The doctor feels sick now as she recalls those events. Now she fears her past is part of this illness. Those thoughts and actions that were her proudest moments, the organizations that offered her awards and accolades, the papers that got high marks—those were just the consequence of neurotransmitters being sucked in and spat out in the wrong ratios. It is that simple. Something we can fix with around 10 pills a day, pills that will make the doctor better but will make the doctor sick. What about the doctor’s sense of humor? What about her energy? What about her wild dancing and her disinhibition? What about her ability to be the life of a party even when she is stone cold sober and everyone else has had 4 or 5 drinks? What about her accomplishments and her intensity? What about her ever-present belief that the world’s people are all connected, and she is to play a small but important, even vital, role in bringing them together? Sick, sick, all sick.
As a patient in the psychiatric hospital, the doctor would dance sometimes. She would be dancing, twirling, laughing, making others laugh. Then, on the same day, she would burst into tears and sit in her room, blanket over head, turning over the possibilities for a painless but sure death. She didn’t have much time to think on it because soon it would be time to line up for medicine.
Next … it’s time for her office hours, to reassure other patients, to pretend she is a doctor. But soon enough … the shrink beckons her for the daily session, and she is reminded of his infinite wisdom and her relative ignorance. She nods and agrees with some of what he says, believes it even when she is talking to him in his little room, but not later, when she is back in bed, nighttime, waiting for nightmares. The psychiatrist says that her frantic sleepless days before Christmas, the ones where her friends couldn’t understand why she couldn’t even sit down for lunch (“You’re going to have a stroke!” a less tactful one declared), the ones where she feigned listening to someone talking while in her head she entertained a disorganized, discordant symphony of thoughts trying to hammer out a requiem, a death march … those days were a “mixed state.” Mumbo jumbo. Nonsense. She tells herself she is just moody. At least now there are moments of heady delicious delight, no matter if they are brief.
So the doctor is improving! And she has reason to doubt their boxes and their labels, as she reads on this illness in rare moments when her mind is still, and she finds there is controversy surrounding every diagnosis and delineation. And so that is fuel for her disapproving, disbelieving fire. All of this is just an expression of eccentricity, she tells herself, and these lousy doctors don’t appreciate someone “as brilliant and beautiful as me.” But later, watching the nurses as they fill out their assessments of the day, she wonders how sick they think she really is, and she hates herself and this lunatic frenzy and she is embarrassed and ashamed.
If she does not believe she is sick, then she has to blame herself, and that hurts. But she can handle that pain and that bleeding, for she alone can suffer pain and bleeding like no others, and that is part of what makes her beautiful. But she is not sick …. According to them, the doctor is sick every day and so she stays in the hospital. She retorts, “Of course that is what they say. Isn’t that their job, to call me crazy?” And then, “If I was not crazy, wouldn’t that put them out of business?”
Nightmares have tormented the doctor since she was a child. But lately they are more twisted. They pull her out of the safety of the day such that she plunges, screaming, down, head-first, into black night, afraid. Some of her medicines exacerbate nightmares. In one awful dream, she is a patient, then a doctor, then a patient again, and she keeps waking up inside the dream to be transformed into doctor or patient, one then the other; it never stops. So first she is giving medicines, then she is being intubated, then she is finishing rounds, then she is enduring electroconvulsive therapy. Finally she drops out of the dream as if from the sky, and she is shivering and afraid.