November 6, 2008: hospital fragments

These are fragments from last year, excerpts I’m hesitantly, gingerly, sifting through now. Perhaps they will be part of a new creative endeavor; perhaps not.

I’m glad they exist. I’m glad you exist. I’m glad I’m still here too. Happy New Year.

November 6, 2008
hospital journal excerpts

Three days ago, there was a river. Wet, slick rocks. Blood on a hand. Cold skin. Why, I can’t say.

I’m not there now. No one is speaking of it.

I want someone to tell me what happened. They want me to tell them what happened. Stalemate.

This is where you go.

First, to document. Documenting will need to be the anchor.

Use this time to improve printing, handwriting, cursive with a shaking hand.

Twice I say: “Do you have albuterol? I have asthma, too.”

“Too”: italics, mine. No one seems to hear me.

So this is the cuckoo’s nest.

If you are reading this, hello! Hello! I write because the hospital-blare TV will make me crazy(er) than I can make myself.

Breathe.

Never my forte.

My roommate, Pat, goes home tomorrow. She is elderly and worried about her dog, Sashi, who has been shut up in a kitchen with linoleum for lap. Neighbors come to feed, walk her, says Pat, but Sashi is used to cuddles, love. Of course. Pat eyes me kindly if battily. At “community swap” I sit beside her, and she smiles.

All, so broken. A boy, Matt, who smoked in the ER, can’t quit, he says. W offers popcorn, looks like a tic-y, rocking version of my father. I fear him, then pity him, then pity myself, then think of asking him for popcorn.

Doug takes in. “Intake.” Sharp intake of breath. I want my bed, my babies; he wants to talk “Women Are From Mars” or whichever planet. He is a Parrothead, he says. We go over Things. He says Synapses a lot, goes SSRI 101 on my newbie ass. About life being what we make of it. Life is balance, do we choose the shit? What’s behind our triggers? I would be bored to death if I weren’t terrified.

“Knowledge is power,” says Doug from across the desk. Pink radiator, crimson chairs. Every room, we must lock in, lock out, be locked in, be locked out.

I swallow my urge to flee. Will my roommate snore as she dreams of her dog? Will I sleep? With 15-minute-interval bed checks?

To get my meds I must go to Paul’s Willy Wonka window. Conspiratorially he says—not unkindly—”You can see…there’s a wide range of people here.”

“Yes,” I say, not unkindly, I hope, “there is a lot…of humanity.”

Broken. Left on shelves, then of their own accord or of others’, fallen. I am fallen.

Someone is talking to me again. I don’t know who.

“Do you want the rabbi to come?”

“No, but my ex-husband might recommend it,” I quip weakly.

Narrowed eyes. Tough crowd.

Then, I think: Yes, I might like to see the rabbi. Could he punch a sacred hole in this, in the anger that separates us?

[....]

Why do [they] seem angry when I say I don’t know if I can make it? I want to make it. Moxie, we know I have. Had. But to weep until eyes swell, and heart shrivels? This lurching heart keeps banging and bleeding and can’t find home.

I want to find home. Help me find home and make it safe with me and I will never leave it.

Tonight, home is a hospital bed beside a sweet elderly lady named Pat who misses her beloved Sashi. I could do worse.

The fear is the night before the structure begins. I am unmoored. My story is unknown, even to myself. My pants, my underwear, stink revoltingly. I have little of my beloved toiletries. This humbles. I am wearing disturbingly blue XXL hospital scrub pants with my gray hoodie. The fabric is coarse.

I don’t know what [they] are telling the girls.

[....]

There is ice cream. Popcorn, snacks…so many crackers. This surprises me.

A note. “Ally,” they wrote. She called while I was in with Doug. I said, no, not now, thank you. Not now. It is enough for me to know that she called. It is good.

I wear a green wrist band that says ALLERGY. Lamictal, it devoured my hair. Geodon, my heart pumped too hard. Trazadone, the acid trip I never had.

Oh, I could tell drug stories if only I could remember them.

[....]

Waiting to be admitted, my headaches, tears, require a rigid body curled uncomfortably on emergency room gurneys. “Who died on this one, I wonder?” I said to Mom. Death is an easy, ready friend, happy to have a cameo wherever it can take it.

[....]

I took my medicine at the Willy Wonka doors, my swallows watched by Paul. I feel some sleep pressing at my eyes. Surprise! There are still surprises—a possible slumber in a room with a stranger? I would have said it was impossible. Miracles.

I miss my babies. I have moxieful [?] to pass on if I can shore up. I love you, baby girls. I baptize you in my tears without pomp and prayer. It is true and real, saltwater like the saltwater that propelled you from something within me to something without. My sad belief tonight in this foreign fluorescent land is that there exists no unconditional love, save mother for child. Father for child.

[....]

Show me a heart laid bare and ready to work. I am waiting.

November 7, 2008
Friday, they say

I have been taking the wrong amount of Trileptal. Oops. Not enough. When did I decide to do that and why? Now I stumble more asleep than awake. Woman, interrupted.

[....]

Talked to S on the designated patient phone. I tried to reassure her. Mommy’s medicines need fixing. Mommy will be all right. The “I love you’s” while W hacks and hacks behind me (“THAT’S NO BULL” says his shirt), strangling, the sound of a mastodon in death throes. So dramatic! Yet that is what comes to this mind. Mastodon! Cave people!

At 10 am we sit through “community meeting.” I am humbled. We say goodbye to Pat and Matt. There are no community issues. (Are there ever? No one speaks.)

Today, group. Group, group, must go to group, and a psychiatrist comes. Three kings.

I have no coat for the mandatory walk. Can I refuse the walk? I am still a Level One, cannot leave, I find. “We have to see about getting your level changed,” says someone, “so you can walk outside.”

“I don’t have a coat here,” I say.

“We have extras,” she says.

Trust me:

You do not want to wear someone else’s coat,
parade the premises escorted,
shaking, shuffling,
in a coat that is not yours.

[....]

One woman laughs, barks, through her lunch, as if the empty wheelchair beside her is home to a friend, a wiseacre, a real crackup. I’ll have what she’s having.

“Tell my mom I need clothes, toothpaste, a toothbrush,” I tell A on the phone. Hard to say what is needed. “Need” is a word that means close to nothing anymore. You slip from want to almost want to yearn and back to want, but you dare not need. That got you here in the first place.

[....]

November 9, 2008

W tells me about Suzy, his girlfriend of thirty years. He’s missed her birthday, he tells me. I say she won’t be mad but he says he feels bad anyway. Cigarettes, he says, I’ll give her cigarettes. When I suggest wrapping paper, a red bow, he says he can’t afford it. I suggest stealing from the art room, wrapping the carton in construction paper, writing a love note on top, the maraschino cherry.

He says he can’t write what he wants to say, not in his own words. The words escape him, he has terrible handwriting, he can’t spell, he tells me, head bobbing, hands shaking like machinery, threatening to knock over his two Styrofoam cups of coffee (“when I sleep I’m dead, I need two coffees to wake”).

I tell W he can tell me what to say, give me the words for Suzy and I will set them down carefully, nothing broken. He refuses, does not like this go-between idea at all. “She would want it from ME,” he says. “She would KNOW.”

He tells me what he would write to her if only his hands, his spelling mind, would cooperate:

“I see beauty in you.”

I have managed to keep my cool this far, Day Four, and yet this simple sentiment sends a flood of tears to my eyes.

“W,” I say, choking, “better I write it down for you, no? Better something she can tuck under her pillow than nothing, than no words of yours?”

No. She would only want it in his scrawl, he insists.

I gulp back tears. I give up, I tell him he is a very good man. [....] But W says he is a drifter.

A drifter, but he always comes back to Suzy.

I see beauty in you.

[....]

“Is that Nurse Ratchet?” asks A yesterday.
That’s like saying “Macbeth”
inside a theatre, I point out.
I am helpful that way.

Today Nurse Ratchet wears a bold aqua
cardigan sweater in contrast to her
customary frown. She surveys the meal.

Her clamped lips express general
disapproval and I hang my head low
as I wheel my new roommate, C,
into the main room for breakfast.

I sit with W
and try not to give a fuck
that my “caretaking”
“false,” “happy”
behavior is being
documented by Nurse Ratchet.

Humanity, humanity
is my mantra, and is
a better side than sausages.
What is the sense of a group
setting if we sit poking
congealed oatmeal with
blunt utensils, saying
nothing to anyone?

I will not see the asylum
without seeing the people.
Who speaks to W—
“I see beauty in you”—
when he is not here?

Would I have seen him,
on the street? Crossed
the street? Looked away?

Who says a kind word to
the young man who
fashioned himself a
noose from tube socks
last night—then wrote
his first poem as he
waited for the orderlies
to prepare his restraints?

Who allows a hug that
takes more than it gives?
I cringe as C braids my hair.

C, so full of what she calls
love and God and Amy Grant,
yet no daughters come to
visit, and my mention of
writing letters to my own
girls brings her to tears?

[....]

The chairs are hard, vinyl, printed with sea shells as if vacation, surf, is just around the corner for all of us. But there is nothing soft here but the flesh and dragging limbs of the inmates.

Not dramatic: locked in, locked down, unable to powder a nose (mirror glass), pull pants up (no belts). Inmate: everything is potential death, self-harm. Windows are not barred (risk of heads grotesquely wedged?) but screened strangely and locked. Keys for everything. No Purell to dissolve the germs of W’s cough, his sputum flying, his microbes blown on the unlucky Monopoly dice. Who would drink Purell?

The answer: some. And that number is enough.

[....]

I pick listlessly at the books on the shelves in the alcove. Messages from chance, my usual folly, magnified by my setting.

“Zeno asserted that Achilles would never catch the tortoise because with his first step he could only arrive at the point where the tortoise was, and with his second step only at the point to which the tortoise had moved while Achilles was taking his first step, etc.”

I wonder if Zeno had a point.

I haven’t caught the tortoise yet.

“What are you writing?” asks a blonde someone—a nurse, I think.

“I’m opening books at random and writing the first thing I see,” I reply. Why start lying now?

“Oh! Well! I suppose some people do that…think they can find…signs….”

It is clear from her tone that she is talking to a patient, not quite a person. This is the hardest part. Being seen.

Oddly and not, it is W who makes the most sense to me. We talk all the time, which perplexes the nurses.

“They think I’m crazy,” I whisper, stage-whisper (I like to try to use my MFA whenever possible since I’m still leasing it). He laughs, shakes, coughs, spits, nods, thumps his feet.

“Do you hear voices?” I ask him. “My shampoo and conditioner sang to me. They were mean. I got rid of them and bought friendlier hair products.”

W laughs again, this time from the gut. He holds his trembling hand to his belly, says, “I don’t…mean…to…offense. No offense.”

“I know,” I say. “I know. You’re not laughing at me. It’s just all funny. This being alive.”

“You make me laugh so hard,” he says, still holding his hunched belly, as if in pain, as if laughter and pain must always entwine. I think maybe they must.

[....]

I go back to my book-searching.

“A terrible thing has happened. No one has died, but the blow is severe…perhaps our most important job is to search the aftermath for nuggets of preserved goodness…We must take a look at all we have.”

But I prefer the next quote I find:

“How am I getting along with my dishes?”