The Two Kinds of Decay

Lockdown

The next day, I am told, I had several visits and phone conversations with people from my graduate program.

They called and visited because the director of the program had spoken with a representative from the hospital and misheard the phrase adrenal failure as the phrase renal failure. And she had announced to everyone that they should call or visit to say goodbye, because I would soon die.

I don’t remember the visits or the phone calls. Later I heard I’d told a visitor that I’d slept with someone else from our graduate program, which I had, once, a year before.

In a few days I was discharged from the hospital and moved back into my apartment, but I hadn’t recovered from the overdose.

In two months, unable to get out of bed, I called my parents in Massachusetts and said I needed them to come to Iowa and bring me home.

I had a fever, aches, rashes, muscle weakness, and extreme fatigue.

As soon as I was back in Boston I went to see my neurologist, expecting he’d send me right downstairs to be infused with gamma globulin.

But my neurologist said the weakness and fatigue weren’t CIDP symptoms, and he was right.

He said there was nothing he could do to make the symptoms go away, and that it was a separate, probably viral, syndrome, and that I should see an infectious disease specialist.

I got home, got into bed, and began yelling with grief, which was something I hadn’t done before. Again, as it had in the hospital in Iowa, my body decided sensibly on a course of action. I was too sad to cry. I had to yell. The yelling relieved my sadness better than crying would have.

After five more months of the fever and the other symptoms, the cause of which was never determined, and after living at my parents’ house all that time, mostly in bed, I woke one day knowing I couldn’t tolerate another day of my life, that this would be the last day. I told my mother. She asked me how I was going to do it, listened to the answer, took away my car keys, locked the garage, and drove me to see a therapist, who talked with us together, and then to my mother alone.

Then my mother drove me home and helped me pack a few things. And drove me to a different hospital from the one where I’d spent so much time being treated for CIDP.

During the evaluative interview, made one mistake. I said I didn’t believe I would ever get better from whatever was wrong with me.

And so I was admitted, with severe depression, to the locked ward.

I was still taking a daily dose of steroids.