Deviation Actions
Literature Text
So I’m waiting in the suicide lobby,
flipping through Guns & Ammo magazine.
“The doctor will be right with you” I hear,
addressed to a burlap sack
with a tragedy mask.
Turning to me:
“Would you like a free drink?” the nurse asks.
“You can have as many as you like.”
“I’ll have 9 of whatever,” I say.
She smiles, and disappears.
…
So I’m hung over and still somehow waiting to die.
The burlap sack is gone now.
An old lady smiles and knits at her hands.
She looks at the chipped grey wall behind me,
trying to see memories in it.
Suddenly, the nurse comes back.
“Can I get you anything? It’ll be a while.”
“No, I think I’ll just tough it out.”
“That’s a good way to go” she says
and disappears again.
…
So I’m five years older and waiting to die.
The old lady is dead. Cremated.
Her husband is knitting at his hands.
He stares at something that I can’t see,
finds her face, and smiles.
“I’m sorry. Thank you for being patient.
We’ll be just a few moments longer” says the nurse.
“Can I get you something to ease the wait?”
“Sure.” I respond.
She gives me Citalopram.
She disappears, but I don’t care.
...
Two weeks later, I’m still waiting to die.
“Up your dosage? The nurse asks.
“Sure.”
“You want Ativan, too?”
“May as well.”
A blurry face glances over at me.
I wave, and it does something I don’t recall.
The nurse has gone somewhere.
…
So another month passes, and I’m shivering, waiting to die.
The nurse comes back with more bad news.
“I’m sorry. It’s taking longer than expected.
Is there any way I can help?”
“Wellbutrin, if you could” I say,
“Wellbutrin, and maybe some therapy.”
The nurse leaves me with Wellbutrin, a therapist,
and a jigsaw puzzle.
“You’re putting that together all wrong.”
says the therapist.
“Look at the box. Yours is sorta fucked-up.”
Little does he know that when the earth dies,
this puzzle will be all that is left,
And I will reconstruct a new Earth from its pieces.
I'm cataloging its shapes in my head,
terraforming new worlds in my mind-palace.
My god, I can think so fast!
…
So a month passes and I’m waiting to die still.
The therapist took my wallet and left.
The Wellbutrin wore off, and now my puzzle looks really weird.
The nurse comes back, and says “I’m terribly sorry for the wait.
The doctor will see you now.”
So I follow the nurse through an unlit corridor
to a hole of a room with a strong electric current.
The air reeks of bleach over caked-on blood,
and rotting latex squeezes my throat.
…
So I’m waiting to die in the doctor’s office.
It’s been a couple of weeks.
“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to find the doctor”
says the nurse.
“It's alright. Can I come in tomorrow?” I ask.
She pauses,
and I pause with her.
We wait there forever.
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More free-verse surrealism about depression, because I'm basically a parody of myself now.
I'm writing and editing a collection of poems. Currently 150 pages in, though it'll be much longer. At some point I decided that I wanted at least 100 poems in my collection, length be damned. And that meant writing some new poems, so I gave myself themes to make it easier. One of those themes was "Waiting to Die," which was supposed to be about not waiting until the last minute to seek mental health treatment. I've never seen that point mentioned, but it's a really important one. When I went in, I was at a place where crying myself to sleep each night was the best-case scenario. I thought I'd be in, they'd diagnose me, and I'd be either fine or not-fine.
What they don't tell you is that it can take a long, long time to diagnose and treat you. For my case, we're talking months. What happened is I went to a clinic. Just a regular mumps-and-measles-style one, not a shrink. I was afraid of going to a psychiatrist because A) I wasn't sure if I was crazy enough to warrant it, and B) what if I wasn't depressed and just thought I was and the psychiatrist judged me and told me I wasted their time? [By the way, I also have some anxiety.] So anyway, I went to a regular doctor, and he prescribed me Citalopram, probably because it's one of the few catch-all drugs clinicians prescribe. Since fucking with your head can be somewhat dangerous, the procedure was to put me on a very low dose of a medication, then check for side-effects vs improvement, then adjust the dose as necessary. So I have to wait two weeks on a low dose while already feeling miserable. No effect. The doctor ups the dose and waits two weeks. Slightly more of an effect, but not much. At that point, he asks if I'd like to be recommended to a psychiatrist and a therapist, and I say yes.
The psychiatrist wants to see how I am for two more weeks. After observing, she offers lorazepam (Ativan) for my anxiety. Two weeks more to check the dosage and make sure it doesn't interfere with my Citalopram. After a while, I want off the Ativan. Two weeks to check the effects. Then we add Wellbutrin at a low dose. Check to see the effects. It's pretty helpful. We up the dose. Two more weeks to test. Seems alright, but it seems to be giving me mania-like symptoms. That, plus being depressed and unhinged, I forget if I've already taken my Citalopram one day, and accidentally take double what I was supposed to take. Not sure if I took double Wellbutrin, too. The whole thing is a blur. I freak out and feel like I'm dying at work, and ask to be taken off of Citalopram. More time passes while we ween me off of it. I realize I can't deal with drug side-effects and work a stressful job at the same time. I quit my job before I hurt myself, and lose my insurance in so doing. Without insurance, generic Wellbutrin is $90 a bottle for a one-month supply. I can't afford it. I have to stop taking it. And that ends my experience with proper mental health treatment. At the tail-end of things, the medication was genuinely an improvement. I just wasn't at a place to trust myself with it while managing everything else. I think if I'd gone in sooner (like all the other times I'd considered going in), I would've been much better off.
Unfortunately, all that info got garbled as I was writing this poem, and it turned into its own thing. I hope to write a more straight-forward poem about it one day, though. On a very related note: if you think you may suffer from depression (or any mental illness, really), don't wait for a definitive "maybe I'm crazy" episode before checking in, because treatment can take time, and that may be time you don't have. Let the therapist/psychiatrist decide if you're crazy. They specialize in mental healthcare, and have a better idea of what could help you.
