish has subsided. You would not have taken a chance only to be left alone with neither wife nor girlfriend and three angry daughters.
If there is any part of you that feels a sense of absence, that something is missing, and you decide one day you want more, if you choose to fall in love with me, then I could be good for you without draining the life from you. If not, then that has to be okay too. I have to be okay on my own too.
He replies a few minutes later:
The seas are stormy.
The air in your lifeboat is fantasies.
I reply, frantically:
Does this mean we can never be together?
He doesn’t reply.
I arrive in Dr. P’s office dishevelled and red-eyed, a large bandage covering my wound and stitches. My arm aches. It hurts to lift it.
“What’s going on?” he says.
“I cut myself last night,” I say, adding, “badly.”
“I see that,” he says. “What happened?”
“The seas are stormy,” I say. “Is there no chance we can ever be together?”
“We need to talk about what’s making you do these things,” he says.
“I love you,” I say. “Please tell me there’s a chance we can be together.”
We banter back and forth like this for an hour. I plead with him to love me. He is patient and careful with his words. At the end of the session I plead with him that I can’t leave. “I can’t go home,” I say.
“You can,” he says. “It’ll be okay.”
“No, I really can’t,” I say.
“You can call me if you need to,” he says. “You need to go home and get some rest.”
I look at him sternly. “Going home right now—is risky.”
He stares back, assessing me. Finally he gives in. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get you admitted.”
Clinical Note:
Trisha Cull has recently experienced a worsening of her mood (depressed phase). She has increased suicidal ideation, plans to kill herself, wants to die.
Admit.
Certify.
Dr. P gave me a journal filled with blank pages—to “encourage your writing,” he said. On the front of the journal is a picture of a doctor in white scrubs, cleaning his hands with a white towel. Across from him sits an attractive woman in white pearls and a pink dress. She is smoking a cigarette. The caption reads: Doctor Scott, a Harlequin Book.
December 2, 2011
I am in the mental hospital again, second time in two years. I jolted awake at 2 am last night, feeling that something was very wrong. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, gauged the tilt of the room, the boudoir rocking back and forth, stood up and found myself likewise in full tilt, both physically and psychologically. My perception of reality was altered. I felt like I was suspended in ten different dimensions. I say ten, but the numerical quantity of the dimensions is incalculable; I fluctuated in and out of them, each one titillating me to enter into it, sucking me sideways, then the other way, back and forth, forwards and backwards, all at the same time. Terrified, I paced back and forth in the room for a while, trying to centre myself but to no avail.
I left my room and went into the bright sterile hallway, down the corridor to the nurses’ station. A man sat there, a male nurse. I found him to be quite attractive, brown hair and short beard, nice shape to his face and mouth. Somewhere in my delusional state I found it in me to be attracted to someone. There was a brief moment in which I sensed annoyance in him, as if to say, “Oh great, here’s another one.” But I approached the desk, leaned onto it and said, “I took a bottle of pills, and I think I need help.”
His eyes widened. “You took a bottle of pills?”
“Yes.”
“How many did you take?”
I paused. I had finished off a bottle of Wellbutrin, 300 mg pills, then poured myself a handful of smaller 150 mg pills into the palm of my hand. I chased them all back with water.
The handsome male nurse disappeared to the back room, told me to wait there. Then all hell broke loose. I don’t remember how I got from the nurses’ station back to my room. The next thing I remember is several people, nurses, standing around the cot, talking in low voices, murmuring about blood pressure and heart rate. A nurse checked my pulse, the machine beeped, then the nurse ran down the hall, presumably to retrieve the house doctor.
The house doctor appeared, a younger man, clean-shaven, dressed in a lab coat, about my age. He was taking my pulse, then slid the stethoscope inside my night shirt. It felt cool and refreshing.
Everything from there on is a blur, or I don’t remember at all, but I can describe flashes of imagery: sticky things being stuck all over my chest and under my breasts (I was embarrassed, being exposed this way); long tubes stuck to the sticky things; a machine with lights on it to my left; several people in the room now. Repeatedly, I sat up, kept blabbering something about “reality,” and “I don’t know what’s real.” And a nice blonde nurse easing me back down, saying, “It’s okay, just lie back down.”
Apparently they were giving me an ECG (electrocardiogram), a measurement of the heart’s activity. I just lay there, exposed, the machine beeping, the murmur of voices around me, everyone speaking doctor language.
Then I passed out and woke up, over and over again. The nice blonde nurse kept grabbing my hand telling me not to go to sleep. But I did; I fell back to sleep, or rather became semi-conscious. My eyes were closed but the nurse kept lifting my hand, holding it mid-air (my hand was limp) then letting it drop to the bed again. There was talk of seizures. The blonde nurse said, “We’re worried that you are going to have a seizure.” This is the last thing I remember before passing out completely.
I slept for hours, waking up a couple of times and seeing the handsome male nurse sitting in a chair at the doorway, watching me. Suicide watch. Then the nice blonde nurse was watching me; they were taking turns. I heard the bustle of other patients in the hallways, getting ready for breakfast, doors slamming shut. The blonde nurse half-smiled. “Can you open your eyes?” I opened my eyes, back into reality, the three-dimensional reality I know so well, back into the world of the living.
Early the next morning, the doctor returned and put an IV in my arm. He had some trouble getting the needle in. He spilled my blood, couldn’t get the needle in the first few times, then finally succeeded. I was relieved for him, wanted him to do a good job for his sake, wanted him to do a good job so he could go home fulfilled, to return to his beautiful wife and children, so he could play tennis on Sundays.
So the IV was in my arm. To make me clean. “This is to clear the remaining drugs out of your body,” the nurse said.
When I first woke up this morning I had to pee badly, so the handsome male nurse helped me manoeuvre the IV stand to the bathroom, rather awkwardly, through the door. I was now within reach of the toilet. The nurse asked me at the last minute to pee into a round plastic tray. I felt stupid about this, but did the job anyway then carried it out to him.
The doctor and another nurse came in some time later to give me my second ECG. The nurse was kind but hurried. She stuck the little stickers all over my body, one on my ankle and one under each of my breasts, pushing each breast aside as she did her work. Then wires were attached to each of the sticky pads. She went over to the machine, checked things out briefly, came back and tore off all the sticky pads, then was out the door without so much as a “See ya.” I fell back into bed, closed my shirt again as I realized my breasts were exposed, and did up the buttons.
Later in the morning I met with Dr. P, heard his voice in the hall, reviewing my chart, talking to the nurse about “the unfortunate news of one of his patien
ts overdosing last night.” I was pale and unwashed, hadn’t brushed my teeth, hair a mess. He knocked on the door, poked his head in and said, “Trisha,” the way he always says my name, declaratively. When he says my name I feel like I exist.
He was already out at the front desk waiting for me by the time I got out of bed and manoeuvred the IV along the hall to meet him. He was leaning with one elbow on the desk when I approached him, then we were off like lightning down the hall. His pace is fast. He should run track. I fell behind him until we arrived at an unfortunately sunny interview room. I wanted darkness, did not want the bright light on my face, nor the sunlit, gleaming table in between us. I felt so ugly.
“So?” he said. “You’ve had quite a night.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He then went on to say many things that elude me now. But he was frustrated. He said I was “wearing my pain on a billboard for everyone to see.” He said, “Why do you do that?” I had no answer, except to say that I didn’t think the pills would have such an effect on me, that I didn’t mean to create such a scene. He balked, seemed unmoved. There was no tenderness or compassion in him this day.
It hurt.
We went back down the hall to my room, which I couldn’t find at first because I was so upset and disoriented.
I fell into bed, curled up into a ball and cried for hours, certain that I’d officially blown any chance I ever had of being with him romantically.
He would never fall in love with me.
Clinical Note:
Wellbutrin OD. Mood still low. Please see house doctor’s notes for medical details. She admits she might do it (cut herself, OD) again because she feels hopeless at present. Chronic self-injury, Borderline Personality Disorder, plus addictions elevate her risk for suicide at present. No passes. FABs (fresh air breaks) permitted so she can smoke.
