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I did not become dogged or declarative, nor did I walk off into the sunset--in fact, for a while there, I saw hardly any natural light at all.
What happened was relentlessly and excruciatingly dull: I lay in a hospital bed and hurt. My ribs hurt, my brain hurt, my thoughts hurt, and they did not let me go home for eight days.
At first, they figured me for an alcoholic--that I'd gone for the hand sanitizer because I was so desperate for a drink. The truth was so much weirder and less rational that nobody really seemed to buy it until they contacted Dr. Singh. When she arrived at the hospital, she pulled a chair up to the edge of my bed. "Two things happened," she said. "First, you're not taking your medication as prescribed."
I told her I'd taken it almost every day, which felt true, but wasn't. "I felt like it was making me worse," I eventually confessed.
"Aza, you're an intelligent young woman. Surely you don't think drinking hand sanitizer while hospitalized for a lacerated liver marks forward progress in your mental health journey." I just stared at her. "As I'm sure they explained to you, drinking hand sanitizer is dangerous--not only because of the alcohol, but because it contains chemicals that when ingested can kill you. So we're not moving forward with the idea that the medicine you stopped taking was making you worse." She said it all so forcefully that I just nodded.
"And the second thing that happened is that you experienced in the accident a serious trauma, and this would be challenging for anyone." I kept staring. "We need to get you on a different medication, one that works better for you, that you can tolerate, and that you'll take."
"None of them work."
"None of them have worked yet," she corrected.
--
Dr. Singh came by each morning, and then in the afternoon another doctor visited to assess my liver situation. Both were a relief if for no other reason than my omnipresent mother was forced to leave the room briefly.
On the last day, Dr. Singh sat down next to the side of my bed and placed a hand on my shoulder. She'd never touched me before. "I recognize that a hospital setting has probably not been great for your anxiety."
"Yeah," I said.
"Do you feel you are a threat to yourself?"
"No," I said. "I'm just really scared and having a lot of invasives."
"Did you consume hand sanitizer yesterday?"
"No."
"I'm not here to judge you, Aza. But I can only help if you're being honest."
"I am being honest. I haven't." For one thing, they'd taken the wall-mounted sanitizer station out of my room.
"Have you thought about it?"
"Yeah."
"You don't have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action."
"I can't stop thinking about getting C. diff. I just want to be sure that I'm not . . ."
"Drinking hand sanitizer won't help."
"But what will help?"
"Time. Treatment. Taking your meds."
"I feel like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening, you know?"
She looked me dead in the eye. I thought she might cry or something, the way she was looking at me. "Aza, you're going to survive this."
--
Even after they let me go home, Dr. Singh still came to my house twice a week to check on my progress. I had switched to a different medication, which Mom made sure I took every morning, and I wasn't allowed to get up except to go to the bathroom lest I re-lacerate my liver.
I was out of school for two weeks. Fourteen days of my life reduced to one sentence, because I can't describe anything that happened during those days. It hurt, all the time, in a way language could not touch. It was boring. It was predictable. Like walking a maze you know has no solution. It's easy enough to say what it was like, but impossible to say what it was.
