The Other Side of the Glass

            by Laura Cornwall

 

The cushion of the chair didn’t sink as I sat down.  In fact, it didn’t move at all. It was covered in fabric with stripes that all seemed to have been taken from the part of the rainbow that had been obscured by smog, and the padding felt like wood. Might have been.   

My mom and I thought we’d sit in the two chairs near the TV that hung in the corner. Sesame Street was on, and I smiled fondly at Bert and Ernie. Within minutes, I wanted to throw something at the forced cheeriness of the show, so we moved to the other side of the room, where an old man lay slumped in a chair, looking convincingly dead.

My mom knitted, I stared at my bag. I considered reading my book, but my hands were shaking and my stomach was pushing against my throat, so I decided against it.  The new Red Hot Chili Peppers album sat waiting on my iPod, and since I only occasionally listened to them, it seemed the perfect music to play; I wouldn’t taint my favorite music with the memories of the experience, and I got to listen to a new album. Drink it in, examine every note and chord and lyric. Busy. Distracted from the other words pushing themselves back into my head.

 

My therapist and I had discussed hospitalization – it’d first come up over two months previous, but I’d pushed it away, terrified. Not of the hospital part, but the missing school part. I cared too much about having a college-worthy junior-year transcript, not to mention passing my AP tests. But after the tests were over, we both knew it could very well be the best thing for me.

Doing work had become nearly impossible. Even working simple math problems was beyond my ability, and not just because I was continuously exhausted and drained. My mind simply lost its ability to think the way it had before. I didn’t just need to push myself to work harder – I needed a new brain. Or a new body. Or both.

School was the obvious example of how out of hand my life was getting: if I couldn’t do any of my work, how on earth could I get to the end of the school year? But my emotional self, hiding behind the problems with school, was having even harder of a time getting through each day, and was the real reason for our discussions of the hospital. I lived two lives at the time, the external and the internal. External-Laura smiled through the stress of AP tests just like everyone else, she made bad jokes and laughed at those of other people. She talked to everyone about band, just like always. She was just like always. She wasn’t actually me.

There’s no easy way to explain the internal life. All those movies about the depressed and the suicidal – none of them can do the feelings justice. I call them the ache. The ache resides directly below my collarbone, but sometimes decides to test its boundaries and expand a little. Sometimes it decides to expand a lot. Toward the end of junior year, the ache pushed past everything else, knocking me off my feet without making a sound.

My therapist and I decided that I needed a better, safer place to get back onto my feet. Despite all my trepidation, I took the plunge. Which is how I ended up on the hard ugly chair watching my iPod shake in my hands.

 

In order to work my way up through bureaucracy to the psychiatric unit, I had to start at the very bottom: the ER. While I sat there, the ache turned into a swarm of bees, a tiger, and an elephant. All at once. Unfortunately, the menagerie inside my chest did not put me any higher up on the list, and I spent over an hour waiting to hear my name.

Finally, a nurse in pale yellow scrubs stuck her head in and asked for me. My mom and I both stood up and followed, though after I got into the second room I sent my mom back to sit down. She didn’t need to hear how out of hand my life had gotten – she couldn’t see it, and even if she was with me in the ER, I still didn’t want her to know.

This second room was hardly better than the first. There were three desks with chairs in front of them, and each had a pale yellow plastic curtain that pulled around the chairs, offering an ounce of privacy for the assessment. Clearly, pale yellow was a popular color in the Alta Bates emergency room. A small part of my mind spun off with evaluations of color choices in hospitals, the rest just spun furiously in no direction at all.

There is very little that can be memorable about my assessment. The yellow curtain made me claustrophobic. My therapist had informed me that if I was overly anxious they’d give me anti-anxiety meds (“Try not to hide your panic like you usually do, because if they can see it, they’ll give you the Ativan, which will help,”) but unfortunately they didn’t, and I didn’t ask. I did, however, get to wear one of those little finger clips that measure your pulse, which was rather exciting. On TV they always fascinated me, though I can’t say why, since they’re little more than a couple pieces of plastic.

After the finger clip and the urine test and the extensive questioning (What’s your name and age, what’s made your situation drastic enough for you to come here, rate those emotions on a scale of one to ten, do you have other medical problems we should know about?), I was sent back to the first room for another long wait. Though it’s widely acknowledged that hospitals are places of waiting, repeating the same waiting in the same room with the same monotonous television is enough to drive you mad.

            A nurse summoned me again and sent me to a room full of cubicles; nothing like what you expect from an emergency room. Naturally, it was the insurance-and-tedious-paperwork room. I left there with a hospital wristband, and a nurse took me to the actual ER, where the color scheme was gloriously not-yellow. I expected to be taken to another little curtained-off area with a chair or bed to wait, but instead I was given the high honor of waiting on a gurney in Hall A. It was actually just a normal hallway, only on the wall they’d crookedly taped a piece of paper that had “HALL A” scrawled on it in marker.

            I spent an unreasonably long time hanging out on that gurney – I stopped counting after three hours. In the time it took to read the whole of Joan Didion’s book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, only one person on staff visited me. She was an intern, and asked exactly the same things as they had before. I wanted to show her that my answers were already on the clipboard, but she had a kinder face than anyone else that had spoken with me. Her eyes weren’t clouded by impatience; they smiled gently at me instead. She had compassion, even if it was wrapped in a white lab coat. Then she was gone.

            My book finished and my kind intern nowhere in sight, I sat back and watched the scenes around me. The beautiful thing about being in Hall A was that I saw everything. EMTs constantly moved through the corridor, and after a while I knew who was new to the job, who was ready to reach the end of their shift, and who had been there for so long that they knew every secret of the building, or at least of that hallway. Unfortunately, the EMTs were far more interesting than the patients they wheeled past me, none of whom were even fully awake. Save for one. 

            “I just need to go outside and have a cigarette!” said a woman in jeans much too small for her, facing the nurse blocking the way down the hall toward the exit.

            “I’m afraid you cannot leave the building right now. You need to wait until we speak with your doctor.”

            “Fuck that, I’m having my cigarette!”

            “That’s not possible. You are under a 5150, as we explained to you.” My therapist had told me that a 5150 meant that you were involuntarily held for 72 hours for psychiatric evaluation, so I knew that she was going to the same building I was. My interest piqued, I listened more carefully.

            “Someone tell these people I don’t want to run away, I just need to smoke!”

            “Can we have some assistance in here?” The smoker was clearly intent on pushing her way past the nurse down the hall to the door, and managed it just as other nurses appeared. The first one yelled to the others, “She’s a 5150, call security,” as she ran after the woman down the hall.

            I couldn’t see what happened after that, but I could hear yelling, and at one point one of the nurses yelled to staff inside, “We need Haldol, now!” I knew, from reading too many books about mental hospitals, that Haldol was a sedative that they used in extreme cases of “agitation” or psychosis. Meaning the woman outside had to be sedated in order for them to take her over to the psychiatric unit. My throat began to tighten and my hands started shaking again. No longer wanting to pay any attention to the world beyond my gurney, I started searching my bag for any sort of distraction.

            Finally, a doctor came to speak with me. She asked me questions in a heavy Russian accent, and I gave her my answers verbatim from before. Some of these answers seemed to confuse her, which naturally bumped up my already very high confidence that any of the staff knew anything about how to deal with me. But she wrote the referral in the end and handed it to me along with directions to Herrick, the hospital branch a few blocks away that housed all psychiatric treatment facilities. Diagnosis and directions firmly in hand, I found my mom in the waiting room and we left through the same door that we’d come in, as though nothing at all had happened. But everything had changed.

 

            Once at Herrick, my mom and I searched for the elusive referral-office. Twenty minutes, three elevators, and two intercoms later, we arrived outside of the adolescent girls psychiatric unit, and were instructed to wait. Again.

            I sat on the wooden bench, listening to the same song on repeat, staring out of the plate-glass window in front of me. I could see the tops of Berkeley High buildings, two blocks and a thousand miles away.

            “Laura Cornwall?”

            “Oh, yes, hi.”

            “C’mon in.” A bearded man with a clipboard held open the heavy door. After I walked through (my mom was instructed to wait on the bench), I heard it lock solidly behind us. There were no handles on the door. Only a bright yellow sign that said “High AWOL Risk.” The bold words code for “High Risk of Patients Trying to Run Out”. Trying to escape the place I was voluntarily entering.

            I followed him down a hallway and through another set of doors, which only stayed unlocked for a moment before electronically melding back into one. The hallway beyond these doors was painted blue and covered with acrylic rainbows, clouds, and flowers. This cheeriness scared me much more than the heavy doors. I can’t live in a ward covered in greeting-card-happiness. Why would I – I’m not like these girls in their terrycloth socks. For all the girls there were in pajamas, some of which were actually scrubs, and most had the same pale blue socks on.

            Nonetheless, I followed the man into the room where he had just placed chairs. The room was tiny, barely fitting the two of us, and all that was there other than our chairs was a blue mat. The kind they used when we did tumbling in circus class, only this mat was clearly not for fun. We were unmistakably in a seclusion room – there was no other explanation for a room only big enough for one, the mat on the ground, the door I could tell was almost as heavy as the ones from before. The clouds painted on the walls did nothing to disguise the feeling of isolation and entrapment. It forcibly reminded me of the decision I was making.

            I honestly have no memory of the interview itself, other than that I did not like the look in the man’s eyes, a false and clinical kind of empathy, more shrewd than caring. All I remember from that period is the time I sat alone in the room as he went back outside the unit to talk with my mom. The door was open, but I was stayed inside, alone in the room, listening to the sounds of teenager girls playing card games and attempting to persuade nurses into more TV and phone time. I had a book open in my lap, but all I could do was picture myself sitting out there, picture myself living with other sick girls, other girls in crisis. Sarcasm and detached humor fled my mind, leaving me alone with my doubt and panic. Finally,

            “We think this isn’t the place for you, since you’re not in acute crisis.”
            “Okay.”

            “I’m referring you to our day-hospital program. I think it’s the best place for you. You’ll have all the support of the hospital, but you’ll get to go home every day.”

            “Okay.”

            “Let’s go back out and talk to your mother.”

            “Okay.”

 

            Soon after that, my mom and I drove home, a second hospital referral staring up at me from my lap. The next day I would go back there and interview with the intake woman for the day-hospital, better known as PHP (Partial Hospitalization Program). If all went according to plan, I would enter the program the day after that.

Until then, I had plenty of time at home, much of which I spent lying in bed. I stared blankly at the uneven yellow paint on my ceiling, letting the panic wash over me. One wave would bring clips that played in my mind of everything that could go wrong. The next wave would bring muffled punches – I told all my teachers I was going to be hospitalized. I left school, and I’m not coming back until the next year. I’m missing the end of my junior year. The word will eventually get out that Laura, perfectly adjusted Laura, is in a “mental institution”. No one will understand.  Back and forth, these waves rolled over me, momentarily drowning me. One gasp for air and then down under again.

 

The interview was no different than all the previous consultations, and the next day I walked into Herrick with my mom. While we now knew the floor, we still were lost among the many beige doors, and the paintings in between them did not help in the slightest. They were à la cheap motel – mass-produced water colors in pastel versions of beige. After knocking on a few incorrect doors, we finally came across a smiling young woman who introduced herself as Rain. She seemed very down to earth – I saw no evidence that I should fear her as a modern hippie – so I bid my mom goodbye and followed Rain down the hall.

The room (it turned out PHP was held entirely in one large room) was warmer than everything else thus far; faux-art replaced by earnest youthful paintings, beanbags strewn about the room, and sunlight pouring in, illuminating everything. The far wall was painted with green mountains and full clouds, but these were executed with attention to detail and color, and there were airplanes, hot-air balloons, and birds, not just creepily cheery flowers. Also, the painted wall wasn’t accompanied by white coats, and doors without handles.

The director of the program, a middle aged woman with long curly hair, stood up from a cluttered desk as I entered.

“Hi, I’m Gina. You must be Laura! I talked with your mom on the phone yesterday.”

“Mhm…”

“The other people should be here soon. Just put your bag in the closet over there,” she pointed to a small closet filled with art supplies, “and sit down anywhere.”

There was a circle of ten chairs set up in the middle of the room. I sank into the one nearest the closet and pulled my legs up to my chest, resting my shoes on the edge of the seat. As I sat, I flickered in and out, either staring at everything or staring at nothing, my mind blank.

Within minutes, other people (all on the older level of the “adolescent” spectrum) began to join me in the circle, sending my mind and heart racing. Each offered a general hello and smile to me, along with their name. Two of the girls looked exactly like two of my friends. Unsure whether that fact was comforting or disturbing, I jumped into another train of thought. As I looked at each girl (for there were no boys that day) I tried to figure out her reason for being in PHP. No one carries around a banner, diagnosis painted in huge block letters, but you can often tell from little details. Instead of letting myself panic, I searched for those details, pointedly ignoring the fact that all the girls were probably doing the same thing to me.

I didn’t need to search for long. Once everyone, including Gina, was seated in the circle, they introduced themselves with their name and reason for being there. Everyone was a depressive on some level, but what changed was how it manifested. Eating disorders, self-injury, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, suicidal ideation, and almost everything else you could think of. All contained in a small group of seemingly normal and healthy girls.

At that point, it really hit me. I dropped the pretense onto which I’d clung the past few days, months, years; the pretense that even though I was sick enough to head towards the hospital, everything was actually fine. I was sitting in a room full of other people whose lives had gotten out of hand, and they were admitting it, taking steps towards getting better, trying to rebuild their lives. They were truly acknowledging their problems. If I was sitting in a room full of those people, I was one of those people.

“Laura, can you tell us what brought you here?”

“I guess in the simplest of terms: depression, major obsessive-compulsiveness, self-injury, and smaller issues therein. I feel trapped in my own head, like I’m watching everything from a distance and my perception has been skewed. I’m seeing a therapist, and it’s helped, but things just keep spiraling down. I only see her twice a week, and she’s the only person in my life who really understands how fucking hard it is for me right now, how much it takes to keep going. I just can’t take it anymore.”

“It’s brave of you to tell all that to us upfront. And don’t be afraid to cry – we don’t even know you yet and we care about you.” Though I was very focused on holding back the tears that I’d tried to bury over the past few days, I could hear how genuine Gina’s words were. If I jumped into the deep end of the pool, she’d help me stay afloat, and eventually climb back out. 

So I took a deep breath and jumped.