Okay, so this is a reprise of something I posted before without fanfare, but I think in these cold winter months we all need CHEESECAKE, so why am I hiding this lightness under a bushel? (I know I know it is ridiculously simple too, but do not be fooled. Try it! It will amaze you. Make you knock your head and think: WHY didn’t I think of this before????) 8D
I post this especially for anyone who takes antipsychotic drugs and has a resulting weight problem, but obviously it is meant for everyone else who needs low cal cheesecake too. 8) Enjoy!
All you need to do is MIX together:
1 container of plain, no fat, Greek yogurt. Yes, you can use regular yogurt but I have found the Greek kind makes this cheesecake extra thick and delicious. Usually these are around 100 calories (also extraordinarily high in protein, if you care).
1/4th of a package of Jello instant low calorie, no fat, cheesecake pudding mix.
Top with your choice of fruit- strawberries or blueberries, or even a few nuts or three or four semi sweet chocolate morsels (if you can actually eat that few…) et VOILÁ!
Try it, it is really an unbelievable dessert, especially if you have not had one in a long time and really want to taste creamy richness of cheesecake without guilt.
Greek yogurt: 100 cal.
Jello pudding mix 25 cal.
GRAND TOTAL for a whole 8 ounce dessert => 125 calories!!!!!!
Now, that is all I use, but if you really want a crust, Lord love you if you NEED a crust, you can do this: break up a couple of graham crackers and mix them with a little of the yogurt to moisten them and press this mixture into the sides of a custard cup and chill it a while until firm. Spoon in rest of cheesecake and chill again for a couple of hours.
CS Lewis, a popular Christian writer of the twentieth century and still known for his Narnia Chronicles, wrote that “a miracle is something that comes totally out of the blue…” Now, he meant something extremely unlikely, like a virgin female giving birth to a child. Now, apparently, this has been observed at least once in modern times. If you don’t believe it, and can understand the technical language, you can read the following abstract as proof. Then you can decide whether or not virgin birth still counts as a miracle:
Source: Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Chicago Lying-In Hospital, Illinois.
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine the conceptional events resulting in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite and to report the first pregnancy in a 46,XX/46,XY true hermaphrodite with an ovotestis… (see the rest of the abstract at PubMed)
Another thinker, British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, suggested in what became known as Littlewood’s Law that statistically individuals should expect one-in-a-million events (“miracles”) to happen to them about once a month. By these calculations, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.
And of course there is the dictionary definition of miracle, which is the one commonly accepted by both religious people who believe in miracles, and those who do not believe in their existence, but who do accept the definition of the word.
mir·a·cle/ˈmirikəl/
–A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is considered to be of divine origin
OR
–A highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment
I myself would add a third, and relevant definition, or qualifier, which is “if it occurs in an individual person’s life, the event produces changes, beyond any that could have been imagined prior to the miracle, in a positive direction wholly unexpected and therefore regarded as miraculous.” To be cured from a terminal or crippling illness is of course a miracle. But so too to my way of thinking would be remission from a future-destroying addiction or mental compulsion. Needless to say, complete reversal of a severe mental illness would count as a miracle. And I can think of others that might be counted as less effulgent but just as miraculous.
Given those broader categories of miracles, then, I will proceed to tell you of mine. I do not know what the Course on Miracles is all about, nor anything of the Miracle classes offered online. If there are similarities, I dunno what it means, except that we came up with our thoughts completely independently. I have spoken of the following things as miracles for many years now without any familiarly with the C.O.M or any other such program.
So, onward to my First miracle. (Alas,I fear I will have to deal with the Second Miracle and the Third, Fourth and Fifth in following posts as this one is already getting long enough and will be longer by the time I am finished.) The first miracle concerned, as some readers may remember, plants, wild plants, field botany, in short, the wonders of the wild green world. But not just that, no, it was the discovery in myself, utterly unanticipated, of a bizarre and wonderful ability to simply know, almost without any idea how I knew it, any plant I came across. In fact, I must have seen them, if briefly, in some plant book or field guide, but it was truly uncanny, my ability to instantly recognize and categorize whole families and genera and then the species within them just by casually looking at any plant, flower or tree I saw, having but glanced at a simple sketch or pencil drawing of a plant the night or even a week before seeing it in the wild.
I once wrote about this miracle in my first blog at http://www.schizophrenia.com. Although the essay has a less than happy ending that has nothing to do with miracles, I will reprint the essay in its entirety here. Suffice it to say that the pivotal moment, the chairotic moment and miracle that surrounds “Prunella,” which I describe early in the piece, changed my life forever.
WILDFLOWERS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
Thirty years ago, I took the natural history course purely for exercise. I figured, what better way to stay in shape than to get credit for it? At the time, I couldn’t tell a maple from an oak, let alone one old weed from another, and it wouldn’t be easy. But just to keep off the flab would be a benefit in its own right. Since the prospectus promised daily field trips, no mention of love or awe or wonder, the last thing I expected was a miracle.
Showing up for the first day’s trip, I wore old tennis shoes of the thin-canvas Keds variety. I had no idea L.L. Bean’s half-rubber hiking boots were de rigueur for a course of this kind. What god-awful-ugly shoes just to walk in the woods! I thought in horror. Right then, I realized I’d made a huge mistake and it was too late to change my mind — I’d have to stick it out for the whole semester. I knew for sure I was going to be more miserable getting “exercise” than I ever would have with my thighs turning to mush, safe in the college library.
The teacher, Miss G, took off stomping down the path and we tramped on after her. I was last, straggling behind, half-hoping to get lost so at least I could head back to civilization. Before we’d gotten far, she halted, peering intently at something near her feet. She waited for us to catch up and gather round her, then pointed at a weed. “Heal-all. Prunella vulgaris,” she announced sternly and without passion. “Vulgaris means ‘common.’ Learn names of both genus and species. Be forewarned, ‘Heal-all’ by itself will not be an adequate answer on your quizzes.”
She stepped aside so we could take a better look. As instructed, one by one the class dutifully wrote down a description and the two names we’d been given. I was still at the back, waiting my turn without the least enthusiasm, let alone the anticipation of what, in those days, we called a “mind-blowing” experience.
“Come on, now, don’t be shy. Step up and look for yourself,” Miss G scolded me, pushing at my elbow to propel me closer.
Finally the clump of students cleared out and I had a better view. For some reason, I found myself actually kneeling in front of the weed to look at it close up. Then it happened. As if the proverbial light bulb flashed on over my head, I understood what Miss G meant when she’d said: “Weeds are only wildflowers growing where they aren’t wanted.”
Prunella, I know now, is no more than a common mint, found in poorly manicured lawns or waste ground. Yet, with its conical head of iridescent purple-lipped flowers and its square stem – on impulse, I’d reached out to touch it and discovered an amazing fact: the stem wasn’t round! – Heal-all was the single most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The world went still. There was only me and the flower and the realization I’d fallen in love.
Since one of my other courses concerned the history of early Christianity, I knew immediately what had happened. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, I’d been struck by unexpected lightning. I’d been converted. I put away my notebook, knowing I didn’t need to write down a word, knowing I’d never forget “common Prunella” as long as I lived.
There were other miracles in my life after that, but none came close to the thunderbolt that knocked me flat the afternoon I saw, truly saw, that homely little mint for the first time. “Sedges have edges and rushes are round and grasses have nodes where willows abound.” Yes, I learned such mnemonics, which helped me as much as the next person when a plant was hard to identify. But I discovered in myself an amazing feel for botany that was like sunken treasure thousands of feet beneath the ocean. Once I knew it was there, I had merely to plumb the depths, more or less unconsciously, and gold would magically appear.
I went walking in the woods every chance I got and carried Peterson’s guides with me even into town, checking out the most inconspicuous snippets of green that poked through the sidewalk cracks. The first time I came out with a certain plant’s genus and species before Miss G told the class what we were seeing, she looked at me oddly. I began repeating this performance until once she even allowed me to argue her into changing her classification of a tricky species. If I still hung back behind the group as we walked, it was no longer from reluctance. I was simply too entranced, looking at each tree, to keep up the pace.
By December, as the semester was coming to a close, Miss G had begun using me as her unofficial assistant, asking my opinion whenever there was a question as to what was before us. Oh, I confess, I never did get the knack of birds. It was the trees and wildflowers that stole my heart entire.
At the end of the semester, we received course evaluations in lieu of letter grades. I opened mine eagerly, expecting praise. Instead, Miss G was terse and unenthusiastic: “Pamela faithfully attended every field trip, but for most of the course she failed to share her insights and established expertise with the rest of the class.” End quote. “Failed to share her established expertise“? What was she talking about? Did she think I’d already known everything she taught us? How could she not understand what she’d done for me, introducing me to little Prunella, how I’d learned everything I knew after that moment, not before?
It was the worst evaluation I’d ever gotten, the injustice of which struck me to the marrow. I went to her office to explain and found a sign on her door saying she’d been called away on a family emergency and would not be returning until the next semester. But I wasn’t returning for the second semester. I was transferring back to my original school.
I caught my ride home, spending four hours crammed into the back of an old Volkswagen bug with two other students, wordless with indignation that replayed and reverberated through my mind. How could she think such a thing? I couldn’t stop writing a letter of protest in my head as the highway flowed endlessly beneath us.
I did write Miss G, finally, explaining all she’d awoken in me, emphasizing the magic I’d discovered in her class, my new-found joy and amazement. At the end of March I got a reply, but no apology, no hint that she understood she’d misunderstood. Not even appreciation for my gratitude towards her and what her course had done for me. Just a brisk, no-nonsense note, little better than a form letter. I had the impression that she didn’t quite remember who I was, that I was just another faceless student writing to her about a natural history course she’d taught perhaps forty times in her long career as a teacher.
Whether she knew who I was or even recognized what she’d done for me mattered little in the end. What did matter was that when I met homely little Prunella, I discovered the whole world in a common weed.
The next posts, or in the following weeks, I hope to cover the other four miracles. If you are interested in them, and I fail to follow through, feel free to “goose” me with a reminder. My mind is a sieve and I rarely remember anything without a string tied to my thumb! 8D
you sprang forth roaring, indignantly alive. 你呱呱來臨,憤然降世
For this, whatever else followed, 為此, 為這帶來的一切
innocent and guilty, forgive them. 無意也好作孽也罷,寬恕他們.
If it is day, forgive the sun 若是白天,寬恕太陽
its white radiance blinding the eye; 原宥它的奪目光芒
forgive also the moon for dragging the tides, 亦要寬恕月亮帶來的潮汐
for her secrets, her half heart of darkness;原宥它的弔詭.它的暗晦
whatever the season, forgive it its various 管他冬夏秋春.寬恕季節的多端侵擊
assaults—floods, gales, storms 水患,疾風,暴風雪
of ice—and forgive its changing; 原宥它的更替變易
for its vanishing act, stealing what you love 它的掠奪行徑
and what you hate, indifferent, 把你所愛所恨無情的奪去
forgive time; and likewise forgive its fickle 寬恕時間
consort, memory, which fades 同樣地原宥它的變易不忠,連記憶也不放過
the photographs of all you can’t remember; 以至你把擁有的拍照忘得一乾二淨
forgive forgetting, which is chaste 寬恕失憶
and kinder than you know; 它實是忠貞和比你所認知的仁厚得多
forgive your age and the age you were 寬怒年齡
when happiness was afire in your blood 原宥當年的你,那時幸福在血液沸騰
and joy sang hymns in the trees; 喜樂在樹 叢間高唱聖歌
forgive, too, those trees, which have died; 寬恕那些逝去的樹木
and forgive death for taking them, 原宥奪走它們的死亡
inexorable as God, then forgive God 若感上主不仁,則寬恕上主
His terrible grandeur, His unspeakable原宥祂畏人的堂皇和禁說的名字
Name; forgive, too, the poor devil 亦勿忘寬恕那倒霉的撒旦
for a celestial fall no worse than your own. 他那屬天的失足並不比你的過犯糟糕
When you have forgiven whatever is of earth, 當你把地上天上水裡
of sky, of water, whatever is named, 有名的無名的
whatever remains nameless, 通通寬恕了
forgive, finally, your own sorry self, 最後切記寬恕
clothed in temporary flesh 那包裝在短暫肉體內
the breath and blood of you 血氣正在消亡的
already dying. 悔疚的你
Dying, forgiven, now you begin. 垂死,被寬恕的你,現在要重新開始.
By Pamela Spiro Wagner, “Divided Minds” 胡思亂想
Chinese Recreation/Translation by Kenneth Leung Sep 3rd 2012, Labour Day Scarborough, Ontario
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I received the email below very recently, explaining the poem above. The only thing missing is the translation of the title, which segues on purpose directly into the first line, and so it too is essential. I hope that Jackie’s father might one day provide that title line. Nevertheless, I am thrilled that anyone likes the poem enough to translate it. Thank you so very much, Kenneth Leung. And thank you Jackie, for sharing it with me and allowing me to share it here.
“Hi Pamela,
“I recently picked up your book “Divided Minds” and I couldn’t put it down. Thank you for sharing your story with the world. I’m an Occupational Therapist working in community mental health on an ACT team, so I interact regularly with people with schizophrenia. Your story allowed me to see how difficult it is to first accept a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and then the difficulties of adhering to treatment. I especially love your poem on forgiveness and shared it with my dad, who translated it into Chinese. I thought you might be interested in posting it on your blog so Chinese readers can enjoy it.
On Medscape yesterday they ran an article/video by a Dr Jeffrey Leiberman, lamenting the failure of three psychotropic drugs –one for the treatment of schizophrenia, and the others for Alzheimer’s — to pass beyond either phase 3 or phase 2 clinical trials. This is part of what Leiberman had to say (please note that the emphasis is decidedly mine…)
“The brain is an organ that is orders of magnitude more complex than any other organ in the body. The brain has 100 billion cells. Each of the areas of the brain is organized cytoarchitecturally differently, and the cells connect via over 30 trillion synapses. Compare this to the heart, the liver, the gastrointestinal system, or the lungs, and there is no comparison in terms of complexity and intricacy. In addition, given the fact that we are developing treatments for brain disorders that affect mental function and behavior, the animal models that are an essential component of biomedical research and drug development are limited, because how can lower species like rodents model the complexity of human behaviors and mental disorders that we are trying to correct pharmacologically?
“In addition, the biomarkers we use to signal the effect of the treatmentor prove the target engagement of a molecule at the desired location in the brain or protein in the brain are still in development and not fully validated. Thus, the complexity of the brain and the limitations of existing tools make the prospects of certainty in drug development [for brain disorders] more questionablethan in other organ systems and disease areas. “Certainly the research community and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) understand the importance of redoubling our efforts to develop treatments for this important group of disorders. The NIH has recently established a new Institute, NCATS, or National Center for Advancing Translational Science, which has as part of its core mission drug discovery and development. In addition, various other Institutes have put out RFAs [request for applications]; this includes the National Institute of Mental Health, which has initiated a series of what are called the “fast programs” to identify drugs that exist within the pharmaceutical industry and may no longer be under development, but can be repurposed for study for specific disorders. A quick, rigorous study using a fast-fail strategy can determine whether these agents have the potential for further development.
“New efforts are coming from the biomedical research community as well as the NIH to spur drug development. I hope this will act as a catalyst for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to not despair or back away from the risk of developing drugs in these areas, but rather to find the resources to support drug-development programs for these disorders.
“What is the benefit? Anyone who works with psychiatric patients knows that there are tremendous unmet clinical needs, whether in schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, autism, or Alzheimer disease. With these needs come tremendous market potential, so for those who stay the course and persevere, there will be very lucrative rewards .To me, this seems like a great opportunity, and I think our partners in the private sector should appreciate this. I look forward to partnering with them to try and work in a way that uses their precious resources most efficiently but still serves our scientific goals and the needs of our patients. Thank you for listening.”
Yes, I noted the last statement, that he wants to serve science and his patients, but i could not help but feel great dismay at the other statements, including the first, that largely states what I already suspected: using animals to prove anything about human brain disorders or states of mind is downright ridiculous. All you can say about a rat’s “schizophrenia” is that it appears to “behave” in some fashion that looks similar to someone who is psychotic…but how would you know if a rat is psychotic, or hallucinating or thinking in a delusional fashion?
Come on? How would you know if a rat had negative symptoms of schizophrenia, or was depressed, or simply felt lethargic because it was hungry or drugged or sleepy or some other physiological reason. Well, you likely could not! Using animals that can not communicate with us to model human mental functioning is downright silly, and yet it seems to have only just occurred to Dr Leiberman, perhaps in his own disappointment with the glutamate-dampening anti-schizophrenia drug that just went bust…I dunno.
Once again, having read about how they are using Ketamine to treat 6-12 years olds with bipolar illness (mind you, I am not convinced that the children are actually Bipolar, only that more and more kids are being diagnosed because conveniently shrinks are allowed to drug them with Abilify and Seroquel and other adult antipsychotics and the drug companies push it on them, pay them for using it etc)
I believe that the use of psychoactive drugs and the rampant use of them is more often inappropriate than not. Truly. The very idea that Abilify and Seroquel are prescribed willy nilly for everything from insomnia to mild anxiety is just plain SCARY. Has anyone out there taking these drugs even bothered to read the side effects, or do they no longer care what they are taking? Obesity no longer scares anyone, but what about diabetes and high blood pressure, nope, I guess not, since those are epidemic too.
It truly astounds me how both those drugs, not to mention a whole host of other powerful drugs are being pushed on the American public, but we are a public that LOVES to take drugs rather than deal with problems by, well, looking at ourselves and thinking about what our responsibilites are and how we might change things…and doing some hard work and hard thinking about things…No, god forbid, why not just take a pill and forget about everything else, and if the pill doesn’t do anything, well, then, probably we are incurably ill and need to take those useless pills for the rest of our lives, because if we didn’t take them we might might might be even worse than we are taking them, right?
Not! Why do we take drugs that don’t help us, or that we do not notice any benefit from (though the shrinks are always willing to point out to us how much better “you are feeling”), drugs that might even make us feel worse in other ways.
Some people who are depressed lose all sexual enjoyment and functioning from their antidepressants, but refuse to stop the drugs because they are afraid…even though the drugs themselves make little difference in their mood, but their lack of sexual pleasure and responsiveness surely has…in a negative way. Why do they continue taking the pills? Hope? Obedience? Uncertainty? Perhaps all three…They may hope that if they take the antidepressant just a little longer, the side effects will “go away” as their doctor likely assured them, and they naturally want to be an aobedient and good patient, so they keep complying. And of course, depressed as they still are, uncertainty about the future plays a huge role, since how do they know that things wouldn’t get even worse, should they cease taking these pills that the doctor says not only will help them but somehow noticeably is helping them, whether they feel it or not.
Argh. I am reading a book, Rethinking Madness, by Paris Williams, PhD. and it is a very interesting take on psychosis and the treatment of it. He suggests that it is NOT always a lifelong condition, or that one breakdown means that one needs to be on medication for life, or in fact that even with repeated psychotic episodes, one can be on intermittent medication and at low doses. I have difficulty reading, myself, so I have not read far along, but the first case study discussed a man who became psychotic suddenly in the late 60s or early 70s when he was threatened with the draft. After that he was ill for a long period of time, in and out of madness until he met the “right doctor” at age 28 or so. I believe it was then that he made the slow transition off all medication and since he was 35 or so has been off meds altogether. And has been well. Recovered, in every sense that matters, completely.
Everything about his history would today dictate that he never be taken off meds, and would mitigate against his ever dreaming of working in the mental health system, let alone as a worker in a state hospital. Yet this is where he has been employed for many years…(I may misremember some details, but that is the gist of it.) I could scarcely wrap my mind around such an outcome…it seemed that amazing.
Yet, I cannot be envious, because I know how often I tried to get off my medications, and because I did not know how, I likely induced a recrudescence of psychosis without even understanding that was what was happening. And naturally, they put me back on the drugs again…It was not my fault, just how it was in those days. I didn’t know, and they still don’t! Even now, though, I do not know if I could get off the meds.
But in my case, I am not sure I want to, largely because I function so well on them. I write, I do art, I sleep well, I am not obese, I have no chronic physical health problems because of them…So I have no pressing need to get off the antipsychotics, nor the anti-seizure meds, which I may need due to temporal lobe epilepsy anyhow. I would like to get off the sertraline, yes, and we are working on that. But why fix what ain’t broke at this particular time? I mean, I only got out of the danged hospital a month ago, and it would seem a little, er, crazy to fiddle with things this soon, much as I wish I could. On the other hand, I don’t mind taking these meds, because by and large, I believe, frankly, that my body has re-established some kind of homeostasis and has adapted to the lowered dopamine…so it has ramped up production to a different balance, meaning that I am fine where I am, but would risk a massive overload should I stop cold turkey.
OTOH, I do not yet understand the absolutely immediate improvement in all my mental capabilities when I take Zyprexa. Yes, I eat and eat and eat. But I can read and pay attention to people telling me things to movies and the TV and just “intake” in a way that I cannot now and have not in years…And it is literally within 2 doses. That cannot be a matter of homeostasis so what is it? Can Zyprexa be the ONLY drug that actually has some beneficial effects? I doubt it. So what is it? Anyhow, any comments on these points would be appreciated. I don’t mind if you want to argue to the contrary, if you feel it strongly. I am here to hear different points of view as well. Though you know of course that I may “argue” with you back! All in friendship and good cheer.
This is the front entrance to Natchaug Hospital, a photo I cribbed from their Facebook page. I am trying to paint it, but that will take a while so for now, this will have to do…Hope I am not infringing a copyright. However, as this post is all about Natchaug it is good publicity too!
After I wrote my early September post “Open Letter to Deborah Weidner MD”https://wagblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/open-letter-to…chaug-hospital/ about my stay at Natchaug Hospital in August, I received a phone message one Saturday afternoon not long afterwards from none other than Dr Weidner herself. She left her cell phone number and asked me to call her back. Her voice was neither angry nor upset, quite the contrary, she sounded very pleasant. So, despite my heart’s clangor in my ears at the same time as it drove nearly into my esophagus with its nervous pounding, I sat down and decided to make the call “without further ado.”
“May I speak to Deborah Weidner?” I asked the voice who answered, intentionally using her first name, so she would not think I was calling on unequal terms, i.e. as a patient.
She responded, and addressed me as “Ms Wagner,” which made me feel better at once. Then, before I said a word, and believe you me, I was not going to be the first to speak in any event, she said (and I quote from a less than perfect memory here, so this is not verbatim), “I read your blog post. You are such a gifted writer. It was really a wonderful piece…” Or words to that effect.
I was both stunned and amazed. Certainly I was amazed this was the self-same “head honcho” who had essentially, so I’d felt in August, been against me at the hospital along with so many others in charge, the MD who had – I felt – given up on me, called me “a borderline”*** and gotten rid of me at the earliest possible opportunity. She could, back in August, so easily have tried to help, tried to find out what had gone wrong and make things better. But it seemed to me at the time that she had simply gone along with the general ill-will towards me and dumped me, no matter how troubled I still was.
Note that when I say, “general ill will” I mean exclusively “the management” — the doctors and social workers and APRNs…those who did the diagnosing and disposing. From the nurses and mental health workers I felt nothing but great support and goodwill, almost to a one (minus, of course, my abusers). Even of the nursing supervisors I found only that single really awful one…at least to my face.
But as for Dr Weidner, I’d felt that she too had decided to “blame the victim” instead of taking responsibility for the very real traumas, which certain “bad egg” hospital staff had inflicted on me…
However, be that as it may, it is all water that has sluiced beneath the bridge, and so as I said, I was stunned to receive Weidner’s phone call. I was even more astonished to perceive such humanity and even warmth from this woman against whom I had conceived such animosity and from whom I had felt the same.
Here she was not only praising my writing skills but speaking approvingly of a blog post that concerned my very negative month-long stay in “her” hospital.
We talked for a while. She may not have known it but I was trembling, both with anger and with anxiety. It took me some time to calm myself, to feel safe enough to answer any of her questions. Finally, she said what she evidently had called about to begin with. “I wonder if you would consider coming back to talk with me and a few other interested people here at Natchaug. I would really love to speak with you.”
I was dumbfounded for a minute. But only for a minute. Then I found my voice, and as soon as I did, I responded with enthusiasm. “Yes, absolutely. I would love to do that. Thank you. I would be more than happy to speak to you and anyone else who would listen to me.”
“Thank you, Ms Wagner. We really want your input, we want to make Natchaug a better place and I think your insights can help us to do that.”
After we hung up, I was beaming. I felt so filled with light that my smile must have been big and bright as a beneficent Halloween pumpkin. I immediately went downstairs to the 7th floor to share the news with my friend of 30 years, a friend who had been appalled when I came home in August in such terrible shape.
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Well, that meeting took place yeseterday, Friday, at 9am. Brityn, my case manager drove me out to Natchaug, and I brought with me the oil pastel painting I’d done while there, the view of the nurses station from my room. I am donating it to the adult unit mental health workers’ breakroom, after Brian, the patient relations advocate, who is both intelligent and caring and an extraordinary listener, displays it somewhere publicly for a time.
When we got there, we were met by the director of nursing, John O, APRN. Shortly thereafter Dr Kline came along and we went into a little room off the lobby. I was a taken aback at first when, while waiting for Dr W, John and Dr Kline started talking with Brityn, as if she were the only person in the room, as if, “professional to professional,” they could ignore me, a mere patient once again.
This was unconscionable. I was the person with whom they ought to have been concerned, and instead they directed themselves wholly to Brityn. It also felt infantilizing. Why didn’t they even greet me or ask how I was doing since I’d left Natchaug? They could have at the very least made small talk with me. Instead, they chatted with Brityn, someone who is not only my junior by about 30 years, but with whom they’d had no prior interactions whatsoever and whom they didn’t even know. It was insulting.
I dunno. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe they just wanted to include Brityn…But it didn’t feel that way to me. It felt like they were talking to her as a way to avoid talking to me, a way to simply bypass chatting with me.
To their credit, however, when I mentioned it – “You know, I am here and I am a person too. You could at least include me in the conversation…” — they apologized. But even now I do not believe they understood the problem. They thought it was perfectly acceptable — since Brityn had driven me (I wonder how they would have behaved had I simply been able to drive myself!) — to treat me as merely a patient, a “charge,” and to treat Brityn as their equal, the other professional, the only one on equal standing with them. Well fork them…It cost me a lot to go up there, not even to talk about what they did to me. Do they really think I am OVER it? They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
But I will let that go as well.
Soooo, down to tin tacks, which turned out to be the golden glue of the meeting itself.
Dr Weidner, small and blond and –somehow I want to call her “open-faced” — she seemed not to hide a lot, had what looked like a genuinely interested and caring face, though naturally psychiatrists are trained to achieve this appearance. Nevertheless, I did trust her sincerity.
This time I cannot recall if she called me Pam, or nothing at all. I do not think she called me Ms Wagner, though. I pointed out that since I understood that the post I’d written, the “Open Letter” had essentially “gone viral” in terms of the Natchaug Hospital staff itself, I didn’t feel I needed to talk much about what had happened in August. I had written all about it in detail. Or most of it…Mostly what I thought I should talk about was “How to make Natchaug a better place.”
I did that, and in fairly great detail. I will write a separate blog about all those suggested changes, and changes which would apply in spades to other hospitals. But for now, I just want to report on the meeting itself.
Dr Weidner seemed to take careful notes and when I had finished I was simply “blown away” when she said, “Pam you have so much to tell us, and are such a good teacher, but there are only the three of us here today. How would you feel about coming back and talking to the entire medical staff? Your experience as a patient and your ability to articulate it would be just invaluable for many more of us to hear.”
Well, I almost laughed in sheer belief and pleasure. “Of course. I would love to. I do public speaking and would have no problem with that. Anything at all that I could do to make Natchaug a better place would be fine with me.”
Dr Weidner also wanted to know what they could have done to make my own stay less traumatic “from the start,” especially how they could have relieved or prevented my becoming mute for so long.
I told her that from the instant that the first episode started, when that nurse or whomever said to me, “Take your hands out from under the blankets!” I felt so betrayed, felt indeed that I was back at Hallbrooke being tortured by those two abusive staff members (who were actually reprimanded for their behavior) that I became mute at that very instant.
Would I have taken Ativan despite my psychiatric advance directive’s proscription against its use? Yes, had someone gently explained its use and suggested I take it to help my mutism, just a small dose, I would have at least considered it.
But no one presented Ativan as an option…I do not believe anyone even knew about it. Except of course to force it on me against my will during the Seclusion event I described in the earlier post. Not until Dr Cappiello insisted that I ask Dr Pentz to prescribe it, and that was only after I had been unable to talk for 8 days.
As for the mutism itself? They — Dr Pentz and some of the other docs and APRNs — insisted that I deliberately chose not to speak, that I could have if I wanted to. But in point of fact, I could not get myself to speak, I woke every morning with no “inclination” to speak and no felt ability to break that barrier…and therefore I truly could not speak at all. In fact, it took hours, and maybe two doses of Ativan before I was able to speak at all even when I did take it.
After a few more words of conversation, the meeting broke up and Brityn and I headed towards the car, with the expectation that we would come back again so I could speak to a larger group of Natchaug personnel.
So that was my reconciliation with Natchaug and I left feeling like a million dollars. Even Brityn told me it was the best appointment she had taken anyone to that week.
You know, my sole worry — and I felt a frisson even as we talked about it and my worries were not immediately allayed — was when I asked if I could ever be readmitted, ie as a patient. I know, I know, why would I even want to? Dr Weidner said she didn’t think I’d ever want to come back. According to her, that’s what I’d written in my blog post. But in fact, what I said was that I didn’t think I would ever be taken back. I was considered such a PITA, why would they want me? And also because I could not see anyone for a doctor but Dr Andrei, and it seems dubious that she would see me. Why I do not know. But so be it. I liked her, never had any problems with her. But I must have done something wrong. This is twice that they have refused to assign me to her.
In truth though, 1) I have NO WHERE ELSE TO GO, no where else I could possibly begin to trust or feel safe, nowhere do I have even a history of feeling and being safe and 2) say that they do change, where else would I want to go?
In any event, since I can work with neithe Pentz nor the other doctor on the unit, because of “conflicts of interest” (i.e. he still has “feelings for me” from our days in med school together) that leaves only Dr Andrei, and I dunno if she would accept me onto her service. So, even if theoretically they would take me back – which didn’t seem at all certain, not from the vibes I got from Dr Weidner — I don’t have any idea who could see me if I were admitted.
(What the fork! I would be stuck in a snake pit like Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living only to be brutalized again. When push comes to shove and I might need or want to be re-admitted, frankly I wouldn’t expect the admitting MD Natchaug to give a damn, no matter how many times I’d spoken to people there and how much I might have taught them. As soon as I need their help as a patient, frankly, I expect I’d simply to be abandoned to my fate somewhere else.)
Well, of course I will still help Natchaug,. How could I not want to help them? I want to help EVERY hospital in the state become as good as Natchaug and even better. But it sucks all the same.
———————————————————————————
*** Finally I want to make a brief comment about the specific words “a borderline” used early in this post, because every time I hear this phrase it makes my blood sizzle. Not only is very insulting, it stigmaties. I may not have borderline personality disorder, but I know what is meant when someone calls a person “a borderline,” and it is invariably takes the place of PITA, Pain in The Ass.
There is a difference, a huge difference between understanding the very real travails that a person with such a personality disorder undergoes daily, the emotional suffering that afflicts that person, and simply calling them names because you find them troublesome.
Empathy goes a long way, especially with someone who suffers from BPD. The idea of calling someone “a borderline” is tantamount to saying, “I suffer from YOU.” A disgusting statement if ever I heard one, one most often made by mental health professionals. Doctors who use the words, “a borderline” need 1) re-education in language and its nuances, but 2) and much more important, a re-education in COMPASSION.
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
I was admitted last Tuesday night, the 17th of July I believe it was, to the Institute of Living, the psychiatric division of Hartford Hospital in central Connecticut. I do not remember this. The fact that I have amnesia for it and for most of the Wednesday following only occurred to me on Thursday, a day and a half later, when I wondered — the train of thought must have had to do with the seclusion episode that took place Wednesday evening and which I described in yesterday’s blog post — why they had been so violent with me, why they had so quickly secluded and threatened me with restraints in a situation that didn’t come within miles of “requiring” them. Surely, I thought, the staff member who admitted me, whoever that had been, had asked me a critical question, which is on every admissions questionnaire upon entering a psych unit or hospital these days: have you ever experienced trauma or sexual assault? (or words to that effect). I could not, and still cannot, for the life of my body or soul remember anything asked or answered at that time. There’s little left in my memory beyond a vague “snapshot” of being wheeled into The Institute of Living (hence forward to be called by its nickname The Toot or by its initials, The IOL) and my understanding that I had been transferred out of the ER. Then the memory goes blank until many hours later. Understanding only as late as Thursday that I had this gap, and pained by the violence dealt me the night before, I went up to my “contact person” and asked about my admission. Could I find out whether this question was ever asked me, and what my answers were? At first, naturally and as a matter of course, she refused. That was SOP. Refuse, refuse, and refuse. So as I stood there, earnest in my request, she seemed about to summarily dismiss it as just another bothersome demand from a too-demanding patient already much disliked by all. What did I expect, cooperation? But to my surprise, her misgivings and the flicker of irritation that had crossed her face at first changed to a flattened look of resignation. She agreed to read my answers to the questions to me. But that was all she would do, so don’t go expecting more than that.
As she read from the top, a few memories stirred and woke, but only temporarily. I fear they soon faded again into the all-white-out of oblivion. Only the trauma memories remain, for they apparently are stronger than thieving Ativan. Can I push myself to remember what her reading my answers back to me recalled to mind? She told me…what? She said that I told the admitting staff member, whom I do not remember a thing about, do not even recall if that person was male or female, doctor or nurse or what…I told that person I was not homicidal, not suicidal, not hearing voices, and that I didn’t need to be in the hospital. Three answers were true, or true enough by then. After having been nearly killed in the ER the people in my head/outside of it, who tell me to do things to myself were not so relentlessly horrible in their demands…so I was indeed no longer suicidal, homicidal or in need of hospitalization. I just wanted to get out of there and go on my upcoming writing-retreat vacation.
As I recall the little I recall now, this nurse, my “contact person” read to herself a lot of the paperwork and relatively little aloud, despite her promises. I kept asking what she had read, and prompting her to read out loud, but she let forth only a few phrases. I still do not know why… though I can guess that pretty bad things are written there about me. That would not surprise me one iota. I do not really care. They will largely be lies or descriptions of that awful scene in the ER from one very biassed point of view. No one will tell MY side of the story, that’s for damn sure. Whatever is said there will be based on what the ER personnel and the guard-thugs did to me, but if my contact person believed them reading them, and never bothered to find out the half of it, then who knows what they all thought about me, or believed…Anyhow, I do not care, because they too were thuggish, professionally and psychologically.
But the big question was yet unanswered. Had I ever in fact been asked about past experience of trauma or sexual assault? Contact Person, whom I won’t name as she was at least marginally decent to me, now seemed interested in this too, having paged through the lengthy document and not found it. She seemed puzzled, said she knew it was a standard question. She started perusing the thing again from the beginning. A minute or two later, she poked a page.
“Ah, here it is. And your answer is blank.”
“So the person just skipped over it. They just skipped it!”
“It appears so. Do you want to answer it now?” She took out her pen.
“Yes, and yes. I have experienced sexual assault three times. And severe trauma due to seclusion and restraints in many hospitals.” I looked at her. She was writing. “Tell me what you wrote.
“Experienced sexual assault. Has issues with seclusion and restraint.”
“NO! I said, it was severe trauma. I have PTSD, ask my doctor. Ask, I dunno, give me a test. I cry just talking about it. My heart rate goes up just thinking about it, even though it happened more than two years ago. It was trauma, and you cannot do it to me again!” She wrote something on the paper but didn’t read it to me. She just clicked her pen off and stood.
“Now you have your answer. I have things to do. Let’s go.” With that, and no discussion of what had taken place on Wednesday night, let alone in the ER, she hurried me out of the side office so she could go back to the nursing station to do some “real work.”
——————————
I suppose there must have been some incidents of relative kindness at the Toot. There must have been exceptions to the Hartford Hospital IOL “coal dust standard.” But only Albert, a tech, stands out. Because they injected me with too much Ativan on Wednesday pm and I was discharged Friday noon, I had very little time between the ER’s monster dose and D3South’s equally large dose of Ativan-it-Away to retain much of anything but what stood out enough to stick, and really stick tight. Their puny kindnesses mostly did not, except for Albert.
On the other hand, the sheer meanness of the staff was astounding. I had a semi-meaningful interaction — though unpleasant – in all that time with only one individual who was not programmed to speak with me. And even that started out with nastiness, though I admit it was sparked by something that was “my fault,” as you will see.
Friday morning I needed migraine meds and my 8am pills. I went to desk at 7:55 and asked for them. A nurse or tech or someone –I never knew and no one ever bothered to tell me who or what they were — lingering at the desk said that the med nurse somewhere in the back would get them. I wandered off, figuring it would take some time and she would bring them to me, which is what they did at every single place I have ever been. But no, by the time I thought about it again, realizing that she had never brought them, it was 8:45 and people were lined up for their 9:00am meds already. I signaled above them to the nurse at the med window that I had not gotten mine for 8:00am yet. She told me that of course not: I left the med station; why should she go after me? Then she indicated that I should get in line to be next…even though that meant stepping in front of someone else. Okay, so I got in line, and – oh, I do not remember all that happened except that I became angrier and angrier with her, resenting her attitude. As a consequence, I did everything I could do to irritate her. She poured the meds at the computer, where I couldn’t see them, saying their names softly to herself so I asked to see the packaging. I didn’t trust her not to withhold or add something I didn’t want. Because I had asked for Imitex an hour before I sensed she would not include it. Well, lo and behold: No Imitrex! So I took the pills, but asked her for the Imitrex as well.
Ah, revenge time! “I will get the Imitrex at 9:00 am sharp, when it is due. That is 10 minutes from now. You can come back and wait in line then.” I just stood there, not budging. I would never stoop so low as to impugn a person’s person, but I probably let loose a few curses and most certainly raised my already angry voice a few decibels. Finally, speaking in a calm, respectful voice, a man whose name I learned was Albert came up to me asking in such a polite manner that I even looked him in the eye, to “please just lower your voice” so he could hear me tell him what the problem was.” Well, treated in such a fashion I understood he would wait for me to calm and not get angry back so I was able to take a few breaths and then make him understand what she was doing…He said, with the med nurse standing well within earshot, though I do not think he intended any manipulation, “It’s okay, don’t worry. It’s nearly nine, and I’m sure the med nurse will get your medication for you.” (I was sure of quite the opposite but harrumph! Well, what could that SOB, excuse me, DOS — daughter of a stud (med-nurse) do but give me the Imitrex now?) I might have crowed, but instead, thanks to Albert and in respect for him, I took it without a fuss and thanked him again.
This sort of treatment gives the lie to what so many providers – both individuals and insitutions — say about the goal of “empowering patients.” What bloviated BS! What they really want are not empowered patients but cowering patients, people too scared and drugged up to object or make trouble in the first place and then who continue to cower before the establishment MD’s power structures all the way to the last place.
My butt hurts from sitting slouched on a bed all day. I need a break. So I am going to post this and go outside in the cooling darkness of the Litchfield hills and drink the air. Since I have nothing I have to do here but write, I will post tomorrow about that single meaningful encounter I had while imprisoned at The Institute of Living. If I still feel it is worth writing about, which as I think about it, it may not be.
Oh, what the heck: Basically, it concerned an encounter with this female tech, a woman who in passing me in the hallway, the first time she had spoken to me so far as I knew, accused me of moral turpitude (not in those words), made a statement shaming me for my behavior on Friday morning at the medication window. What had I done? By talking too loudly, I had made “the poor man behind [me]” cover his ears and point at his skull to communicate his displeasure. PLUS, I had made everyone wait a good 30 minutes…I knew the 30 minutes was an exaggeration, so I didn’t even touch that, but the shaming tactic got to me. I went back a few minutes later and said I wanted to speak with her. We went to a couple of lounge chairs in the hall and sat down.
“What precisely did I do that was morally wrong this morning?”
“Do you know you talked so loudly this morning that the poor little man behind you was covering his ears and pointing at his head?”
“So I should have talked more softly, but I do not have eyes in the back of my head to see him. I could not know he was communicating by pointing at his head. It is not morally wrong not to have eyes in the back of your head, nor is it morally wrong to speak in a loud voice.”
She reiterated the case of “the poor little man behind you pointing at his head.” But I continued to press her on what was morally wrong because I didn’t have eyes to see behind me. Finally she granted that I could not help not seeing him and that it wasn’t actually a morally wrong thing to do, to yell or talk too loudly. At this point I said to her, nearly in tears because just having a calm conversation had taken such effort on my part, “Be careful what you say to someone on this unit you know nothing about. Words have power and you should use that power with care. You have NO idea how those words you spoke affected me, no possible idea…”
She gave me an intent look, almost a fearful one, as if afraid that — well, no, I don’t think she gave a damn whether or not she caused me any emotional harm. She no doubt despised me along with the rest of the nursing staff. But perhaps she suddenly appreciated how even her words were important and powerful, and carried weight and could do some good but could also do just as much psychological damage and maybe more sometimes than the loud voice that damaged mostly ear drums.
Things really are stressful, not least because this lovely 17 year old cat refuses to eat and barely drinks…
It is too late to write much and I am much too tired, but suffice it to say that I am overwhelmed with sadness for, well, my father, my dying cat, and the stress of a face to face mediation that has been scheduled between me and the people who tortured me at that certain hospital about which I am always writing. You would think I would be happy to be getting somewhere but no, I feel only worn out and sad beyond belief. I wish I could look forward to it, somehow. But I just feel guilty, because I did not do anything to prevent their abuse. I should have refused to lie down on that restraint bed! I should not have gone like a lamb to the slaughter just because I was afraid…I should have just stood there and made them carry me over. Not fought or resisted just done passive non-violence…I feel so slimed that I actually went to that bed and lay down on it, naked (covered with part of a sheet, that they moved away to restrain my limbs so cruelly as to cause me exquisite physical pain…) I feel so guilty and so terribly sad. WHy didn’t I resist? Why did I do what they said to? I had always resisted up until then? Why did I let the fear of their assaulting me again get the better of me?! I cannot forget that, I cannot forgive MYSELF for it. I feel more degraded by that than by almost anything… I feel dirty and scummy and like a disgusting piece of garbage…
Freud and an angry God, hmm, I mean Doctor, electro-shocking a poor ant. Drawing by Pamela Spiro Wagner, 2012 (all rights reserved)
Although most of this post was written and posted back in 2011, I have both edited it and written an addendum, especially for the students in Holly C’s course, with whom I will be doing a Skype class on Monday. If others do not want to reread the post and wish to skip to the end where I have placed the addendum, feel free.
First though, please be aware that descriptions and names of places and so forth have been changed back to their originals except for the names of some people involved, such as my doctors. Those names are somewhat similar, but still disguised. In Divided Minds, we were forced by the publishers to completely disguise everyone, including their physical descriptions, and to make amalgams in some cases, taking two doctors and blending them into one. In Blacklight, by contrast, I am determined that my descriptions of people, previously altered in order to “protect them,” will be honest and forthright, rewritten so that while their names may be changed, their descriptions are as aboveboard as memory makes possible. After all, I write nothing but the truth as I remember it. I wrote a fair amount in my journals at the time and I referred back to my notes there in writing this. What is more, I intend no libel and in fact, I want only to be fair and to bend over backwards in giving as much credit as possible where it is due.
The Ogre Has ECT: 2004
I am delivered like a piece of mail to the Hospital of St Raphael’s, on a stretcher, bound up in brown wool blankets like a padded envelope. It’s the only way the ambulance will transfer me between Norwalk Hospital and this one. The attendants disgorge me into a single room where de-cocooned, I climb down and sit on the bed. All my bags have been left at the nurses’ station for searching; this is standard procedure but I hope they don’t confiscate too much. An aide follows me in to take my BP and pulse, and bustles out, telling me someone will be back shortly. I sit quietly for a half an hour, listening to the constant complaint of the voices, which never leave me, sometimes entertaining me, most of the time ranting and carping and demanding. A thin, 30-something woman with curly blonde hair, rimless glasses and residual acne scars that give her a kind of “I’ve suffered too” look of understanding, knocks on the door-frame..
“May I come in?” she asks politely.
“I can’t stop you.” My usual. Don’t want to seem too obliging or cooperative at first.
“Well, I do need to take a history, but I can come back when you’re feeling more disposed…”
“Nah, might as well get it over with.” Then, nicer, I explain, “I was just being ornery on principle.”
“What principle is that?”
“If you’re ornery they won’t see you sweat.”
“Aah…”
“And they won’t expect you to be medication-compliant right off the bat.” I shrug my shoulders but grin, I want to think, devilishly.
“I see you have a sense of humor.”
“You should see me…”
“I’m sure we all will. A sense of humor is very healthy. But it worries me that you already plan not to take your meds.”
“I’ll only refuse the antipsychotic. Look at the blimp it’s turned me into.” I haul my extra-large tee-shirt away from my chest to demonstrate. Fatso, Lardass! Someone snipes. She doesn’t know it but you really believe you’re thin. Ha ha, you’re a house! Look at yourself! LOOK at yourself! Ha ha ha ha! The voices are telling the truth: I know the number of pounds I weigh is high, outrageously high for me, having been thin all my life, but I haven’t lost my self-image as a skinny shrimp, so I can’t get used to being what others see. The voices love to remind me how fat I really am. Only the mirror, or better, a photograph, reminds me of the honest to god truth, and I avoid those. I avert my eyes, or search the concrete for fossils, when approaching a glass door. Anything not to be shocked by what I’ve become. Pig! Glutton! It seems they don’t want to stop tonight…
I realize suddenly that I’ve lost track of the conversation.
“I don’t think they’ll allow you to do that for long.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t you remember what we were talking about? Were your voices distracting you?”
“Just thoughts, you know, plus some added insults.”
“You’ll have to take all your meds eventually.”
“Then they’ll have to switch me to a different pill, even if it’s less effective.”
She sucks the top of her pen and looked down at her clipboard. “So,” she starts the formal intake. “What brings you here to St Raphael’s?”
The voices break in there, again, confusing me. When I can get my bearings I tell her what made me transfer from Norwalk Hospital and why I opted for shock treatments. She takes a closer look at the mark of Cain I’ve burned into my forehead, writes something, then corrects me.
“We like to refer to them as ECT here. ‘Shock treatments’ brings to mind the terrible procedures of the past. These days you feel nothing, you just go to sleep and wake up gently. I know. I assist at the ECT clinic.
“Oh, I know, I know. I’ve had ECT before. I know what it’s like and it’s a snap. I asked for this transfer because I hope it will help again.”
We talk some more about why I’m here and what I’ve been through and the voices keep to a minimum so there’s not too much interference. She says she’s going to be my primary nurse and that she thinks we’ll work well together. I nod, thinking she’s pretty okay, for a nurse.
I’ve arrived after lunch, which is served at 11:30am so someone brings me a tray and I pick at it in my room. People come in and out of my room but only speak to me a second or two before they leave, a doctor does a cursory physical, someone takes me down the hall to weigh and measure me. I return to my room, too scared to do otherwise, constrained by the Rules of the voices. The first break in the afternoon is medications in the late afternoon, when someone tells me to line up in front of a little window near the nurse’s station. When it’s my turn, I look at the pills in my cup. Ugh, 20mg of Zyprexa, an increase, plus a host of other pills I can’t remember the names of. I hand the pill back to the med nurse. I’m not taking this, it makes me fat, I say. Give me Geodon. at least I don’t put on weight with Geodon.
“Sorry, Dr Kroeder has ordered this one. We can’t just go around changing doctor’s orders. You either take it or you refuse.”
I was in a quandary. I hadn’t even met the doctor and already I was fighting with her? Should I take it and argue with her later? But then I’ll eat my whole dinner tray and more. Better to start off with my principles intact, so she knows what I’ll take and what I won’t take. I hand the pill back. ”Sorry, I won’t take it.”
“If you decompensate further we will have to give you a shot, you know that, don’t you?”
“I’ll be fine.” I do a little dance step.
“Yeah, and look what you’ve done to your face. Come closer.”
Wondering what she wants, I lean in gingerly, fearing her touch, but she only takes a tongue depressor and smears some ointment on the big oozing sore.
“You’re done.Go eat some supper.”
At 4:30? That’s pretty early. I can’t cross the threshold of the dining room, the Rules the voices make forbid it. I cannot enter the milling crowd, suffering little electric shocks every time my body makes contact with another. Instead I retreat to my room. Sitting on the edge of my bed again, I wonder what to do. How can I get supper, or any meal, if the voices won’t let me go into the dining room?
Just then, the thin blonde nurse with the glasses, what’s her name, leans into my room. “Aren’t you hungry? There’s a tray for you waiting outside the dining room.”
“They made a rule I can’t eat with other people, and I can’t get in the dining room…So I can’t eat.” I read her name tag. “Prisca.”
She smiles and glances down at the tag on her chest. ”Oh, just call me Prissy, everyone else does. I hate it, but what can you do? What are you talking about? There’s no such rule. For now, I guess I’ll let you eat in your room, but that is against the rules and we’ll have to get you into the dining room eventually, whatever the voices tell you.
She brings in the tray: white bread with two slices of bologna and a slice of cheese tossed on top, a packet of mayonnaise, a small green salad in a separate bowl, with a plastic slip of French dressing, and a packaged Hostess brownie for dessert. I didn’t eat lunch, though they brought it in, so even this impoverished repast looks good to me and I eat everything, despite not having taking the hated Zyprexa. I curse myself for it, of course, and do some leg lifts and crunches for exercise afterwards. Ever since I’ve been refusing the drug, I have lost weight. Now I am down to 155 lbs from 170 the last time I weighed myself and I intend to get much thinner, since I started at 95 before medications over the years slowly put weight on me.
After supper the voices start in again, louder and louder, telling me how fat I am, how disgusting and terrible I am. I notice the clock hanging on the wall, which ticks audibly punctuating each sentence. The voices were carping, now they are threatening, and demanding…Finally, their all too familiar sequence segues into telling me I’m the most evil thing, and they don’t say person, on the planet. I’m the Ogre that ate Manhattan, I’m Satan, I’m a mass murderer, I killed Kennedy and deserve to die, die, die!
I’m wearing a heavy pair of clogs with wooden soles and almost before I can think about it, I know what to do. I heave one up at the clock, hitting it dead center. It crashes to the floor. Scrambling to grab a shard of the clear plastic cover before the staff comes running in, I lunge towards where I saw the largest piece fall, one with a long jagged point. I have my hand closed around it when someone tackles me from behind. He’s not very big and I can feel him struggling to keep me pinned. I almost succeed in stabbing myself, but he manages to engulf my hand with his two and press them closed against the flat sides of the shard.
Other people crowd into the room now and they pry the shard from me and grab my arms and legs so I’m completely immobilized. Then at a word murmured by one of the male aides who have materialized out of nowhere, they swing me up onto the bed, like pitching a sand bag onto a levee. I scream but they ignore me and strap my ankles and wrists into leather cuffs which have been rapidly attached to the bed frame: four point restraints.
I continue to scream and scream, but nobody pays attention. A nurse comes at me with a needle, saying it is Haldol and Ativan and proceeds to inject me. Although I am still crying that I want to die, that I’m Satan, the Ogre that ate Manhattan, that I killed Kennedy, I’m the evil one, the room then empties, except for a heavy-set café-au-lait sitter, who hollers louder than I do that her name is Caledonia. She pulls up a chair in the doorway, pulls out a cosmetics bag and proceeds to do her nails in spite of me.
I am told by Prissy that I scream most of the evening and keep the whole unit awake until given a sleeping pill and another shot. All I remember is restless twilight sleep coming at last, broken when a short sandy-haired woman, dressed in a sweater set and skirt, comes in and takes my pulse. I’m groggy with medication but she speaks to me nonetheless.
“I’m , Dr Kroeder, your doctor. You’ve had a bad night I see. Well, perhaps tomorrow we’ll get a chance to talk.”
“Get me out of these things!” I mumble angrily. I can’t sleep like this!”
“”Not yet. You’re not ready. But try your best to sleep now. We’ll re-evaluate things in the morning.”
Then she turns and is gone.
As I get to know her, I will like Dr Kroeder for her kindness, toughness and honesty, but I will hate her too for opposite reasons and it will be a long time before I know whether the liking or the hating or something else entirely wins out.
The first thing that makes me know ECT is going to be different at St Raphael’s than where I had it before is that we all have to get there on under own steam rather than travel in wheelchairs, the way I’ve known since childhood all hospital patients must travel. We walk there, all of us, down interminable corridors, around several corners, through doors to more of the same. In short by the time we get there I have no idea where we are. I said it was a snap when I had it before, but now I feel like a prisoner going to the hangman, a “dead man walking.” Something about our going there in a group voluntarily, by choice and yet somehow not totally by choice, makes it feel like punishment, like having to cut your own switch, not a medical procedure at all. This sets my nerves on edge. When we finally get to the rooms clearly marked “ECT Suite,” instead of the doctor being ready for us, no time to anticipate or fear what is ahead, we have to wait and wait and wait. We’re told the outpatients have to be “finished up” first. My apprehension grows. I’m used to getting to the ECT rooms and immediately climbing up on the table and getting it over with. Waiting and having time to think about it brings me close to tears.
Finally four in-patients are to be taken. I think the nurse calling us in senses I am too anxious to wait any longer, for she makes sure I’m with the first group. I clamber up on the table, and see Dr Kroeder looking down at me, smiling. I notice how white her teeth are and the little gap in her shirt across her chest as she bends over me, strapping something over my forehead as Prissy puts a needle into the heplock already in my arm. I feel my arms and legs quickly cuffed down by others in the team, a mask clamps down over my face and I’m told to breathe, breathe in deeply and I breathe and breathe and a chasm in hell opens and the demons reach out and scream as I plummet past into a terrible inky blackness…
I wake up a second later and immediately vomit into a kidney basin hastily held out by a nurse. “Why didn’t you do it?” I cry out, confused. “Why didn’t you do it, why did you made me wait? I can’t go through this again!”
Strangely, Dr Kroeder has disappeared, and so have Prissy and the nurses that had surrounded me just an instant before. Instead a plump, baby-faced older nurse smiles as she takes away the kidney basin and says, kindly, “You’ve been sleeping soundly for an hour. They did the treatment already and you’re waking up. How about trying to sit up now?” Slowly, I push myself to a sitting position and swing my legs over the edge of the table. No dizziness, no more nausea. I feel okay, except for a slight headache. So I slide off the table and ask where to go. Surely they won’t make me stay a long while this time. The nurse leads me to a wheelchair and asks an aide to take me back to the unit. Ah, a chair at last. At least I’m not expected to walk on my own after that ordeal.
ECT Takes place on Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week and though I vomit many times upon waking up, that is the least of it. What I dread most is the anesthesia, how I plunge from perfect alertness into the dark pit and feel like I wake a second later, sick and confused. I grow more and more afraid until, at the end of a series of 8 sessions, I refuse to go on to a second series. I thwart this by grabbing something to eat every morning, which is forbidden as you cannot have ECT if you have eaten or drunk anything within 12 hours of hte procedure. Because my symptoms are still severe and Caledonia comes to sit with me one to one more often than not, Dr Kroeder tries to persuade me, but I am adamant. I am not depressed (quite despite what she tries to convince me of). ECT hasn’t helped my obsessive intrusive thoughts/hallucinations this time so no more of it. No more! Then she threatens to have the next series court-ordered and to add insult to injury, she says she will force me to take Zyprexa as well, the drug I so hate. I explode.
“What! You f—ing can’t do that! I’m a free citizen, I’m not a danger to myself or anyone else.”
“In fact, I can do it, and I am going to do it, whether you like it or not. You need more ECT and unfortunately you refuse the only drug that is effective for you. Pam, look, how can you say you’re not a danger to yourself? Look at your forehead! That’s not the mark of I it’s just self-mutilation. Look at where you carved that mark into your hand when we weren’t watching you carefully enough. Isn’t that danger enough?”
“But I’m NOT going to kill myself. I don’t want to die. I just want to be disfigured so no one will want to be around me and they’ll stay safe and uncontaminated.”
Dr Kroeder’s eyes suddenly glitter and she has to blink a couple of times. “Well, I’m not going to let you continue to do what you want. Period.”
She was standing at the foot of my bed, one foot on a lower rung, casually holding a clipboard. But she moves closer to me, standing to one side, the clipboard clasped business-like across her chest. Gazing intently at me, she shakes her head in what appears to be sadness. I’m not sad, I know what I have to do. I don’t understand why she feels this is so terrible, but I know enough to remain quiet. Finally, she turns and quietly slips out of the room.
This alarms me; it shocks me. I know she means what she says. Worst of all, Dr O’Maloney, my outpatient psychiatrist, has signed off on it well, agreeing it is the only thing left to do, that already I’ve been in the hospital two months and little has changed, that the situation is desperate. Their only problem is that to get a court order they have to get me a conservator who will agree to it. They want to appoint my twin sister and they discuss with her whether or not she’ll agree to forcing more ECT on me, in addition to Zyprexa. Despite fearing that I’ll hate her, she too is convinced there are no other options.
So Dr Kroeder wins and I endure eight more ECT sessions. Finally I’m discharged a month later, much improved, so everyone says. As a condition of my release, I promise that I’ll continue to take Zyprexa. Forced to, I do promise, even though my history clearly suggests that I will not. I’m also supposed to return once every two weeks for maintenance ECT treatments and Dr Kroeder threatens me with a police escort if I don’t comply. But this time I thumb my nose at her. So, she’s going to get both the Hartford and the New Haven police involved? She thinks they are going to bother to arrest me just to drive me down to the hospital for ECT, something they themselves probably consider barbaric? J’en doute fort. I doubt that big time! In fact, after a call to the Legal Rights Project, I learn that any conservatorship was dissolved the moment I was discharged from St Raphael’ s and that the doctor has no power over me at all now, zilch. So I write Dr Kroeder a nice apologetic letter — sorry, doc, but no more of your ECT for me. Ever.
Several months later, hearing command hallucinations, I pour lighter fluid over my left leg and set it on fire. So much for the restorative powers of shock torture, excuse me, electro- convulsive therapy.
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Addendum: not part of Blacklight
ECT in 2003 (after DIVIDED MINDS ends)
The first time I had ECT was in 2003 at John Dempsey Hospital, which is connected to the University of Connecticut’s medical school. There, in desperation, because of an “obsession” — and I say that advisedly, because I was not so much obsessed as consumed — with the face that I saw in the biohazard sign (which we called the biohazmat man in DIVIDED MINDS) as well as a little red figure I saw running through it, I asked whether something like ECT might help me. The head psychiatrist of the unit wasn’t certain, it wasn’t commonly used for that. But he was willing to try it nonetheless. It took some doing. I was very scared, and the procedure scared me even more, as it turned out that a “heplock” had to be placed in your arm hours beforehand, so a needle could be easily inserted and anesthesia given later during the procedure. But this frightened me and I balked. I also balked at signing various papers. I almost backed out, and rescinded permission at least once. But finally I went through with it.
The actual ECT was near torture, both because of my terror of anestheisa and also because at Dempsey Hospital absolutely no attention was given to the comfort of in-patients, so that we were made to wait until afternoon before our treatments, meaning that we could eat neither breakfast nor lunch on those days. Or at least we could not eat until the treatments were given. Since meals in-hospital loom large in importance, especially when there is little else to do and one’s medications induce hunger, this was a huge problem, particularly when I was already very apprehensive. I never did understand the rationale behind this. It seemed to be particularly bad planning to have any ECT patient have to have treatment so late in the day, given that fasting was essential. But hey, who was I but a mere mental patient? I had no rights, I just had to do what I was told!
Anyhow, I suffered the agonies of hell, but I went through with it, hating each session, until, after I’d undergone five of them, I began to complain that my memory was being affected. I decided to stop, but I noted at the same time, strangely enough, that the biohazmat man had also disappeared from my radar. Weird! It seemed to have worked, ECT had broken the back of what had been consuming me. In point of fact, ECT at that time worked so well that the biohazard sign has never bothered me again in such a fashion. Which is close to a miracle in my book.
Memory is fiction. I wrote that in 2005, believing I read it in the New Yorker somewhere. Memory is fiction. It’s not that we make our memories out of whole cloth; we believe we remember things clearly, but the mind is a funny thing and what we recall happened, and what “really” did are two different things. Of course, in the end, there is little way of knowing what is correct, unless the event was a public one and well-documented. Unless? Hah. Just think of one of the most public and most highly documented events of the 20th century, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and try to come to some conclusion from the “evidence, the facts, about what “really” happened. The truth is, no one can tell you what really happened because everyone’s memory is different, and in that sense even though the objective evidence supposedly remains the same, each witness interprets it differently, through a different viewpoint and a different political and sociological lens. So where lie the facts of “true memory” and where is the bosh of “mere fiction” in that public event, those historically documented facts? Answer that and I am certain there must be a big prize out there somewhere for you.
But I suspect the truth is that this notion of “really happened” is just a big brainwash by those in power who have cornered the market on their own version of it. In truth (and these words all get so sticky here), if I believe something happened one way, and this belief has informed my life and behavior, isn’t that the most important thing about the event, more important than any theoretical “facts” of the matter? Given than no agreement has been reached about something so public that it ought to be obvious, Who killed President Kennedy? how can anyone tell me that an XYZ in my own little life that I remember clearly, happened rather in the fashion that they recall and not as I do? What gives their memories more weight than my own?
You can indeed turn it around and say Fiction is memory, and be just as correct, meaning that in all the stories we make up about the world reside parts of ourselves and our lives, that nothing is ever truly “made up” or completely foreign to our experience, however outlandish the characters or strange the events described . There is a truth behind the settings and deeds that derives from one’s center, making fiction a personal memory of the deepest sort.
People have asked how I could recall with such clarity events that happened 20, 30 or 40 years ago, even down to dialogue, the way I’ve written it in DIVIDED MINDS or prospectively in BLACKLIGHT, and all I can say is — aside from the fact that out of 40 years I remember very little all told, even though what I do recall, I recall with great vividness — that I feel I remember every event I recount as clearly as if it happened yesterday. There is no guarantee, mind you, if indeed memory is fiction, that I recall anything with factual accuracy, whatever that is! I can only claim to capture what memory remains of those years, to capture my memories, no matter how time has embellished or hardened them, or in fact hardened the embellishments.
As to DIVIDED MINDS, I remembered a great deal more than what I wrote, until the book project was finished, at which point I pretty much lost it all. Once it set the years down as “my story” I feel as if I mentally deleted all other remembered events as less important, therefore forgettable…I wish this hadn’t happened as there was much I used to and wished to recall. Perhaps I have earlier versions of my book without such deletions, on my hard drive to jog my memory, but it is as Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek wrote, (I paraphrase) If you prize your memories, don’t write them down (because that solidifies them forever in a form that freezes out all others).
Nevertheless, not a word I have written either in DIVIDED MINDS or in BLACKLIGHT has been deliberately fictionalized. I remember each and everything that I have written about, though whether my memory be factually accurate or not is anyone’s guess.
As an aside, I know all too well how false memories may be unconsciously confabulated. When I lived at the Transitional Living Facility in Hartford in the 90s, the staff there and at the nearby hospitals were so intent on ferreting out “multiples,” the newest fad diagnosis, short for persons with Multiple Personality Disorder, that I am absolutely convinced they induced many if not most of the residents there to “remember” early childhood sexual traumas, incidents which they might never have “remembered” and which likely never happened. For instance, my friend Joe latched onto the “fact” that his father “molested” him — but the only evidence he ever gave for that was that he put his hand on his knee once while driving…Now, I never bought it, since it seemed a fatherly thing to do, a father putting his hand on the knee of a young boy! And Joe never once said that anything else ever happened between them. In fact, he always said that his father was a womanizer, if anything. Be that as it may, the residents were made to confabulate these false memories and this was a necessary prerequisite for the psychologists there to proceed to “uncover” the desired dissociative disorders, i.e. closet multiple personalities. I am telling you, it was a huge fad, and MPDs were coming out of the woodworks. I am convinced that many so-called multiples today, most of them, are residual from that terrible decade of the 90s, and they have not been able to let go of that diagnosis. Furthermore, no one, no doctor or therapist has been brave enough to deal with the lie that they were induced, even forced to buy into, and so the “fiction” is being perpetuated and their lives and no doubt others connected to them destroyed.
Forgive that tangent, but it is one aspect of memory — induced false memory — that does upset me, because it has destroyed so many lives, continues to, and no one is held accountable.
Nevertheless, for most and in most lives, those not deliberately ruined by multiple-personality-mad psychiatrists and/or overzealous psychologists, the “facts” whatever they may be don’t matter as much as one’s memories, as I’ve pointed out. Certainly for me, I’ve lived my life through my memories, and the memories have been what has influenced me, affected me, changed me and made me into the person I am today, for good or ill.
I have some other thoughts on this, but it is getting very late so I must quit for now and go to bed…TTFN (ta ta for now).
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 