CHAPTER 14
SEARCH AND SEIZURE
Early the next morning, my mom and Allen arrived to pick me up. When I saw the Subaru, I bolted from my father’s house.
“They kidnapped me. They held me against my will. Bad things are happening there. Drive,” I commanded.
My father had already relayed the story of what had occurred overnight. After I had said those terrible things and insisted that he leave, he went upstairs to a room where he could monitor me through thin walls without my knowing. He tried to stay awake but nodded off. As soon as he heard me trying to break free, he ran downstairs to find me barricaded in the bathroom. It had taken him over an hour to coax me out and onto the couch, where he sat with me until dawn. He had called my mother, and they agreed that I needed to be admitted to the hospital. But they remained adamant about one thing: I would not be placed in a psychiatric ward.
Allen drove me straight back to Dr. Bailey’s office as I rested in the backseat, once again resigned to my fate.
“Her EEG was completely normal,” Bailey protested, looking through my file. “MRI normal, exam normal, blood work normal. It’s all normal.”
“Well, she’s not normal,” my mom snapped as I sat there, quiet and polite with my hands folded in my lap. She and Allen had made a pact that they would not leave Dr. Bailey’s office without getting me admitted to a hospital.
“Let me put this as delicately as possible,” the doctor said. “She’s drinking too much, and she’s exhibiting the classic signs of alcohol withdrawal.” The symptoms matched: anxiety, depression, fatigue, irritability, mood swings, nightmares, headache, insomnia, loss of appetite, nausea or vomiting, confusion, hallucinations, and seizures. “I know it’s hard to hear about your own daughter. But, really, there’s nothing more I can say. She just has to take the medication and knock off the partying,” he said and winked conspiratorially at me.
“Alcohol withdrawal?” My mother brandished a piece of redlined paper that she had prepared. “These are her symptoms: seizures, insomnia, paranoia, and it’s all just getting worse. I haven’t seen her drink in over a week. She needs to be hospitalized, now. Not tomorrow. Now.”
He looked at me and back at her. He had no doubt he was right but knew better than to argue. “I’ll make some calls and see what I can do. But I have to repeat: my feeling on this is that it’s a reaction to excessive alcohol consumption.”
He left the office for a brief moment, returning with news. “NYU has a twenty-four-hour EEG monitoring floor. Would you be happy with that?”
“Yes,” my mom said.
“They have a hospital bed ready this moment. I don’t know how long it will be open, so I would advise you to go to NYU immediately.”
“Great,” she said, gathering her purse and folding her paper. “We’ll go right away.”
We entered through revolving doors into the busy, recently remodeled lobby of New York University Langone Medical Center. Nurses sprinted by in green scrubs, followed by nurses’ assistants in purple scrubs; doctors in white lab coats chatted at the crossroads of the corridors; the patients, some with bandages, some on crutches, some in wheelchairs, some on gurneys, journeyed past, dead-eyed and unspeaking. There was no way I belonged
We found our way to Admitting, which was a group of chairs surrounding a small desk, where a woman dispatched patients to different floors across the gigantic hospital.
“I want coffee,” I said.
My mother looked annoyed. “Really? Now? Fine. But be back right away.” A part of my mom believed the old, responsible me was still in there somewhere, and she simply trusted that I wouldn’t escape. Luckily, this time she was right.
A small stand nearby sold coffee and baked goods. I calmly chose a cappuccino and a yogurt.
“What do you have on your mouth?” my mother asked when I returned. “And why are you smiling like that?”
The strange taste of foam, a mixture of saliva and steamed milk, on my upper lip.
White lab coats.
The hospital’s cold floor.
“She’s having a seizure!” My mom’s voice echoed across the vast hallway as three doctors descended on my shaking body.
From here on, I remember only very few bits and pieces, mostly hallucinatory, from the time in the hospital. Unlike before, there are now no glimmers of the reliable “I,” the Susannah I had been for the previous twenty-four years. Though I had been gradually losing more and more of myself over the past few weeks, the break between my consciousness and my physical body was now finally fully complete. In essence, I was gone. I wish I could understand my behaviors and motivations during this time, but there was no rational consciousness operating, nothing I could access anymore, then or now. This was the beginning of my lost month of madness.
PART TWO
THE CLOCK
What is today’s date?
Who is the President?
How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?
What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?
Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?
Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?
Name five rivers.
What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?
How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?
If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him?
What should you do if I fall asleep?
Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?
What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?
What about his Everest shadow?
Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations?
Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?
Would you visit a country where nobody talks?
What would you have done differently?
Why are you here?
