cygnoir.net the black swan with digital wings

just say no

The podium obscures most of the diminutive woman behind it, but her voice bubbles up over its top, bypassing the tinny microphone altogether and roiling throughout the high school auditorium. Seven hundred staring faces turned toward her.

“I know this is a difficult time. The pressure to fit in is overwhelming. I sound like someone you can’t relate to — just some adult prattling on about things that will never happen to you or your friends.”

Her voice breaks, a gentle ripple within her light soprano. She grips the rickety podium with tiny hands.

“But it *can* happen to you. It happened to me. Sure, when I started, I thought I had it all under control. But it doesn’t last. No, once you’re hooked, you’ll do anything for it. Anything.

“God, I look out at all of you and see so much talent, so much promise, and you can fool yourselves all you like but it’s a tenuous grip you’ve got when you’re battling … addiction.”

She hits this last word like a xylophonist on the brink of despair, invisible mallet in her hand as her silver rings snick neatly on the wooden surface.

“So what can I say to make you listen? Probably nothing, but I’ll try. Take a step back, reconsider, think of … think of me and my wasted life, shaking and screaming as I saw things that weren’t there and was powerless to come back to reality.

“It’s a cliché, we all know it: ‘just say no.’ It’s not easy to ‘just say no’ but do it, do it if you value all you’ve got going for you right now.

“Just stand up and walk away. Be brave like I couldn’t be brave.

“Don’t do Mahjongg.”

._.-.

Two Saturdays ago, I woke up feeling dead-awful. Nausea, headache, dizziness — like a hangover without the fun the night before. I called in to work because I knew I wouldn’t be able to be civil while dealing with less than civil med students for eight hours. I napped. It was good.

After a few hours of naps, and trying to wake up so I didn’t mess up my sleep schedule, I was feeling “punky,” as my mom likes to call it: when I’m not quite sick, not quite sulky, not quite restless, but somewhere in between all three. I didn’t feel like doing anything. Keeping up with the ICQ barrage was even more than I could handle, and I normally enjoy the messages flying back and forth, little telegrams all over the world, connecting me. Grounding me.

Some people take baths to relax. When I’m feeling punky, I take a shower. The shower is not quite a religious experience for me, but it comes pretty close. Something about the steady stream of water, the warmth, the scrubbing heartily at my scalp, elbows, tummy, and ankles, watching the bubbles like petals on my toes. My showers are always a strict routine: wash hair, wash face, wash body, in that order, and never any other. I had just rinsed my face when the hallucinations began.

If it’s not already apparent, I don’t do illegal drugs. I have, in the past, and am not embarrassed of that, but they’re just something I’m not interested in right now. In addition to that, Chad is vehemently against all drugs, and I don’t want to freak him out, even though I know that some of them are really no big deal for me or for other people.

But the hallucinations … they were a big deal for me.

._.-.

I opened my eyes after rubbing my hands all over my face, and my head was tilted downward so I first saw the bottom of the tub. There were shapes in it. Not bubble shapes or my feet or — o my god. They were tiles. Mahjongg tiles.

Thinking I had just played too much Mahjongg Solitaire, and was pretending they were there, as some sort of weird joke on myself, I rubbed my eyes vigorously again and looked back. Still there. And more. Now there were more tiles.

I looked up to the ceiling. There too. I looked on my arms, my legs. There, and there, only in miniature. I got out of the shower and wrapped my big white towel around me, and saw them there too. On the bathroom floor. On the bathmat. On the carpet in the bedroom.

There they sat, blandly, stacked at different heights, in all their lovely patterns, as if waiting for me to play them.

That’s about when I went into full panic-attack mode.

._.-.

For those non-panickers out there, let me describe what it’s like for me personally. It’s like driving on the Edens Expressway in Chicago, in the rightmost lane, and having someone on the left try to cut inches in front of you just as someone entering the expressway on the right is merging into the exact same bit of space. The brain goes, “Uh, I am in immediate danger. There are several things I could do right now, but instead, I think I’ll just make Halsted’s heart pound out of her gut and her breathing superfast, and I’ll toss in adrenaline just to make things interesting.”

And so I “freak out” as observers call it, usually resulting in hyperventilation, dizziness, extreme claustrophobia, and an overwhelming desire to get out of whatever it is that I’m in, not “as soon as possible,” but immediately. Crying or moaning usually starts when I realize I can’t do that. Crying adds to the hyperventilation, and moaning just makes me sound like the ghost of Jacob Marley in the Alastair Sim version of “Scrooge”.

At no point during a panic attack am I able to articulate what it is that I need, nor am I able to snap myself out of it. Keep your arms and legs inside the ride until it comes to a complete stop. Usually I am functional enough to call someone who knows what one of my panic attacks *sounds* like over the phone, and they can talk to me as it subsides.

._.-.

I called Karawynn, with whom I had been talking earlier, and she suggested I call Dr. Doctor. As I calmed down somewhat, I agreed that that was a good idea. The tiles were still everywhere, but I had accidentally discovered that they didn’t show up on patterned surfaces, like the comforter on the bed, or on the windowblinds. So I focused on those as I searched for the after-hours number.

Couldn’t find it, although I did my best to tear the downstairs apart, dump out everything in my backpack, and generally cause much disturbance to poor Zen, who probably thought this was all some elaborate setup to a Fun Game, and I never delivered.

Getting down the stairs in the first place was pretty interesting. Since the tiles were stacked at different heights on each stair, I had to test before stepping on them to see if they were sturdy enough to support me. They always were, but I had to test, prodding with toes in little stabs downwards until my foot hit something solid. Then step. Repeat about a billion times until I got downstairs.

Sometimes when I looked down while walking on level ground, I’d trip on the tiles and lose my balance. So I didn’t walk around much.

._.-.

On the web — hah! she exclaimed, I can still use the internet! — I found Dr. Doctor’s pager number, and paged him. He wasn’t too thrilled about that, and didn’t seem concerned in the least about my hallucinations. Not that he was completely unsympathetic, but he just asked me a bunch of technical questions and then said for me to wait it out and if I was still having them in an hour, to go to the emergency room or to call the on-call psych resident.

Since he wasn’t too concerned, I calmed down even more, and eventually figured out how to navigate through the foot-high stacks of Mahjongg tiles. I can’t say as it was any fun, but it was manageable after a while.

._.-.

Sunday brought me little sleep and more tiles. Chad was out of town for the weekend, visiting friends and family in Florida, so I called his parents’ house to let him know what was going on. Woke him up from a dead sleep, and I knew that the Mahjongg element of the whole thing would completely crack him up, but to his credit he did not laugh at me once. I finally called the on-call resident after I had been hallucinating for twenty-four hours, and she told me to take the Klonopin and try and get some rest. She didn’t seem concerned, either. Then again, I guess it’s part of the Doctor Handbook not to say, “O my god, Mahjongg tiles?! You’re insane !”

I didn’t get much rest. I stayed home from work and laid in bed a lot and tried to close my eyes but the tiles were there too. The Klonopin helped not one bit, nor did it hurt, I suppose. But I remember thinking sometime Sunday afternoon that it might be a really good idea to beat my head against the wall in the bathroom and hope that neither surface fractured.

Thankfully, I could still use the ‘net to a certain extent, and I had many friends who consoled me, commiserated, mentioned that their friends had hallucinated on zoloft too, and it did make me feel a bit better. Kite had a particularly relaxing effect on me; she didn’t laugh at me but she did make me laugh. At one point, Karawynn asked if I had played the tiles yet, and you know, I really wanted to. I mean, I like Mahjongg Solitaire. At least, I did. But it’s uninstalled from my PalmPilot and my computer now, so I can’t be tempted.

._.-.

The tiles stayed with me into Monday, although faded, into my session with Dr. Doctor. During the session, he decided it had nothing to do with my meds, but instead was “an atypical anxiety attack.” I felt like saying “no shit” to the atypical part, but the fact that he diagnosed it as an anxiety attack really bothered me. If that’s true, then this could happen again, and next time …

… it could be Scrabble.