Authors: Quinn Loftis,M Bagley Designs
“The main thing you need to know is that bipolar is very treatable. While it can take a while to find an effective combination of medicine
s, Tally can lead a normal life if she remains on her medication and does therapy as needed. She will likely have to have her medicine adjusted periodically over time. But as long as she takes care of herself, she will be able to manage the disease rather than the disease managing her.”
My parents are silent. Out of the corner of my eye I see my mom shift nervously. My father is motionless. I can’t tell what thoughts are running through their heads. I try not to shift in my own chair but the silence is beginning to make me uncomfortable. Finally, my mom speaks and her words rip wider the already bleeding hole inside of me.
“How long will she be this way?” She asks, as if I’m just an old carburetor that needs to be replaced.
I feel the familiar rush of anger that has been out of my control and grip the arms of my chair to keep from jumping up and telling them both to go to hell. I grind my teeth in an attempt to keep my mouth shut and try to take slow breaths like Dr. Stacey showed me.
Dr. Stacey sidesteps the questions and continues on with her explanation of my diagnosis. “We are beginning a combination of medicines that has proven to work well for other bipolar patients and we hope that it will help level her out. It takes several weeks for the medicine to get in her system so we won’t know for about a month if the medicines are going to help. My suggestion is that she stays here through the summer. She needs to learn how to deal with the emotions that make her feel out of control in a healthy way.” Her face grows serious. “I need you to understand that your daughter is not defective, she is not fragile or broken, though she may feel that way. What she needs most from you is for you to treat her normally. If you make her feel like there is something wrong with her then you will hinder her therapy.”
“I’m right here you know,” I grumble.
Dr. Stacey gives me a brief smile. She is very good at dealing with my surly attitude and I have to admit that there are days that I purposely try to provoke her, though I don’t understand why.
My mom turns to look at me. Her face is blank. Any emotion a mother might show for her daughter in such a difficult situation is absent and I feel it to the depths of my messed up soul.
“We love you,” her words are clipped and sound about as full of love as dried and wasted desert is full of water. “We expect you to do your best to fix this,” she continues, “so that another embarrassing situation doesn’t arise again.”
I nod, but I don’t speak. I know that if I do I will break down completely. I’m so angry and it’s so easy for others to become the object of my wrath, deserved or not.
When the meeting is over my parents both give me awkward hugs but there are no promises of to call and check in and no lies of understanding of how hard this must be for me. Mom passes on a letter from Natalie, my best friend, and tells me that she’ll be by later that week.
“Tally,” Dr. Stacey’s voice has me stopping before I can exit her office. I turn to look at her and I can instantly see that, as usual, she sees much more than I want her to.
“It’s okay to be angry; it’s what you do with that anger that matters.”
My eyes are empty. I know they are empty because I am empty. I am empty and nothing seems to fill the void. “Whatever you say, doc.”
Her lips purse as she gives me a solemn nod. “How about you take some time to yourself? You can spend time in your room, or anywhere else you can find some peace.”
I’m surprised by her suggestion because we aren’t typically allowed much alone time during the day. Doc says it’s because alone time fosters self-pity and depression. Personally, I think they just like watching the crazies interact with one another. It can be quite entertaining when a yelling match ensues over who was using the colored pencils first. Yes, I said colored pencils. Scary, I know.
I make it back to my room without incident. By the time I walk in my breathing is shallow and I’m biting my lip to keep back the tears. Tears make me angry because they are just one more reminder of how broken I feel. I shut the door behind me and slide to the cold, hard floor. I pull my long sleeves up and stare down at my arms. The cuts are almost all healed, but the scars left behind will always be a silent reminder that I am fragmented, unable to be solid and whole. I will never wear short sleeves again. I close my eyes and search for something inside me that I recognize, anything to remind me that I wasn’t always this way, I wasn’t always such a mess. I don’t even recognize myself anymore and every day I seem to fade even more. The worst part, the absolute worst part, is that I don’t understand why I feel this way. Why do I feel like the end of the world is one step away? Why does breathing hurt and why does despair seem to be my only friend? What has happened that could possibly make me feel so completely and utterly damaged. My parents haven’t always been so cold and distant. They were never the most affectionate people, but they weren’t so awful to cause me to have a complete and total meltdown of outrageous proportion.
I bang my head against the door as I begin to feel the constant rush of emotions that I don’t know how to restrain
, boiling up inside. I don’t want to be this person.
“WHY
?!” I finally give in and scream. “WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!” I’m rocking now and I know that I should stop. I’m telling myself to stop but I can’t. The flood gates are open and nothing will close them until I’m utterly exhausted. I thrust my hands into my hair and pull, feeling a slight measure of relief from the emotional agony as the physical pain briefly distracts my fragmented mind. I release my hair and begin to scratch my arms until blood is welling up and skin is gathering under my nails. I don’t care; I just don’t want to feel anymore, I don’t want to hurt anymore. I hear myself screaming incoherently, until all that’s left is whimpers.
As I roll to my side and curl up in a ball, I begin to shake as if the temperature had suddenly dropped and a raging blizzard is swirling around me. It’s then that I realize that I’m not broken. Broken implies that I might be able
to be fixed. No, I’m not broken. I’m shattered beyond repair, beyond hope. I let myself sink into the darkness and welcome the familiar comfort of knowing that I won’t live forever. Someday I will die and this torment will be over.
Mental Illness: a psychological pattern or anomaly, potentially reflected in behavior, that is generally associated with distress or disability, and which is not considered part of normal development of a person’s culture.
~Wikipedia
.
Mental Illness: FUBAR. ~Tally Baker
“I’m not going!” A shrill, familiar voice pierces my ears as I walk by Candy’s room. Candy runs through her usual morning routine, screaming the same thing over and over again as orderlies coerce her out the door and into the medicine line. Though the screaming can become quite painful
to the ears, I find it strangely comforting. In a world where things seem to be unreliable, unpredictable, and chaotic, Candy’s morning tantrums remained as constant as the sun rising. Therefore I treasured them—weird, I know.
As I walk past room after room, I hear patients, or clients as the good doctor likes to call us, begin to stir. Most are not in a hurry, after all where do they have to be? The med line, the cafeteria, group therapy; none of those things are going anywhere, so very few of them bothered to rush. No, those of us here at Mercy Psychiatric Facility are just trying to make it to the next minute, and sometimes even that feels like too much.
“Morning Ms. T.,” Zeke, one of the orderlies, smiles at me. Zeke is another reliable part of my messed up life at Mercy. Every morning, without fail, he’s waiting by the med window to say “
morning.”
He stopped prefacing it with the word
good
after the first greeting when I sort of screamed at him. “
What the hell could be so good about another day that I have to get through?!”
I admit that it was rude, and any person in their right mind would not yell at a large man over six feet tall, with hands big enough to crush a human skull, but then, when I arrived at Mercy I wasn’t in my right mind. Since then I have learned that though Zeke is massive, he is a big teddy bear. His skin is so dark that when he smiles his teeth nearly glow and his eyes are warm and soulful. He has a Mississippi accent that reminds me of blues and muddy water.
Despite my outburst, Zeke was unfazed. He just grinned at me with his kind eyes and nodded his head, as if he understand
s so much more of the world than I ever could. I haven’t yelled at him since, even on the worst of days.
It’s hard to believe that over two months have passed. Two and a half months ago I had been falling apart on the inside, and the brokenness had finally caught up with me, leaving me to explode onto anyone in my path.
“Morning Zeke,” I actually felt like smiling this morning and, as instructed, tried to grab that tiny victory. Dr. Stacey was continually harping on me to claim the tiny victories. I’m still wearing long sleeves, but then Rome didn’t fall in a day.
“The tiny victories are the ones that really matter,” she says over and over again. And deep down I know she’s right. Those victories over the everyday challenges that we face, things that a normal person wouldn’t even bat an eye at, are vital to someone like me; someone just trying to keep breathing.
I walked up to the med window and stared down at the nurse sitting behind the glass. Her
out of the bottle
red hair is piled up on top of her head like a basketful of bird nests. One too many layers of makeup coats her face. Sheila has been the med nurse at Mercy for ten years, or so Candy tells me. Candy also tells me that Sheila has been known to help herself to a Xanax from an inattentive patient’s pill cup. She smiles up at me as she hands me the little white paper cup that holds the key to my sanity. I take the cup and stare into it, counting the pills, not only to ensure myself that they are all present and accounted for, but also to ensure that the pills are indeed the ones that the doctor says that I am supposed to be taking. I have the colors of the pills memorized. If one of the colors is missing from the rainbow of drugs, Shelia and I will have a nice talk about how dumb it is to mess with a crazy person’s meds.
Five pills, they’re all there, staring silently back at me. I hold the cup to my lips and tip my head back, pouring all of them into my mouth. I chase the pills with a swig from the cup of water sitting on the counter and wash them down. I take one more sip before I open my mouth and allow Sheila to see that I h
ad indeed swallowed the pills. She nods and waves me on, already gathering the next patient’s medications. Out of the corner of my eye I see her hand quickly dart forward. I turn my head just in time to see her snag one of the little blue pills from one of the cups. I don’t think. I rarely do, I’m kind of impulsive like that. I slam my hands down on the counter right in front of her and begin yelling, “STRANGER DANGER, STRANGER DANGER!” Why those particular words popped into my head, we may never know. Shelia jumps and the pill falls from her hand. Her eyes shoot up to mine and I give a subtle shake of my head. The commotion behind me is keeping Zeke busy. Just a side note, if you ever need a distraction in a mental hospital, just scream, for some reason it’s like a howl to a pack of wolves and the crazies all feel the need to join in. I lean forward close to the opening of the window and I hold her gaze. “If I ever see you doing that again I’ll cut off your thumbs so that you have no way to pluck one of those little pills from the cups.” Her face pales and I try to feel bad that I’ve sort of come across as a little psycho, but then I remember that I’m in a mental hospital, so psycho is sort of expected.
After I fill my tray with my standard breakfast, peanut butter and butter toast, I take my usual seat in the far back corner of the cafeteria. I’m sitting for less than a minute when the chair across from me is pulled out from the table. Candy plops down across from me with a wicked grin on her wrinkled face. Her light blue eyes dance with humor and childlike delight.
“You got out of it again didn’t you?” I ask with a smile of my own.
Candy nods at me victoriously. “I told them from the beginning I’m not doing group therapy. I have no need to pour out the ugly details of my messed up life so that they can all foam and slobber at the taste of my wretchedness.”
“Gee, tell us how you really feel Candy,” I tease.
She gives me a confused frown, “I just did. I would use more colorful language but I’ve been warned by the doc that if I don’t tone down my potty mouth then I will be losing privileges.” She lets out a humorless snort. “I pointed out that there are a few things wrong with their way of thinking. First off, who the hell uses the term
potty mouth
to refer to cussing and what privileges do they honestly think we have in this nut house?”
I have to laugh. Only Candy could get away with talking like that to the doctors and nurses and whoever else came into the line of fire. You see, she is a permanent fixture at MPF; she has been deemed by the courts as unfit for society. As such, she gets away with a lot more than the others do. It’s not like they have a whole lot of options as to where they can send her, no other facility would likely take her.