The Death of Small Creatures

by Trisha Cull

  December 5, 2011

  I’m thinking of taking one of the plastic knives, breaking it into a sharp point and using that as my newest instrument of destruction.

  Why do I do this?

  Because the pain is so great. Daggers in my chest.

  I love Dr. P. He does not love me. It is becoming clearer to me how delusional I have been in believing that one day he might risk everything to be with me. There was a time though when it seemed more real. I believe there was some merit to my thinking. He is a man, and I am a woman after all. I know he has been attracted to me, to my mind, my body, my intellect. But to what end?

  I am trying not to take it too personally, telling myself that he would not leave his wife, his family, for any woman, no matter how beautiful and talented and exquisite she might be.

  Am I exquisite?

  Beautiful?

  Talented?

  Or just a mediocre hack?

  The urge to cut is great.

  Some time later…

  Approaching the dinner hour: I have been eating meat while in here, have succumbed to my most primitive bloodthirsty appetite, sucking the marrow out of life.

  One might be tempted to regard life in a mental hospital as sparse, lacking in ornamentation and lustre, but I see it differently. The uniformity of it all, the track lighting and bland walls, the gleaming corridors, the wood panel doors, the single-person cots (they make no beds for lovers in a mental hospital), even the fake pathetic Christmas tree in the drab lounge area, all of these things for me are luminescent. These things exist on the fringe of a functioning society. Life in here is not, however, dysfunctional; it is ultra-functional. Only its inhabitants are dysfunctional: people like me who fall deeply in love with the wrong people.

  Life in here is ultra-functional by virtue of its uniformity, the mealtime schedule, the slippery, ergonomically correct lounge furniture, pill time, snack time, bedtime and so on. They insist upon this ultra-functionality in order to counter the psychotic nature of what exists within it, because it makes them uncomfortable, because people like us make them uncomfortable.

  Clinical Note:

  Better today. Better ego structure and impulse regulation. Family supports have begun to rally around her. She is not ready to quit cigarettes. She often abuses over-the-counter cold remedies as well. Extensive past substance abuse. She acknowledges that her wish for self-injury and suicide is elevated while she is intoxicated. Zero current plans to kill herself.

  Increase passes slowly.

  Increase activities.

  Family meeting this week.

  December 6, 2011

  Fifteen minutes until nighttime meds. I am longing for heavy sedation.

  Something happened tonight, something I’ll regret for the rest of my life, something that made my mother break down and cry.

  We had been to the Oak Bay Laundromat, then gone shopping at a vintage clothing store, then to the Dollar Store. I bought hair clips, and a shiny star garland for my mini Christmas tree. I strung the garland around the tree with Mom’s help, her feeble destroyed body straining to reach the top of the tree. I put my laundry away, gathered some clean panties for the hospital, and a pair of black leggings. I cuddled the bunnies for a while and gave them their almond treats.

  When Mom wasn’t looking, I snatched the sharp yellow paring knife from the dish rack, thinking she would never notice that it was missing, put it in my purse and off we went to the hospital. Mom dropped me off and left. I was worried that the nurses would search my purse upon my return (sometimes they do that), but they didn’t.

  When Mom got home she noticed the knife was missing and raced back to the hospital to retrieve it. She called me in a panic on her cellphone. “The yellow knife is missing, Trish!”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You have it!” she said.

  She came up here and got the knife, cried in my arms. I held her tight, and she sobbed in my arms.

  I feel so bad. I assured her that I would not cut myself in the future, that I hadn’t yet used the knife to cut myself. But of course I will, and of course I had already.

  Mom spoke with the nurses and told them what happened. The nurse and I then talked privately after Mom left. I told her that I had already cut myself but not to tell Mom, and could I have a bandage?

  Tomorrow they will advise Dr. P of what has happened, and I will feel like even more of a fool than I do now.

  I wonder what he will think of me, what he’ll do. I hope he doesn’t take away my fresh-air breaks, my smoke breaks.

  I need cigarettes desperately right now.

  December 7, 2011

  This morning I met with you again. You had written down on your notebook, in full view for me to see, Borderline Personality Disorder. My ever-changing diagnosis.

  It scared me today when you suggested electroconvulsive therapy, ECT. I thought of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which they have in the movie collection here. I thought how desperate you must be to be suggesting something so severe.

  Is this your last-ditch effort?

  Clinical Note:

  Impulsive cutting of self:

  “I’ve been feeling the urge to do that a lot lately. I felt relieved afterwards. Had my mom not found the knife I don’t know what I might have done.”

  Cut prior to admission to hospital.

  Cut during this admission.

  One OD.

  Lengthy history of cutting. Long-standing bulimia. Very severe alcoholism, plus extensive history of other street drugs (past intravenous drug abuse, rare). She was heavily abusing over-the-counter cold remedies prior to her first admittance to the Eric Martin Pavilion three years ago. Nicotine dependency.

  She has chronic history of very poor impulse regulation. Yesterday’s incident of self-abuse demonstrates this. Essentially, her life has been para-suicidal behaviours, which now have escalated in risk.

  Trisha’s defences:

  Projective identification

  Denial

  Acting out

  Turning against the self

  She feels “rejected” when her daily passes are curtailed for her safety. She worries that I will abandon her.

  DBT (Dialectic Behaviour Therapy) referral

  ECT consult and opinion

  Lamictal

  December 10, 2011

  I have just returned from an eight-hour pass, from mini-Christmas at my sister’s place.

  My gifts include:

  crystal paw print earrings

  pink socks with puffy birds on them

  beautiful big violet bath towel

  small lead bunny

  a glass rabbit candle holder

  a crystal bowl from Bowering

  a framed picture, blown up, that I took while in NYC a couple years ago: it’s a picture of a building front with plate-glass windows into a shop with a pink neon sign out front that says, SoHo Psychic.

  We ate roasted chestnuts. I had a big plate of four-cheese ravioli in a cream rosemary sauce and a Diet Coke.

  Now I’m back in the hospital, back in blue scrubs. I’ve just read the purple pamphlet that Dr. S (consulting doctor and expert on ECT) gave me:

  Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

  Information booklet for patients and families

  Caring for the people and families we serve

  December 11, 2011

  I had my stitches removed this morning. The nurse, Amy, removed the eleven stitches, left twenty-two angry puncture wounds on either side of the cut in the middle. The cut has healed well.

  I’m looking at it now, swollen and red, a fissure.

  It itches.

  The further away you drift from me (and you seem so far away now), the more I want to tear myself open, to ease the pain an
d anxiety. And the more I cut myself open to ease the pain and anxiety, the further you drift from me.

  The morning after my OD last week, as I sat at a table across from you in the sunny interview room at the end of the hall, the IV in my arm, my face pale and sickly and my hair a mess, you said, “Well, you look like a real psych patient now.”

  “I guess so,” I mumbled. “You seem angry.”

  “How do you expect me to be?” you said.

  “A little more compassionate,” I said.

  “No, I’m frustrated,” you said. “You’re wearing your illness like a flag.”

  “Oh,” I said, devastated.

  “Why do you do that?”

  I was near tears.

  You lightened a little then. “Okay,” you said, “no more picking on Trisha.”

  I said nothing.

  “You okay?” you said.

  “No.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you okay?” you said again.

  “No.”

  We walked down the hall together. You softened a little, kept asking me if I was okay, to which I replied each time, softly, decidedly, “No—no—no.”

  “Do you want something to help you sleep?” you said. “Do you want to sleep all day?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  9:05 pm

  I am N268A, that is to say, North East wing, number 268, A side of a twin room.

  I have had three roommates in the time I’ve been here, almost two weeks now: Hailey, Jean, Patricia. The room is divided into two by a tall blue curtain that hangs from the ceiling and stops two feet from the floor. The floor is wood laminate, has a nice sheen. I have always liked wood-inspired things. The walls are pale green. There is a window on the far wall of the B side. The window only opens a little. There are white slats covering the glass. You can’t really see outside. There is a whiteboard on the wall at the end of each of the beds. The room number is on the upper right corner of my board. On the left side of the board, a column reads:

  My nurse is: Amy

  Today is: Sunday December 11, 2011

  I like to be called: Trisha

  My goal today is: nothing

  There is a built-in fake wooden desk to my left, and to the left of the desk are four cubbyholes. The bottom cubby is locked and only accessible with the nurse’s key. Inside the cubby are my earrings and shaving razor.

  They left one pair of earrings out though. Tonight I used the hook of one of the earrings to cut my right arm above the knife cuts.

  Dr. P is right—I am a walking billboard of garish and tactless pain and humiliation. I almost like it, but only because it is familiar and comforting to be this person, because this is whom I have always been for as long as I can remember, because I am nothing, blank, immaculate, if I am not a wrecked human being. I am a good person, but that is all, and that is surely not enough to build a life around.

  I will see you again tomorrow, then every day this week until Friday, then you are off on Christmas holidays to spend happy and festive moments with your wife of twenty-nine years and your three grown daughters, to live a whole-hearted meaningful life with a woman you’ve built a life around. How can I compete with that?

  I am a mental patient.

  I cut myself.

  I OD.

  Clinical Note:

  She is ready emotionally and intellectually to commence ECT. We are awaiting a space on the roster. I will meet with her family members this morning to answer their questions with TC’s preferred limits on the information given.

  December 13, 2011

  Today I gave you your Christmas present, a pair of white Calvin Klein socks, and a Christmas card I made in art therapy a week ago. I included in the card two pictures of me, when I was younger, dating back to 2003. In one picture I am standing next to a stone wall just beyond a slant of sunlight coming in through a window you cannot see in the frame, inside of Château de Chillon in Switzerland. In the other picture, I am standing next to an open window in a hotel room in Rome, Hotel Dolomiti. In both pictures I am more slender than I am now, more beautiful. I want you to have these pictures of me, to keep them in a private folder in your filing cabinet at work, to take them out from time to time and look at them, to look at me.

  December 14,2011

  I am second on the waitlist for ECT. You popped your head in my room this morning today just as you were leaving to a meeting and told me.

  I longed for you, wanted to reach out and touch you, have you hold me, have someone, anyone, hold me tight.

  You thanked me for the Calvin Klein socks. You were even wearing them. You stretched out your leg, pulled up your pant cuff and showed me. I was drawn to that little bit of exposed skin above the sock.

  Pathetic.

  December 17, 2011

  Saturday.

  The hospital is particularly quiet, sterile.

  Just now I thought my roommate was crying into her pillow, but when I stepped around the curtain to ask her if she was okay, she was laughing into her pillow instead.

  I had dinner tonight with Danny, a nineteen-year-old patient from central Alberta whose parents are crackheads and dope fiends. Danny smokes weed too but is trying to stay away from it. His eyes are dark blue, his face lovely and young, his hair brown and short. I sat across from him, listening to him talk about wanting to buy a little motorhome so he can drive it back to Alberta and live in it when he gets there. I watched his mouth, his lips, and I wanted to kiss him.

  I wonder why no one comes to visit my roommate, and so close to Christmas.

  I wonder if they will begin the shock treatment this week.

  I asked you if you would be present when they do the treatment. You said, “No, but I will be with you in spirit.”

  I wanted to ask you to change your mind, to make an exception, to be an observer in the room as they pull down my shirt and place the electrodes on my body, so that I could feel the erotic tension of your gaze as I drift off to sleep, so that you could bear witness to my controlled seizure as the current flows through me. So that I would know you are partial to my nudity, and so that I could pretend that what I’m about to feel as the electricity flows through me is partial to orgasm flooding through my body.

  December 19, 2011

  My rabbit Caravaggio died last night at approximately 6:30 pm.

  Why did I not note the exact time?

  I held him in my arms as the vet inserted the toxic solution into the catheter in his paw.

  Which was it? The left or right paw?

  He had become tangled in the mesh underneath my couch. I finally found him there when I returned home on one of my day passes from the hospital. His back legs were bound tightly together. For two days I thought he was just hiding under there, the way he so often does. For two days he was tangled under there without food or water, writhing in pain, writhing to get free.

  My beautiful Caravaggio.

  He was paralyzed in his hindquarters, the vet said, totally and permanently paralyzed. He was incontinent, had peed all over himself, causing urine scalding on his hocks and around his genitals, which in turn caused an infection that I did not know about, which no doubt had been causing him great pain for weeks. He also had an obstruction of the bowel.

  Had I trimmed his nails I believe he would not have got tangled in the mesh.

  I am now on call for ECT.

  They only do ECT early in the mornings, I’m not sure why—perhaps something to do with the ambient temperature of the procedure room so early in the morning, the humidity level as storms swell over the island, or the first light of day slanting into the room, upon the table, slanting inward upon my half-naked body, warming my face perhaps as electrodes are placed onto my scalp.

  Am I making the biggest mistake of my life?

  M
y old roommate Patricia said, “Don’t do it, kid. You’ll never be the same.”

  That got to me.

  But now that Caravaggio is gone and that destruction has passed, now that I lie here in this hospital room, heartbroken and writing to you, I think, Fuck me, bring on the ECT.

  Later…

  Digging a hole in the earth is difficult.

  It is a difficult thing that until tonight was an abstract thing, like playing a violin or skydiving. Or indeed, it is strange to fill a hole with dirt, to heave back into the emptiness the same dirt you have just spent an hour removing, using your foot on the base of the shovel’s blade in order to use your whole body, thus forcing the blade to further gather the earth so you can fill up the emptiness.

  Digging a hole in my sister’s front yard, under the blueberry bush, I was sweating, noticing how out of shape I am, how little I have used my muscles in the last three weeks. One loses muscle strength, cardio and flexibility. Running is not allowed in a mental hospital. I understand this intuitively even though no one has ever told me not to run. Running would be absurd, like skipping the 200-metre sprint at the Olympics. Like me with my nose ring when I was twenty-two—it just didn’t fit.

  I am digging a hole into which I will lay Caravaggio to rest, having first placed him in a wicker basket, covered him in a blanket, gently rubbing his flank, his belly, then stroking his cheek and ears the way he always liked me to while he was alive. Then I put the basket in the hole, held it for a moment first and whispered, “You’re not in there,” and then, “I love you.”

  I am on call for ECT for tomorrow morning, which means they will be here early to take my vitals. I will then be escorted over to the other side of the hospital. I will go in my pyjamas, the nurse said. I will either sit in a waiting room or lie on a cot.

  I wonder what effects it will have on me. Will I be instantaneously altered in some way? Will it hurt? Will I see a profound change for the better?