"crow," by my daughter 

I feel I should apologize to the receptionist, get up from my chair in the waiting room and say, “I’m sorry for the way she spoke to you.  She’s bipolar. " Unmedicated bipolar, I think to myself.

She’s gone off on the receptionist at the outpatient GI surgery center, where she’s  waiting for endoscopy and colonoscopy at the age of 21. She’s made a point of complaining for having to wait the half hour we’ve been waiting, which isn't a long wait at all these days. She’s already balked at the admitting office, threatening  to go home, but she needs this test. And so I respond with my reflective best. I say, “You’re pretty frustrated right now, Jane.” I’m neutral. I’m Switzerland.

Jane sits down and continues to rail on about the delay, the incompetence of the staff, and so on and so forth. I resist the urge to explain that there are other patients and protocols and that hospitals generally have their inefficiencies, it’s to be expected. I resist because I know that to say anything may set her off again, probably make her go ballistic.

Frankly, it’s a miracle she made it through the prep for the colonoscopy.  I’ll give her credit--she’s done that on her own, all by herself.  She doesn’t live at home anymore, but she did call me at 4 am to tell me she’d been vomiting and has a hemorrhoid the size of grape. She thinks she is dehydrated, and the patient advisory nurse has told her she can go to the ER.  It’s possible she is dehydrated, but her voice on the phone is barely coherent, her explanation random. 

If she goes to the ER, it will be more money, and I’ll have to take her.  It feels bad, making a decision that might not be in my child’s best interests, but I’m not really sure what is and isn’t in her best interests anymore, and I know it’s not in my best interests to get up and go to the ER with her. I urge her to hang on until 8 am, but she’s not known for patience. Her last words before hanging up on me are “You’re not helping. Fuck you.”

I wonder what’s helping and what’s not as Jane and I continue to sit in the GI procedures waiting room. Finally, the nurse comes and takes her away, behind the automatic doors—“Staff Only Beyond This Point”—and since there’s only Health News Now and a Time magazine from 2004 to read, I try to watch Rachael Ray on the TV mounted overhead.  The story catches my attention . . . it’s the horribly disfigured face of a young woman.  Rachael Ray is going on about how the woman and her husband are both blind and face the challenges of raising a young child. I don’t hear why the woman’s face is the way it is, but she looks like she’s been mauled by a bear or in some terrible car accident.

You can’t see Jane’s disability. She looks a little untidy sometimes, but nothing you’d stop on the street about. I’ve been living with and trying to love Jane all these years, trying to understand the disease and advocating  for her for years, but sometimes it's hard even for me  to believe she has a serious mental disorder. To the world, her hypersensitivity and narcissism make her look like an asshole. Maybe she is an asshole, I think. She certainly acts like one.  I resent the fact that she refuses to take medication that in the past, to my mind, has helped.  I resent the fact that she lies and says she’s taking it, even though I know this is often what people with bipolar do and I should probably expect it.

What really scares me is that for the last couple of years she’s been drinking, probably a lot. I’ve been called to the ER twice in the middle of the night, both times her blood alcohol sky high, almost to the toxic level, where it can kill you in and of itself, even if you don’t fall down a flight of stairs or drive your car into a bridge abutment or throw up and aspirate. Alcohol on bipolar is gasoline on fire.

Continue reading Part 2.