Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

Valium and ensure I’m comfortable. I arrive at the imaging centre, referral in hand. The woman behind the desk takes it brusquely from me.

‘When will I take the Valium?’ I ask.

‘What?’ she snaps. ‘No. There needs to be a specific doctor here to administer that and he’s only here on Tuesdays. If you want your scan today, you need to do it without.’

I nod, embarrassed, hand to my throat as it tightens. After waiting a while, I’m taken downstairs and given a gown to change into and a locker to place my clothes and shoes in. I sit, holding the gown around me, wishing I’d brought socks for my bare feet which are trailing on the cold floor. I’m taken through to the room with the MRI machine, the technician comes in, tells me that it’ll last about forty-five minutes, that the noises the machine makes may be loud and disorientating but I need to lie completely still so that the scans, the pictures, are taken properly, can be read. I lie down. My head is strapped in place, I’m given earplugs and closed in on both sides. The technician leaves the room and his voice comes over the speakers:

‘We’re going to start the machine now and you’ll move inside.’

The surface I’m lying on slides inside the scanner slowly, and my breath quickens, trebles in speed.

‘Now you’ll hear some loud noises.’

A throbbing, clanking, banging noise starts pulsating through the machine and vibrating into my body, shaking my eyeballs loose.

I try to keep calm but the roof of the tube I’m inside is just a couple of inches away from my face. I’m being buried alive, trapped, I can’t move my body; my breath hits the ceiling and bounces right back down at me. The noise is so loud I feel like I’m consumed by it.

It’s the sound of a workman’s drill meets a round of live ammo, mixed with European house music that you can only hear at five a.m. when your brain is scrambled and your pupils full. Just one more second, I tell myself repeatedly. I don’t work out how many seconds there are in forty-five minutes. Although the scan is done in three parts and they offer to let me out between each section, I say no: I want this over as soon as possible. The tears pool under my static head.

The next day, I receive a call from the doctor’s office, calling me in. She tells me that not all of my scans came out entirely clearly but that they can see what look like lesions on my brain. The world stops entirely for a moment, just a millisecond before it bounces and catches up with itself, carrying on as it did before, leaving me behind this time. I’m googling as she speaks. The results: multiple sclerosis.

She tells me not to panic, that she’s going to refer me to the MS specialist centre, but that there are other things that can cause these lesions: Lyme disease, Parkinson’s and other autoimmune disorders. But none, nothing at that moment, seems as bad as MS. As losing my ability to walk, to swallow, to care for myself. I’m alone in the world: how does someone who has no one to care for them survive this? My appointment’s a week away – at one of the best centres in the world – and I spend the week googling feverishly, looking for stories of successful recovery. I drink even more than I do usually and panic three times daily that the Xanax isn’t in the bottom of my bag at all times.

I go to the centre with my friend. I’m given the same examination by a new doctor – a hammer to the knees and elbows, a grip and a grab – and she asks me to join her at the desk. She says, ‘Look, there’s nothing conclusive in your scan: some of them are blurred; there are lesions, but who knows what they’re from. The only way to diagnose if it is MS – and there’s no indication currently that it is – is to see you over a period of time, so we’ll monitor you and do a follow-up scan.’

The relief rolls off my shoulders. I feel liberated and free, like I’ve been given my life back. A few months later, I’m given another scan. The doctor leaves a voicemail. I call her back. Nothing necessarily to worry about, she says, but there’s something behind my eye they’d like to take a look at. She asks me to go back in. I delete the message; I never go back.

A week later, I overdose.

CHAPTER 24

Day One in the psych ward. 5.30 a.m. Low, steady voices wake me. I haven’t actually been asleep that long, having woken in panic every time the night staff did their bed checks, every ten minutes.

One of the voices I hear now has a thick, sharp accent. I open my eyes, trying to work out where I am and who’s speaking. The voice sounds foreign, definitely non-American, possibly European. My eyes begin to focus on the wall I’m facing; through the mesh I see the city, made from shadows and false light, under the still-dark sky outside. I take a breath and turn over to see to whom the voices belong. There’s an elderly woman with white tightly cropped hair sitting in the bed next to me, the bed that was empty when I fell asleep. She’s being washed by a nurse, her nightgown pulled down. Her breasts, lined, wrinkled and brown, rest on the white sheets. She offers up an arm to be washed, and then the other, the white hairs on her arm standing up for inspection under the yellow strip-light over her bed.

I watch out of half-closed eyes. I don’t want either of them to see me watching. I don’t want to talk, make polite conversation with a new, mad, topless woman. I’ve only been here a handful