I AM FRANTICALLY PACING AROUND DR. A’S OFFICE, TALKING SO fast that she can hardly keep up with me. I am so agitated that I want to peel the skin off my body, but I keep digging my fingernails into my flesh instead. Even I know that I’m unraveling: For the last two weeks, I’ve lost my appetite and virtually stopped sleeping, and I’ve been unable to sit in one place for more than 30 seconds at a time.
“Manic,” Dr. A offers as her diagnosis. “You are having a severe bipolar episode and need to be hospitalized. I’m worried you might hurt yourself or do something crazy, like go out and buy a Corvette.”
She snatches the phone from the edge of her desk to find out if there are any beds left in her own hospital’s adult inpatient psychiatric unit. That way I can be in a safe place where nurses make sure I eat and sleep and choke down my mood stabilizers—even when I really, really don’t want to.
Before I know it, I am in a wheelchair, being swept through the locked doors of the inpatient psychiatric unit that is merely a few twists and turns from Dr. A’s office on the fourth floor of a sprawling hospital in suburban Chicago.
I am no stranger to mental illness, especially the bipolar disorder that has followed me across the country like any mental hospital I have ever been to. The unit is bright and airy, with comfortable rooms that have the best showers I’ve ever encountered in a hospital: The water gets hot instead of running cold for so long that strands of my hair turn to icicles that drip down the back of my neck.
