Life Beside Mental Illness
My first psych hospitalization lasted two months. I was 17
years old. My psychiatrist discharged me in February, and I caught up on all my
schoolwork by April so I could graduate with my class. That fall, I enrolled at a
university but freaked out on day one and left. Instead, I went on a job
search. The first opening I saw, in the want ads of the newspaper, specified
doing lab work, night shift, call this number if interested. I was and I
called.
I wanted to stay busy, not to deny my mental illness or make a misguided attempt to avoid it, but because I had the desire to live my life. In this blog post, my aim is to show that mental illness hasn't blunted my life, hasn't numbed me to the flavor and variety in living, but is an interruption. The stops and starts don't prevent me from getting back on the horse. I illustrate how mental illness operates side by side with having a "regular" life. I offer the example of my start in treatment, juxtaposed with my first jobs, my first love, my reach for greater independence. In that spirit, I continue on, respectful of the effects of bipolar disorder on consistency.
Back to the lab job, I submitted my application and was hired after the interview. I showed up in my white lab coat I was told to purchase.
They said open the coolers, and I did, and they were filled with specimens from
doctors’ offices, urine, blood, sputum, you name it. If it oozes from the body,
there’s a test that can be run. And I’d take each and start a sheet and take a
sticker from the sheet that I applied to all the samples from a particular
patient. It’s known as accessioning. That’s where I started, in a room with
eight tables, three of us per station, opening coolers, attaching numbered stickers,
passing tubes and containers on to the table leader for distribution.
It was the early 1980s, and there I was aged 18 at a night job
that nowadays would require some sort of certification, that would require
protective equipment, at least gloves and a mask, but none of this happened. We
winged it and as long as we got the job done right and quickly, they were happy
to keep us.
Sometimes it wasn’t done right, and the lab manager would
call us into a room. He’d sit on a stool, smoking a Marlboro, all of us
gathered around. He’d stress how we needed to be professional and careful and
maintain the sanctity of this lab, eyeballing us, taking another drag and
blowing smoke up into the air.
We could smoke in the building, but only at the end of one
hallway, unless we were the manager.
I became a table leader in accessioning, in short order,
because I was fast and good at sticking numbers to specimens correctly. One
night a shoebox came in along with the usual blood tubes in a cooler and my
table people didn’t want to open it. It had no labels and felt different and
weird in weight from our usual stuff. As the table leader, it was my job to
take a look. With some trepidation, I peeled the tape away, pulled away the top
of the shoebox, and oh my goodness, there was a severed hand inside. My
accessioning manager looked startled as he told me to take it to the cytology
guy. Nobody liked going there. Cytology guy sat in a cramped room with slides
in cardboard sleeves and who knows what else, plus he had the presence of a
troll under a bridge. But I took the box over and said, “You have a helping
hand on the job tonight.” He laughed, then I laughed, then we took a good long
look at the hand. He noted that it was probably gangrenous thus was chopped
off, and we exclaimed at the same time, “Should have put it on ice!” and we
were good buddies from then on.
One of my friends at the tables, Audrey, took me to a party
after work one night. I’d just gotten a buzz when I met this guy, so handsome
with his dark hair and mustache, that I fell in love, or at least lust,
immediately. We left on his motorcycle, my first time riding on one, and landed
at his house. He lived on Devil’s Reach Road, and that’s where I lost my
virginity. We had a predominantly sexual relationship. It was enough to sustain
us over the summer. When he wanted to get an apartment with me, I politely
declined. I’d lost interest. My first love was now my past love.
After a while of moving specimens from boxes to testing
areas, I was recruited by urinalysis and bacteriology. For weeks I unscrewed plastic
urine specimen cups, dipped in a tool called a loop, pressed it into the medium
on a culture plate, and streaked the bit of urine across it. I’d add that plate
to a rack, run the loop through a flame to sterilize it, and open the next
container. The goal was to see what kind of bacteria grew on the plate. I was
knee deep in urine every night. Then I got bumped up to plating all the other bodily fluids. They were sorted as “nose”, “throat”,
“ear”, and came in as swabs. I had to choose the correct plates for streak
cultures and be swift about it. Toward the end of the shift, I’d open the stool
samples, literal buckets, under the hood in the back and get swabs of those.
Then I ran the pregnancy tests. This was
old style, mixing a drop of urine with a drop of some kind of hormone and
rotating this on a plate to see if it became grainy. Home pregnancy tests
weren’t around yet.
The urine plating, I soon found out, was taken over by a
series of pretty boys.
The urinalysis manager was a gay man, and the assistant
manager was lesbian, and I was about to come out myself. These two seemed to
have realized faster than I did and that’s why I ended up in their department.
Really, that was it. I fit in and we could all carry on comfortably with each
other.
The manager Fred was a short old man, stout, and reminded me
of a toad, strange but nice. He lived a long drive from the lab, with his
mother, and whatever young man, hard on his luck, he’d taken in and given a job
to, and I don’t know what else because I wasn’t privy to that.
The assistant manager Cheryl was a domineering sort, a bit
butch but not overly so. We weren’t attracted to each other but did go out to
clubs in the city and did have girlfriends and I was sort of friends with her
but her whole scene was rough and lacked any semblance of class. Once I got
caught at Cheryl’s over a weekend due to a big snowstorm and it was all about
this other lesbian couple making out, and about eating box macaroni and cheese
and tolerating the upstairs neighbors playing Don’t You Want Me, Baby on
repeat.
Fred would talk about his life with his mother. He’d go on
about “Mother said this” or “Mother wants me to that”, giving off a creepy
Norman Bates vibe. Fred also had an antique shop, and once I asked him the name
of it and he replied, “My Mother’s Place.”
Fred and Cheryl ran urine tubes through a centrifuge and
then read the microbes from the spun down bits. They’d both been trained on
microscopes and what to look for in urine such as crystals and red blood cells,
and how to count fields. They switched off reading microbes on Saturdays, Fred
one week, Cheryl the next. Then they wanted me to take that over. I didn’t know
how to refuse. The training they gave me wasn’t much, and they said it didn’t
matter, and there I was. I did it for one week and felt guilty, like I was
giving results that were probably wrong that might affect treatment and health.
Then I quit.
And that was my first job, my oddest one ever, and I both
love and hate on it to this day.
While I’d been working that job, I saw my psychiatrist
weekly, both of us smoking in his office while he asked how I was in his French
accent. Having cigarettes and essentially performing smoking held importance
for me. It’s common among psych patients and was totally accepted in the 80s. Concentration
on smoking helped me avoid feelings in my therapy sessions. I’d show up in 80s type
of clothes, pants with suspenders and shoes that looked like spats, a cute
fedora on my head. Or I’d change it up with a flowery skirt bought from the
wannabee in the sixties shop at the mall. I liked accentuating that I was thin,
very thin, but as wasted away as anorexia made me, my psychiatrist didn’t
specifically treat it. It was the 1980s and the awareness and knowledge of
eating disorders wasn’t there yet.
After I left the lab job, I did door-to-door canvassing for
a nonprofit supposedly calling out exploitation in utility company billing,
electric and gas and water. It was solitary work, knocking on doors in a
specified neighborhood, explaining the nonprofit and asking for donations. I found
that if I asked for a donation as if I expected it, that of course you want to
give because all of your neighbors are, people would pull cash out of their
wallets. And after a couple of months, that got to me because it had no
meaning. Donations paid canvassers’ salaries and basic operating expenses, but
we didn’t actually do anything for anyone, not as promised in the brochures we
handed out. However, there were a couple of interesting parts. For a few days
we traveled to Long Island to canvas, and it was all about talking fast and
moving on. The following week we were in Roanoke, Virginia, the foothills of Appalachia,
and I had to slow down and sit for a glass of sweet tea. It was good for my shy
self, all of this interacting. And I was introduced to salesmanship. I
appreciate interacting but truly despise selling, especially if the target isn’t
planning for an expenditure.
After that, I worked at a department store, in the handbags
section, and that was okay and stable and gave me money for weed and
occasionally dancing the night away at a club. And then I started going in and
out of psych units, interspersed with trying a new college with a new line of
study that wouldn’t last. And I’d pick up work and meet various casts of
characters and find out more about business and capitalism.
There’s complexity to being mentally ill and falling off into the severity of it before recovering and working again and pursuing goals like education and friendships and moving out of the family home. I didn’t sit, static and stiff, waiting for symptoms to pounce. I still don’t. It’s much more about living life and then depression might take over, or mania might take over, and then the focus is there. But it doesn’t stay there. There’s humor and richness and quirkiness to all experiences and I’ve been witness to so much that’s colorful or dirty or a revelation. I like being in the thick of it. I’m not stuck in a mindset of being only a psych patient. The world is multi-faceted and so am I.
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