The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Page 10

  ‘Would you please stop that,’ she said sternly. He didn’t. He couldn’t. ‘Leave the room,’ she commanded, thoroughly annoyed. Poor fellow. He got up from his mat, burping more than ever, and crept away. Many months later, when I was leaving hospital, he came up and apologised to me: ‘I know it has been irritating for you. I’m sorry,’ he said. I hated myself.

  Occasionally there were patients who frightened me, particularly some very powerful looking fellows with schizophrenia. There was a chap called Roger who lumbered around the ward uttering vile imprecations against the nurses who persisted in calling him Roger.

  ‘Don’t you fuckin’ call me that. I’m the great Nasrat, creator of earthquakes and tidal waves. Turkey and India, that’s me. The Great Nasrat. Not piddles like Newcastle. Turkey, that’s me.’

  One day we were taken on a ward outing to Centennial Park by the occupational therapists. We all queued up for a coffee from the kiosk near Grand Drive. Ahead of us was a crush of young mothers and babies waiting to collect their takeaways. Nasrat wasn’t standing for any of this. He charged through the crowd yelling at the top of his voice: ‘We’re all loonies and I’m the Great Nasrat and I’ll blow you fuckers to Kingdom Come if you don’t get out of our way.’ I’ve never seen a crowd disappear so fast. Unfortunately the staff pulled down the shutter in a flash and we didn’t get our coffees until the OTs reassured the canteen staff and restored order. Gradually I came to see that Nasrat was no threat, and if he became so he was taken to the secure unit for a day or so.

  There was a woman I tried to avoid. She was grappling with her demons as she paced about, her lipstick smeared all over her face, her hair filthy, her eyes wild. One day she set her sights on me and followed me down the hall.

  ‘You fuckin’ cunt bitch, you don’t even care about raping those babies, do you? Cunt. Can you lend me twenty cents?’ Another day she tried to sell me a handful of those frightful lollies that look like false teeth.

  There was a dear little woman from a Middle Eastern country whom I liked very much. One day she said to me, apropos of her sexual experience, that everyone in her country removed all body hair: ‘When scuba diving seaweed is not good. We seek the sea cucumber and the oyster.’

  Then there was one very young woman with severe postnatal depression. She and her husband and tiny baby were living in at the hospital. Every day, the husband went off to work as usual and this young woman was helped to care for herself and the little one. I rarely saw her until, one evening at supper, she was brought in by her nurse and seated at a table, the carrycot placed on the table beside her. Just then her husband arrived. Suddenly a childlike, shrill, piping squeal sounded through the room.

  ‘Giddy, giddy, gout, your shirt’s hanging out, five miles in and five miles out.’ The young woman dived under the table. ‘Whippy’s taken, one, two, three. Find me, Daddy. Find me, Daddy.’ He stood still, red-faced and she scrambled out and launched herself at him. She wrapped her arms around his neck, clambered up his body and wrapped her legs around his waist. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ she piped, clinging limpet-like, snuggling into him. I remember how that little scene made me cry. This was a manifestation of serious post-natal depression being played out in the dining room for all of us to see. This was what this potentially fatal disease could do. What pleasure, then, when about two weeks later I saw that she had regained her equilibrium and was being discharged. It’s a disease that can be cured. Before she left, she happily and proudly showed us her tiny baby.

  And there is no doubt that some funny things happened which made people laugh, without any malice intended. There was one chap who was convinced a kangaroo was trying to get him into a taxi and take him to Edgecliff.

  One of my daughters took a particular interest in Tom Bull because he really was very amusing and, despite his chronic illness and obsessional behaviour, there was a twinkle in his eye and I think he knew he made people laugh and enjoyed the attention. The first time I met him was the day I finally crept down to the dining room and joined the queue for breakfast. Tom had to go through so many rituals for every step he took that he held things up and people grew impatient and shouted for him to hurry up. This morning the nursing staff took him under the armpits, lifted him up and carried him forward upright.

  ‘Don’t worry me now,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m frantic with pain and worry.’ He took his runny scrambled egg and shook the salt over it.‘Would you like the salt?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me a long-winded explanation,’ he groaned.

  One day I was lying under the tree when I saw him making his ritualistic way across the lawn, fiddling with the scratchy old earphones he always wore. He didn’t notice me until he was up close and he burst into a paroxysm of coughing. Then he started to talk. I wrote it down later.

  My name’s Tom, My third cousin wrote the words of the song.‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’. If I had time, I’d tell you. Frantic with pain and worry. I take cold showers summer and winter as told to me by my Jewish psychiatrist, Dr Edelman, of Maroubra Junction. I have to go now and swallow my stelazine tablets. I’m aged fifty-one and Dr Edelman tells me that Tom Bull’s heart, lungs, liver and kidneys are in perfect working order. If I had time I’d tell you. Terrible worries I have.Old Mrs Fisher.Nerve case.Over two hundred ECTs.Silly as urine.Said my father poisoned her dog in 1943. I had to patch it up with her in 1978. They dumped a dead dog on Tilly Devine’s doorstep in South Maroubra. Terrible people. I’ll have to sell the house. Nasty phone calls, people ringing the doorbell, asking for money. Irish people.Frantic with worry. Had a terrible headache since 1951.A Hungarian psychiatrist, Hungarian, once told Tom Bull, ‘You have to do everything quickly.’When I asked why, he said,‘Because there’s not enough time.’

  He did a little dance, two steps back, one forward, over and over again and finally disappeared. A few months later, I went on another outing—this time to Darling Harbour.

  ‘Oh, God, Mum. Did Tom Bull go?’ asked Harriet. When I said he did, she moaned in embarrassment. ‘I hope no one saw you with him,’ she said. ‘People will think you’re mad.’

  Tom always wore the same shabby, navy jacket and my successive navy blazers are always affectionately known to the family as Tom. Only this year, as I waited in my car at the traffic lights, a familiar figure crossed in front of me. For a moment I couldn’t think where I had seen him before. Then I recognised that it was Tom and my heart was gladdened to see that he walked swiftly and without hesitation, free of the tics and twitches that had assailed him when I had known him.

  Apart from the moving or bizarre behaviour of my fellow patients, there are one or two who will remain in my mind forever, so admiring am I of their courage. On one of my admissions, a middle-aged woman was in the room next to mine. She was slim, tall and neatly dressed, usually in a crisp white shirt and tailored pants. She tied her grey hair at the back of her neck with a black velvet bow. Every evening without fail and all through the weekend, her husband was there to visit her. Her door was usually closed, but it did not block out the inhuman noises she made. The hairs on my arms stood up and I felt alternately hot and cold when I heard her. Howls, yelps, long, frenzied spasms of barking. I would put my fingers in my ears to block out the sounds. It was so alien, so . . . so sub-human. One day I met her husband on the stairs. He looked exhausted. I felt such pain for us, for all of us.

  ‘How do we bear all this?’ I asked, although I had never spoken to him before.

  ‘That which does not destroy me makes me stronger,’ he said. ‘All of us.’ And clichéd as it is, I’ve come, in my life, to believe it. It is only through difficulty and suffering that we truly grow.

  Every night this woman was called out of her room to receive her medication at the dispensary window. She would howl despairingly when the nurses started calling her, but finally, when their patience was exhausted, she would stumble down the hall, saying: ‘Don’t look at me, don’t look at me. I’m not human an
ymore.’ Everyone in that place of pain seemed stunned by her cataclysmic, desolate, chilling howls of grief. I remember how I just knew I could never survive such a visitation of madness, a madness that would make me less than human.

  Then one night, a small miracle of insight was granted me. As this woman came towards us, I realised that, rather than being sub-human, she was in fact super-human. She was bravely continuing to battle the predator that had taken hold inside her and one day she would win. Every time she screamed, ‘I’m not human anymore’, she was affirming her very humanness. I went back to my room and cried for her courage and defiance. I prayed that I, too, might be touched by grace.

  Another group is invariably found on the ward of a mental hospital. As a mother, I find the sight of all the girls with anorexia nervosa to be particularly heartrending. They are committing a slow and painful suicide, and it seems as if those who love and care for them are impotent. I could see the agony in their parents’ eyes and I could only imagine their despair. Only too often when I went into the toilets I would hear someone gagging painfully as she determinedly spewed up her guts. In a room by himself was a young boy who weighed just 28 kilograms. His eyelids were sewn shut to protect his dehydrated eyeballs. His hands were tied to the sides of the bed to prevent him tearing the feeding tube out of his nose and, because he tried to get his teeth to it, his head was also strapped. He was very close to death and his body was covered in long, soft downy hair—a feature of this illness.

  As I gradually got better, I spent quite a lot of time on the girls’ special ward as they were usually confined to bed-rest, bored witless and unhappy. They wanted to know all about my daughters and I think they envied them their good health. They spoke openly about all the tricks and subterfuges they employed to keep the weight off and it didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t understand.

  Every morning I’d hear them, first thing, thumping one by one down the corridor in their hospital gowns, to be weighed.

  ‘You wake me every morning,’ I complained. ‘I wouldn’t have thought sprogs like you could make so much noise.’

  ‘It’s a good chance to walk some weight off,’ they told me. Other times, at odd hours of the day, I would hear a bath being run in the bathroom just across the hall from my room. Probably, one of the girls was having a ‘dry bath’. The running water hid the sound of them puffing and panting as they did push-ups, or ran on the spot behind the closed door. (Incidentally, only in a mental hospital would you have a sign on the bathroom door that said: ‘If you want a hot bath, run the cold tap full on.’) The girls’ beds were strewn with fluffy toys, tapestry, crochet sets, magazines. I tried to encourage them to wellness but gradually came to recognise in their emaciated bodies a stubbornness and ruthless determination. Some days, one or other would be crying because all privileges had been withdrawn until she put on a few grams. Bed-rest, no television, no visitors.

  ‘It’s such a little bit,’ I’d say.

  ‘I know. But I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My brain won’t let me.’ Simple as that.

  When I finally left hospital, they made a huge cake and card for me and gave me flowers and we hugged and kissed. On a later admission I saw one of them arriving at an outpatients clinic. She was horrified to see me in there again, but I was so pleased to see the progress she had made. I really admire the persistence of the therapists who try to help young people with anorexia and the strength of will that helps these ill young people recover.

  It has been on psych wards that I have started to understand real compassion. I have been humbled by the tolerance and compassion I have witnessed from one human being to another: patients towards each other and staff (nursing, catering, cleaning, medical) towards patients, usually in the profoundly depressing surroundings of government hospitals. What I have witnessed in hospital has taught me how ordinary people try—sometimes with almost superhuman determination— to overcome adversity and find a positive meaning in living. For some people, simply to get up in the morning is the supreme act of courage.

  I think I should say a little bit about electro-convulsive therapy, or ECT. It has had very bad press, and I think that any of us who saw the films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or A Perfect Mind, or the television series Angel at My Table, about the life of the New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, have quite understandably been horrified at the thought of such a barbaric treatment. And it was barbaric in the early days. Shocks that could not be properly calibrated were delivered without anaesthetics or muscle relaxants so that people had frightful fits that could actually fracture their limbs. It was also administered to ‘recalcitrant’ patients for punitive reasons.

  These conditions do not apply today. The administration of ECT is rigorously monitored and patients must sign their consent, which they can withdraw at any time. It is really a treatment of last recourse when nothing else has succeeded in getting a patient out of a deep depression. I have had over 30 ECTs, but unfortunately it has never helped me much. However, I have seen many very sick people start to walk, talk, eat and drink after as few as three or four sessions. It definitely has a place, and when it is the treatment of last resort I always hope it might work and am willing to give it another chance. However, I have to admit that I am always anxious, and glad when it is over.

  On one admission an old lady was having ECT at the same time as myself. She told me that we were used as gland parts. Under ECT they were removed and sent to Sharon Stone and Raquel Welsh. I told her I thought that unlikely, but she could not be persuaded otherwise. It didn’t seem to bother her, however.

  I think people are curious about what actually happens. Let me tell you what my experience has been. It is given three times a week and you must fast from midnight, but this is no problem as it is done early in the morning. In some hospitals you all line up on chairs outside the treatment room and wait your turn. I never liked that method. The waiting always made me nervous. In other hospitals, a nurse collects you from your room and takes you to the ECT room which is like a small operating theatre except there are no instruments, only the black box that will deliver the shock and oxygen cylinders.You get on to the table in your pyjamas with a sheet over you, but pulled up so your feet are visible. This is so they can be observed twitching when you are administered the ECT and the nurses know you have received a jolt. One or two electrodes are attached to either side of your forehead and plugged into the box. It takes about a minute for this to be done.Very often the charge nurse has asked me if I would like her to hold my hand and I have gratefully accepted the offer. Then you take some big breaths of oxygen and the anaesthetist first administers the anaesthetic followed by a muscle relaxant that prevents the terrible convulsions that were so appalling in bygone days. Before you can count down from five you are asleep. A rubber pad is placed between your teeth to prevent you biting your tongue and that’s that.About four minutes later, it’s all over and you wake up in recovery. You’re wheeled back to your room, a welcome cup of tea comes along and I always fall fast asleep again for a few hours. During one admission I attempted to write down a few words about the treatment.

  Tomorrow I start. HAS TO WORK. What else.

  Day 1. ECT

  Knocked out all day. Jaw ache. Dead.

  Day 2

  Frozen cold. So tired.

  Day 3

  Injection is like ice particles burning up my arm I shamble. Who I?

  Day 4

  Cannot feel. I am empty.

  Day 5 ECT

  Too wretched to—

  Day 6

  Devoid of hope. I think I am dying.

  They are going to push on. Push on! They are disappointed. They!

  Day 7 ECT

  Sleep better. Taste the toast.

  ECT 13

  Bad. Twitching and Felt a gust of hope this afternoon. Am I getting better?

  Day 8

  I remember the long ago past. I forget this morning or five minutes ago.

 
Day 9

  ECT

  Day 10 Can’t remember.

  ECT 11

  It kicks me. I’m grovelling. Memory bad.

  ECT 12

  Flashing in my skull.

  Number 14

  How can I keep doing this?

  ECT 16

  Second last coming up. Can’t take it anymore. Poor little head . . .

  What I have found most upsetting about ECT is the short-term memory loss that I suffer. Although told that this is transitory, I have found that large parts of my memory have gone forever, even when I have asked others to jog my memory by recounting events I have taken part in. Not a flicker of recognition. However, in all fairness, I must say that depression itself plays havoc with the memory, as if the brain shuts down almost completely to protect the little bit of reality that the sufferer can absorb. Furthermore, in the blackness of the illness, you stop receiving impressions that you would take in when you were not ill. Most things simply pass you by. So perhaps it is a combination of the depression and the ECT that is the cause. I would not like anyone to be persuaded out of this treatment for fear of memory loss. If it can save your life, it is essential. Harriet had a joke she used frequently, probably to deal with her own sadness as much as anything when I was undergoing ECT: ‘Come on now, Mum. Concentrate. Which one am I?’