So this was the deal: before the days of Google Maps and MapQuest, Snakelady had to get herself to an in-patient psychiatric unit in a town I’d never been to. As anyone who knows me can attest, I am not good with directions. Under duress it is a lost cause. I went to two good friends and asked for a favor. “I have to get to the hospital and I can’t figure out a map well enough to drive myself. Can you figure out the directions and drive ahead of me, letting me follow you so I have a car when I get out?” They agreed and I followed them to a place I would come to know well over the next two years. I hugged my friends good-bye and entered alone.
Remember how I wasn’t desperate the last time I’d been to a psychiatric hospital? It was a different ballgame now. I was willing to take any medication, listen attentively to a diagnosis, and generally be a compliant patient. I needed help. I wasn’t willing to give up my self-destructive behavior. No one had ever asked me to. It never occurred to me it would become a condition of therapy. I was a young ‘un.
I was asked what were to become very familiar questions:
Are you feeling helpless?
Are you feeling hopeless?
Are you feeling suicidal?
And a host of others. I was given a physical exam.
I don’t remember them asking me what I thought was wrong with me and I honestly didn’t know. I had taken one adult psych class in college and didn’t see myself reflected in anything the course taught. I had never tried to diagnose myself. I wasn’t particularly interested in labels. I might have been had I been more aware of their consequences, but that was really a problem for future years.
I was admitted and handed two milligrams of Ativan. I swallowed them with a Dixie cup of water and went to the smoking room. They took effect and the medication took the edge off the anxiety. I was not scared. To be honest, for the first time in a long time I felt deep relief. I could tell that I was in a place where people knew how to help me. Everyone had been kind and there were no holes in the blankets, I checked.
A few hours later I saw a psychiatrist that I was to come to know very well. She’d had blood tests run. She’d read my admitting paperwork. She asked me a series of questions. One of them was, “Have you spent unusual sums of money recently?” I thought about the army duffel bag full of new clothes sitting in my closet. “Yah.” I didn’t realize that was symptomatic of anything besides bad judgment.
“You have bi-polar disorder and you’re in a rapidly cycling manic phase.” She said this as if she did this every day (she did, of course). I was floored. Our session lasted about 20 minutes. She told me she was taking me off Prozac and adding Lithium, a mood stabilizer, to my regimin. She left to attend to other duties and I was left to attend to the diagnosis I had been so “ready” for.
I was prepared for “depression.” I was prepared for “anxiety.” I was prepared for “that self-destructive behavior is bit of a problem.” I was not prepared for:
- You need to be on medication for the rest of your life
- You will probably still cycle from depression to mild mania even with medication on a semi-regular basis, particularly with the seasons
I don’t know when it sunk in that:
- I will cope with mental illnes when I am young, I will cope with mental illness when I am middle aged, and I will cope with mental illness when I reach old age.
I’m glad I didn’t know then how hard it would be.
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