I didn’t know that I was going to scare the doctor who had met me at age fourteen and seen me through some of the most traumatic, vulnerable and victorious moments of my life: childbirth.
I wasn’t able to stop crying; I couldn’t explain why I was crying. I was mortified by my loss of control. . .”I just want to die” I said . . .which might be something that a teenager can say in a dramatic moment to a friend or your parent ( who would just probably roll their eyes and tell the teenager to just get on with things). However, my doctor’s response was rather different.
“I think you should go talk to Dr. So and So” she said. She gave me the paperwork to go see him and I just signed it without looking at it very carefully. I was a snotty mess and at the time we lived in a small town just minutes from the “big” town that the doctor was in and I knew I was in danger of being seen by someone I knew. This meant I was in a hurry to get into that new doctor’s office.
I saw but did not comprehend the security doors that we had to buzz to get into. Thank God Hubby was with me because as soon as they closed behind me and I realized I was trapped, I began to freak out inside. “Promise me you won’t leave me! Promise me!”
His office was located inside the pysch ward. Snippets of that ward stood out to me: the messy board games in one area, missing vital parts. The people who moved slowly, unknowingly around the furniture. These were people like the ones I had known in nursing homes, in the group home for mentally ill people that I had worked in as a college student. I did NOT belong here. This was NOT me. I felt I would die if I was left in this place.
Also, the receptionist ( who we did not have to talk to) who was flipping through a magazine and looking bored was someone I’d gone to high school with! I knew who she’d first slept with. I did not want her to see me like this. I did not want to be this person who needed to be in a pysch ward. Let ME OUT.
The doctor was small and in retrospect, I think I knew him from before, from a class I took at the local community college. Maybe he recognized me, too, but it’s hard to say.
He reminded me in that moment of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. He was terribly twitchy. It was not good to feel like I was placing my life in the hands of someone incompetent. All I wanted was to GET AWAY. I composed myself and did my level best to appear sane.
I felt like I was on trial. Speak well and you get to go home. Mess up and you will rot in this place.
Doctor So and So had to leave for a bit so an intern came in. She seemed quite sane and quite nice. I have always been good at small talk and so we talked for sometime and the whole time we were talking I was sending her these little messages “Look. You and I. We are the same.”
I don’t know how or why it happened, but they did decide to send me home. But first I was to stop at the pharmacy.
I wish I could tell you that Dr. So and So was a brilliant man and that he knew exactly which meds would turn back time and fix the fracture in my brain. But that’s not what happened.
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