The Two Kinds of Decay

More Cause and Effect

After four days on the ward, I was allowed to sign out for a chaperoned walk around the parking lot. Three days after that, I signed out on a day pass. My parents came to get me and drove me to the computer store because I believed every document on my hard drive would self-destruct on New Year’s Day. I spent my day pass loading new software and manually reopening and resaving each one of my files.

That night I went back to the ward feeling good about my successful day off from lockdown. I’d avoided unhealthy behavior, as long as I didn’t count the obsessive reformatting of hundreds of digital text files. My success earned me the right to ask to be released.

I left the psych ward a few days after Halloween.

Instead of going home, though, I had to go to the other hospital, the one where I’d spent so much of the mid-1990s, because my severe depression, which I’d mistaken for a CIDP relapse, had triggered a CIDP relapse.