At precisely eight am a nurse knocks on a door and I am awoken.
“Doing alright in here? We’ll bring you breakfast in about an hour.”
A few minutes later the lights brighten andd I start to cry because time is regulated the same way on flights across the International Date Line, triggering memories of Japan, of a day when I and the other girl on the exchange skipped school to walk up a thousand rocky steps in the rain to visit a Shinto shrine on top of a hill. I wasn’t haunted then.
You guessed it, I’m back at the HSC’s emergency room.
It turned out that Josh was right, going to the bar was a bad, bad plan. I was too drunk to stand by midnight so Penner and Tammy took me back to their place and put me to bed. A couple of hours later when the booze wore off I got up, only to find that Penner and Tammy were gone, back at the bar after disposing of their nutcase friend. I was furious, made some random phone calls, one to Josh I guess because he grabbed the pair of scissors from my hands.
Yesterday I discovered that cutting myself works almost as good as cough syrup at making the ghosts go away for a little while, and I carved a lovely cut into my left arm before I was so rudely interrupted.
Next came the screaming, “I want to die! I don’t care, anything is better than this!”, the 911 call, the hospital.
Once there I try to lengthen the cut with the oxygen valve on the wall of the room somebody has hidden me away in, I try to break the glass window that looks into the rest of the ER with my foot. A nurse threatens to put me in restraints. I’m smart enough to avoid getting “violent” again.
And so I’m fed through the system one more time. Only this time I know I’m going to die if something isn’t done, if something doesn’t change. Josh knows it too. The system doesn’t care. We arrive at the hospital at four am. At ten am I’m finally seen by a psychiatric nurse.
“Okay, we’ll see what the doctor has to say.”
Cold mashed potatoes and green jello. At one pm the doctor sees me.
“Okay, I think we’ll pass you along to psych.”
At three pm the woman who will decide my fate walks into the room and I try to explain that I’m not going to survive outside of a hospital.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any beds.” The cunt is smiling as she says this.
I burst into tears and Josh starts yelling at her.
“Okay, I’m going to make a few phone calls, I’ll call another psychiatrist and come back.”
I am going to DIE. This is how the story ends, prepare yourself for the anticlimax.
I could have flown to Japan in eleven hours. Anna is in Japan right now, backpacking on her Russian mobster Father’s dime.
Anna isn’t sick.
And just when I’m about to lose all faith in the system, not that I had any to begin with, the psychiatrist returns to tell me that there is a bed after all, at the Victoria hospital, the hospital where my baby brother died. Josh and I both start crying as a wave of relief washes over us, and I wonder what skeletons will come walking out of daddy’s closet when he drives us there, when he’s forced through the doors of the ER on the other side of town.
Somehow he manages to unearth some of mine instead. Of course he does. But the story sounds a little different when it exits his lips,
“’Don’t cry mommy.’ And she said to me, she’s a little angel, and she realized that she had so much to live for!”
Another round of tears, and make mine a double. Is this really going to change things? Will I become human again? Will daddy? Will Josh?
I hope that this is the beginning of the end, but know that it is only the end of the beginning as I kiss the two men goodbye.
After another three health care professionals ask for my life story and I’m given a tour of Unit Six – lounge with television, pool table, ping pong; kitchen from which patients may help themselves to food; linen closet; quiet lounge with books we can borrow or where we may quietly visit with others – I am left alone, in the silence of a private room that overlooks the city, so tiny and so huge, the strip-mall capital of the world surrounding me and crushing me. I’m on the inside now. It really is very quiet.
August 22, 2005
Time isn’t the only thing that’s regulated at the hospital, specifically at Unit Six. I write because I’m not allowed to have a cigarette for another half hour.
After a fitful sleep I meet new doctor #4209, Dr. Derocquigny, let’s call him Dr. D. He wears his hair in an impressive comb-over and black, wire glasses sit on the tip of his nose. His office is a throwback to the sixties with dark wood and blue plush chairs, confidential notes unscrupulously strewn about a desk. I give him the jist of things, and things I’ve forgotten to tell other doctors or things they didn’t bother to ask about, like how every time I look at a clock and it’s 11:11 of 11:25 I have to look at the clock an odd number of times, the lower the number the better, and wish that Josh and me will be together forever and always, that he won’t leave, before reciting some other nonsense, an affirmation that I made up when I was a kid.
“So there’s a common theme here – abandonment.”
“Yup.”
“Your Mother abandoned you by dying and your Father essentially abandoned you by not allowing you to grieve her death.”
I nod my head.
“Lots of chronic issues that will have to be kept watch over on a long term basis, and some personality issues, and you’re very depressed.”
“Yeah, I woke up feeling awful again today.”
“Yes. And you’ve been on the Celexa for a year. Have you noticed a change?”
“Honestly? No.”
“Okay, I’m going to give you a test dose of Effexor, 37.5 mg. I find more people respond to it, even though Celexa is my favourite SSRI. Different things work for different people.”
“Okay.” I don’t tell him I already gave myself a 400 mg test dose of Chris’ Effexor when he stayed at our apartment.
“And your other doctor, Dr. Kettner, is worried about you losing weight.”
“I know, but I swear, I don’t have an eating disorder! I have everything else, but no eating disorder. I used to try to make myself puke to get rid of the way I was feeling in high school but I couldn’t.”
“Trying to purge yourself of bad feelings. Uh-huh. Bad feelings aren’t kept in your stomach.”
He manages to make me crack a tiny smile.
“And how did you sleep?”
“Not well.” I’m not even lying, trying to get pills.
“Did you have trouble getting to sleep or trouble staying asleep?”
“Both.”
“Okay, I’m going to add some things at bedtime. One to help you fall asleep ad one to help you stay sleeping.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, we’ll see how you do.”
He opens the door for me to leave. Three new pills. Things are looking up.
* * *
I attend the day groups for lack of anything else to do and my inability to fall asleep. I’m handed a photocopy of some self-help book and led through a breathing exercise – “Imagine you’re lying on a beach, feel the warm sand…”
I’m there for a minute but then I’m back here, staring into a cup of pills. I open my eyes. It’s time for a smoke, but not for another freaking half hour! I sit in the lounge and watch “Days of Our Lives” with a few of the other girls here. I haven’t seen the brainless soap opera for seven years but the plot hasn’t changed. Then another nurse whisks me away to recite my life story, just one more time, and she tries some good ol’ positive reinforcement on me, telling me how strong I am and how much I’ve accomplished. Everyone here is trying to compensate for the things daddy never said but I still feel like ripping my arms open. Sometimes even validation can be invalidating.
When I’m finally let out for a cigarette I meet my neighbour, Angeline, who just happens to be a short, Filipino Angelina Jolie circa “Girl, Interrupted”. She bums two smokes and talks about how crazy everyone else here is and tries to get me to give her bus fare to break out of this place.
Naturally I have an easier time talking to her than anyone else here, not to say that they aren’t pleasant, with the exception of Michelle, who prances around Unit Six in a fuzzy halter top and fuck-me boots, trying to pick up the guys here and casting evil looks at the girls. Aside from her I’ve met Kristen, a single mother about my age who almost did herself in Saturday night; Nicole, also a single mom, bipolar, with a tan as dark as her thick brown hair; Kari-Ann, also bipolar, with short blonde hair and a nose ring like mine; Tammy, who is trying to get rid of the “monsters in her head”; Louise, an elderly lady that hands out compliments and speaks endlessly about gerbils as we smoke; Donald, probably a schizophrenic, who says “Hi Jen” a little too loudly every time I pass him in the hall; John, who wears a Hawaiian print shirt and disrupts the groups with lame jokes; and Avi, an older East Indian man who tells me I have a beautiful face. The conversation with them feels sketchy and forced, and I start handing out compliments too – we all do – to fill in the gaps.
* * *
Josh comes to visit and drop off some of my things and we scream at each other outside for a good half hour before he comes up to my room. Actually, I was the only one screaming. He wants me to get off the clonazepam while I’m here, but I feel like emptying the contents of my arms for God’s sake. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I leave a note for Dr. D. Our goodbye is cut short when the bus pulls up early. Damn, I’m scared of losing him. So fucking scared. Is it my fault that I just eat whatever pills come in the McDonald’s ketchup cup? Seroquel, clonazepam, risperidone, and lorazepam this time. At least I’ll be sleeping tonight. The moon shines bright yellow and soon it will be fall.
August 23, 2005
Day two. Time passes slowly here, of maybe it’s just me, being still for the first time, or the lack of change, fantasizing about sharp objects of all shapes and sizes. I sleep through the morning, through the psychotherapy group in progress across the hall that I was supposed to attend. When I crawl out of bed Angeline is waiting for me, waiting to stir the fucking pot. She sneaks behind the reception desk and grabs my smokes and a lighter and we go outside forbiddenly. She talks about jobs she’s had in the past – modelling, nursing, banking, and the list goes on. I don’t know whether or not to believe a word of it and she’s starting to make me feel nervous and manic, like the girl who took things a little too far. Luckily Kristen comes around a little and joins us after a while, sitting on the grass facing a cold beer store. She invites me to join her in listening to some CDs when we go back upstairs, noticing my weariness and Angeline’s randomness.
Back inside I see Dr. D. Mental illnesses are divided into two categories – Axis one, which includes depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia; and Axis two, which encompasses personality “issues”. Dr D. thinks I have Axis one depression in addition to BPD and starts feeding me more and more Effexor. He shoos me out of his office again, “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Lunch is vegetarian stew that looks more like a vegetarian’s barf, but I don’t go hungry – some of the others donate portions of their meals to the fake vegetarian trying to avoid mystery meat. After lunch it’s time for arts and crafts, I’ve never been good at the crafts bit. We’re supposed to make animals by gluing golf balls together and painting them, adding googly eyes, etc. I am making a little replica of Peter when a pair of scissors goes missing causing the activity to come to a halt. When I finally finish a perfect little cat I try to carry it to my room on a paper plate and it crumbles in my hands, painted black golf balls fall and dance about the floor. It’s time for a nap.
* * *
I wake up to a phone call from daddy. He doesn’t mention finances once. Now I know what it takes to have some kind of “normal” relationship with the man I share half my DNA with – a stay at a mental institution. I wish this bothered me more, I wish hearing him talk to me the way he did when I was all he had made me cynical rather than eager – and hopeful. I know that caring voice, that ideal father fasçade will disappear after I leave here, when budgeting and good grades and not smoking become real again, when he’s no longer scared of losing me is when he will.
After I talk to him and then Josh I spend most of the evening talking to Donald, who I find out is an amazing man. I find out he constantly listens to headphones not because he’s a schizophrenic, although he probably is, but because he loves music, especially the Beatles. We swing our legs like the arm of a metronome as we speak, trying not to dissociate. He tells me about his youth, about living in Osborne village and travelling around Europe in a camper with his sweetheart in 1975, about Vatican City and sex on the beach in Greece. This man makes me think that life is probably worth living. I know everyone here has a story that’s probably more interesting than mine, and I can learn something from each of them. When I consider that the women from Donald’s past would probably be afraid of him now I feel a great sense of injustice.
August 24, 2005
I wake up at five am and stumble down the hallway, past the linen closet, past the workout room, past the patient phone, to fetch some pain meds from the night nurse. I have my period – at least I’m not pregnant, I’ve been too stuck to renew my prescription for birth control pills for at least two months, I guess because they don’t change the way I feel.
I realize my logic is absurd.
I shuffle back to my room after downing a T3 and try desperately to sleep, turning from my right side to my back to my left side to my back and so on. On Unit Six we wait all day for bedtime and it seems another day has begun. Five fucking am. Every little while I hear my door open and feel a flashlight being pointed at my head. At one point I think I hear someone in my room, scribbling down notes about me on a clipboard, but when I open my eyes I realize it’s just the cooling vent making strange noises. The pills that used to knock me out for twelve straight hours now only provide sleep for a few. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the constant bed checks, who knows. When I do fall back asleep a P.A. announcement resounds immediately, “Breakfast trays are here!” So much for sleep.
I put on some clothes, sort of brush my teeth, and go to the kitchen to eat a banana and a stale bagel with marmalade on it. I hate marmalade. Then I sit in the lounge to watch the news. Apparently Brad Pitt eating at some pretensious restaurant in Calgary is news. For fucks sake. Fifteen minutes until smoke time. I figure I’ll go back to my room again and try to clean my nose ring, another simple task I’ve been neglecting, but I’m stopped short – the doctor will see me now.
“How are you feeling today?”
“Pretty much the same.”
“Your urge to cut?”
“It’s there – I was looking down at the knife on my breakfast tray…” Oh sweet, sweet knife with serated edge.
“I’m going to give you another dose of Effexor.” I’ve already had 150 mg at breakfast. A little more for tea sounds fine with me.
“I have these obsessive thoughts about knives, about plunging a knife deep into my chest…”
Dr. Wakeman used to interpret these fantasies as a desire to perform surgery on myself, to littlerally “get the weight off my chest”; Dr. D. approaches the matter from a less Freudian and more medical point of view, and we talk about obsessive thoughts versus impulsive thoughts. My thoughts have drifted into the realm of obsession. I bitch about daddy for a while and leave the office just in time to join the others for a cigarette, two cigarettes. Chain-smoking is the rule around here, and at ten am I’m being forced to participate in the psychotherapy group. I’d rather eat nails, shards of glass, earthworms. I find out that Nicole and Tammy are being discharged this week and I wonder who will take their place. Tammy tells us about how last weekend when she went home on a pass she lay in bed with her daughter and felt like she was protecting her from the monsters. I think this is perhaps the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.
* * *
Loud, short yelps coming from the seclusion room resonate down the hallway. On days like today the psych ward isn’t exactly condusive to mental health. It all started with that goddamn psychotherapy group, I warned you, “Interaction Group” they call it. At the group a topic is given by a psychologist, Dr. Bruce Hutchison, a real pompous asshole. Both inpatients and outpatients participate in telling the group what the topic means to them, and then the last half hour is less structured, and glorious “interaction” begins.
The topic today is stress and substance abuse. At first I was excited, I could speak for days about those subjects, hell, I already have in this book. Most people go on about smoking joints, drinking beer, snorting a line of coke now and then. When my turn comes around and I start talking about crystal meth it seems everyone shuts down, writes me off as a lost cause, Hutchison is unaffected.
Fine, whatever, I can deal with apathy. So everything’s peachy until the last man speaks, a woman actually, Suzanne, an outpatient. She tells us all about her suicide box, a box of saved up, old prescription drugs she keeps, and about the times she’s taken a couple of bottles of pills with a bottle of wine. You see, last New Year’s I decided my ideal suicide would involve a bottle of expensive wine and a few bottles of valium. Thoughts of that scene race through my head.
Time for interaction! The rest of the outpatients, particularly an annoying woman wearing a pink sweatsuit with the words “hip hop” on the ass, spend the last segment of the session telling Suzanne why she should throw out the box, while us inpatients just sit back and watch. I lose it a little more with each passing second. A bottle of pills would taste so good, go down my throat so smoothly, be digested so exquisitely making those little volcanoes erupt in my stomach. This is my fucking destiny, this is my story, this is how it goes. I don’t know why I stay in the room, first tapping my feet, then my fingers, then putting my head between my legs. Does anyone notice me slowly going crazy? No, they’re too focused on Suzanne and her stupid fucking box. When the half hour is up I run to the nurse’s lounge.
“I’m not okay!”
A nurse brings me to the kitchen and pours me a glass of juice. Angeline plops down opposite me. Fuck!!! She is a fingernail and I am a chalkboard.
“I just want to be by myself right now.”
The nurse doesn’t think my idea is sound, so I wait at the table listening to Angeline scratch and scratch until someone finds a doctor to get me an Ativan (lorazepam).
“You’re selfish. What’s so wrong? You don’t need to be in here, so many people are worse off than you, at least you have your Dad.”
I haven’t the fortitude to respond. I just sit and wait for a pill to be brought to me as the rat spins the wheel faster and faster in my head. I wish I could pull it off. The pill arrives, just one, not sixty, and no Merlot, just water to chase it. I soon find myself in my room, under a hundred blankets, in the fetal position pretending I’m inside mommy’s womb.
* * *
But the day goes on as days do. Kristen rescues me from Angeline, we listen to silly music in the quiet lounge, lying on the floor. At one point we get up to use the phone and who else but Angeline has been using it for an hour. We knock on the door to let her know her time is up and receive bouts of profanity in return. Finally a nurse comes and tells her sternly that she must get off the phone, so she hangs it up and starts throwing some kind of fit.
“Someday you’re all going to be someone’s keeper!” she screams. I have no idea what this implies. The entire floor is put on lockdown until the nurses can get her to lie down and stop screaming.
I’m absolutely frazzled, I feel like I’ve taken things one slep too far, even though I’m not the one screaming. I’m back in sixth grade and I’ve put snow on the substitute teacher’s chair. He’s about to sit on it and I can’t take it back, there’s nothing I can do.
* * *
Josh and Penner come to visit in the evening and none of us scream, that’s got to mean something. They rescue me from another vegetarian stew with chicken fingers and fries that taste undeservidly delicious. Penner says Unit Six is nicer than the psych ward at the HSC, where she stayed after landing that plane. I love these two miscreants with all I have and when I kiss Josh goodbye it feels like our first kiss, like we’re back at his parents house, making out on the couch before they got home. I was wearing a blue corduroy skirt and a black sweater with feathers on it. I feel like we’re alive, not quite human but alive, for the first time in a very, very long time.
August 25, 2005
This morning I meet Wesley, a nineteen year-old who smokes the same brand of cigarettes as me. His story could be mine – crystal meth, good marks, steady job, breakdown. He has his guitar here and plays me two of my favourite songs, full of self-pity. The he plays two of his own, one about cocaine and one about the psych ward. They’re trite but still beautiful. The doctor calls him away before he can finish the last one. I think I will be friends with this boy and I jot down his phone number in my journal where I know it will be safe.
* * *
I should be doing laundry, one of the few chores patients are expected to do themselves, because we’re “able-bodied”. I lie in bed instead because sometime in between Bocce Ball and a phone call to Josh a profound sadness has been injected into my veins. I don’t think I’ll be getting out of here any time soon.
No visitors tonight so I’ll have to amuse myself, and there’s nothing amusing about depression. Although the affliction is romanticized by many, although I’ve been guilty of doing so myself, depression is boredom, isolated in its purest form. Lying in this hospital bed I can see exactly why I started using drugs, why I once put a cigarette out near the veins in my left hand, why I don’t look both ways before crossing the street. I can see all my accomplishments and all the failures that went along with them. I can see that there is much more to my illness than borderline personality disorder’s neat list of symptoms describes. I can see the knife under my parents’ bed that I hallucinated when I was five, and it’s still pointed directly at me, it has been all along.
Dr. D. orders 450 mg of Effexor.
August 26, 2005
Something’s not right. Donald says his left leg is giving out on him but his doctor tells him that getting it checked out is “not necessary”. Plans are in the works for him to be shipped off to a real asylum, one where the criminally insane reside, half an hour outside the city. Just lock us away and forget about us.
Me, I lie in bed, perfectly still, watching the sky above me move, blue fading into white fading into grey – summer fading away. Occaisionally a bird flies by, a tiny little V-shaped thing like children draw in pictures. I cry and cry for no reason at all, or because I’m sick, or because Prozac Nation lied to me and told me that medication would remove the grey cloud that’s positioned itself over my head.
Dr. D. starts me on Wellbutrin in addition to the other six meds I’m on. He says that Effexor and Wellbutrin in combination is the most potent brew of the “new” antidepressants. Hee says that if this doesn’t work I’ll have to go off all meds for a week and then begin taking a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, one of the “old” antidepressants, like the ones that make Karen’s hands shake. Not only do they inhibit but they also prohibit one’s diet, one’s lifestyle. If on an MAOI, I could kill myself at a wine and cheese party by simply partaking in the festivities.
The truth is, despite popular knowledge and the claims of psychiatrists, there haven’t been many advances in psychopharmacology since the seventies. It’s always been a guessing game and still is. Even if this new concoction makes me better it will stop working in a few months, maybe a year if I’m lucky, once my brain gets used to the chemicals intruding it and finds pathways to return to it’s regular habits. Desperate housewives and disillusioned college students may pop billions of dollars worth of SSRIs, but here on Unit Six, we are all still waiting for a cure.
Donald is probably my favourite person here. He lends me his precious headphones to listen to Paul McCartney’s “Distractions” when he can tell I’m not doing so well. He puts an arm around me for a second when I’m sobbing after Josh’s visit. He tells me that I remind him of his high-school sweetheart.
Donald lives in the past where things are simple and the world seems huge, but his intentions are purely altruistic. I’ve never met a man like him before.
Meanwhile daddy tells me it’s okay if I miss a semester or two of school, and Josh makes an emergency appointment with Dr. Wakeman. He’s sick too, and it’s time for us all to get better, somehow, I have to believe we will, or I’ll end up like Angeline.
August 27, 2005
Synchronicity. Terror. Joy.
Some days cannot be described using words but if I had to pick three, those would be the ones I’d choose and one of them is stolen.
Wesley is amazing. We think the same thoughts.
“You’re a fascinating person.”
I look down at my slippers. They have smiley faces on them but I’ve defaced them and turned those smiles upside down. “So are you.”
“You’re so lost, and it’s so beautiful.”
I start crying, not for Happy or Sad, but because I feel too much to hold it in; I have to exhume something.
“I’m not just saying that for self-benefit.”
“I know.”
We speak and then we are silent and in those silences our souls are revealed to one another. I have trouble looking him in the eye.
I don’t want to have sex with him; I don’t want to ruin this energy, lightning only strikes once. I want to sew our bodies together with thread. I want to eat his flesh.
“If we’d just taken a class or something together or something we’d probably never have met.”
“Probably not.”
“It makes you wonder how many people out there are just like you. A lot?”
“No. Not very many.”
“Probably not.”
Silence. Those eyes.
“It’s like we’re kindred spirits or something – I know that sounds corny but…”
“No, it doesn’t. This doesn’t happen very often.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
I feel alive again. Not quite human, but it’s a start. I can see myself as a professor of sociology again, rather than a corpse. At the same time I can see myself living out the rest of my life in here and being quite content. But I need to run away so that Wesley remains perfect forever.
* * *
Daddy visits. He was supposed to arrive at seven and he finally shows up at eight-thirty, half an hour before visiting hours are over. I make him come out for a cigarette with the lot of us, sitting on pine needles underneath an evergreen tree because the air is full of mist that looks like snow near the light of the streetlamps. Donald calls him J.R.R. Tolkien. Wesley listens to him tell a long-winded story and the groundhog that has taken up residence under his deck. When it is time for him to leave I accompany him downstairs. He hugs me goodbye and says over and over,
“Can’t I just take you home?”
Sadness lingers like the mist in the orange light but I do not cry.
* * *
I call Josh to say goodnight and I’m not scared of him leaving me when we hang up for the first time in – for the first time ever. Could this really be? Could the meds actually be working, could I be getting well?
Am I in love with Wesley?
Where is the crash, the payback for a good day?
Happy, is that really you?
How you terrify me so.
August 28, 2005
Happy runs away when Kristen, who has become my roommate because her former roommate, and elderly lady, is puking or shitting something that smells like sulphuric acid causing me to give up my private room.
“You and Josh could still see each other, but you should go live at your Dad’s for a while, save some money, get better.”
The wheel starts spinning. I want to stab myself in the jugular with the fork that’s lying on my bedside table. Kristen starts playing some bad R&B break-up music and I feel like I’m going to start vomiting, pain shoots through my head, but I can’t leave because I don’t want her to hate me. After two songs I decide I can pretend to clean up my side of the room and make a break for the nurse’s station during the process.
“Get this fork away from me and give me an Ativan!”
Fuck, I don’t need advise from a twenty-three year-old with a five year-old daughter who is attending CDI Business College – you know the type “We offer jobs in exciting fields like child psychology, TV/VCR repair…” – and who tried to kill herself because she snorted one too many lines of coke at some party. And to top it all off she likes country music even more than the cheesy R&B and has one of Dr. Phil’s latest books on her bedside table.
I’ve never been good with roommates.
There is nothing to do on the weekends here. Visiting hours are extended, but that is only useful if you have visitors. Josh and I agreed not to see each other for a few days after our last spat of throwing insults back and forth and seeing who could cry harder. Penner is out with the lesbians-only clique she’s established. Daddy is out spending money he does not have, and is up to his old parenting via denial tricks and won’t let Angie come to see me. Wesley is out on a day pass, not that I care, not that he would want to keep me company.
I tap my feet and wait for four-thirty. I can have another Ativan then.
* * *
After dinner meds and after dinner I meet two new people, Erin, who tried to hang herself and shares my love of shoplifting useless things; and Shauna, who is afflicted by a mixed bag of personality disorders and who lived in Japan the same year I did, teaching English. Together we watch the sun set and the clouds turn bright pink. Nicole stops to look and remarks that we’ll never watch a sunset like this one together again, we’ll all be well and in different places next time the sky explodes into colour. Wesley calls Nicole the bipolar superhero.
I’m feeling better, a little too good, mischievious. I pace the halls – Angeline can be heard screaming from the phone room and I’m in the mood for a scene. Unfortunately she storms out before the nureses have to intervene and I’m only granted a glare before she heads for the elevators, so I sneak into Wesley’s room – he’s roommates with Donald who is quite distressed as I break the rules and enter the room of someone of the opposite gender – and place a twig shaped like the letter “Y” on his pillow. We found one like it under the evergreen tree last night but he insinctively destroyed it before we could talk philosophy. I just told that dumb story about the guy who responds to his final philosophy exam, which simply asks “Why?”, with “Why Not?” and gets the highest mark in the class. In Montreal Katrina used to claim that guy was her dad.
Donald tells me that I am a giant.
“It must be hard, being a giant,” he says, sympathetically, “You want to take big steps but you have to be careful and try to take little steps so you don’t crush people.”
I agree with him, probably a punishable mistake, reinforcing his delusion, but I can’t help it as I find the metaphor quite fitting.
August 29, 2005
Cigarettes are my only company today, I guess it’s time to learn how to be alone.
Several patients are being discharged – Tammy, Nicole, and Kristen. I wonder who my new roommate will be as I sit on my bed trying not to dissociate, and I think for a minute that I’ll miss Nicole’s insights into mental illness, but then again I don’t think she likes me much.
What are you talking about? Yesterday she told you that you are a kind-hearted person who will change the world someday.
Yes, but she wouldn’t join me and Donald, smoking on the bench, instead she went to sit with Kari-Ann, far away in the grass. It seems the two are best friends because they share the same label, and I certainly don’t know how to rid the world of labels.
We might as well all have stamps on our foreheads, no, tattoos, more permanent. Mine reads “Borderline” and psychiatrists don’t like borderlines because we’re too unpredictable in manner and mood, so I’ll be sent home by the end of the week, I’m sure of it.
And will I be different then? Will this place have changed me? Everyone tells me I should take that semester off, but something inside me tells me I should just buck up and hide in the library stacks.
* * *
By six pm I am sobbing and pacing back and for the in front of the nurse’s station. Tammy, Nicole and Kristen’s replacements have just walked in. I’m even talking to myself a little, me, the queen of first impressions.
Eventually a nurse notices me.
“Can I help you with something?”
“Yeah, I’m depressed as hell and I can’t stop crying.”
What I need is a hug and someone to talk to. The nurse and I stare at eachother for three seconds before she speaks.
“Is there some medication I can get for you?”
I pause. Is this what it’s come down to? “Yeah, sure.”
“What usually helps when you’re feeling like this?”
“Benzos I guess?” I’m incredulous.
She hands me a cup of pills and I swallow them apathetically.
“Do you want a movie to watch? I can open room six-twenty-four for you – “
“I’m too depressed.” Oops, that came out a little too loudly. The newcomers watch. Welcome to Unit Six!
“Oh, I’m sorry you’re so depressed. You should watch some TV.”
“I think I’ll go write a note for my doctor about this.”
“Good idea, just keep yourself busy!” The nurse departs.
I stand in the middle of the hallway not knowing whether to go right or left.
August 20, 2005
Some days are too typical to bother writing about. I’ll be brief.
I see Wesley after my eight am cigarette. The magic seems to be gone, I think because I feel I have to live up to “fascinating” or because the sexual tension between us is making me stutter. We sit down together to watch New Orleans sink on TV, but he gets up almost immediately, muttering something about having to get stuff together in his room.
I work out, take a shower, try to keep myself fucking busy.
Dr. D. sees me for longer than usual and the look on his face says “What the hell am I supposed to do with this one?” I leave him another note, apologizing for being the cause of his frustration.
Josh and Penner are scheduled to visit me but neither of them are answering their phones. I leave manic messages.
“I feel like I’m just one big problem! I really need you guys to come here. Please come!!”
I call Angie because she’s turning fourteen today. This day will forever remain in her memory as the birthday her sister missed because she was in the nuthouse. I wish her a good one and lie that people are in line for the phone so I have to hang up because I have nothing to say for myself.
When seven pm rolls around and there’s still no sign of Josh or Penner I believe with all my heart that they’ve rethought the cost/benefit analysis of being part of my life and decided they simply cannot afford risking an investment in something so unreliable, something that certainly doesn’t promise much of a return.
I sit on the floor near the nurse’s station weeping, mourning my loss. I cry so hard that my body convulses and I cannot breathe. The nurses are fed up with me, just like Dr. D. One of them begrudgingly gives me an Ativan and tells me to go lie down and settle down. Lying down I come up with a plan. I’ll break one of the CD cases I have in my room and use the pieces to dissect my arms. All I want is to see blood, my blood, bright red water. I stand up to put this plan into action and Penner and Josh appear before me, holding sunflowers. Some days I wonder how long I can live like this for. Some days I wonder if it’s worth it.
August 31, 2005
And some days are just empty white boxes on the page of a calendar.
When fuck-me boots Michelle first arrived here Donald snuck into her room in the middle of the night and starated kissing and touching her, believing that she was a girlfriend from his past. So when Donald puts a hand on my hip and tells me I’m dressed provocatively (I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt) I have no choice but to tell a nurse. I’m a fucking hypocrite but I can’t afford to be traumatized further – waking up to a forty-seven year-old man trying to have sex with me might send me over the ledge. And I didn’t know that the hospital staff would write up a formal report and take away his smoking priviledges. He passes me in the hallway.
“I can’t smoke because you told them I did something inappropriate, Jen. I don’t remember anything inappropriate.”
He looks so sad. Goddamnit. I feel like a piece of shit.
I walk throught the rest of the day expressionless. I do as I’m told. I feel like a robot, a robot with a few screws literally loose. “Keep Fit” group, cigarette, lunch, cigarette, call Josh, dinner, cigarette, silence.”
My new roommate is a tall, thin Native girl who’s either catatonic or won’t speak to me because I’m white. Everyone else is hiding in their room or laughing with their visitors. Wesley is out on a pass, not that he’d want to watch me cry anyway.
“You’re pushing people away,” Dr. D. remarks, “It’s your worst fear but you can make it come true with your behaviour.”
Really, huh. Never considered that one before.
But I can’t make it stop! My brain is broken and doesn’t seem to be responding to the massive amount of chemicals being forced into it. I should be put down like an annoying pet. Instead the doctor orders 600 mg of Effexor, the highest dose one can take before the drug becomes toxic.
* * *
Wesley shows up and we spend the evening wearing blankets like capes and running around the ward, going outside and smoking, the wind is ferocious and our capes fly in the wind. He’s Batman and I’m Robin and we paint pictures of animals doing drugs to “work through our addictions” and we laugh. Then I call daddy because he called earlier and left a message for me to call him back. My short time of being treated like an equal, a human being, has expired. He accuses me of being on drugs and implies that Josh is the reason I’m at a mental hospital; he cannot accept the fact that there’s this thing called mental illness that affects people, that chemical imbalances can’t be blamed on anyone. In addition, me needing $250 for rent, not his $500 000 dollar house, is the reason for his financial ruin.
Why am I surprised?
I hereby promise that I’m not ever going to have any kind of relationship with my father. I die a little death every time he lets me down. The bull stops here.
September 1, 2005
Tonight I mourn the loss of my Father. The man a little girl used to wait for at 5:30 pm while she built castles out of the blocks that her bipolar aunt, the one the man would later disown, gave her. “Daddy!” she would exclaim, throwing her arms around him, the man wearing a suit and tie that smelled like Clorets gum and photocopied paper. The man took the little girl on roller coaster rides at the fair, took her out for ice cream on hot days, hurtled her around on a sled in the winter. The man always looked like he was enjoying these adventures as much as the little girl, the man with the beard and mustache that he refused to shave. But as time passed and the man’s wife miscarried child after child the man changed. The little girl couldn’t finish all the food on her plate sometimes, then the man would send her up to her room, or drag her up the carpeted staircase if she wouldn’t go herself. The little girl couldn’t practice the piano sometimes because of the noise in her head – voooom, vooom, vooom – and then the man would punch her in the stomach, knocking the air out of her. The little girl cried for no reason sometimes, then the man would get very angry. He would call her a crybaby and yell “Just stop it!”, so she ran somewhere, usually behind the locked door of a bathroom, where he wouldn’t see her cry harder, hugging her knees to her chest. More time passed and the little girl grew up, watched her mom die, the man was all she had left. The girl got lost, found drugs that would make the tears stop. The man didn’t notice that the girl looked pale and too thin. The man never asked her how she was doing, and if she cried he would yell again, “I don’t have time for your emotions!” But the girl got good grades and nothing else mattered. She graduated at the top of her class and won a scholarship to attend a prestigious university in Montreal. The man never congratulated her, just wished that the scholarship was larger, and when the girl moved away he called her once every month or so to complain about the money she was spending to cover her living expenses. The girl moved back home to save the man money. The man never thanked her. There would be no more hugs, no more rides, no more ice cream. All that remained of the man the little girl used to wait for, every evening, was a beard and mustache.
Tonight I cry but I don’t run to hide. I cry for a man who no longer exists, or maybe for a man that never existed outside my head.
She cries because she is free.
With freedom comes responsibility and poverty. I know things will be different when I leave this place. Change is a choice and I want desperately to change, to stop chasing spectres and trying to catch hummingbirds. As my tears wane the grey sky outside is lifted, revealing the blue, pink, and purple underneath. Hundreds of birds come out of hiding and fly towards the setting sun. Donald looks at me looking out the window from across the room.
“Jen,” he says, “you look like you’re in your own little world. You’re a real individual, you don’t follow the crowd, you do your own thing, I like that.”
I smile for the first time today, a real smile, not the smile of a cashier telling you to have a nice day, whatever that means.
“Thank-you.”
Dr. D. has promised to get me on disability insurance and has given me a full weekend pass to go home. Josh tells me that Peter waits for me to pass through the door everytime he come in, and that he is giving away all the liquor we own to Penner before I arrive.
While I’ve been pacing the halls of Unit Six Josh has seen Dr. Wakeman and gotten prescriptions for trazadone and seroquel, to silence the voices he hears after I go to sleep, and hopefully to silence some of his complaining about his fucking back problems. He is also going to be collecting disability benefits until school starts in January, this is the plan. He believes things are going to get better and I believe him – somehow I still trust him, I guess that’s what love is.
This weekend will be a test for a pill-popper and a visit to life after the psych ward.
I look in the mirror and see the girl I always wanted to be. Why is it so tempting to hurt her?
* * *
“I’ll be Nunk, you’re Munk,” announces Wesley as we head out for the last smoke of the day.
“Okay, Nunk.”
“I wonder what the security guards would say if we told them that.” Rampant paranoia – we’re smoking on hospital property which has recently been outlawed.
“Probably up our meds.”
“Yeah, put us on tranquilizers or something.”
“I think I’m just going to start doing that, not hide my craziness, you know?”
“I don’t know, I feel normal for the first time on these meds.”
“I don’t.”
September 2, 2005
I’m starting to feel like a permanent fixture here, as another group of patients arrive. Rachel is quiet and seems incredibly fastidious and her diagnosis is simple depression. She does not smoke and she’s earned the coveted weekend pass in two days. She makes me feel dirty.
The other two provide entertainment. Kari-Ann and I try to muffle our giggling when Cuong, an Asian man that speaks little English comes in to the kitched and starts flailing his arms about wildly in some attempt to exercise while the rest of us sit at the table for Friday afternoon’s coffee and cookies group. He then opens a package of soda crackers, breaks them into a few pieces, places them neatly on top of an apple in the fruit basket, and leaves.
Jennifer is a clonazepam addict, much worse than me. When she is told she’ll have to wait fifty minutes for a pill she starts speaking so quickly and loudly, she sounds like a goddamn jet plane,
“I’vealwaystakenclonazepamitjustcalmsmedownyouknow?Itjustmakesmefeellikeahhh.”
This is why you shouldn’t eat clonazepam like candy.
Dr. D. doesn’t see me until late in the day, and when he does I have a breakdown in this office about daddy, about how fucking mean he is, about how he disowned his own sister when she was too sick to attend my mother’s funeral, about how easy it would be to call him and ask for a ride somewhere or a little cash. The doctor says it’s a positive thing that I’m crying so hard, that it means the antidepressants have kicked in. Still, I ask him for a lobotomy. Instead, he starts me on yet another pill – lamotrigine – a mood stabilizer.
A mood stabiliser is probably what I need this weekend, for which I am both excited and terrified for as I wait in line for my bedtime meds.
September 5, 2005
I fail the test. Saturday goes wonderfully. Sunday Josh sleeps all day and I start having obsessive thoughts about cutting perfect, straight lines across my limbs with a razor. After much deliberation, I go to the drugstore and refill my old prescription for clonazepam. I eat all twenty-one pills at once and take eight of Josh’s trazadone too. I feel nothing. When Josh wakes up he can tell that I’ve taken something when he looks into my eyes. I am honest with him and he takes me for a long walk during which he insists that I’m delusional, that my depictions of him never getting off the couch are inaccurate, that I’m the only crazy one, that he’s put up with a lot more from me than I have from him. I scream at him to shut up and threaten to hit him if he doesn’t, but he carries on as I start to cry and question the depth of my dementia. I don’t even know where we’re walking. “Can we go home now?” I sob as we walk down our street to the apartment. I don’t recognize the setting. Monday I have no pills to slow my thoughts so I fulfill my fantasy and start cutting into my biceps with my razor. Josh finds me.
“Goddamnit babe!”
He takes the razor away, but there are blades in the medicine cabinet and I slip one into my pocket. He walks me to Penner’s apartment because he cannot stand the idea of accompaning bloody, broken me back to the hospital. He kisses me goodbye and promises to visit me during the week. I climb the stairs to Penner’s third floor suite and immediately ask to use the washroom, where I take out the blade and continue where I left off, sliding it across my forearms.
When I exit the bathroom my shirt is covered in blood. Penner quickly pulls up my sleeves.
“These are fresh! You just did this! Don’t fucking lie to me! I’m taking you to the hospital, my dad will drive us, let’s wait outside.”
The elevator takes us up to Unit Six. Penner drags me to the nurse’s station and shows off my bloody arms. They are bandaged up and I am asked to spend the night sleeping behind the nurse’s station where I can be woken up to test my “sense of consiousness” every hour.
September 7, 2005
“When people start bringing things into the ward from outside like razors, it’s probably time for them to be discharged.”
I stare at Dr. D. blankly, trying to find the logic in that statement. Two days from now I’ll have to leave.
Josh dumped me over the phone yesterday. The reason? I’ve gone completely mad, I’ve changed, he “couldn’t even fuck me on Sunday or Monday”, he doesn’t know who I am anymore. I’m not the girl he fell in love with and he’s been thinking about doing this for weeks and it’s the hardest decision he’s ever had to make.
“Is this permanent?”
“Yes.”
The weekend was a desert, and I a piece of straw that broke Josh’s back. Fuck, Saturday was perfect though, we made love looking into each other’s eyes and he told me he could see the whole world in my eyes.
Remembering this I begin my death mission. Today is the day I will die. I tell my primary nurse what just happened and ask her if I can take a hot bath.
“Are you safe to do that?”
“Yes.”
In the tub I try desperately to drown myself but I can’t get enough water in my lungs and my nose hurts like hell. I climb out. I will have to fetch razors somehow. I pretend to go out for a smoke and walk to the drugstore across the street, fucking oppertunist bastards, making it this easy. I try first to buy five razors and a bottle of 200 tylenol pills. My credit card gets declined because Josh advanced all the cash that was left on it after daddy paid it off for the third time this year.
“I’ll go find something less expensive,” I say with a smile that matches the cashiers. I scurry back to the aisle where shaving products are kept and stick two razors down my pants and make a run for it. I take the elevator up and enter my room, get into my bed, and start sawing at my arms. I feel no pain. Why aren’t these razors sharper? Blood starts to soak the sheets. A nurse comes around to do rounds and I hide under the blankets. So far so good. More sawing, a nice deep cut near my wrist, blood pouring down my arms, I hope I start to feel light-headed soon. Another nurse comes by.
“What’s going on here?”
“Nothing.”
“What have you got there, in your bed?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, I’ve seen it all, let’s see your arms.”
I sheepishly show him my bright red arms.
“Where did you get the razors?”
“Across the street.”
“How many do you have?”
“Two.” I hand over my precious instruments of death.
“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”
I am led to the medical supplies room to get bandaged up once again.
“So why did you do this?”
“I want to die.”
“Sometimes people hurt themselves to make emotional pain go away.”
“I know, but today I want to die.”
“Death is quite permanent, feelings aren’t.”
“I want to die.”
I will be spending another night behind the nurse’s station and my cigarette priviledges have been revoked. I sit on the bed for a minute before deciding that Josh must change his mind!
“Where are you going?”
I race to the payphone, dial our number, start begging through the sobs and the shaking.
“You have to hang up.”
I refuse to, Josh can’t go away. I can’t hang up until I reverse his decision. I start banging furniture around.
I overhear one of the nurses – “Should we bring them in?”
“I fucking love you too!” I scream at the top of my lungs, slamming down the receiver.
I exit the room to be greeted by two nurses and two men that look like they work out a lot wearing scrubs. I am pushed along into the seclusion room.
“You’re going to sleep in here and the doctor has ordered a needle for you.”
This is nothing compared to my longing for Josh to come back, to visit me like he said he would, to stay with me through thick and thin like he promised a thousand times after I asked him a thousand times. “I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry.”
One of the nurses empties a needle of fluid into my butt in front of the males who watch amusedly, but I don’t care. I’m going to find a way to die in this room. As soon as I’m left in the room I look for tools. The pillow is wrapped in plastic! I’m overjoyed as I rip the plastic off and put the maeshift bag over my head while holding it tightly around my neck. One of the nurses peers through the one-way window. Fuck. “Look at this,” he says. Before I can suffocate myself the bag is ripped from my hands and what’s left of the pillow and the blankets and sheets on my bed are also removed, leaving me with nothing but a lone mattress in the middle of the room. I study it, looking for ways to use it as a weapon, but I pass out before I can think of anything, I don’t know what was in that needle but I pass out for twelve hours on the bare mattress.
* * *
I spend most of the next day crying. I will have to return to the beard and mustache, daddy’s house is my only option, I’m in $30 000 of debt, for which Josh is to thank for most of, which I will never be paid back, which will never even be considered. Wesley is leaving today in addition to my worst nightmares about abandonment coming true. He hugs me tightly and whispers in my ear, “I won’t hurt you. I love you. If you hurt yourself I’ll hurt myself. That’s just the way it is.”
I whisper back, “I love you too.” And before I can blink he disappears.
I think I will call him
* * *
I get the machine, but I don’t mind, I like answering machines because when you run out of things to say you can simply hang up the phone.
Damn machine, now I’m left sitting on my bed thinking of what could have been, what will never be. I will never have a child with Josh. I will never get to show Josh Japan. I will never watch Josh play with Peter again. I will have to sleep alone.
I hate sleeping alone. Josh usually passed out on the couch, hardly ever cuddled with me, but still, I’m scared of boogymen and monsters under the bed. Josh kept them away.
I thought the weekend would be a visit to my future, instead it was a visit to my past, and unknowingly, I kissed it goodbye.
September 8, 2005
I am being throttled into my future at lightning speed. Wesley called back last night, and I am to go to his apartment tomorrow. I don’t know exactly what this curtails, but I am certainly pleased about it. Abour the way he said it on the phone when I asked what we should do –
“You will come to my apartment.”
As far as moving is concerned, I am actually kind of looking forwards to returning to daddy’s mansion for a while, having meals prepared for me, doing laundry for free, saving my disability cheques rather than spending them on ramen noodles and rent.
I think something’s working.
I’m tempted to ask if I can leave this place today. The past three weeks have certainly been fascinating, but now it’s time to go, the hallways are starting to turn to dust and the ennui is palpable. I suppose I’ll go to sleep.
* * *
6:15 pm. I can feel a fit coming on. I can feel the plasticine chemicals in my brain trying to stop it. My heart races. I realize how uprooted my life is going to be. How will I spend my time at daddy’s house? Everyone there goes to bed at 10:00 pm. I haven’t lived there for three years. I feel tiny little shocks going through my body, making me twitch. Then I remember last Christmas, how I spent it with Josh, how we cooked our own turkey, how we talked about doing a better job next year. Fuck that fucking turkey; fuck these fucking tears! My nurse is on break but she’s coming to talk to me afterwards. Fuck these fake plastic tears! Fuck this fake plastic life! What will I do tomorrow when there is no nurse on the way? Talk to Eve? Talk to daddy? He laughed at me the last time Josh broke up with me. Then he yelled at me for screwing up his goddamn routine as he drove me to work with tears streaming down my face. And fuck Josh, I got over him that summer, I was ready to start a new life with Penner and Maybe, but he came back like a cancer, that fall. He waited until my birthday to say “I love you.” It took time for me too, it took time for the cancer to grow and meastisize, eventually taking over my entire body. Have I been dead since then? Maybe, but right now all I can remember are the happy memories, kissing and planning for the future. Gone, all gone is holding hands while we walk to buy cigarettes at the gas station, gone is him surprising me with my favourite kind of scratch ticket, gone is the laughing at dumb action movies. Gone. And fuck, I have to fucking see him to pick up my laptop and my cat? I’m going to be a fucking wreck. No chemical could stop me from sobbing so fucking hard. We wanted to go to Mexico this Christmas to get away from the awkward family get-togethers. Gone.
Wesley better be prepared for the storm that’s headed in his direction.
The nurse arrives and tells me to focus on my future. In just two years, I’ll be in Vancouver, starting my master’s degree, starting my life.
Gone.
* * *
I knock back my little cup of evening meds for the last time. Leaving this place will be bittersweet. This place. Unit Six. The Psych Ward. This place is like summer camp for people who feel too much or hear too much or see too much – everyone is scared to come here, no one wants to come here, but when it’s time to go, to go back to life outside, you don’t really want to although you know it’s necessary. This place is not a home.
I’ve met some of the most interesting and kind people here that I ever have or ever will. I will miss Kari-Ann’s knowledge of mental illness and her will to get up every morning even though she’s tried fifty different medications. I’ll miss Angeline’s nonsensical speeches. I’ll miss Rachel’s grace. I’ll miss the amazing speed at which Jennifer delivers her tirades and her caring sensitivity. I’ll even miss both Michelles – one my silent rommate, beautiful and frail, and one who waits for no one and used to watch herself breathing out white clouds of crystal meth in a mirror the way I used to when I was in high school. Most of all I’ll miss Donald – his tales of the past, his unabashed singing and dancing, and his amazing heart. He sees things on a different wavelength than anybody else, but he’s given me reasons to hope, no matter how much it hurts.
The story is about to change. Drugs and alcohol will slip into oblivion. Some characters will be added while others will disappear.
That’s just how life is.
Gone.
The pharmacist in question had scolded me for bringing in a prescription that was “not written properly”, and said it would cancel out all of my existing prescriptions which, of course, were my psych meds. At the time, I was still on a whopping 450 mg of Effexor, and a single missed dosage would send me into withdrawals that were agonising in a different way than my pelvic pain, including characteristic “brain zaps”. The thought of being without the antidote to the zaps, in addition to not having sleep or anxiety medication, in the middle of my struggle to keep up at school in the midst of being ill and getting little sympathy or slack for my condition, made me very uneasy. I still do not understand why my tears angered the woman behind the counter so much, after I meekly asked if she could call or fax my doctor for a new script and she angrily agreed to the “<BIG SIGH> extra work”.
for two weeks. The Thursday before two holidays that Maggie gave herself and her staff as days off – Good Friday and Easter Sunday – I felt so ill that I went back to the hospital, this time to the ER, by ambulance. My methadone clinic had written a prescription for the following week the day before, forgetting about the holiday closures. Thus, on Thursday morning they called to tell me that they would write a new prescription for me to pick up and bring to a pharmacy that would be open for me to come in on the long weekend, either Safeway or Shopper’s. In the past I had gotten “carries”, take-home doses of methadone, on long weekends, but this time it was too close to a hospital admission for suicidal behaviour (it is easy to overdose on even a double dose of this potent medication). I planned in my mind to bring my new script to Safeway, and when I went to the ER and left my dad, at a distance, the job of letting the clinic know I would not be able to come to pick it up, they let him know that they would fax it to Shopper’s. I had told my dad all about my trouble with the pharmacist and owner there, years ago, but he assumed that the staff would have little memory of what happened so long ago, and certainly would not be so silly as to bring up their past nonsense.
, my physician entered the room.
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