The doctor is sick.
Her feet are swollen, as if her heart is failing. But it is strong and beating faster than usual, as she runs her fingers through her hair. Her vision gets blurry sometimes, and she has to hold onto something when she stands up or she will fall down. The doctor is sick because she is taking medicine to make her well. Lithium, Seroquel, Depakote. Mood stabilizer, antipsychotic, mood stabilizer. Two pills, 4 pills, 3 pills. Plus a multivitamin because Depakote can cause her hair to fall out. Skinny and fat bottles, next to her bed so she won’t forget. As if she would forget.
The doctor is sick because 3 weeks ago tomorrow she made a concrete plan to take her life. She wrote 5 letters, the longest to her sweet and supportive husband. She put some pills and some alcohol and the letters in her backpack and made it to the front stoop before she sat down, her heart breaking, and called her best friend.
The doctor is sick. Sicker now that she is home. As a patient in the psychiatric hospital, she was the doctor, and she held “office hours” (24 hours a day) to answer questions about GERD, schizophrenia, and stomachaches. This made her feel a lot less sick. Everyone said she was clever. She is only a medical student and offers a disclaimer with her advice (along with the suggestion to see a “real doctor”). But to most of the patients she is a doctor. And she feels the calling to be a doctor. Deep down inside herself she feels she was born to be a doctor.
In the psychiatric hospital, she felt alive when she gave advice. It made her feel she was helping people. She lives for people. And it distinguished her from the rest of them. They were her friends and she shared illness with them, but somehow she was different. Sometimes, this gave her comfort. Other times she held onto them as anchors in the madness they were swimming through together. Those times she found comfort in being the same as them. Exactly the same.
The doctor is sick. On the discharge sheet, 18 days after admission, her acceptance of this fact (“judgment and insight”) was judged “fair.” This is because the doctor does not believe in her diagnosis. She does not want to be sick. She wants to be the person she was before—minus those highs and lows. She would trade in the agitated anxious state that caused her to drop out of her pediatric rotation. She would trade in the days spent in bed in college, while everyone seemed to be having fun. She would trade in the Google searches of “suicide methods.” She would trade in the panic that caused her to stop her rotation, and therefore caused her to stop playing with the pediatric patients in the playroom at night, after her clinical duties were finished. In the playroom she was not a doctor or a medical student. She was just someone’s playmate. She held the little hand of her little patient and she felt like she was exactly where she was supposed to be. She knew she belonged when she helped her patients forget they were sick.
The doctor is sick. She is drinking hard lemonade, even though it makes the dizziness worse. The doctor has a swollen face and swollen fingers and her wedding ring does not fit anymore. She has gained 10, no, 15 lb because of the medicine, and she knows her husband has noticed. The doctor knows that she has enough pills beside her bed to end her life, but she also knows she is calm now. She is calm in a way she has not felt for as long as she can remember. She thinks back on college, on that 2-month period when she slept until 2 PM, and got out of bed only to smoke marijuana and change the CD on her stereo. She thinks back on the way she pulled the blanket over her head and she remembers that she wanted to be dead.
The doctor remembers writing her treatises later that year on the meaning of life, of the world, of peace and joy and love, on her desktop computer. She wrote and wrote and wrote, as she often did, and sleep did not seem very necessary or desired. She felt she was more connected to the world than anyone else on the planet. She felt more intensely than anyone else on the planet. She ran 5 miles a day, 15 miles on Saturdays. Tears streamed down her face as she bicycled back from her volunteer work with the elderly. She felt so much love and she felt so different from everyone else. Tears came again when she read literature; she felt alive with politics and meaning and urgency. Her heart pounded and she felt words run through her mind that told her to keep working, harder, and that she was capable of more efficient, more emotive, more effective, more productive work than anyone else on the planet. She had more insight than anyone else on the planet. But all of this was directed to help other people, and so she was connected to the whole world.