Coping with Disaster:
A Manic's Tale
John
woke up in a hospital bed. There was nothing but bare walls and a
door with small slit through which he could see a nurse's station. He
had no idea how or why he was there. With nothing but a hospital gown
on, he got up and tried the handle. It was locked. There was
something unsettling about being locked in a tiny room, dependent on
the staff to let you out. Then a voice reminded him that he was here
because he needed it. She was a female, but it came from inside his
own head.
“Try
to remember the night before,” she said.
John
ignored her voice. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't convince
himself it wasn't real. Out of frustration, he pounded on the door
and let out a scream. A nurse looked up from the nurses' station and
signaled to an aide in a beige uniform. The aide opened the door.
“You
need to calm down,” the aide said.
“Where
am I?” John asked.
“You
were brought here overnight by the police. You need to relax.” The
aide closed the door and locked it.
John lay
back down. As his memory came back, he remembered when he first began
hearing the female's voice. It was three days ago. He was driving to
work when she first announced herself.
“My
name is Stephanie,” she said.
John
quickly looked behind in the passengers' seats. Not noticing anyone,
he checked to see that the volume was turned down on his radio.
Confused, he made sure his cell phone was not on speaker phone and
that he had not accidentally called a contact. His phone was not
turned on.
“I've
been spying on you,” the voice continued.
John
listened intently, realizing the voice must be coming from inside his
skull. It felt like someone whispering in his ear, like they were
leaning up against him to give him a secret message. He couldn't make
sense of it.
Finally,
as if it was only natural, he spoke aloud. “How have you been
spying on me?”
“We
can wiretap your thoughts. We can see through your eyes. We can
observe your life. We have the capability to monitor you. You've
never noticed.”
“How?”
John asked.
“I've
already told you too much,” Stephanie said.
The
voice went away. Naturally, John began to question his sanity. He
called off work and drove back to his apartment, where he promptly
googled schizophrenia.
Hearing voices was an indicator of having the disorder. The thought
drove John to throw up in his toilet. He then drowned two beers and
googled thought monitoring.
After digging around, he found out about a technology called voice
to skull technology. The
government had the capability to send signals directly to the brain,
as if someone was speaking right next to you. John became a
conspiracy theorist after reading this, and was convinced someone was
playing an elaborate hoax on him. Satisfied, he called his earlier
conversation a prank and watched TV. Unfortunately, things only
became weirder the next day.
The next morning in bed, John woke up to the voice. “I'm breaking the rules by talking to you.”
John ignored her and went into the bathroom. He began to brush his
teeth. As he was brushing, a force took over his arm. Without
control, the force moved his hand away from his mouth and dropped the
brush into the sink. Staring into the mirror, his mouth began to open
and close as he began to speak out loud uncontrollably.
“I can make you talk to me.” Of course, it should be noted this
was Stephanie speaking and possessing him, which John found amusing
and alarming at the same time. Nonetheless, he sat down on the toilet
and listened.
“I've been watching, and you're a slob.” This time the voice was
only in his head. Stephanie continued. “If I have to control you I
will. I'm breaking all the rule by doing this, and you will listen.”
Back
in the hospital room he looked down at a wrist band that said he was
an hospital in Indiana. He lived in Ohio.
Memories
came crashing in from the night before. He remember being arrested
for trying to walk barefoot across a bridge. The cop pointed out that
he left his car parked in the middle of the road blocking traffic.
Stephanie had told him that he was performing a secret initiative to
get recruited into the government. John normally don't think this
way. Something had happened from the first time Stephanie contacted
him to being arrested. It was such a blur, but he remembered quitting
his job. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Then he went a day
without sleep and decided he was going to drive to the Grand Canyon.
Stephanie told him they could meet there. But he couldn't figure out
why he began to believe such irrational ideas.
“How
are you doing?” A man with thick framed glasses and a blue button
up sat across from John's bed.
“What's
going on?” John asked.
“You're
going through a manic episode. At least, from what you told us last
night when you were brought here by the police. You told us you had
gone two days without sleep and were driving out west to meet a lady
that was talking in your head. These are typical symptoms of a
bipolar disorder. You were experiencing mania.”
John
stared at him in disbelief.
“So
I'm not schizophrenic?” he asked.
The
doctor chuckled. “Quite the contrary, I'm diagnosing you as
schizo-affective bipolar.”
John
felt his stomach drop at the thought of being diagnosed bipolar. But
he also felt relief there was a reason for how he was behaving. This
is what mania does to him, he thought. It clouds thinking, turns a
person into a caricature of himself, making him believe in conspiracy
theories and magic. He felt embarrassed about his behavior.
The
doctor told him he would speak with him throughout the week. Later, a
nurse came into the room with his clothes and told John he'd been
involuntarily admitted, which meant that he was at the hands of the
state and a doctor as to when he allowed to leave the hospital.
The
nurse left the door open. John stepped out into a circular room with
a dozen rooms. In the middle was the nurses' station sectioned off
with glass. There were a few guys walking around. One looked at John
and started to scream about Jesus. This was David.
For the
next few hours John establish a routine of walking around the nurses'
station in a circular path. There was a TV at one end of the room but
he couldn't sit still to watch it. The passing of time was unbearable
in the hospital, to the point that he could only think about how slow
it passed. All he could do to stay sane was to walk. He felt restless
and being locked up in the hospital intensified the experience.
During
his walks, Stephanie would politely interrupt his thoughts.
“They
put you in here for a reason,” she said.
“You're
a figment of my imagination,” John replied.
“Doesn't
change the fact that you can hear me. They put you in here so that no
one will ever believe your story. Now you're just another crazy
person with a nut job conspiracy theory.”
“Who
are they?”
“We're
an organization that spies on people's thought for profit.”
“What's
your organization's name?”
“I
can't tell you yet. I'm already in a lot of trouble.”
“How
can you talk to me, tell me you've been spying on me, give details
about your operation, but not be able to tell me your organization
name?”
“It's
classified,” she said. “Please don't get upset. I care about you
John.” Stephanie sounded concerned.
This
blew John's mind. He couldn't get over the fact that his brain could
really come up with such a convoluted tale. But nonetheless it was
proof of his own brain fabricating this story. It was incapable of
coming up with a name, which showed a lack of evidence and story.
John
felt triumph and relief with this thought and kept on walking for a
few more hours until dinner trays arrived.
The
doctor arrived at the same time the next day. “The mind can be a
powerful storyteller,” he said. “It can create a persona that you
never encountered before. The goal for your the rest of your stay
here is to push back the voices into the recess of your mind. I'm
prescribing you lithium mixed with Serroquel as an anti-pyschosis.”
John could only agree with the doctor's prescription.
Later that day the nurse gave John his pills. They didn't work. For the
next three days John continued to hear Stephanie with newer voices,
and learned to lie about it to the staff. He said he was doing
better, that he was coming down from his mania. But the truth was he
starting to agree with the voices. Psychiatry was bullshit with snake
oil passing as placebos.
Despite
his slow acceptance of the reality of the voices, he was still
hesitant no matter how much Stephanie tried to convince John she was
real. And yet he couldn't believe his brain could fabricate such a
complicate lie. His logic was torn in half. Both ideas were
unbelievable, but logic also dictated that one must be truth. There
was a chance that Stephanie was indeed real, and that gave him
comfort.
“I
love you,” she told him on the third night of the stay. John was on
his daily walk and when he heard this. “I found out about you
through my daily task of monitoring,” Stephanie went on. “You
were picked to be part of this. We were planning on initiating you. I
never thought I could love a specimen. It's my fault you're here.”
“Why
would you put me here?” he asked.
“So no
one would believe your story. They'll call you schizophrenic. But I
also must suffer. For there's no way we'll ever meet. Your role was
to be a vessel for other spies to secret converse with one another in
the real world. We were going to use you to communicate with other
vessels. But I couldn't bear to see that happen to you. So I made you
go insane so you could be be put in here. Now you're free from being
used.”
A nurse
stopped John during his walk.
“Are
you still hearing voices?” she asked.
“No,”
John replied.
The
nurse frowned and walked away. The doctor always asked the same
question. John lied every time.
“Why
must you speak through people?” John asked.
“Because
it's our way of secret communication,” Stephanie replied. “The
government developed this technology to interpret and monitor
people's thoughts. They also devised technology so that a human
being's body could be taken over by another human being via virtual
reality. We call it possessing.”
Her
story sound convincing and his logic screamed it must be true. But
the doctor countered this later in the day.
“John,
plenty of patients tell these stories about their body being
possessed by the government or their thoughts being kidnapped. It's
all a part of the illness. I'm going to up your dose of Serroquel. If
you get better you can get out of here by the end of the week, but so
far the voices are still coming to you. That isn't good.”
John
pleaded his case of sanity to the doctor.
“No
one thinks you're insane,” the doctor replied. “It's all an
illness.” The doctor left and again John felt the lingering want of
a better answer.
By the
fourth night, the nurses had put John in restraints for pounding on
the walls. At the time, he was trying to get the voices out his head.
They were more than Stephanie this time, but rather multitude of
different voices all arguing inside his head. It took three separate
shots of Benadryl, Ativan, and Haldol to calm him down. The nurses
strapped his wrists and ankles with leather straps to his bed. An
aide sat at the foot of his bed to watch of him.
“I can
get you out of here,” Stephanie whispered.
“How?”
John asked. The aide raised his eyebrows but didn't say anything.
“I
know how to calm you down. I can get rid of the voices.”
“But
your voice calms me down,” John replied.
“It
would only be for a short while. At least until you got of here.”
“I
love you,” John whispered.
“That
breaks my heart,” Stephanie sighed. “But we can't be together. I
have my duty, and you your life.”
John
fell asleep in the restraints.
By the
fifth day the voices were gone. John felt restless but beside his
anxiousness was normal. The doctor remarked that the medicine was
finally working, and that with no time he would be out of there.
And so
John got better. Two more days passed without voices or manic energy.
He felt restless to get out of there. In the meantime he made friends
with a woman who was there on court order for slapping her
ex-husband. Her name was Elizabeth and she did yoga in the courtyard.
This was what caught John's attention. Apparently her ex-husband had
fought for control of her five kids and this had driven Elizabeth
over the edge. John would have never guess that such a gentle and
kind woman could be capable of such violence. Then again, he never
knew he would be capable of getting himself into a locked psych-ward
either.
John
also worried about his job during the meantime, and through a phone
call found out the ambulance company had let him go for consecutive
no-call no-shows. John vowed to fight it. Overall, though, John get
better in the doctor's eyes and was granted releases after a week in
the hospital. Stephanie had not returned in the meantime, nor in the
following three months after that.
During
that time, John found another job as an EMT. He also got on with his
life, putting behind his experience in the hospital. It had become a
footnote in his life, one which he told no one. But occasionally he
missed Stephanie's voice whispering into his mind some little insight
about his life. It was on a rainy day that he found himself walking
alone in the rain that he tried to talk with her.
“I
know you're listening,” he whispered. There was no response.
John
tried a few a times before giving up. He headed back to his apartment
and dragged himself up the stairs, his boots leaving a wet imprint on
each step. Inside, he went to the bathroom and rinsed his face with
water. And then he heard a whisper.
“I
miss you,” she said.
He
looked into the mirror and traced a circle around the edge of his eye
with his finger.
“I
knew you'd come back,” he replied.
