It was Terribly Funny

Posted on April 24, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Psych Wards Recent

This is, at last, part of the story of my 2005 hospitalization.

The nurses came looking for me, holding their second fingers and their thumbs as if they’d just snapped them. They beckoned me to follow and sat me down in an office just off the south corridor of the Behavioral Medicine Unit. I had walked by this niche plenty of times but I had never noticed the door nor conceived that there was a space there that could be filled.

Life had pressed the pause button. The tape froze, a snowstorm of static sprayed across the picture tube. I was energetic with franctic sparks that made me seek out the dirt in my fingernails, study the bare walls for images that only I could see. What would happen next in this theater of halls that looped and intersected in front of the glass nurse’s station? Up to now, everything the staff did had been transparent. But just a little while before other new patients had disappeared and rematerialized, the line between their lips flat. I did not see the real pattern or realize that I had a turn.

The psychiatrist who met me there, Doctor Speare, had kind eyes that could quiet you in the most incalescent mania. Nonetheless, I fidgeted agressively. Who was this stranger? When you went to the hospital, your doctor was supposed to see you, right? This guy acted as if he knew me like an aquarist might know a species of tropical fish. Flipping through the notes the nurses had written, he paused, looked up at me, and asked “Has anyone ever told you that you were bipolar?” I stopped, muttered the word, and then told him “No.” I had questions. Wasn’t I depressed? How could three different doctors before him not seen my psychosis? He explained that the anti-depressant I was on could push a person into a mixed state: that was why I had whirled into the vortex of a suicide attempt that had led me to commit myself.

When we were finished, I called Lynn. “They think I am bipolar,” I said. Our conversation was pieced together from my staggering desire to know the truth. We’d have to research this together, I inveighed. She promised to make some notes for my regular doctor. I hung up the phone, wandered over to one of the common rooms. So this was it. I was in the big time of mental illness now. Or so I had been for who knows how many years? I giggled. It was terribly funny.