by Marian Keyes
The basic rule was that if it didn’t have a protective fence around it, it wasn’t high enough. I could chance it and I might get lucky and meet my end, or, more likely, I might break every important bone in my body and have to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair being fed through a straw. That was a risk I couldn’t take.
An overdose of paracetamol was another bust: it didn’t always kill you but it destroyed your liver, so you had to live out your days in pain, discomfort and misery.
Basically it came down to two methods: cutting my wrists or drowning myself. I’d plumped for drowning myself and I planned it meticulously. I’d gone out and bought tins of strawberries, the works – and it had still been impossible to achieve.
At that moment, with Dave looking at me with his little prepubescent face, I felt more wretched than I could ever have imagined feeling. I felt worse than suicidal. I was trapped in being alive and I thought my head would explode from the horror of it.
But I was in hospital now and they were going to magically cure me, so I settled for saying, ‘I suppose I’ve got things out of my system. I still feel … crazed, but … I’m in here and you’re going to make me better, right?’
Dave diagnosed me with anxiety and depression – now, there was a bombshell – doubled my dose of antidepressants and, mercifully, prescribed sleeping tablets.
‘I’ll check in with you in a couple of days’ time,’ he said, getting up to leave.
‘What?’ In a panic I jumped off the bed and tried to stop him walking out of the room. ‘Is that all? That can’t be all. What else will you do for me? How are you going to magically cure me?’
‘You can walk in the grounds,’ he said. ‘Nature is very healing. Or you can take relaxation classes or yoga or do occupational therapy.’
‘You’re having me on,’ I said. ‘Occupational therapy? Do you mean like woodwork? Knitting?’
‘Or mosaic work. Or painting. There’s a full programme. People find it helpful.’
‘And that’s it?’ I was out of my mind with agitation.
‘There’s The Wonder of Now. We’re getting good results with that.’
‘What’s that?’
Dave tried to explain, something about living in the moment, but I was way too distressed to understand or even listen.
‘I need drugs,’ I was pleading. ‘I need special good strong tablets or tranquillizers. Xanax, please give me Xanax.’
But he wouldn’t. Apparently Xanax was only ever prescribed as an emergency short-term measure.
‘I tried to kill myself!’ I said. ‘How bad do I have to be?’
‘You were well enough to admit yourself to hospital.’
‘I’ve admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital,’ I said. ‘Therefore, by definition, I am very unwell in the head. Therefore I need Xanax.’
But he just chuckled and said that I was great at arguing and I should consider a career as a barrister. Being in hospital was a good opportunity to find ways to self-soothe, he said. Once again, he pointed me in the direction of occupational therapy and suddenly I understood why mentally ill people were called basket weavers: it was one of the activities that happened in occupational therapy. I am a basket weaver, I thought. I have become a basket weaver.
Camilla was anorexic. She was no trouble. I suppose she didn’t have the energy to be. She ate nothing all day long until the evening, when she had quite a substantial plate of salad. She had a thing about coleslaw. Had to have it. Odd. I’d always thought that anorexics simply ate nothing, and certainly this one ate very little, but she did eat and was actually very particular about it.
On my first night she asked me, ‘What are you in for?’
‘Depression.’
‘What kind?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Bipolar? Post-natal?’ The post-natal was particularly exciting because there was a version of it, with fairly extreme psychotic symptoms, that was enjoying a bit of publicity at the time.
‘Just the ordinary sort of depression,’ I said, almost shamefaced. ‘I want to die most of the time.’
‘Oh, that …’
Ten a penny, that type of depression.
To my surprise (category: extremely unwelcome), there was no camaraderie or support from the other patients. It wasn’t like the time when my sister Rachel had been in rehab. As far as I could see, everyone there had helped each other.
But in this place everyone was locked in their own private hell. We were all in for different things: anorexia, OCD, bipolar disorder, post-natal depression, and good, plain, old-fashioned nervous breakdowns.
Despite the fact that nervous breakdowns didn’t medically exist (they’d been rebranded as ‘major depressive episodes’), St Teresa’s was wall-to-wall with sufferers. These were men and women who’d been overloaded with demands, from their children, their parents, their banks and their jobs – especially their jobs. People whose responsibilities had built and built and built to a point where their overloaded system just blew a fuse and they’d stopped being able to function at all.
The hospital was their sanctuary. Lots of them had been patients for several weeks, even months, and they wanted to never leave because while they were there no one could ring them, no one could email them and no one could post them scary letters telling them how much money they owed. While they were in hospital they didn’t have to pick up their Alzheimer’s-riddled mums from police stations, they didn’t have to deal with the bailiffs showing up at their workplace and they didn’t have to run a home and a full-time job on four hours’ sleep a night.
Many of the nervous-breakdown people were those whose businesses had crashed, who owed hundreds of thousands, even millions of euro, money they could never pay back. They were terrified of being tipped back into the outside world, where people were howling for their blood. In St Teresa’s they could sleep and stare out of the window and watch television and let their minds be white and blank. They got peace and quiet and drugs and three meals a day (disgusting, but that’s by the by).
The only thing that scared them was their weekly review with their psychiatrist, in case they were declared well enough to be sent home.
But I wasn’t like them. My pressures, the sources of my distress – whatever they were – were internal. Wherever I went, they came with me.
The one other thing that terrified the nervous-breakdown people was the chance that their health insurers would refuse to pay any longer and they’d be turfed out, back into their hellish lives.
But I didn’t even have that worry. Some months earlier I’d signed on the dotted line for a private health care plan that would cover me for a good long stay in hospital. I wasn’t sure how it had come about that I’d spent my money on something so responsible, it certainly wasn’t my usual way, but there we are.
Before my shambolic attempt to drown myself I’d found being alive almost unbearable but I quickly discovered it was actually worse in St Teresa’s. At least in the outside world I’d had the freedom to get in my car and drive and drive and drive. Time had passed very slowly before I was in hospital, but within its confines time ground to a total and utter halt.
There was nothing for me to do. Every morning and afternoon the chirpier patients took themselves off to baking and mosaic and all the other occupational therapy classes. The anorexics strapped weights to their ankles and arms and pumped their way around the edges of the grounds, again and again, until they’d completed four miles, six miles, eight miles, whatever killer goal they had in their heads. Sometimes a nurse would come out and drag them, protesting, back in.
The more catatonic people parked themselves in the television lounge and let non-stop twenty-four-hour crap wash over their slumped heads, and the really broken people stayed in bed all day long and had their meals and medication brought to them.
But I didn’t fit into any of those categories. I was jittery, jumpy, terrified and very lonely.
The only thing I enjoyed about the hospital was my sleeping tablet. It was given out ev
ery night at ten o’clock and people began hovering at the nurses’ desk from about 8.13 p.m. onwards. I’d found it humiliating queueing up in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest style and always forced myself to hang back, near the end, but by Christ I was grateful for it.
Mum and Dad and Bronagh and my sisters all came to visit me and they were variously bewildered, horrified, heartbroken and totally unable to offer any advice. We were all in over our heads.
Everyone agreed that it was fairly hard core to have tried to drown myself.
‘But you weren’t really trying,’ Claire insisted. ‘Like, it was a cry for help, right?’
Was it? ‘Ah … yeah, right.’
‘Like the business with the sleeping tablets?’
‘Ah … right, okay.’
Mum and Dad insisted on talking to young Dave, but they emerged from the meeting more confused than before they’d gone in. ‘You need to slow down,’ Mum said doubtfully. ‘Take time to smell the roses; try not to have so much stress.’
Bronagh came to visit me just the once. ‘You don’t belong in a place like this,’ she’d said. ‘This isn’t the Helen Walsh I know. You’re not sectioned? So why don’t you come home?’ And off she scarpered.
She was right: I wasn’t sectioned and I was free to check out of the hospital at any time. God knows I wanted to leave, I hated it there – there was one day a load of us ended up watching the same episode of EastEnders three times and no one but me seemed to notice – but I thought there must be something that I wasn’t getting. I kept trying to figure out the key to the place. People came in broken and went out better … what was the secret?
So I tried. I tried staying in bed all day, I tried watching telly for hours and hours, I borrowed Camilla’s hand weights – she was very reluctant to loan them to me – and marched around the grounds pumping my arms. In the end I even gave woodwork a go. I made a bird box. Everyone made bird boxes.
I kept asking Dave, ‘When will I be better?’
And he kept fobbing me off by saying, ‘While you’re in here, you’re safe.’
‘But I don’t feel safe. I feel so frightened, so anxious.’
‘Have you tried yoga? Have you gone to any of the relaxation classes?’
‘Ah, Dave …’
After two weeks I said, ‘Dave, I’m sorry. I need to see a real doctor. Someone older, with more experience.’
‘I am a real doctor,’ he said. ‘But I’ll talk to my colleagues.’
A few hours later my bedroom door was pushed open by a woman who had my file in her hands. ‘I’m Dr Drusilla Carr.’ She seemed irritable and distracted. ‘Dr Kilty said you were looking for a doctor who is older and more experienced. I’m certainly that. I’ve been a consultant psychiatrist for twenty-two years.’ She rattled it out without making eye contact; she was still scanning through my notes. ‘However, Dr Kilty is a very able doctor. The care plan he has put together for you is exactly what I would have done. I have no suggested changes.’
‘Would you not give me electric shock therapy?’
Finally she looked at me. She seemed taken aback. ‘Electroconvulsive therapy is a treatment of last resort. It is sometimes – only sometimes, mind – used in cases of schizophrenia, psychosis, extreme mania and chronic medication-resistant catatonic depression.’
‘My depression is resistant to medication!’ I said. ‘The tablets didn’t stop me trying to kill myself.’
‘You’ve been on medication less than four months,’ she said, almost scornfully. ‘I’m talking about people who’ve been depressed for years.’
Years! Sweet Jesus on a stick! I couldn’t take years of this. How could anyone?
‘And ECT has many side effects, particularly memory loss.’ With unintended irony, she said, ‘Forget about it.’
‘Forget about it?’
‘We’ll keep on trying with medication. It’s early days.’
Eventually I accepted that the hospital wasn’t the Holy Grail, that a magical cure didn’t live there. No one was to blame. The fault was in my own ignorance, in my too-high expectations: ‘miracle’ cures don’t happen.
I came to see the hospital for what it actually was: a holding pen for fragile people and – for me anyway – its only function would be to keep me safe if I ever planned to kill myself again.
I waited three weeks and four days – until I’d finished my bird box – then, as clueless and uncured as the day I arrived, I left.
I didn’t feel better or fixed or safe, but at least I could watch what I wanted on telly. I suspected I probably wasn’t going to try to kill myself again. I felt I’d been given a message from the universe, even though I didn’t believe in that sort of thing.
Dave seemed sorry to see me go. ‘Don’t forget, you can always come back,’ he said. ‘We’re always here for you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, thinking I’d have to be in a pretty bad way before I considered that as one of my options.
All credit to me, once I was back in the world, I did just about everything everyone suggested to make myself better. I took my antidepressants, I went to Antonia Kelly every week, I did Zumba on Wednesdays and Fridays, I went to yoga workshops – horrible types, yoga people, so self-absorbed, so ‘spiritual’ – and I gave homeopathy a go. I bought a CD of Dave’s fave, The Wonder of Now, which had me baffled. Its basic message was that it doesn’t matter if you’re in unbearable pain because all there is, is now. But I didn’t understand how that made unbearable pain bearable. Unbearable pain is – the clue is in the name – unbearable. In fact wasn’t it worse if it was happening in the now? For a short while I was so enraged that I contemplated making my own CD, Fourteen Excellent Ways to Avoid the Now, but I could only come up with two methods:
Drink heavily
Take strong sedatives
Sorrowfully I abandoned my project, then I cheered myself up by firing The Wonder of Now into the bin with such force that I shattered its plastic case.
I started work again, staying away from the more stressful end of things, and I kept pursuing a cure for myself. I had reiki, I tried Emotional Freedom Therapy and I did six sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (utter codswallop). I hurtled down cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac searching for a fix, and was always disappointed. But time passed and after a while I felt more normal. I knew I wasn’t the same as I used to be, I wasn’t as resilient or as optimistic, and maybe I never would be, maybe the person I was, was gone for ever, but about a year after I’d tried to drown myself, Dr Waterbury said he thought I was well enough to come off the antidepressants. And about a month after that Antonia Kelly set me free to fly on my own.
SUNDAY
47
The beeping of an incoming text woke me. Where was I? I was lying on my side on Wayne’s living-room floor. I reached for my phone. It was 9.37 a.m.
Why was I curled on my side? Why was I letting myself away with such unprofessional behaviour? Because – I established with a tentative touch – there was a massive bruise on the back of my head.
Ouch. And another one on my forehead. And a third one on my knee.
Last night, after I’d managed to get myself upright, I’d limped my way to Wayne’s – my left knee had taken a bang in the fall – and let myself in, then made my way to his bathroom to tend to my wounds. There were plasters and Savlon in the cabinet. ‘Wayne, I’m sorry,’ I apologized to the empty walls. ‘Trespassing like this, stealing your first aid supplies, but it’s all in the cause of finding you.’
I inched my fingertips through the hair at the back of my head, trying to establish the extent of the damage. A lump was already starting to swell up but it didn’t feel like the skin was broken and no blood came away on my hand.
The front of my head was worse. A red lump was pushing its way out through my forehead and the skin was raw and bleeding, but when I washed the blood off I decided it didn’t need stitches.
I gave it a swipe of Savlon, then wished I hadn’t because by using an antibacteri
al cream I was lessening my chances of catching gangrene and having to have my head amputated; but then again, you don’t hear of so many cases of gangrene of the head. I didn’t bother putting on a plaster because the only ones Wayne had were Ben10 ones – something to do with one of his nephews, I was assuming – and I had some pride. But I took four of his Nurofen. And one of his Stilnoct.
I shouldn’t have. That really was theft. That really was shameful.
Sleeping tablets were hard to come by and I had twelve of my own in my bag, but there we are, I couldn’t account for my actions. Then – I’m not exactly sure why – perhaps to wash away the shame, perhaps because I was standing at a bathroom sink, I brushed my teeth. Might as well, I thought. Carpe diem and all that.
Feeling surprisingly shaky, I’d made my way downstairs, holding on to the wall as I went.
Artie had sent a text asking if I was okay and I’d texted him back, telling him I was grand, although I wasn’t really, then I carefully lowered myself to the floor and hoped I’d get concussion and die.
While I waited for the blood to flood my brain, I wondered who had hit me.
Could it have been Walter Wolcott? I wouldn’t put it past him, but I reckoned he was too old and heavyset to run fast enough.
Might it have been John Joseph? But why would he have hit me? Just because he didn’t like me? Again, I wouldn’t have put it past him, but would he have had the time to get from RTÉ ahead of me?
And, while we were on the subject, why didn’t John Joseph like me? Lots of people took dislikes to me, but John Joseph and I had got off to a good start, hadn’t we? What had I done to make him change his mind? Was it important? Not to me, obviously; I didn’t give a shite whether he liked me or not. But did it have something to do with Wayne?
And speaking of Wayne, there was always the chance that the person who hit me could have been Wayne himself. But I liked Wayne. I couldn’t let myself believe he was the type to go round clattering well-wishers on the head.
Could it have been Gloria?
