Have you ever witnessed someone lose their mind, or better yet, themselves? I have. And, contrary to what you might think, it's not as straightforward or as easy to remain calm through than one might imagine. My co-worker, and sometimes friend, Kate, called me one night distraught after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend and searching for somewhere close by to stay for awhile to recover and figure out her next move. Sure, I could participate in the cause and provide this grieving person with a place to seek safety and mend a broken heart...what else did I have to do? That night began a 4-day excursion into a firsthand experience of a psychotic break. Thankfully, only partially my own.
Within 24 hours, Kate had attempted to leave one of those one-hour optometrist mega-stores glasses in hand and tab unpaid because "Money is meaningless. God will take care of us now". She also tried to leave a Mexican restaurant in the same fashion, but with less allusion to God's ability to pay for our purchase. This post-break-up recovery was beginning to cost me a lot of money and making Kate act rather strange. 24 hours after that Kate had not slept a wink in 3 days, had ransacked my apartment, was prosthelitizing any chance she got, and began talking about how her father sexually abused her when she was a little girl (she later retracted these allegations). My increasing concern about Kate's state of mind, my growing sleep deprivation, and her conversation about sexual abuse triggered feelings and awakened memories that I had long attempted to suppress even as I always had access to them. For the first time in my life I said out loud that the first time someone had sex with me I was six years old. Great timing, I know, but one cannot predict nor control spontaneous declarations of sexual abuse.
The next 24 hours are emblazoned in my brain like a slow-motion movie, frame by frame. Kate continued her downward spiral as I attempted to talk her into going to the hospital a mere four blocks from my house "just to make sure everything was alright". The more she realized that I was becoming scared and steering her towards help she became erradic and was threatening to drive herself in her car out of state "on the wings of God". I had to do something bold to protect her and myself. Don't ask me how I made this decision, out of all other options, but I ended up faking my own death. I get points for creativity at least, right? Perhaps I was merely acting out how I felt. I told her I felt like I was having a heart attack, made believable by her awareness of my previous cardiac condition, and knew that I was dying. I collapsed on my floor as Kate began chanting and strangely made the choice to empty the entire contents of my Issey Miyake cologne all over my body to "bless" me. That is literally the last time I spent that much money on cologne. She was so far gone at that point that she let me walk downstairs with her, in my dead state, and drive her car to the ER entrance of the hospital. She ran screaming into the hospital that I was dying while I was attempting to whisper to the doctors out of one side of my mouth that my friend was going crazy. Now the frames of the movie become jagged and out of time...Kate begins screaming and is tied down in restraints on a gurney...someone is asking me about her insurance, her closest relatives, and the events of the past 4 days...Kate begins screaming obscenities at me as I begin to uncontrollably cry for what would turn out to be the next 2 days...I'm waking Kate's parents up at 3am, people I've never met, to tell them that I've taken their daughter to an ER nearly 50 miles away from them because she is losing her mind...I'm driving back to my apartment, barely able to see the road, after I realize that her 2 cats have been in her car the entire time as Kate had planned to take them on her road trip...I collapse in Kate's car, unable to move, and watch the sunrise with two screaming cats in carriers unsure of what to do next...I hear a song on the radio which somehow perfectly captures my confusion, fear, and the unspeakable sadness of watching Kate lose herself and speaking my own crazy history in an unscripted moment of exhaustion and emotion, a song that will flood me with unbearable emotions for years to come...I'm in my apartment cleaning up my expensive perfume so that the cats don't eat it up off the floor...I am naked on my red IKEA couch trembling...I am back at the hospital crying to a psychiatric nurse who tells me that Kate has been stripping her clothes off all night and has yelled at her terrified parents who drove in the middle of the night to find their daughter a shadow of herself...I am hugging this nurse who is gracious enough to whisper to me "you did the right thing, sweetie, this isn't your fault." Thank you, dear, unnamed psychiatric nurse, for saying the words that I clung to for dear life over the next several weeks. It was not my fault. I did the right thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment