Storytime Sunday: Bear Country

This took place in a mystical time before Rachel had a metric buttload of medical and psychiatric problems. Back when I was in shape. When I was 5'6", 120 lbs. of pure lean muscle mass, ascended ropes for fun, ran a 5 minute mile at 7,000 feet, could carry an 80 lb. backpack 20 miles a day... I was ripped. I was also mostly sober, only smoking pot on weekends and breaks and never drinking (this was before my brief coke phase, though admittedly after I tried acid the first time). (And god, if I could have transitioned with that body...)

Anyway, it was August before my junior year of high school, i.e. the August before my life as I knew it ended. I was all into backpacking and so was my mom's boyfriend (the guy who thought he was an amoeba), so us four (me, bro, mom, mom's bf) went on a little camping trip. We went to Mammoth in California. We had a lake picked out to go to, above the treeline and near some glaciers to hike to.

It was only something like 10-15 miles to hike in, but it was also gaining over 2,000 feet in altitude, so it was a respectable hike. We got most of our gear brought in by pack mule, but I was still carrying more than 60% of my weight on my back. This included a lawn chair strapped to the pack, because priorities! Other critical provisions included Nalgenes full of vodka and blue peppermint schnapps.

It was late in the day when we finally arrived and found our delivered gear. We scoped out a campsite and moved the gear to it in 3 or 4 trips.

Something about this spot: I mentioned it was above the treeline. I don't know if you've ever been to that altitude, but real trees suddenly vanish above a certain point. All that was there was scraggly things that could just as well be shrubs. One problem with this is that you have no way to keep your food away from bears. No worries, we had bearproof containers for like half 10% of the food. Good enough.

The first few days went well enough. We ate all the MREs we brought - heavy, but tasty by camping standards. We caught some trout in the lake, which still had ice floating in it in August. They made for a nice break from the freeze-dried food. One thing we learned quickly: do not eat the chili macaroni. That shit was foul. One day me and mom's bf hiked up on one of the glaciers, so you can add "never have I ever walked on a glacier" to options you can use against me.

It was getting close to the end of the trip. Just two more nights and we'd be hiking out. We made Bisquick with schnapps in it for breakfast - green, minty pancakes. Yum!

We met a group of women hiking past our campsite. The Women's Sierra Club, or as I now call them, "Dykes on Hikes." They opted to camp a bit uphill so we wouldn't all be up in each other's shit. We did the nightly routine of piling all the food and stuff up and throwing the lawn chairs on top because, I dunno, a bear would look at it and think it was a solid wall or something.

In the middle of the night I woke up to a clanging and mom's bf shouting for me to wake up. I lept out of my sleeping bag into the freezing air and unzipped the tent. "Huh? What?" Clang.

"There's a bear."

I shrank back into the tent. "Uhm... a bear?" Clang.

"We need to chase it off."

"Chase it off? How?"

He shrugged. "Lights. Noise." Clang.

"But what if it attacks?"

"It won't attack. Come on." He strode off toward the clanging, shining his flashlight. I grabbed mine and headed after. I thought I saw something move and almost shat myself.

Then I remembered hearing somewhere that bears are scared of dogs. So I started barking. "WOOF WOOF WOOF ARF ARF WOOF!" I followed the clanging, barking the whole way. The clanging stopped, but I kept going. I seemed to reach the end of the trail of debris and finally stopped. It was too dark to try any cleanup, so we went back to bed to deal with it in the morning.

We took an inventory of what was missing. Basically all the food except the little bit in the bearproof container. Ripped bags. And one lawn chair. Who the hell took the lawn chair? Of course - the Women's Sierra Club. They must have taken it, then the bear came and ate all the food.

The trail of debris had to be a quarter mile long. Food pack after food pack ripped to shreds. Except the chili macaroni. One of those packs was partly nibbled through and the rest left completely untouched. Jesus, even the bear didn't want that shit.

And then we found the lawn chair, at the end of the trail of debris. It was slightly bent and a little dinged and scuffed, just fallen over on a rock. That's when we realized what happened: the bear stuck its head through the lawn chair to get at the food and got it stuck. The clanging was the bear trying to knock it off.

Anyway, apparently my mom chatted with a couple of the women uphill about the bear situation and they should be careful about it. They thought we had an actual dog to deal with that. Don't call me a dog - that's cold, girl.

Packing up and leaving was completely uneventful, and with the lighter packs and downhill grade it was a much faster, easier hike back. We were good about leave no trace protocols. We left only footprints and took only memories of lawn chair stealing bears.

Storytime Sunday: Road Trippin' Balls

Or: Doc Hofmann is My Co-pilot

Note to children (those under 25) reading: Don't be like me, mmkay?

Have I mentioned my days of drug experimentation? Well, this was one of those days. One spring break a bunch of us did a long multi-part road trip down the west coast. We started in Walla Walla, Washington and went west to a cabin in the woods. We spent a few days there being shitshows, then it was time to drive down to San Francisco. We rolled out and headed down.

But wait! I had an appointment at Evergreen to keep along the way. When I experiment with something, I don't fuck around. So here I picked up a small pharmacy including mescaline, mushrooms, mescaline blended with MDMA (because why not?), and of course, LSD. Unlike everything else, the acid wasn't good to go - it had to be dosed out first. That meant dropping the liquid on sugar cubes and wrapping those in foil as our doses. Transaction done, weed smoked, I was on my way.

My two passengers dosed themselves when we left and started to come up around dusk. We were crossing into Oregon a little after sunset and I kept getting startled by headlights in my rear view mirror. I'd see the lights rushing up to me, then actually look at them in the mirror and they'd be keeping their distance. I can't be that high, can I? Damn, I did not mean to get that high if I'm driving.

Bright objects started getting a bit of bloom and trailers, and the shape of the roadway was really... far out, man. Oh shit. Then I remembered handling the freshly-dosed sugar cubes, still dripping acid solution, when we bought them. See, one of the fun things about acid is that it can be absorbed through your skin. Or my skin, as was the case.

So, driving into the night of this 16 hour drive, I was coming up on an unknown number of hits of acid. This left me in a predicament. I was already tripping and I didn't know how much higher I'd be flying soon, so I had to let someone else take over. But the two other people in my car were both on two hits and riding the snake. Simply getting a motel wasn't an option because that would fuck up the road trip schedule, and that would be terrible. I considered that, though. I also considered telling my passengers what was up.

I kept considering as I chain smoked and assessed all the way to Springfield. "Hey, guys! It's Springfield. The Springfield."

"Let's find the statue of Jebediah Springfield!"

So I pulled off the freeway and on to the deserted, 2 AM streets of Springfield, Oregon. The few street lights were very pretty and glowy and it felt a bit like being on a movie set. Alas, there was no statue at what seemed to be the town center. The place was begging for one - I could see the incorporeal pedestal it belonged on right there. But along the road leading away, we spotted something. There it was, the comic book store and, right next to it, the Kwik-E-Mart. We came for Simpsons, we got the Simpsons.

We kept going and pressed on through the trip. Er, night.

Around 5:30 AM we reached Grant's Pass and stopped for gas. Oregon has this stupid law where it's illegal to pump your own gas, so we had to deal with the attendants. And we were all saucer-eyed and tripping to varying degrees. The guy in my back seat was clinging to the ceiling hand grip and rocking back and forth with a deranged grin on his face. The guy in the front seat was maintaining his composure like a pro and avoiding any interaction. Me? I was fighting against permasmile and trying not to focus on any trippy things I saw. After that stress, we continued on our way.

Down Highway 199, going straight for the coast. We'd been periodically smoking weed along the way; we smoked more once we got outside Grant's Pass. Dawn was starting to creep up and as it started to get light out here was... snow? It was snowing, and driving through that was unbelievably trippy. I was most definitely still tripping and here was this drifting star field I was floating through. There might have been the car engine, but I could still 'hear' the silence of the snow over it. We danced around corners, we rocketed up hills, we entered another world when we passed through a tunnel.

It was around 7 AM when we came down out of the snow. The snow turned to drizzle turned to nothing as we crossed into California. As we came down out of the mountains, I finally felt like I might be coming down myself. Mostly. We crested a hill near the coast and it opened up into an utterly surreal sight of fields of sunflowers catching the morning rays. Just as the world opened up into that, the shuffle on the stereo pulled up "No Rain," and I knew everything would be just fine. Good thing, too - I was spent.

Problem: who was going to take over for me? Guy in the back seat volunteers. "I've come down enough." Well, if you say so. We pull over and swap positions. I gobble 2 hits of acid and curl up in the back seat as though to sleep. And we carry on.

I spent hours in awe of the sights - the glistening ocean, the alien trees, the twisted road. For a while I had my face pressed to the window in full perma-smile mode. It was glorious going down Highway 1 with a sleep-deprived, residually-tripping madman at the wheel, but that could only go on so long. He started getting swervy and jerky, and we can't have that with blind turns and 200' cliffs.

So he pulled over. Guy in the front seat? "I can't fit in your driver's seat!" He had a point. This guy was like 6-foot-20 and not going to squeeze under my steering wheel.

So this is how it's gonna be, guys? Really? I drive us more than 12 hours from bumfuck backwoods Washington to Crescent City, California, mostly on acid, and my only replacement driver is done for before we reach Mendocino. I'm supposed to take over again? Don't you guys remember when I ate all that acid this morning? Fine! Fine, someone's gotta do it.

So I took over driving again, and let me tell you, Highway 1 is an... interesting drive when you're tripping. I fortunately learned quickly: don't get engrossed by the pretty images, if they suck you in you're dead. Cars coming the other direction were heart attack inducing when they actually passed, but for the most part, while stressful, it was also oddly zen. I was connected to the car and fully open to the magnificent natural beauty around me. The smooth g-forces of each turn, the almost rhythmic rising from and falling toward the ocean along the roller coaster roadway. The sea spray and the spring foliage enveloped me in a blanket of smells. And it was such a beautiful day, with swarms of itty bitty UFOs on the ocean surface, all flickering in the sunlight.

But I couldn't keep it up. The only thing keeping me awake at this point was the fact that I was tripping. So we pulled into a market in (I think) Stewarts Point - it was somewhere not too far north of Jenner is all I know for certain. I didn't think I could go on. Big guy was going to have to squeeze in there. He wasn't so sure about that - said he'd think about it while I bought energy drinks. So I went in, I purchased a Monster and two Red Bulls, and I walked out with the receipt... for $6.66. That was a trip. Though it was more of a trip for the big guy. He saw the 666 was was like, "alright, it's a sign. Let's do this!"

Big guy took off driving and I pounded my energy drink, again starting to come down. This situation lasted all the way to... Inverness. Maybe - probably not even that far, though my memory is kind of fuzzy (can't imagine why). His knee was killing him and someone else had to take over. Other guy was curled up like a baby in the back seat. Alright, all on me again. As always.

So I'm still tripping a little and now kept awake by energy drinks, at least, and we're in the home stretch. We just have to make it to Foster City and we can pass out. I drive us through rural Marin County and we trip out on the farms and cows. Remembering how close I used to live to the cows, I tripped out harder.

I was so strung out. Soooo strung out. I was shaky and weak and twitchy, but dammit, we were going to make it. We slipped down onto the 101 and I was almost overwhelmed by all the cars and traffic and buildings and oh my god so busy! But that was just the start. We stopped for more energy drinks (in Greenbrae, I think), and I pounded one on the drive down through Marin.

I wasn't properly tripping at this point, I don't think, but distances, proportions, and perspective were still all weird. And so it was that I got on the Golden Gate Bridge, with its 2-feet-more-narrow-than-standard lanes and no median. The lanes looked like they got narrower and narrower and all the other cars seemed huge and smothering. I was gripping the steering wheel for dear life and biting down on my cigarette.

I barely remember the rest of the drive, just floating through San Francisco and riding the current down 101. We pulled into the Residence Inn parking lot, and thus ended that leg of the journey, nearly 24 hours after leaving.

To be continued...

Storytime Sunday: Grand Theft Golf Cart

In which Rachel comes within 15 feet of being arrested as an accessory to grand theft.

Boredom and insulation from consequences breeds a certain kind of adventurous nihilism. There are no consequences, so clearly nothing matters. But that just invites pushing the boundaries, seeing how far you can go until there actually are consequences.

Getting caught smoking weed on campus 3 times and ignored smoking at least as many? No consequences. Going to work drunk, and even drinking at work? Nothing. Stealing benches from the school and proudly displaying them outside my house? Pfft. Smoking cigarettes inside the computer lab in front of the publicly-accessible webcam? Please. I don't remember if this was before or after I biked through the library naked.

Whitman was a game preserve, where we were protected from responsibility. And we were going to (incrementally) take that as far as possible.

So it was one fateful... I honestly don't know what night - Tuesday and Saturday were about the same then. Some night a bunch of us were getting drunk. Anyway, this one guy, let's call him C., proposed stealing a golf cart from the school. He said he'd stolen it before, it's really easy. He just needs to stick his Leatherman in the key slot and turn. However, he's already in trouble with the school (somehow, I don't remember how he pulled that off), so he needed someone else to take the fall if they got caught. Nothing matters, so K. volunteers as driver/fall guy.

The plan we didn't realize we made was to all go on a joyride. Or at least, I didn't realize until it was happening.

I heard a putt-putt going down the dark street, then a "heeeyyyy~~". The golf cart was ours.

Seven of us (if I'm not mistaken) piled onto that one golf cart. It was one of those maintenance golf carts, so it had a flat bed in back; four of us piled on there. Another three crammed into the front seat. And we were off.

Off where? WHO CARES? Past Hunter Conservatory, up the street, back between the buildings. "WOOOOOOOOO!" Zigging and zagging all over the damn place. Where to next? How about we buzz Prentiss (the girls' dorms)? Yeah! Not that we voted on any of it, we just rationalized it after K. drunkenly swerved in that direction.

So we swerved between the dorms, down the path, through the sprinklers - don't touch the brakes! - almost into a bench, past the music building... We were about to go back out onto the street, off to who knows where.

"Police!" Fuck. K. brought the cart to a halt just at the (far) edge of the sidewalk.

"Step out of the vehicle." 4 drunk college students proceeded to fall off the back.

"Have you all been drinking?" Eeyup. Very drinking.

"Which one of you was driving?" Okay, K., now's the time to be the fall guy.

"I'm going to ask again, which one of you was driving?" Any minute here, K.

K. was not going to be the fall guy.

Another cop arrived. A sergeant. He surveyed the scene, turned to the cop next to him and said "I was expecting a drunk Bill Murray."

K. eventually did confess in a manner so anticlimactic I don't even remember it happening. Or maybe I would have remembered if I wasn't freaking out because, oh yeah, cops.

"Are you all Whitman students?" Sighs of relief all around. Yep, yep, yep, "kinda." Goddammit, C., they don't need to get into full time vs. part time vs. no time.

We were all Whitman students, so what did that mean? "We'll call security and..." The cop could barely keep a straight face here, "see if they want to do anything."

There was one hard-ass among the cops, always going on about C.'s "weapon" (his Leatherman) and being generally annoyed and bitchy. Then there were the rest of the cops arrayed at this scene. Shaking their heads, resisting laughter, cracking jokes between each other. I guess there are worse things they could get called to.

One of the cops reminded us how lucky we were which side of the sidewalk we were on when they caught us. This side of the sidewalk, Whitman security gets us, that side of the sidewalk the po-po gets us. Po-po gets us for theft in excess of $1,000 - i.e., Grand Theft Golf Cart. (Not that Whitman would ultimately press charges, but still - they don't have beer in those jail cells.) But we were on this side so...

Finally security arrived to tell us to go home and sleep it off. Well, okay, he did ask for all our names and student ID numbers first. He was very official about it and everything. And then he sent us home, said we'd be hearing about disciplinary action later. Uh-huh. So can we go now?

We could go, and that could only mean one thing: go back home and drink and party more. "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

P.S.: There never was any disciplinary action. No one even heard a peep from admin except for K., who was summoned for a Talking To. No consequences. Nothing matters.

Storytime Sunday: This Ceiling Sure Looks Inviting

Tequila has a tendency of convincing you certain things are good ideas. None of them are actually good ideas.

My last year at Whitman, I lived in a party house. Like, had a giant living room / foyer where we held bumpin' concerts regularly. Rosaacs, it was called (because it was on the corner of Rose and Isaacs streets). We had a lot of adventures. One night the guy who would become my roommate there called me up and asked "wanna go commit some federal crimes?" But that's another story.

There were four of us. There was me, obviously. There was J., a hilarious manly man astronomy major who tried (unsuccessfully) to switch to archaeology; he basically ran the house, he ran the concerts and loves Old Granddad, Pink Floyd, and dirty blues. There was S., a Swazi astronomy-math combined major who smoked whole trees of pot and drank cheap beer constantly (along with stealing my and Jake's booze); when he got deported, we found his room even messier than mine, with bottles of piss accumulated among the beer cans knee deep in places. And there was I., the diabetic sophomore who always got blacked out and lost his insulin pump; it's a miracle he survived.

We were hanging out drinking one winter night with friends mostly from the FUSH (Fucked Up Shit House). We = me and J.; I. and S. were off getting fucked up elsewhere. So all of we were hanging out in the kitchen taking bong rips and shots (except J. - he'd never touch weed). One of the FUSH people noticed a hatch in the ceiling. "What's up there," he asked.

J. shrugged. "I dunno!"

I took my shot of tequila. "Only one way to find out." See, at that point I'd been in the habit of crawling into tiny spaces for some reason. Crawling into walls, you know, like this. So I figured, fuck it, let's check this out. Tequila said it was a good idea, at least.

J. grabbed a ladder and set it up underneath. I wrestled my way to the top and pushed the square up, then slid it to the side. "Whoooaaaaa..." There were pipes in there. And a crawlspace big enough to hang out in. And... what's that against the wall there? I pulled myself up, sticking to the 2x4s and keeping my weight off the drywall ceiling.

"Hey, someone pass me the tequila," I called down. One of my friends dutifully handed it up.

Just drinking tequila in the ceiling. WCGW?

I was enjoying my ceiling tequila, but there was something missing. There's something about confined spaces that just screams "hotbox me!" So I drank a little more tequila and asked for the pipe and a lighter. You know what happened next.

I was getting comfortable up there. As I drank more tequila people started to wonder if I ever planned to come down. I wasn't thinking that far ahead. I had my Hornitos and I was happy. But all good things must come to an end. Eventually I was summoned to climb down. Easy enough. Just shuffle backwards along the 2x4s same way I came in. What could possibly go wrong?

I was going along all right, laughing like an idiot the whole way, when something fell out from under me.

You see those pipes there? Yeah, they're actually important.

As you can see, I couldn't stop laughing at my fail, face-arming myself because my palms were occupied holding me up. Once I calmed down enough, I shuffled over and climbed back down through the opening that was actually supposed to be there.

Repairing it was an adventure. J. took charge - it wasn't the first time he'd had to replace drywall in that house. We went to Home Depot, got a sheet, took it home, drank some bourbon, cut it, replaced the old sheet, drank some beer, spackled, painted, good as new.

Then we drank more. The end.

Don't forget to vote in this week's special poll all about this story --->

Storytime Sunday: The Cat's Stuck in the Wall

Note: This is an abridged telling of the story on account of not getting my poop in a group to write the story in a timely manner. This is what you get.

"Mew! Mew!" Almost rhythmic mews, distant and muffled. Edie's missing, and now there's muffled kitten meowing no one can pinpoint. We listen from the basement - she's at the front of the house and somewhere above. We listen in the front room - she's near the front of the house and somewhere below. We can hear her meowing beneath us.

"Mew! Mew!"

Hours of searching have passed to no avail. She's going to die of dehydration in there, we have to get her out! I can hear where she is, under the front door. I tear up the flooring in front of the door only to find hardwood underneath. I grab a claw hammer and maniacally attack the hardwood with it, ripping up chunks.

That goes nowhere, it just spews shredded wood all over the carpet and takes a divot out of the floor. Someone eventually gets the idea to look inside the walls. We only find a couple ways in, through the upstairs balcony. The openings are tight and the roof inside looks cramped. But we can hear the cat clearly inside. Yep, the cat's definitely stuck in the wall.

"Mew! Mew!"

Someone needs to climb in there and look. This looks like a job for Stuporman! (That was my inebriated alter-ego at the time. Stuporman - fighter of sobriety, defender of awesome.) I dive in head first and wriggle through the opening. I climb onto a half inch layer of soft dust and sediment and turn around, coating myself in it. With a flashlight, squeezing my head under the floor, and eventually a mirror, I solidly confirm Edie's location: at the bottom of a shaft.

So here's what we knew: Edie got into the wall through a vent opening. She wandered around exploring until she came to a shaft, like a hollow column. Then she fell down it and got trapped. This didn't get us any closer to getting her out.

I tried lowering a shoebox wrapped in a sheet, tied to another sheet, with food in it down the shaft. It just landed on her, if it even made it all the way down. We looked and looked with mirrors. I started chain smoking inside the wall.

"Mew! Mew!"

Someone gave us the brilliant suggestion to call the fire department. They laughed at us. We called the humane society. They don't do that. Someone posted a frantic message to the all-campus listserv, asking for any help.

Two guys came by to help. They tried various approaches. I continued to lay in the wall, smoking. Dust was sticking to my finger and caking to my lips. Someone passed me a pipe. I hit it and resumed smoking. Still in the wall.

"Mew! Mew!"

I noticed the open space between the upstairs floor and the downstairs ceiling. The notion of rats running through there entered my head. Is there rat shit in here? Wait... oh fuck. Someone pointed out to me: the dust. I was laying in rat shit and probably eating hanta virus as I smoked. I spat gritty bits of dust out of my mouth. Then I shrugged and pulled out another cigarette.

I spent late into the night inside this wall, increasingly tired, high, and, later on, drunk. I eventually crashed and came back the next day to climb inside the wall and chain smoke for a few hours, listening to the cat's mews to make sure she was still alive.

"Mew! Mew!"

Four hours in the wall today got me through a half pack of cigarettes and not much else. Still laying in rat shit, but I don't care, this is my spot! By this point I kinda feel like just lounging inside the wall from now on.

It all just kind of runs together at this point. I spent literally all the time I was at that house inside the wall chain smoking. There was no point to being in the wall, I didn't even pretend to be there for the cat other than to 'listen to make sure it's still alive'. Why did I want to lay there in rat shit regolith and chain smoke without a view of anything or any TV/computer/whatever? I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The next day, while I was gone, Clark arrived. With a jigsaw and a bottle of whiskey in hand. "Where's the cat," I imagine he asked with a cackle after kicking open the door. He cut a square out of the balcony floor directly above the shaft. As soon as it was open and the cat could see it was a way out, she climbed out on her own. Just stuck her claws out and parkoured up the sides of the shaft. Stupid cat. 

Storytime Sunday: Goddammit to Me

Have you ever really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? I have. This is the story of when I was.

It was 2003. RSD was my life at this point. It seemed to stretch back forever and it would surely continue forever. Mom had set me up in a little rented back house in a simulacrum of independence at least. The pain had gotten a little better with my spinal cord stimulator implant, and with new medications, but it was still pretty bad.

We'd fired the doctors at Stanford after being frustrated for too long with their inflexibility and purely "do as I say" authoritarian way of doing business. We found a new anesthesiologist/neurosurgeon who had RSD himself and was an all-around cool guy. And we found a pharmacologist who specialized in pain management to handle my medication.

Now, one weird thing that happens with RSD is that your opioid receptors - the ones that hydrocodone, oxycontin, morphine, etc. bind to - stop working right and those drugs are minimally effective for the pain. So you have to try other things. My new pharmacologist switched me from Neurontin to Gabitril (that's its own story), put me on methadone (it partly gets around the receptor problem) and some other things. But you have to be innovative with this. You have to think outside the box.

He had an outside the box option: ketamine. It's an anesthetic that works directly on pathways the RSD acts on (specifically, NMDA). It was a perfect option. And he had an outside the box delivery mechanism for it: a topical cream. I was a little sketched out by ketamine, but I went with it. We ordered the cream from a compounding pharmacy and I soon got it.

One tablespoon applied to the affected area once per day. Easy enough. Well, maybe a heaping tablespoon - my legs are big. Hey, this stuff works great. I want this to cover my whole legs. A couple tablespoons - it's a cream, it can't be dangerous. 

I started to get extremely sleepy. Head bobble all the time sleepy. After I fell from briefly losing consciousness mid-stride, mom took me back to her place. I slept a lot. But damn if my legs weren't feeling good.

"Moouumm..?" I shambled down the hallway to her room. "Moouumm..?" My brother was staring at me, I think. Mom walked to the front of her room and saw me, pupils blown, bruise forming on my head. "Are you okay," she demanded to know. I just continued shambling toward her bathroom. She probably asked again if I was okay, but I don't really know.

I managed to shamble past her into the shit-'n'-shower, as we called it (the closet-like room with a shower and a toilet right up against it). I saw her holding the external power supply to my SCS; it had apparently been dangling from my ass the whole time.

I reached out my hand. "Goddammit to me," I demanded.

"What?"

"Goddammit to me," a little softer this time.

"Goddamn what?"

"Goddammit to me."

She looked down at the power supply in her hand, and back at me. "Give it to you?"

I nodded. "Goddammit to me."

"No."

"Goddammit to me," I pleaded.

"You're gonna drop it in the toilet."

"Goddammit to me," more politely.

"You're gonna drop it in the toilet."

"Goddammit to me," super politely this time.

"Fine, fine." She handed it to me. I immediately dropped it in the toilet. It cost $8,000 to replace.

I don't remember what happened next, but apparently she called 911. She thought I had a head injury, but no, I just fell out of bed.

Next thing I knew, I was nowhere and formless. There was something sudden and awful, disembodied pain. I imploded, my muscles all spasming shut in an instant. My eyes flew open. I saw things, as in I got the raw sensory input, but nothing made sense. Though in hindsight I know what I saw, at the time, I couldn't identify shapes or colors, let alone objects. It was just raw, terrifying sensory overload.

What I didn't realize was that I was on the nice-living-room (not the one we normally used), on the couch, getting an IV stuck in my arm. This disorienting assault on my senses and my beings may very well have been the most terrifying experience of my life. It was like I had just been born and hadn't yet formed a concept or understanding of anything - not even my body or my senses.

I woke up in the hospital hours later to learn that I'd OD'd on ketamine. Apparently the extra I was applying had built up in my system and I was just on K the whole time until it crossed that threshold.

As a bonus, I found out from my pharmacologist that even with my stupidity, that shouldn't have been nearly enough to OD, only to have a bad time. Turned out my NMDA receptors must have been shot - likely excitotoxicity damage from so much continuous pain for so long literally killing the receptors. Joy.

I tried ketamine in another form after that. Pills. It became my only "as needed" pain relief other than pot. I was scared shitless of it, but when I needed it, it was a godsend. When I was really hurting, goddammit to me.

The Nuthouse

Gather 'round, boys and girls, and listen to the story of Rachel's trip to the nuthouse. The loony bin. The insane asylum. Whatever derogatory name you prefer for "psychiatric inpatient." 

It was 2001: not a space odyssey. The previous year, I'd been diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD, also known as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type I), first in one leg but rapidly spreading to both. It's a shitty disease. Really shitty. The pain - burning, crushing agony - never stops. The nerves get crossed, so normal sensations like a light touch can feel like a red-hot belt sander. I was still in Stage I of the disease, though rapidly on my way to Stage II, so fortunately it wasn't that bad. It was just miserable. The best parts are that the doctors gave me about a 5-10% chance of total remission (you're never "cured" of CRPS), it spreads in more than 90% of cases, and more than a third of patients eventually have symptoms throughout their whole body. So it was utterly hopeless.

I was depressed, naturally. In pain, can't do anything, dreams shattered, no hope, miserable side effects from the medications. But I went through the motions. I let myself be carried along by the currents because I didn't know what else to do. Some parts of the ride were even pleasant - the weekly spinal anesthetic injections I got in the OR felt sooo good. It was also, strangely, a respite from my bouts of intense emotional hurt and rage shortly before. In hindsight I was (hypo)manic for much of high school, and even younger (I first experienced psychosis in elementary school), but at the time I was just "impossible." (That description has a lot of meaning rolled into it that I don't feel like unpacking. I'll just say that if someone calls me "impossible," they will generally trigger either a flashback or an intense fight-or-flight - usually flight - response.) And now that I was depressed, that had settled down.

But my depression needed treatment, the doctors decided. To their credit, they first tried an antidepressant with proven efficacy for alleviating nerve pain. But that made me completely dissociated, so no go on that one. They tried a couple others with minimal effect. Then they tried Paxil.

Now, normally if a story involves putting a 18 year old on Paxil, it's not going to end well. When it's a 18 year old with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and miscoded 5-HT-2A receptors, it ends like this.

My energy started to come back. I was more alert. I also got even more grumpy than usual, but that didn't register until it was too late - I had reason to be grumpy after all. I was snippy and implacable. And I started to realize some things. I started to really grasp how hopeless and miserable things were. I started to realize there really was something I could do about it. I could force them to make me better. They didn't want me to die, but that was my ultimate way out. So I could force them to make me better or watch me die, and I'd win either way.

Now, this wasn't arrived at by any kind of rational thought process, or even coherent chain of thinking. It was more a subconscious emotional realization that came into the conscious when the time was right.

I wanted more Norco (hydrocodone). I'd taken the max dose, but I was in pain and I wanted more. I got very, very angry that mom wouldn't give me more. I don't remember things all too well, but at some point while screaming at her, I picked up a nearby pair of scissors and slashed at my arm with them. I think I was wrestled to the ground, but trying to cut my arm open with the scissors is the last thing I remember.

I don't know how I was transported to Stanford University Hospital, but I was taken there under a 5150 order: "danger to self." Basically, I was involuntarily committed by the State of California.

My memory picks up again inside the psych ward doors. I was assigned a room near the entrance on the lockdown side of the ward. At least one of my parents walked me in, I don't remember who, of if it was maybe both. All I could do was cry and scream. The more I did, the more they disregarded me. I gathered enough control to stop and be silent. They left me alone. This was what I needed.

They clearly weren't going to help me, they just wanted to keep me from escaping my misery. Well, if they weren't going to make things better, I still had a way out.

I pulled the pillowcase off my bed. Making sure they didn't see, I tied it to the doorknob. I tied a slipknot in it and slid my head through. Then I squatted, kicked my legs out, and dangled with my butt off the ground. Things were going dim, but they caught me. I know they got me down and restrained me. Next thing I know they're shoving a pill down my throat. Zyprexa, a powerful antipsychotic.

I passed out and awoke in a dissociated fugue, unable to move. The rage was gone, but all the hurt, both physical and mental, was still there. I couldn't cry. I could barely whisper. Lifting a hand was difficult. They administered my morning medications, plus more Zyprexa.

They dragged me down the hall (not literally - I was stumbling as they held me up) to bathe me. I don't really remember it. I had a visitor whom I won't name. They wanted to give me a massage to make me feel better. The orderlies helped lay me face down on a... something, I don't remember if it was a bed or a gurney or what... in a room with privacy.

It started with my back. I didn't like it. It felt like they were using soap, not lotion. They didn't go far down, though, only about halfway down my back. Then they started on my legs. That outright hurt. Remember the non-painful sensations feeling painful? This is someone who knew about that symptom and inflicted this on me anyway. It hurt. "No," I muttered as loud as I could manage, "stop." They didn't hear me, apparently. "Hurts," I tried again. More massaging my calves, tearing at my flesh. The massaging moved upward. Knees. Lower thighs. Upper thighs. It just hurt before, but this was starting to feel violating. Starting to brush up to my butt and around to the inside of my upper thigh. "No," I tried to scream, but only a mumble emerged. I reached up with all my might to stop them, but my arm barely moved. But they did stop - to shush me and push my arm back down before resuming. I tried to crane my head to make them hear me. "Please, no." More shushing. "It's okay." My neck lost strength and my head fell back down. I quietly whimpered as they massaged my butt and inner thigh.

I passed out from the emotional exhaustion. I woke up in my room and dragged myself to a corner where no one could be behind me. I curled into the fetal position and let my head droop back and forth, sometimes hitting the wall. It wasn't forceful - I couldn't have managed force even if I wanted to.

I was already on a drug called Neurontin for my nerve pain. It dulled the pain, sure. It also dulled my mind, made me lethargic, slowed my metabolism, ballooned my weight, made speaking difficult (I couldn't word good), and wreaked havoc on my ability to form new memories. I was on 1500 mg three times a day when I entered the psych ward. Since it allegedly worked as a mood stabilizer (funny story, it totally doesn't based on all the best research), they increased that, first to 1800 then to 2000 for a total of 6000 mg/day. My pharmacologist would later call this borderline malpractice - it loses efficacy at such high doses and basically all you're doing is adding to side effects. Which may have been the purpose. It helped the Zyprexa with incapacitating me.

There was actually a plausibly legitimate reason for this. They needed to keep me from hurting myself while the Paxil left my system and I stabilized, and incapacitating me was a good way to do that. But it was miserable and it made me easy prey, as you saw.

I didn't really eat those first few days. I had to pick at it a little while they watched - had to be a good little psycho. But I didn't want to. I may have been too out of it for much of the pain to register anymore, but I still wanted nothing more than to die.

The 72 hours on my 5150 order expired and it was renewed with a 5250 order, a 2 week extension.

What finally drew me out of the room was the need for human contact, any human contact. I shambled out there, still weighed down by the Neurontin and Zyprexa (though building some tolerance at least), and I think talked to one of the nurses. It kind of went from there. The nurses were all very nice and respectful, even to a psychotic 18 year old, and I thank them for that.

Social contact got me in a different mode. It distracted me from my misery and made me forget I wanted to kill myself. But only while I was talking. Back in my room, in my thoughts, I still wanted to die. Still, I could be good and behave. It was the only way to get transferred to the normal ward, where they promised me better painkillers and a lidocaine IV.

So I behaved. And so I was rewarded a few days later. They took me out of lockdown and gave me a new, much nicer room in the nicer, bigger non-lockdown side of the ward. They also almost immediately gave me the IV anesthetic, as promised.

The people on the locked ward were all recluses in really bad places, so I didn't really interact with any of them. The unlocked ward had a crazy cast of characters. Old, young, middle-aged; mental illness, dysmorphia, addiction. Addiction was a pretty common thing for people to be there for. 

There was one girl there who still haunts me. She was so anorexic - like horrifying anorexic, Auschwitz-anorexic - she was in a wheelchair with a feeding tube up her nose. She was too weak to speak above a whisper. I'm not sure why, but seeing her like that really got to me. She made me feel sad, and not the kind of sad I was already feeling.

There was a lounge on the ward and access to movies. I distinctly remember watching True Romance with some roadie in there for rehab.

There were the silly arts and crafts activities. I got nothing out of them, naturally. No, less than nothing. They just gave me anxiety about how awful it would be if I drew/whatever anything and vicarious embarrassment when people would explain what they made.

At some point I think they might have told my parents I was bipolar. I don't really remember. They seemed to figure the Neurontin was plenty and there was no need to pursue other treatment. Just keep me off SSRIs, that's all.

I slowly picked back up to "normal" and even a little happy - other people's happiness, and their obvious hopes for me, was infectious.

After another 5250 and close to 3 weeks total involuntarily committed, I was released from the ward into my (IIRC) mother's custody. I did kind of miss it at first - there was no lidocaine IV at home.

Postscript: Being in the psych ward was one of the worst experiences of my life. It's also something I'm glad happened, considering the alternative is that I'd be fucking dead. People can be shitty, doctors can be dumb, others take advantage, but at least I'm still here.