Lenox Hill Hospital

It’s dawn in the hospital and we’re swimming around the carpet in various stages of psychosis. A manic will skip in every now and again, but it’ll be several hours before any of the depressives crawl out of their cocoons. I want to be in bed too, snuggled up under piles of starched white linen, but there was an old woman staring at me through the barred window of my room, so I curled up in one of the hard, beige chairs in the day room. My fingers are blue and purple, from hair dye or malnutrition, I don’t know. A sleepy, half-drunk sunrise casts orange and lilac shades into the room, flared through the glass panel at the nurses’ station and on the backs of doorknobs. 

I think about snatching a keycard off one of the nurses’ necks and jamming it to the lock for freedom. It would be so quick, so easy. I miscalculate my speed and get pricked again. 

The Quiet Room in this hospital is pale blue and hard. I spend much time there. 

Inspirations strikes

Being in the hospital too long does a number on you. It’s a big world out there, we’d hear over and over again. A terrifying sentiment. Behind the double barred white doors there’s a world with deadlines and shopping carts and electric bills and traffic and Sunday scaries. There are things we forget how to do, like balance a checkbook or drink cola or unlatch a window and put your head and shoulders out for a breathy take of cold winter sunshine. Things we missed doing. 

Some patients cling to the safety net of the hospital with childlike apprehension. One of the older patients, with a salt and pepper beard, tells me he’d been there for three months. 

“I don’t know how you can stand it,” I say to him. 

“I’m nervous. I’m getting out tomorrow.” 

I burn with jealousy as I reassure him. On one hand hospitals were responsible for keeping me alive, on the other hand it’s like, isn’t there any other fucking way we could do this??

I read about hospitals in Europe and other places that seemed more fantasy than real. Hospitals that let you have a phone, gave you outdoor time, didn’t restrain you and even let you go on errands, or to school or work. Where were these units in America? Maybe the issue was that I was in Indiana. Now that I’m here in New York, the healthcare quality should’ve skyrocketed, but here I am, locked away from the Internet, begging the doctors to keep prescribing me the one drug I know that keeps me alive.

That was the thing though. When I get sick, at the exhaustion point of psychosis, the hospital isn’t so bad. I’m going to be fighting off creatures anyway, it didn’t matter if I was in a padded cell, or on a bus to Nevada. At least in the hospital they’d give me something to make me sleep. So that was the allure. The hope that somebody would look at me and go, “oh poor thing, we’ll take care of you”. That’s all I want. To be taken care of.

I learned something crucial from this past episode. I had four stages of psychosis. I’m sure the doctors have their own terms, but I’ll call them Bizarre, Preview, Active, then Exhaustion. Bizarre was my everyday life, with bits and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle out of place. Preview was the worst one by far. At least to me. With little or no active visual hallucinations or commands, Preview was a state where things were wrong or off, like bars of sunlight refracted through chlorine water. It was a sort of half-crazy, the way one feels on a day that’s maddeningly hot. There were disturbances in the planes of reality, but not enough to freak me out. Enough to keep me awake at odd hours, to have me nod off on public transit, go on strange and dangerous adventures to seek thrills, to sex clubs, to climb water towers in the dark. Preview had so much discomfort, a horrible bone deep ache that made me act out more and more until I finally went headfirst into Active psychosis. Preview was quite often the longest period of psychosis, and the one my support system took notice of the least. The change in my behavior patterns weren’t subtle but I defended them and squashed them with such severity that it was difficult to tell for anyone not watching me extremely closely or had known me for years. But eventually my hands burned bright red from keeping the lid on the boiling pot till I either let go with a gasp or the pot exploded. This was the entrance into the Active phase, where I was hallucinating vividly, my speech was distracted and scrambled. I was usually pretty much immediately hospitalized. Because of an attempt on my life or others. The active phase didn’t last long, it burned so much energy, like a neutron star collapsing in on itself, that once I hit the Exhaustion point, I was out. At Exhaustion I was bedridden, comatose. This was a good place for doctors to give me meds as I was too tired to resist. 

A good eighteen hours of sleep is like a miracle Band-aid for me. Not a cure, a Band-aid. Sometimes the Active phase would jump out at me without the Preview warning. Those were tough, and usually happened because of med changes or unusual amounts of stress. I had an inkling that combining my Seroquel with another antipsychotic would do the trick. For some reason, Lithium seemed like the magic cure.

By the time I had regained consciousness in Lenox, to start demanding my phone and clothes and books, I tell my doctor immediately that it was imperative that I be on Lithium to regulate my mood, and to my surprise, she prescribed it. It always takes me by surprise when a doctor actually listens to me.

As I begin to regain my sentience, I complain, bored, with cabin fever. If you could waltz into the hospital for a three day stay and a couple of milligrams of this and that, without it being this horrifying ordeal, it would be a merry Christmas. The first part of most of my stays were spent so psychotic and/or sedated that they were only accessible as hazy memories shot through a kaleidoscope. Flashes of the blue quiet room, or bustling techs, of echoing screams and arms against my thighs.

So once the med routine of Seroquel, Zyprexa and Lithium had taken effect, I’m able to sit up with my eyes open all the way and find that I’m hellishly bored and claustrophobic. Even if not ready for discharge, ready for stimulation, for contact with the outside world, to maybe even crack a joke, do some crayoning, and eat solids again. 

As I sit in Lenox Hill Hospital, scribbling this with my little golf pencil, grumbling about discharge arguments I had this morning with my doctor, for the first time in a while my head is clear and still like the bottom of the summer sky at nighttime. I’m on the med regime I’ve been angling for at last, and there’s quiet. The three months of whatever the hell that was is finally over.  

Discharge

I find out the plan to discharge me has gone through so I gather my things gleefully and make the phone calls I need to. 

As usual, discharge is uneventful. Maya comes and picks me up. I answer all my pending texts on the subway, whenever there’s internet. When I get home I scrub myself in the shower and spend the afternoon cuddling Audrey and napping in my own bed. 

Few days later

I’m in the kitchen, singing “Daisy Bell ” and making an Earl Grey teacake. It’s raining outside, soft patters of drops thud against the glass of the windows. The sky is the exact shade of steel gray that I like and it’s warm in the apartment. Seinfeld is playing in the background. The audience laughs as I whip the eggs. Life isn’t so bad after all.