Chapter 22 #2
He asked me a few questions, and I didn’t get the impression he knew much more about eating disorders than I did.
He added that I wouldn’t see him often while I was hospitalized.
For how long, I wanted to know. That depends, he answered.
Most of the time I would be in the care of a social worker I’d meet in the morning.
Dr. Bill and I didn’t talk long before he got up and walked me to the door. The nurse was waiting and escorted me back down the hallway. I followed her up long flights of marble steps to the third floor. Room 303 was small with a single bed, a bathroom, and a window overlooking the front lawn.
My suitcase was open and had been gone through. The hospital had confiscated several small rocks I’d collected from the Forum. They took my Bible. I wasn’t allowed to have anything that could be used for self-harm. I guessed some patients swallowed rocks and other things like that.
Or maybe the fear was I’d turn them into a weapon, throwing them at somebody. I knew that mentally ill people sometimes got bad ideas from reading Scripture, particularly the Old Testament.
“If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off,” and they would.
The nurse went over the litany of rules.
I wasn’t in lockdown and had reasonable freedom unless I abused it.
I could go outside but wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital grounds.
She preferred I didn’t walk around alone, and it was mandatory that I show up for all meals and activities.
I couldn’t make phone calls without permission.
“Any questions?” she asked.
I noticed there wasn’t a way to lock my door. I envisioned the patient who reminded me of Frankenstein. I thought of being naked on Dr. Bill’s exam table.
“Is it possible for me to lock my door?” I wanted to know.
“No, it’s not allowed,” she said.
That night I lay awake in the dark listening to the clicks of the digital clock on the nightstand.
The radiator clanked like something was trying to beat its way out.
I thought of my father and what he would say if he knew where I was.
Before leaving Rome, I’d written notes on postcards, addressing them to him and faking the dates.
I described walks along the Tiber River that never happened.
I mentioned Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican, the Circus Maximus, the Mamertine Prison where people were locked up while awaiting execution.
I told him about my accommodations at the Kolbe Hotel on Via di San Teodoro, and that I could pick blood oranges from trees on the grounds.
But my favorite site so far was the Roman Forum, once a meeting place where politicians stumped, gladiators fought, and criminal trials were held.
It’s where Dad would have hung out in ancient times, I mentioned.
Now it was in ruins, columns standing with nothing around them but rubble.
I asked my roommate to mail a postcard to my father every three days, and she said she would.
When I woke up the next morning in my hospital room, I didn’t know where I was at first. Then my stark surroundings came into focus as the radiator hissed and banged.
I got up, looking out the window at snow falling, dismayed by what had become of my life.
A brisk knock on my door, and a nurse walked in holding a small paper cup and a slightly bigger one with water in it.
“Good morning,” she said. “It’s twenty-eight degrees out and you might want to wear a sweater.”
She handed me the cups. In the small one was an orange-and-yellow capsule, and she watched me swallow it with water.
“Open your mouth so I can make sure it went down,” she instructed, and I did.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Navane,” she said, and I had no idea what that was.
There was no way for me to look it up. Had I done so I would have discovered that it’s an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Dr. Bill had diagnosed my mother as a paranoid schizophrenic.
Those were his words exactly years later when I went to see him, asking what was wrong with her.
I don’t believe his diagnosis was correct.
Even if it had been, it was ridiculous for him to assume I needed her same medication.
I had an eating disorder. Dr. Bill said if I didn’t get it under control my organs would shut down.
I might have a heart attack. For sure I would die.
Maybe that would be fine by me, I thought.
After the nurse left, I dressed, walking out of my room and shutting the door. I headed to the stairs, reaching the nurses’ station, where I was intercepted by a heavyset man with a shaved head and deep-set piggish eyes. He introduced himself as Don Boone, the social worker Dr. Bill had mentioned.
Don told me that we’d be spending a lot of time together, and I was instantly wary.
He was far too touchy and invasive in every way imaginable, all in the name of therapy.
He boasted that he had a good idea what was wrong with me.
Nobody better than him to deal with it, and we’d fix me together. I wasn’t confident and didn’t like him.
This wasn’t starting well, I thought while heading downstairs. Inside the dining room with its bare wooden floor and white-cloth-covered tables, I picked up my plastic tray of eggs, toast, orange juice. I sat alone looking around at other patients, a few of them middle-aged, the rest much older.
I was the only young person in the hospital and prayed that no one would shuffle over to my table. But two patients did, a man and a woman, both in their sixties or seventies.
“Why are you here?” the man asked me.
“I have trouble eating,” I replied, my breakfast untouched.
“Why won’t you eat?” the woman inquired.
With shaky hands she picked up her glass of milk.
It dribbled down her chin, and she explained she had cerebral palsy.
Her body had no control, and that’s the way I felt inside.
I couldn’t control a thing. Not even something as basic as eating.
I either ate nothing or too much and got rid of it.
But I didn’t tell the patients at my table that.
By the time breakfast was over, my brain wasn’t working right.
Within hours, I could scarcely function.
I felt like Pinocchio morphing from flesh and blood back into a wood carving.
I couldn’t think. During group therapy, I was in a stupor.
When I wasn’t attending something scheduled, I sat in a chair in the lobby staring into space as if I’d died and nobody told me.
The next morning the nurse walked into my room with her singsong greeting as if I were a child or demented. I told her I couldn’t function on Navane. I didn’t want to take it.
“Well, you have to.” She hovered over me as I sat up in bed.
“It makes me feel terrible.”
“After a while you won’t notice it as much.”
“Why do I have to take it?”
“Doctor Bill wants you to.”
“What’s it supposed to do?” I swallowed the capsule.
“It will help you,” she answered.
I spent another day in a fog as if someone had banged me on the head. I’d take a shower and fear that a patient would wander into my unlocked room. When I’d dry off, I’d stare in the mirror at blue veins and protruding bones. I had no insulation against pain and cold.