Читать книгу Madness: A Bipolar Life - Marya Hornbacher - Страница 24

Same Day

“For all is well in our little tiny town,” I sing, my hands a blur as I deal out the millionth game of solitaire of the night. I stand up in my chair, sit down in my chair, hop out of my chair, do a little Snoopy dance, my hospital gowns flapping about me like wings—I’ve grown inordinately fond of these gowns and am wearing several at once, “for dramatic effect”—and I sing the Snoopy song, stand on my chair again, imitating Snoopy as vulture, plop down. “I never did like Peanuts much,” I remark to the catatonic man who sits across from me, “but when I was little my parents took me to see the Peanuts musical, and I liked that, but I thought it was kind of ridiculous that all the kids were played by grownups.” I look at the man, who is just off an unfortunate suicide attempt, and, feeling bad for him, I climb onto the table and deal him a game of solitaire too, very pleased with myself for doing so upside down. I spit tobacco juice in a little cup, this nice man having loaned me some chewing tobacco since I am not allowed to smoke. “I don’t mind that stuff,” I say, my lower lip full of chew. “Here,” I say, climbing off the table and coming around to the back of his chair, “old chum,” I say, banging him on the back, “you play like this. You pretend that all the face cards are aces, and so when you get a face card you put it here, and then you go through the deck looking for all the twos or fours, which you use as wild cards, and when you do get an ace, or a joker, we’re playing with two jokers, see, then when you, like I said, do get an ace, you turn the face cards upside down on it and call it a double ace, and after that you flip the cards upward, like regular solitaire”—I am leaning over him, my hands flying over the table like a blackjack dealer’s, my arms on either side of his head, and I’m stacking the deck and shuffling the deck and stacking it and shuffling, and flipping up the cards—“and you start going for a flush or a full house.” I fan out my hand, the result, apparently, of the above machinations, say, “See?” and pound him on the back. “It’s very grand!” I cry, and go skipping down the hall, am shushed (nicely) by the very nice night staff as I skip by, skipping backward back to the desk; “You’re very nice,” I say, “I like you very much,” and I skip on, skip straight on till morning.

Dr. Lentz has explained to me that I’m having the good kind of mania, a euphoric mania. Everything is beautiful, simply gorgeous, I am talking a blue streak and what I’m saying is nearly incomprehensible, seeing as I’m dashing through a thicket of random thoughts so quickly no one can follow (it’s called flight of ideas). I am grandiose, delusional, I’m flinging my body about; I am, to the casual observer, clearly possessed.

It would seem I’m a textbook case. Every symptom of mania I could have, I have, in force: the extreme, minute-to-minute mood swings, rapid speech, the grandiosity, the impulsivity, the delusions, the feeling of complete invincibility, and the absolute conviction that certain untrue things are true. I can hear my thoughts zipping and whistling through my head, and see them snap and sizzle in streaking red lines on a complex grid that was designed by God and given to me personally; I am a millionaire high-society lady and should be treated with the utmost respect due to my superior station; my car can fly. These and various other ideas flash through my head, passing as quickly as they arrive. What causes them? I’m guilty of every precipitating factor you can think of—no sleep, gallons of booze, not enough effort to stick with my medication, a complete inability to grasp the seriousness of my diagnosis—and, it turns out, I have a disorder that has gone untreated for too long. But from my perspective, a manic break is a fine, fine thing, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why everyone is so upset.

The staff of this hospital, at least, is experienced and trained (and did I mention that I like them very much?), so my batshit state is nothing new to them. I’m on Unit 47, where they put patients who aren’t capable of being responsible for themselves—the suicidal, the very manic or profoundly depressed, the schizophrenic during a severe episode of delusion, and the variously psychotic. They dose me with a powerful antipsychotic, probably Zyprexa. It’s a stopgap to get me down off the ceiling while, over the next few days, Dr. Lentz works on figuring out what kinds of meds and how much of them I’ll need long term. I don’t mind taking it, not at all—these people are lovely, absolutely lovely, and so nice! I’ll do whatever they say.

Dr. Lentz makes his rounds in the morning. He sits on a chair in the center of the room and I sit on the edge of the bed, bouncing up and down. I come in and out of the conversation. I stop bouncing and fall back on my bed. I sit up again. I fall back, sit up, and keep finding him still there, sitting on his chair. I leap to my feet and start striding in purposeful circles around him, studying him from all angles, walking in and out of the stream of light coming through the window.