Diagnonsense
This is a true story. Though I did hallucinate parts of it
PROLOGUE
The nurses’ hands were soft as she smoothed the sticky white pads onto my hands, chest, and head. These were the electrodes. A black switchpad blinked with multicolored lights on the sidewall of the cold cement room. The basement of the hospital had that underground chill, a stillness that came from the sound-dampening earth we were under. An IV had already been placed in the port in my chest, and the paperwork was coming next.
As I had three times a week, I glanced across the page and felt a jolt of nerves go through me. Page one: sign this, in case you die. Page two: sign this, don’t worry, you probably won’t die. Page three: death is but a construct of the mind, now sign the damn form. So, I sign, “Leah Gai,” and the hands that were just so gentle now have to wedge a plastic guard into my mouth, shoving my tongue into an uncomfortable but mostly safe position.
I don’t know what will be gone when I wake up, what chunks of memory will have been carved out of me with a hot ice cream scoop. But as I fade away with the countdown, I just pray that this works. Shock therapy is no one’s first choice.
Electroconvulsive Therapy is kind of like turning the computer off and on again. It’s supposed to reset things, but I wasn’t just experiencing a glitch, I had a brain full of malware. Twenty years in a downward spiral of psychosis is not something you can take to the genius bar.
As the surge went through me, my fragile and fragmented mind could not handle it. Once solid memories turned to dust like a thousand year old corpse, held together by nothing but time in Pompeii, until a hand disturbed its rest. ECT was a last resort. And when my last resort failed after twenty years of experiments, trials, hospitals… When it all came to nothing, I was ready to try anything.
I was a lunatic, a rambling mess. Many nights I woke up thinking I was on fire and dove in the bath to put myself out, but it was all in my mind. When the torment wore me to exhaustion I shook, curled into the fetal position. I wept as my muscles twitched uncontrollably from years of heavy prescriptions. I was desperate. So when my mom told me about the new trials for dementia patients using mushrooms, I was ready to try it.
Psychedelics are not recommended for psychotic patients, or even those with a family history of psychosis. Psychedelics often worsen, or cause breaks in those prone to them. Taking mushrooms was a risky gamble. There was a chance that this would end up going nuclear. But I was out of options, it was time to throw a hail mary.
By the end of that year I held my first job.
GOD’S EYE SYNDROME
I was just eleven years old when I first hallucinated. Sitting in my big old blue armchair in my bedroom one afternoon, the world simply dropped from underneath me and began to spin, like a globe slapped by the hand of God.
All I could think was, “Man, puberty’s weird.”
In the room I shared with my sister was a big blue recliner that was all mine. I got it cheap with my allowance from the thriftiest thrift store in Oakland. Most afternoons you could find me in it, playing computer games or reading a book.
It was a random afternoon, nothing special about it, when it struck. One moment I was sitting, and then I was slammed back in my seat, as the world began to rush towards me. The chair stayed in place, yet the ground beneath it sped at a terrifying speed. As the world flew underneath me, all around me I saw… everything.
Blurry at the edges, I saw children pass by, eyes burning with tears, sitting over their mothers, peppered in deep sores. Past the sick, the dying. I saw dry lake beds with emaciated lambs licking rocks in feverish hope, I saw child soldiers rush by, I saw starving bodies rush by, I saw raped girls rush by, I saw, I saw, I saw. Death, pain, starving.
Then slam! I was back in my room, just as fast. I was gasping for air, terrified, with tears in my eyes. The room around me now appeared gray and flat. I felt as though I had just seen through the eyes of God, and now I had the horrible knowledge of a doomed world and was looking through dull human eyes that saw nothing. The information that was stuffed into my head was huge, horrible and incomprehensible. That was the God's Eye experience.
I was just a kid. I had barely left elementary school. I still had my entire Barbie collection in the big wicker toy chest. I still played dress-up. I made mud pies. So I had no idea how to talk about this. Who could I tell and what, what would I say? I had no idea what it was that happened to me, and this was already a weird time. Y’know, I’m growing pubes, my chest always hurts, occasionally I see the death of the world through the eyes of the omnipotent. Kids, am I right?
And honestly, that’s kind of what I thought for a while. This was probably just hormones gone wrong. I probably shouldn’t say anything. I’ve always had an active imagination.
Lies keep us safe, hidden, protected. But this had been brewing for a long time, and no one had recognized the signs.