Gina sat alone at a patio table of a restaurant with a book in her hands and watched a small fire truck and ambulance pull up a half a block away. A group of emergency responders entered the front door of a small business. Within a few minutes, they rolled an unconscious woman out on a gurney, placed her in the back of the ambulance, and drove off.
Gina sipped the last of her espresso and imagined the woman on the gurney disappearing through the doors of some emergency room entrance. Sooner or later, most everyone would be carted away like that, she thought. And what difference would it make? Living with depression was just prologue to the ambulance ride.
“Bye bye,” she said. “Get some rest, now.” A woman at a table across the way glanced at her coldly.
She was losing her camouflage skills. Sometimes, her private monologues would last for minutes. She couldn’t control the flow of words that would deliver her to rapturous heights or cavernous depths. And she was completely alone in a sea of concerned friends and relatives. How could anyone understand that she wasn’t like them? Food, sex, child rearing, social obligations–they all repulsed her. In the midst of her isolation, her shame kept others who could help her at a distance. She could feed on depression, at least. It’s all she had.
In the midst of her deepest slump, she had grown dependent on Effexor. When her doctor prescribed the drug to her, he didn’t detail the possible effects it would have on her mind and body. He just said, “Effexor will level you out. You’ll like it.”
But after just a few weeks of taking it, Gina felt discarnate. The world passed in front of her like an arthouse movie. Her intent was not to stay on the drug for long, but she was so afraid of getting irretrievably depressed that she kept taking it. She was ingesting the bare minimum, 37.5 milligrams, once a day. She took it at night because it made her sleepy. Her doctor didn’t want her to stop in the winter, too, so time just continued to go by.
One morning as Gina was making breakfast, her youngest daughter Beth walked over to her, held Gina’s face in her hands, stared into her glassy eyes, and said, “Mom, are you in there today? We love you, you know. Please come back to us. Please?”
“It’s my medication, baby,” Gina said. “It tamps down my emotions. Everything seems monochrome. Even you. I wish I could feel again, but I can’t.” She wiped the tear from Beth’s eye and touched it to her tongue. “So salty,” she said. “My baby’s tears are so salty.” She wrapped her arms around Beth’s trembling shoulders, stroked her hair, and whispered, “I need to come back to the world, baby. Somehow, I need to come back.”
Gina started weaning herself off Effexor. This made her feel overwhelmed, like there was entirely too much on her plate. When she was in this mode, she didn’t take day-by-day sequences into consideration. Instead, she tried to process everything all at once. This made her anxious and then unable to do anything. She would lapse into uncontrollable crying spells. The tears just came whenever, and they stopped her in her tracks no matter what she was doing. There was no telling what might trigger a crying spell, either. It could be anything from someone asking her if she was OK to simply having to wake up in the morning.
Then Gina began feeling head shocks. She thought of them as audible electronic zaps that concentrated around different parts of her brain. They were quick little moments, like pop rock candy sensations that lasted only a second or two. Some came in ones, others in quick successions of three. They happened when she looked to the left or right, turned her head to back out of the driveway, when she was driving and doing a lot of looking around, and so on.
As the months passed, the head shocks began tapering off, but Gina struggled with anger, frustration, and dizziness. Sometimes, numbness rippled through her body in waves, which triggered anxiety attacks. Everything fatigued her, and she found it hard to concentrate on the simplest tasks. And she scared her children.
She finally researched her condition in detail and realized she could probably recover. A full recovery could take up to two years. She had avoided returning to her doctor because she resented being treated with such slovenly, unprofessional, and even dangerous indifference. Still, she thought she should gain more insight into her situation from someone with a medical background who might understand her circumstances. When she explained that she was weaning herself off Effexor, her doctor nodded casually as if everything was in perfect order. He told Gina she was doing the right thing and said, “Don’t worry about the head shocks. They’ll go away.” That was about it.
“Thanks for not giving a shit,” she said. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You’re just making things up.” She walked out the door and found a different doctor.
Gina ordered another espresso and returned to her book. It was the story of a man so tormented by his struggles that he traveled to Tibet to find peace within himself, only to learn that existence was short, fickle, painful, and to be experienced in the moment no matter where one lived. Gina turned to the last page. The man’s final words before he died were, “They’re all just grasshoppers before the winter, just grasshoppers before the winter.”
“Why?” she asked herself. “Why in the world should I come back?”
