Living with Diagnosis

I wake up, and man, again… only emptiness. I am feeling I will die soon. This sudden premonition has happened before. I remember running to a friend’s house back then. But she with very calm tone reassured me:

– It is just a thought and let it be, you might be exhausted from so much pain.
But now it repeats again. I am looking at my hands and imagining how one day these hands will be placed in a coffin, and people will say, “her hands have withered.”

A kind nurse agreed to listen to my desperate voice. She had no answers to my questions but still kindly listened. I persistently asked her: Is this a symptom of some mental disorder, or am I really foreseeing this?… No answer …

Then this happened: the day dawned, the sky brightened, and the other residents of the clinic came out. One of them, who stood out for her psychotic episodes the day before, was lying on the couch, trying to wake up while being heavily sedated by medication. The drugs clouded her mind so much that you could immediately tell by her glassy eyes that she wasn’t from this world at that moment.

Today, she was peacefully sitting in the living room, and I could talk to her. Lisa turned out to be a friendly person. Caring and cheerful towards others. Her ironic and biting comments towards the nurses were her hobby, but sometimes they were even funny to me.

I wanted to smoke a cigarette again. I entered the smoking room, but another resident was coming out. She held the door with her sweater sleeve, so she wouldn’t touch the door handle with her bare hand. Probably she had a hygiene obsession or a fear of germs. She kindly told me not to touch the handle and left the door open for me to enter the room. I felt a paradoxical emotion, wondering why she cared for me like this. It touched my heart. The people around me care so much about me in this situation, yet I feel nothing for them. My fellow resident’s minimal attention captivated my mind, which translated her action into care. I felt warmth in my heart…

I finished smoking and went outside. The resident with psychosis, Lisa, was still sitting there. Yet yesterday she was begging for us to do Pilates, as she was a Pilates instructor outside. No one listened, and she couldn’t escape being seen as an annoying lunatic. But today, she was sitting on the couch, dazed, staring at a single point. I had to continue the line of care and kindness I received before smoking.

– Would you like to have a Pilates lesson? – I asked.
– With pleasure! – she said and jumped out of the couch as much as her dazed brain allowed her.

The Pilates lesson took place… the mood improved… it seemed like a sense of teamwork had formed.

The next day she asked me for a cigarette. Not that she really smoked, no, she wanted to sneak into the smoking room to breathe fresh air from the open window. The nurses had sealed all the windows in her room to prevent anyone from jumping out. Her bed was different from the others’, too. Apparently, this bed had belts, which the nurses had successfully used on her the first night. That first night, she indeed stood out from the others with her uncontrollable actions. She screamed, shouted, and called for the professor, wanting to talk to him. In a manic phase, she shouted at the top of her lungs – “I want to talk to the professor!” – while the nurses tried to calm her down. She then began to undress demonstratively, which immediately silenced the other patients and brought laughter to the male nurses. At that moment, I doubted their professionalism and wanted to shout from my heart that there was nothing funny here, but they were saved from my comment by their authoritative status. So that night, they tied Lisa to the bed and sedated her. That’s why she had glassy eyes when I met her the next day. Since then, they’ve kept her sedated with medication.