Though now I had company thanks to my pregnancy, I was still going through a lot. I stayed outside only long enough for the dog to relieve herself. Whenever I felt dizzy, I would stop and sit on the stairs of some doorway and pretend I was adjusting the dog’s collar or tying a shoe, only to undo it later and tie it again somewhere else. The most important thing was to avoid conversation at all costs; I didn’t trust that I could control the situation and chitchat like normal. But not everything was negative. I knew the fetus could perceive the variations in light through my body at five months, and when the sun shone, it relieved me to know that Yoro was also discovering something beautifuclass="underline" light filtered through my skin. Once the dog had done her business, I would go back home, stretch out on the sofa alone, and close my eyes for a few minutes, feeling safe, at home, on firm ground, and I’d relax. The walls in my apartment were always straight and the necessity to pretend was over.
Clearly, I’d heard that the support of a psychiatrist or psychologist could be very helpful under these circumstances. But I still couldn’t bring myself to use public transportation or walk more than a few blocks at a stretch; I thought it was best to give myself a little time until I could make an office visit. Meanwhile, I began fantasizing about the figure of a psychologist as a panacea. I recall those days as being happy ones, with the possibility of a cure bringing a new sense of hope. Having seen the sunlight again, even if only for a brief period while walking the dog, I could picture something I failed to believe in until then and had only regarded with utter apathy: my recovery.
Sixth Month:
A few tiny steps led to a few more, and though it proved challenging, I was able to walk for the first time into a psychiatrist’s office, that of Dr. Z, who had come highly recommended. I spent hours thinking about how to properly explain to him my issues, my phobias, and my despair over Jim’s absence. I had a hard time ordering my thoughts, and it was even worse trying to figure an effective way of expressing them to a stranger. But I did my best, trying to make the doctor’s job easier by shaping my story into a useful tool for my recovery. After listening to my litany of symptoms, the doctor looked as if he’d just woken up and asked about my relationship with my father as a young girl, as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said. I couldn’t find the connection, since one of the few things I was sure of is that my situation was owed to a very real concern, the death of a loved one, just as my previous crises were inevitably tied to the very specific circumstances of having to renounce maternity or my sexual identity. But I answered his questions thoughtfully, despite feeling dubious that my relationship with my father in childhood had anything to do with the issue at hand, trusting the word of so many people who had assured me their recovery began right here, within these four walls. Surely they can’t all be mistaken, I told myself.
Well, I learned that it’s possible for everyone but oneself to be mistaken. That gentleman lacked the intelligence to analyze a single thing. He diagnosed the problem I was already perfectly aware of, which is what brought me to his office in the first place—depression—and said I needed proper medication as soon as possible. He referred me to a psychologist for group therapy. I asked if medication was really necessary and wanted to know how he felt it was going to cure me. He said yes, absolutely, in answer to the first question, and our dear Dr. Z had no idea how to respond to the second one; he simply looked at me snarkily, as when someone tries to make up for his lack of knowledge by dismissing your question as ridiculous.
After six months of treatment I knew exactly what kind of method the doctor was using: trial and error. A perfectly unscientific method. He changed my medication according to the secondary effects the different pills had on me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to read the brochures and appreciate that each medication was geared specifically to treat different types of problems. But all he was doing was looking for one that would just shut me up and was free of side effects. So I went through periods when I lost my appetite entirely and periods of binge eating. In six months I went from weighing 110 pounds to 155, and from 155 to 104. Apparently, they couldn’t find the right medication, the drug that would sedate the sorrow away with minimal collateral damage; a sorrow that eventually would have gone away.
A friend recommended that I see another specialist. There was a caveat, though: it took an hour by train to get to the specialist’s office, and for me the action of walking to the subway, riding the subway, then walking from the subway to the office was the equivalent of drenching myself in cow’s blood and jumping into a shark-infested sea. But prey to the magical thinking one tends to embrace in times of weakness, I decided that because he was so far away, he was a better psychologist, similar to the notion that the best sorcerer is the one who requires the greatest effort to reach, with challenges and tests to realize along the way. That’s how I became part of Dr. O’s practice. The O could also be thought of as a 0, as in Dr. Zero. What should have been an hour’s commute was actually three, thanks to all the times I had to exit the subway, with intense panic attacks and vomiting. Certainly the experience heightened my sense of sacrifice, making me believe it meant something special, that by overcoming so many obstacles I was activating a kind of positive reinforcement. Dr. Zero’s diagnosis for the same set of symptoms was entirely different, a variant species of bipolar disorder that also required medication, in this case a mood stabilizer. It didn’t take me as long this time to refuse more medication. I changed doctors once again.
Over the next three months I was diagnosed with as many different illnesses as doctors consulted: three, Drs. E, W, and B, respectively. Just imagine that for a bellyache, one doctor diagnoses liver cancer and the second appendicitis, and the third assures you it’s only gas, and each wants to treat you immediately with a liver transplant, an operation to remove your appendix, or a few simple pills. Well, that’s psychiatry for you. Of the three, Drs. W and B caused me the most distress.
Since Dr. W had no idea what sort of diagnosis to make, he tried to work backward, first choosing an illness and then offering up a tray full of symptoms. Over the four months I visited his practice, Dr. W would habitually ask me if I heard voices. Dr. W had chosen schizophrenia as my disorder and was simply waiting for me to manifest the major symptoms in order to send me to a psychiatrist who would share the pharmaceutical company’s profits by way of the insurance company. Since I never heard voices, my answer was always no, but the doctor asked so many times it made me feel as though the specialist had already come up with his diagnosis and the absence of voices was all that stood in the way of verification. He was so insistent about the supposed hallucinations that in one way or another, he held me responsible for screwing up the treatment. So pretty soon I started to question myself, doubting whether the voices I actually heard, the same ones that everyone else heard, were real, and worried that they were just figments of my imagination. So when a cashier’s voice came over the loudspeakers in a supermarket, I would go to pieces thinking it was one of the voices the doctor was waiting for, and so I would timorously ask someone to repeat what the voice had said. And sure enough, the other people could parrot back the voice’s announcement. Exactly what I had heard myself. Unquestionably the voices I heard were real and meant for everyone, not just me, but I had to suffer weeks of second-guessing myself and dread before I finally told the doctor I was never coming back to his practice again.