1993: I sat across from my psychiatrist. She never wore the same shoes twice. She asked me a lot of questions about my childhood. She asked me if I’d ever thought of harming my son in any way. I was horrified by the thought of hurting my baby boy. It had never occurred to me. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Tammy, what you need to realize is that your life will never be as bad as it was when you were a child.” I nodded, but I didn’t believe her. She was my psychiatrist for years. She was the only one I ever told about the times my dad tried to kill us.

1985: He was trying to kill my mom and us kids. My mom took us and fled. My brother refused to leave. We hid in a trailer. Dad killed himself in the basement of our house. When we drove up the driveway to the house that morning I already knew. I’d tossed and turned all night having dreams where I was choking to death. The threat to my life was over, but I kept seeing him around town. There he was walking down the sidewalks, there’s his face on a bus going by, oh shit and he’s that man in the store. He was everywhere. I started to feel him behind me when I was loading clothes into the washing machine. I would close my eyes and run. My mom came home from work and scolded me for leaving the lid up and the washer half full of clothes. The water was cold by then. I told her that I had to run from the basement and that I was sorry. She hugged me. She bought a new house. I wanted to ask the other five who had survived with me if they saw him but I didn’t.

2009 Mother’s Day: I am sick in bed, shaking with fear, unable to go to work. I can’t get my valium refill. The doctor says he faxed it in and the pharmacy says they never received it. Alex holds me and wishes me a happy mother’s day. “Probably your best yet, huh?” I couldn’t laugh at his joke then but he tries to remain lighthearted when I am in extreme distress. He recommends that I have a shot of Jack Daniels to calm me down. I refuse. I am afraid that it will trigger an alcohol binge.

The following Wednesday, I am sitting in front of a new psychiatrist. He asks me what happened the weekend prior. I try to explain about the panic attack I can’t stop. He bumps Effexor to 300mg and Valium to 30 mg. He adds Trazadone. He spends an hour with me and tells me I have post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, and severe depression that is medication resistant. He snaps my file shut, ready to go, but before he stands he looks at me and says, “If you ever find yourself out of valium again and going into withdrawals, drink some alcohol. It acts on the same part of the brain that valium does. Don’t you go telling anyone your doctor told you to get wasted.” We shake hands. I make a mental note to tell Alex he was right.

I spent some time in the lock down facility. I am panicked the whole time I am on that floor because there is no escape. Only the employees carry key cards. The doctor who gives me a physical tries to make jokes. I can’t laugh. I am trying to behave in a way that will get me out of the lock down floor. For whatever reason, the severe psychiatric patients are locked down with the drug addicts going through their withdrawals.  They are so sick: some pacing and shaking, others vomiting into garbage bins, there is crying and face picking and wails I will never forget. I can’t drink water without supervision and I am watched as I piss. I wonder if I could break through a window and jump out. I want to be outside in the freeway polluted air, smoking a Camel filter. I pretend I am doing research for a novel. I sit still and observe. I want my cell phone back. I want to go home. Dr. Joke asks me how I am doing and I tell him it’s not like I thought it would be. I joke that I am looking around for the table with Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito playing cards. He says those days are long gone. He asks me if I have ever thought of hurting myself or anyone else. I lie when I say no. I have to sign a contract that if they let me move to outpatient I won’t hurt myself or anyone else. I don’t tell him that I imagine jumping in front of every fast moving vehicle I see. When I am finally set free they put me in outpatient loony bin. I am escorted out by card carrying scrub wearing men.

I am assigned a therapist. They take me to him. He is nice. He already has my file. He asks me if I’ve ever been raped or molested. I ask him if I can go home early. He sighs and says it’s time for lunch. I get into the line and wait. Sugar and caffeine are forbidden. People nibble candy from their purses and pockets; fill water bottles with coke or coffee. It’s finally my turn. I take my cucumber sandwich and sit at a large table. They have little packets of mustard and mayo, but plastic knives and forks are forbidden. I find that amusing. The groups of people sitting around me are talking about work as I choke down my sandwich with warm water. They are comparing notes on patients and discussing how to care for the nonverbal ones. I realize I have sat down at the employee table and try to eat faster. I have 15 minutes until I have to be back from lunch. Smoking is prohibited. I throw away my paper plate .I walk through the door right in front of the woman at the front desk and exit. I walk until I am standing over the freeway overpass and smoke as much as I can. It would be a perfect place to jump. I imagine my body down there, splat.

When I return to the building, room 2, I sit at the table ready for the class to begin. Some of the people I had eaten lunch next to come in and take their seats. They are not employees after all, they are patients like me. There are other patients in the chairs surrounding me. Some have their mouths wide open and the saliva runs down their chins and onto their shirts. Some patients are so drugged their heads fall over and smack the table, startling me. The therapists try to talk to us in calm tones, asking the ones who keep nodding off to please try to stay awake.
There is a woman in the corner reading Twilight with her headphones on full blast. The therapists try to remove them and bring her out of the corner and into the group. It’s a no go. She needs the music to drown out the voices in her head. She said they are telling her to do bad things. I close my eyes and thank the sky that I am not that sick. There is an elderly woman who sits at the front of the class surrounded by bags. I find out over the course of weeks that she believes the feds are watching her and that they will come into her apartment and steal all of her belongings while she’s gone. That is why she must bag them up and bring them with her. Her diaper leaks sometimes. No one says anything about it. Psychiatric facilities involve a lot more body fluid than I’d imagined. I carry hand sanitizer.

When I do my one on one time with my therapist I ask him about all of the patients who are nurses, CNAs, LMTs etc. He says that those in the care giving industry are statistically number one on the list of people who seek help there, followed by teachers, and then insurance salesmen. I laughed, just about the insurance salesmen part. I ask him where and how the doctors go for treatment. He pauses for awhile before telling me that they go to hospitals outside of the one that they work for, and that they don’t identify themselves as doctors during the group sessions.
As the days go on I start to like the structure there. I start to worry about some of the patients when they don’t show up for a day or two. There is a woman with trickatilamania who sits across from me. Once, when I was speaking during group, she announced that my voice is a trigger for her. She asks them to stop me from speaking. I hate her suddenly; her head a pattern of long curly hair and softball sized bald spots. I over think why my voice would be a trigger. She cries a lot and lets the snot run free. There are tissues everywhere in the room. I don’t know where I fit in.

I encourage a few others I feel comfortable with to come out and smoke with me on the lunch break. After a few weeks more and more patients are there now. There is a tiny little 20 years old girl with two babies at home. She likes to spread out on the grass and close her eyes to the sun. She came to the treatment center from the hospital where she was treated for a suicide attempt. She wears the tiniest outfits, little halter tops and shorts, overall shorts with no top underneath. Her arms and legs are covered in scars; fresh bloody cuts over old purple skin where she had started to heal. She tells me that they have taken all of her meds away now that she had tried to OD. I want to hug her but I don’t. I have never seen someone with that many cuts on their body in my life. I talk to her about ways to take care of herself while taking care of her babies. I bring her a recipe for edible play dough she can make with her kids. She offers me a hook up on the opium poppy seeds she’s been buying. I just laugh.

There are a few patients who swap their pills with others, the smell of marijuana hangs in the air and that guy named Josh under the tree there is smoking heroin. I can’t imagine that a group of us who have decided to have our lunch outside goes unnoticed but it’s never mentioned inside the hospital. I crave coffee but since it’s forbidden inside the building I sometimes walk around to the little corner shop and buy a cup. It’s nasty but I chug it hot, just trying to get something into me to make it through the rest of the day. I wonder if I’ll ever be OK and what OK is.

There is a pregnant woman in the program. She dresses up each day in patterned thrift store dresses, stockings and heels. She makes no attempt to hide the track marks on her arms. She smokes Marlboro Reds and talks in the group about wanting to get sober before her baby comes. She is six months pregnant. She’s always asking people for things: a piece of paper, a pen, an Advil. She deals drugs to some of the other patients. I recognize it immediately because I used to be part of that world and I’d recognize the drug/money pass off anywhere.
I am standing alone during lunch on a sunny day, not far from where Josh sits with his rolled up tinfoil smoking heroin, when she approaches me. “Do you have a tampon?” she asks. I immediately dig into my purse and pull one out for her, but as I do I can’t help but look at her swollen stomach. “Are you bleeding? You should call your OB/GYN.”I say.  “Nah”, she answers, “This is my ninth pregnancy. I’ve had eight miscarriages already so I’m sure everything is fine.” She staggers away on her high heels, the backs of her feet covered in Band-Aids. I remind myself once again that I am not the doctor here. I am a patient. I try not to judge her, but I do.

With my insurance running out I begin to feel more pressure to be better. In a private one on one with my therapist he asks me if I am starting to feel the effect of the doctor doubling my Effexor. “I am beginning to think”, I spit out, “that this quest for happiness is bullshit.” He looks taken aback and he comments that I seem irritable. I look at him sitting there calmly and I tell him the conclusion I’ve come to, “I think that life is just a series of hrumph moments, sometimes punctuated by joy, or sadness, in varying degrees.”
He looks at me for awhile before smiling. “Tammy, you just described life.” It hadn’t occurred to me before that this could be true. I had imagined that most people were happy most of the time, with a few ho hums bits and grief only on occasion. “So how do I get there?” I wanted to go from the constant sadness to the ho hum. He didn’t really have an answer. When I left that day I didn’t know it would be for the last time. I made the decision the following morning that I had learned all that I could there. The medical bills piled up.

December 23, 2009: I sit in front of my psychiatrist. He asks me how I have been feeling and I try to explain that going through the physical therapy has brought up a lot of old memories and emotions. Taking the huge step of wearing a bathing suit and getting into the pool at the hospital every week was hard, but I did it. I tell him that I joined a book group and that I am now attending family functions instead of hiding at home. I think that this is all good news, but he wants to know what I have been doing about getting enrolled in college. “You’re not twenty anymore, but you’re not sixty either. You still have time.” I can’t explain to him that I want someone to take me there and stay by my side as I go through the process of enrollment. I can admit to him that I am scared that I am going to fail. “You’re not going to fail.” His response surprises me. I wonder where it comes from. Is it because he makes $300 per hour to talk to me? Is it because he been seeing me for over a year and he really believes that I can do it?

I know that our time is running short so I ask him the question that has been weighing heavily on my mind for most of my life. “Do I have to go through life feeling so incredibly sad all of the time?” He responds that it is not normal for someone to feel sad most of the time, as I do. He suggests adding another medication to my list, a tricyclic antidepressant, checking back with me in a month, and if I’m still feeling so sad adding a drug called Abilify. I want to ask him if he could prescribe something with a weight loss side effect as well as a daytime boost of energy, but the timing seems wrong. I thank him and leave.

I see my dad riding with me in the elevator down to the first floor. He’s not stuck at 57 this time. This is what I imagine he might have looked like had he lived. He has shrunk in size and has difficulty walking. I think about that and feel no rage against him. He would be approaching his 82 birthday. In my mind I want to believe in God and in a place where people who die go and spend eternity in peace. I don’t believe it. I want to believe that maybe my dad is now my guardian angel. Before I take the two hour bus ride home I go to the chapel in the hospital and sit in silence for awhile. I feel empty but calm. I feel stronger.
I imagined that 2009 would be the date on my death certificate. Now it feels like more of a rebirth. I have no idea what’s ahead but I feel ready.

' January 1st, 2010 at 12:11am 9 comments