Chapter 42
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42
The doctors took me away from my kids and my dogs and my house. I couldn’t
go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a
bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room. I was watched, even when I
was changing. I had to go to sleep at nine p.m. They supervised me watching
TV, from eight to nine o’clock, in bed.
I had to be up every morning at eight. I had endless meetings every day.
For several hours a day, I sat in a chair receiving mandatory therapy. I spent
the time in between meetings staring out the window, watching cars pull up and
drive away, so many cars bringing so many therapists and security guards,
doctors, and nurses. What I think did the most damage to me was watching all
those people coming and going while I was prevented from leaving.
I was told that everything that was happening was for my own good. But I
felt abandoned in that place, and while every-one kept saying they were there to
help me, I never could understand what my family wanted from me. I did
everything I was supposed to do. My kids would come for an hour on the
weekends. But if I didn’t do what I was “supposed to do” during the week, I
wouldn’t be allowed to see them.
One of the only people who called me was Cade. I’ve always felt safe and yet
also a sense of danger with Cade. The most entertaining call I had the whole
time was his FaceTiming me from a hospital in Texas to tell me about how he’d
gotten bitten by a scorpion in his bed—in his bed. His leg blew up to the size of a
basketball, no joke.
“Are you serious right now?” I said, looking at his swollen leg on my phone. It
was unbelievably bad. Thinking about Cade’s poor leg gave me one of the only
true distractions from what I was dealing with, and I’ll always be grateful to him
and that Texas scorpion.
The therapists questioned me for hours and what seemed like every day, seven
days a week.
For years I’d been on Prozac, but in the hospital they took me abruptly o it
and put me on lithium, a dangerous drug that I did not want or need and that
makes you extremely slow and lethargic. I felt my concept of time morph, and I
grew disoriented. On lithium, I didn’t know where I was or even who I was
sometimes. My brain wasn’t working the way it used to. It wasn’t lost on me that
lithium was the drug my grandmother Jean, who later committed suicide, had
been put on in Mandeville.
Meanwhile, my security team that I’d been with for so long acted like I was a
criminal.
When it was time for blood draws, the tech drawing my blood would be
anked by the nurse, a security guard, and my assistant.
Was I a cannibal? Was I a bank robber? Was I a wild animal? Why was I
treated as though I were about to burn the place down and murder them all?
They checked my blood pressure three times a day, like I was an eighty-year-
old woman. And they’d take their time. Make me sit down. Get the cu . Slowly
attach it. Slowly pump it up… Three times a day. To feel sane, I needed to move
around. Movement was my life as a dancer. I thrived on it. I needed it and craved
it. But they kept me in that chair for ages. I began to feel like I was being ritually
tortured.
I felt anxious in my feet and in my heart and in my brain. I could never burn
o that energy.
You know how when your body is moving you’re reminded that you’re alive?
That’s all I wanted. And I couldn’t move, which meant I began to wonder if I
might actually already be half-dead. I felt ruined.
My ass grew bigger from sitting in a chair for hours a day—so much so that
none of my shorts t anymore. I became estranged from my own body. I had
terrible nightmares where I was running through a forest—dreams that felt so
real. Please wake up, please wake up, please wake up—I don’t want it to be real, this
is just a dream, I would think.
If the idea of my being in that place was to heal, that was not the e ect. I
began to imagine myself as a bird without wings. You know how, when you’re a
child, sometimes you run around with your arms outstretched, and with the
wind moving over your arms, for a second you feel like you’re ying? That was
what I wanted to feel. Instead, every day it felt like I was sinking into the earth.
I did the program by myself for two months in Beverly Hills. It was hell, like
being in my very own horror movie. I watch scary movies. I’ve seen The
Conjuring. I’m not scared of anything after those months at that treatment
center. Seriously, I’m not scared of anything now.
I’m probably the least fearful woman alive at this point, but it doesn’t make
me feel strong; it makes me sad. I shouldn’t be this strong. Those months made
me too tough. I miss my days of being what in Kentwood we used to call a sass
ass. That time in the hospital took away my sassiness. In so many ways, it broke
my spirit.
After two months in one building, I was moved to another run by the same
people, and at this one I wasn’t alone. Even though I used to prefer being by
myself, after two months in what felt like solitary con nement and on lithium, it
was honestly so much better to be around other patients. We were together all
day. At night, each of us was left alone in an individual room—the doors made a
pow sound as they shut.
My rst week, one of the other patients came to my room and said, “Why are
you screaming so loud?”
“Huh? I’m not screaming,” I said.
“We all hear you. You’re screaming so loud.”
I looked around my room. “I don’t even have music playing,” I said.
I later learned that she sometimes heard things other people didn’t hear, but
that freaked me out.
A very pretty girl arrived and became instantly popular. It felt like high
school, where she was the cheerleader and I was the demoralized nerd. She
skipped all of the meetings.
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