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

day seven being my release date. If I’m kept in I’ll be spending another weekend in here. That, I know, I simply cannot endure. When it arrives, I bother the nurses on reception all morning and they assure me that I will have a meeting with my doctor. Ana has already left, vowing never to return but inviting me for a glass of white wine in her penthouse apartment uptown when I, too, get out.

I give it everything. Pin my hair sedately, tone down the eyeliner and red lipstick. I practise looking calm, collected, unemotional. I’ve taken my Prozac and beta-blockers every day without complaint, twice a day. Attended every group, made small talk with people who scared me, confused me. I’ve done every single tiny and big thing asked of me. It is time to be rewarded. And rewarded I am.

The doctor tells me first that he’s diagnosed me with major depression and substance-induced mood disorder. He goes on to say how well I’ve responded to treatment, what an improvement they’ve seen. That he wants to discharge me but would feel much more comfortable doing so if I were leaving to go straight to rehab for three months of intensive in-patient treatment. His request shocks me, startles me. I flinch at his suggestion, a flush flying up my neck and face, as if a dragon has breathed fire in a line across my body.

‘Are you OK?’ he asks.

‘Yes, of course!’ I laugh. ‘It’s just, and I really appreciate you looking out for me, I have to be back at work – in-patient is really not an option.’

He frowns. ‘Oh, well. We want to know that you’re taking it seriously – that you’re committed to your recovery and your sobriety. You have good insurance and we’ve found that in-patient treatment has a much better recovery rate.’

I nod and smile, trying not to talk, shout, scream over him. I absolutely cannot be locked up for another three months. I don’t know what the legal situation is, right there in that moment, but I know I can’t do this.

And here’s the rub of the truth: I’m not better. I know I’m not. I haven’t spent a day, a night, an hour or a minute in this ward sitting and thinking about what actually might be wrong with me, how I can begin to get better. The Prozac I’ve been taking hasn’t made me feel even a little better. The beta-blockers simply make me able to walk around and talk without dissolving into a heaving, weeping panic attack. My focus, for better or worse, has been on getting out of there. Getting back to my life, my job, my existence. However bad it seemed before, no matter how bad it was before, it was mine. And if nothing else, being in here has given me a basic desire to go home and live it.

He is right to be suspicious of my miraculous recovery and generic statements about my mental health. Because I am full of shit. But right now, what I still need more than anything is to get out of the hospital and regain my independence, my freedom, my life. So I say to him:

‘Honestly, I am so committed to my sober life, a life in recovery. This hospital, and particularly you, have made me realise that I do have problems, but with hard work I can overcome them. And I must thank you for that. Because you probably saved my life! And why would I want to give all of that away now?’

He smiles.

‘There must be a compromise that doesn’t require in-patient treatment?’ I try.

He nods; there is. The solution is an agreement to go to AA meetings, coupled with out-patient rehab three times a week at a centre in Manhattan. I agree, quickly and happily. He gives me a number to call for a service called Bridging the Gap. It’s for prison inmates and hospital patients leaving incarceration and entering AA. They take you to your first meeting on your first day, ensure you’re not pounding shots or shooting up within hours of re-joining the real world. I call, am given my contact for the next day. We’re to meet in a diner.

I spend my final night in the hospital with a new roommate. She talks all night, constantly, manically about why she’s there, about being accused of trying to murder her boyfriend’s mother, a claim that she isn’t fully denying, while talking in great detail about how she’d do it and what she’d do to her boyfriend while she was at it. I don’t sleep a wink that night. I daren’t turn my back to her. Fearing for the first time what someone in this place could do, would do, in the space of ten minutes before the next check.

The next morning, I sit, bleary-eyed, with my packed plastic bag and my dead flowers, terrified to the very last second that the paperwork won’t be ready in time or I’ll do or say something that will make them reverse their decision.

I sit perfectly still, reasoning that if I don’t move a muscle, then I can’t accidentally mess it up. And it works. I’m given my discharge papers, a Bridging the Gap information leaflet, a book of AA meetings and a rehab booklet. Half a tree to save my life.

I say goodbye to everyone, knowing I will never ever see a single one of them again, and a nurse walks me to the doors, unlocks them for me to pass through. The click of the door unlocking sounds like the most beautiful poetry rolling inside my ears. She points the way to the lift. I say thank you and walk towards it as fast as I can without breaking into a run. I don’t look back, not once, terrified of what I might see, determined already to carry as little of this out with me as possible.

It doesn’t deserve another glance, another snatched look. I climb into the lift, ride