They keep the psychiatric department in the basement. At night i read teenaged novels on vampires and high school romance. In the morning i ask cavalierly about childhood sexual abuse, the precise description of the bleeding pigs they hallucinate on their hospital gowns, the million and one ways they have tried to off themselves. This man says another man is waiting for him, and every night for a month he packs his bags until the morning his family found their sweet and smiling grandfather was lying in the yard his throat slashed with his own pocket knife. Another woman tries to overdose on the trazadone prescribed to her dog. And yet another yet another, he must be kept from yanking out his lines, he thinks they are snakes, then he licks his blood. And a dignfied grandmother fondles herself in front of her astonished children.
And they are so normal, and it is so clinical, they are you are me, my mother your uncle, the mad are among us, we merge and we flux we check in and out at the front desk, we all have demons, some are quieter than others.
And these horrors are not so horrific at all, everything is endured, and cleanly consumed in the beeping and the flurry of nurses, and neatly filed charts, with brightly colored tags, like little ants we have made a place for everything, at least for a little while.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
D, are you considering specializing in psychiatry? I encourage it. I can see you making a big impact there, what with your phil of mind background, and not to mention your penetrating understanding of how people think, whereas the traditional medicine areas don't require any special insight (but what do I know?). Do what you want, but for me psychiatry is especially thought-provoking.
not really, although thanks for thinking so. i agree its interesting. It sounds so good on paper. So fascinating, scientifically and existentially. And psychiatrists are some of the smartest people i know (and include a handful of philosophers). But its really hard, its too much. I feel like i can deal with people's pain when i can hide behind their urine cups or heart murmurs, like the pin hole to see a solar eclipse. If i can hide behind the abstractions of philosophy. Or the blistering but passive truth of literature. Then i can look. But the rawness of human sadness, or psychosis, or the absolute disorder that lies behind the thin veil of conscious thought is too much sliced open in bright light like that. I think it takes strength that i am too lazy to develop.
Post a Comment