Death Grip (36 page)

“It's not abnormal?”

“No—not at all, not if you're taken off benzos so quickly. I know exactly what you're going through. It's terrible; worse than anything. But it's not abnormal by any means.”

“So when … I mean, but when should I feel better? The doctors said it should only take a few weeks, but I'm sicker than before. I mean, Alison, I feel totally
crazy
.”

“It's early days for you yet, Matt. I hate to say it, but again, given your history and how quickly you came off, it could be a while. You're going to have to give yourself time—your best ally right now is going to be time.”

My gut drops another notch.

“A while?”

“There are no hard-and-fast numbers. Some say a range of six to eighteen months, but it's all totally individual. You could also reinstate and try to taper again more slowly, but I'm not sure you'd want to at this point. It sounds like you've worked pretty hard just to get off.…”

“I see. And will I feel better every day, or better all at once, or what will it look like?”

“Well…” Alison pauses. “From what I've seen, healing from benzo withdrawal is pretty erratic and individual. You might get a good few hours, or a good day of feeling totally normal—what's known as a ‘window.' But then the symptoms can come back stronger than ever, and you'll just have to hang on to how you felt during that window and know that another one will come again soon. They'll keep coming and keep getting longer and closer together until eventually you feel like yourself again.”

“I haven't had any of these windows…”

“I wouldn't worry about that yet, Matt. I really wouldn't. It might stay that way for weeks or even months, but I do promise you this: You're going to get better. You won't feel this fear for the rest of your life. No way: Don't let anyone tell you that. It's this strong now because you're in the first three months of benzodiazepine withdrawal. It is a real, physical and emotional syndrome from which you will heal—I promise. If you let time run its course, your body will find its way back to what I like to call ‘intrinsic health'—your inner sense of wellness and wholeness.”

“It will?”

“Yes. It will—you will. I've been exactly where you are today. I was there only four years ago actually, and now I'm almost totally better. You just have to hang on.…”

“My God … I …
Thank
you, Alison. That is the one thing that no one has told me yet: that I will have my life back again if I just hang on.”

I'm standing in my living room crying, trying not to let my snuffling carry across the line. Even spinning with dizziness and sheathed in muscular rigidity, even tormented by terror and insomnia, I feel relief for the first time in years.
Years.
I have my answer. The pills were and are causing this—it's exactly as I've suspected all along. Alison and I agree to meet at a coffee shop in a few days; I can hardly wait. And then it happens: That night I get a window, a temporary reprieve. I'm out on the living room floor at 2:00
A.M.
doing bottle exercises when the movie
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
comes on Comedy Central. Because it's so late, the film is uncensored and I soon find myself wheeze-chuckling, then wheeze-laughing, then outright belly-laughing at the ribald jokes. I have not been able to properly laugh in months, but something about the movie and the bottle unfreezes my rigid belly, and it no longer feels like my diaphragm has been dipped in concrete and rammed up my throat. There has been an electrical current coursing along my spine—a friend, passing her hand over my belly the next year, will sense it without any prodding from me—and that, too, recedes into the background. I can breathe freely, easily. I can laugh. The room takes on its normal contours; the walls lean back and resume an upright stance. The reading lamp in the corner no longer looks like an exploding sun. Even the Chinook winds have calmed, and the cold air outside the picture window is clear and still. A crescent moon arcs through the sky, dipping west over the First Flatiron.

After
South Park
ends I fall asleep on the couch. I wake up back in hell, but it scarcely matters because I've seen the other side. Soon windows come every day between 11:00
A.M.
and 1:00
P.M.
, and I start “slobbing”—laughing plus sobbing—with relief when they arrive. One comes at a bank ATM on Canyon Boulevard downtown; I deposit a check and stand there slobbing onto the keypad before I realize other people might see me.

A few days later, I have a med check-in with Dr. Porridge, my second since Hopkins. I drag myself to his office, this cursed and familiar place. I do not want to see him again—I'm not really sure what I'm doing here, other than I must rely on him to prescribe nortriptyline. I sit in the lobby, chewing on a sesame bagel. Ever since Hopkins I've had a bothersome lump in my throat on which food seems to stick, creating scary sensations of choking. A doctor there told me it was psychosomatic, a
globus hystericus
, the throat walls swelling due to overbreathing. But even knowing this isn't enough, and as I take small bites of bagel I feel the lump grow, and start to obsess over it. My mouth is dry, and the bagel has only butter for lubrication. It's clumping up like bread crumbs. I need some water.

Just then the doctor comes to fetch me. I follow him to his office, casting about for a drinking fountain in the hall but not seeing one.

I sit down in a big chair, and before we start I ask Dr. Porridge for a drink. I'm freaking out without something to wash this bagel down.

“I'm, like, choking or having a panic attack!” I squeak. My heart slams unchecked and wild; my throat feels like it's closing up. This is the first time I've panicked in this man's office, ever. Dr. Porridge leaves the room, fetches a cup of water, and returns. I drink, and feeling the water go unobstructed down my throat calms me enough to tough out the remainder of the appointment. I just need him to sign off on prescribing more antidepressants and I can get the hell out of there.

“Sorry, Dr. Porridge. I … I just had a panic attack.”

“Well, Matt,” Dr. Porridge jokes, “I'd like to think I don't have that effect on people!”

“Oh, no, I—It's not you, Dr. Porridge. I just felt like I was choking and started freaking out a little,” I stammer. “I've been on edge … as you know … ever since I came back from Baltimore, and any little thing sets me off. I … I just have no buffer.”

“Well, that's not good, Matt.”

“No, I suppose it isn't. But I … I know we've talked about this, but I'm really starting to be certain that this is all benzo withdrawal. I talked to a woman a few days ago who's been through this, and she said it can take months, not just weeks, to feel better.”

Dr. Porridge pauses, writes something on his pad.

“Now, Matt, you know that's not possible. I've told you and the doctors at Hopkins have told you that it should only be two to four weeks. Well, it's been a month now and you certainly don't seem to be feeling any better. In fact, you seem much worse, which is very alarming to me! I'd like you to stop obsessing over this benzo-thing and instead focus on your treatment. We need to move you past this anxiety.”

“And how would we do that?” I ask. “I'm tired of taking pills.”

“Well, Matt, are you taking
any
of your medicines, the ones they prescribed at Johns Hopkins?”

“Yes and no. Like I told you last time, I've stopped two of them. I'm not taking Neurontin anymore, Dr. Porridge, and that's pretty much that. I'm not going to start again—it's expensive and I don't have the money. And I didn't like lithium either. It made me feel terrible. Dizzy and terrible. So I stopped.”

“Now, Matt, Neurontin is a perfectly safe anxiety drug. And I think we were seeing some good mood stability with the lithium. It's a good first-line treatment for the sort of emotional lability we've been seeing with you. I'm still not sure why you would want to give up your treatment now, of all times.”

Emotional lability: I'm labile only because of the benzo rollercoaster, because of all the other crazy pills.

“It doesn't matter, Dr. Porridge. I didn't like taking them. And … and I'm starting to feel the same way about this antidepressant, nortriptyline.”

“Which is quite a good one, Matt. The doctors back East were right to put you on it. It's an old antidepressant and has been very well studied.”

“Well, I'm not sure I like it either,” I say. “It dries my mouth out and makes me superdizzy when I stand up. And I think it's giving me heart palpitations.”

“I see.” He jots more notes. Then: “You know, now's absolutely not the time to stop, and again I'm dismayed, to be honest, that you've taken yourself off the Neurontin. We need to treat your anxiety, Matt.”

“It's seizure medicine. I don't have seizures.”

“But it was helping your anxiety.”

“Was it? I'm not so sure of that anymore either, Dr. Porridge. I think it was mainly helping me with the symptoms of benzo withdrawal.”

“Um-hmm. Matt, I'm just going to say it again: There is no ‘benzo withdrawal' going on here. What you're experiencing right now is a flare-up of your original panic disorder, and it's very dangerous for it not to be medicated. I'm worried, Matt. Frankly I'm very worried for you.”

“I see, Dr. Porridge,” I say. “So am I.”

Because this is only a fifteen-minute check-up, our time has ended. I say good-bye to Dr. Porridge, the last time I will see him professionally. I go to the bathroom, splash water over my face, and look at myself in the mirror. A fierceness burns in my eyes, some flicker of the old me. The way the doctor phrased a few things has triggered a connection in my mind: “
your
medicines,” “
your
anxiety,” “
your
panic disorder,” as if they were a part of me, as if they were appendages or facial features. As if no matter how fast I run, they will always keep pace, nipping at my heels. I never really picked up on that before, on the intonation and its connotations. Because they're not really
my
medicines nor
my
anxiety nor
my
panic disorder anymore, are they? The wrong living—the starvation, the drugging, the addictive, obsessive tendencies, the pillhead mindset—that fueled the fire have ended, so why is it still
my
panic disorder? Why do I still need
my
medicines? I don't. I absolutely do not. It might be panic attacks that I'm experiencing now, but they don't belong to anybody in particular, especially not to me. They arise from an ocean of disembodied chemical terror, as ephemeral as sea spouts that twist above the waves only to vanish. As I've always sensed with anxiety, what I'm feeling comes from with
out
myself—that external, spectral presence—and my chat with Alison Kellagher has finally proven correct the notion that benzos are the root cause. The fear needn't
belong
to me now or ever again. There is a wonderful essay online called “Decolonizing Our Minds, Freeing Our Spirits,” by the survivor of psychiatry Leah Harris, that warns against letting psychiatric lexicon consign you to a life sentence as a patient. Harris speaks to the power of thought and language to determine “the course of our individual and collective existence,” then points out how dangerous it is to let psychiatric labels like “sick,” “disordered,” and “mental patient” alter that course. “These labels shut down understanding,” she writes. “They reduce the mystery and complexity of our experiences into a diagnostic category that impedes healing. These terms colonize us, and foster dependency on a system to ‘fix' us.”

Indeed: “my” panic disorder. I have let them colonize my mind. I have let them call me “depressed” and “bipolar” and “anxious” and “cyclothymic” and “drug addicted” and “panic disordered,” but I have never requested that they simply call me “Matt.” My birth name: Matthew Samet. That's who I am: Matthew Samet, a climber, a writer, a son, a guardian to my dog, a friend, an intact human being. Not patient number “0-394-27-11” as my Johns Hopkins Hospital ID card identified me. Not a “troubled young man with a history of anxiety, substance abuse, mood-cycling tendencies, and a chronic panic disorder.”

As they say in the mafia movies, “Fuggedaboutit.”

Something in me releases, and a decision has been made: I am done with psychiatry, forever. I will not continue down this dead-end road another second, spiraling down into ever more serious diagnoses, serial hospitalizations, med roulette, and polydrug cocktails. I'll stay on this antidepressant until I feel strong enough to taper, but then I will find a general practitioner, outside the system, to help because
I am done with psychiatry forever.
I need to find the real me again—the one without chemicals—no matter what may come. I will not set foot in Dr. Porridge's office again. I will not take his free samples. I will not share with him the details of my life.

I've bumped into Dr. Porridge in town a few times since, but it's easiest, I've learned, if we pretend not to know each other—merely seeing his face uncorks a host of bad emotions. And besides, what really is left to say? I'm not going to change
his
mind about anything. I last saw him three years ago at the mall as I was leaving a massage appointment. I came out to the parking lot and hopped on my motor scooter, parked up on a sidewalk island. I keyed the ignition, revved the engine, and got ready to bounce down into the lot when, lo and behold, who should be walking toward me, latte in hand? I had my helmet on, Darth Vader black to match the scooter, eyes obscured behind wraparound sunglasses. Dr. Porridge didn't appear to recognize me, but I certainly knew who
he
was. I had him in my sights, there on the sidewalk, ambling along. I revved the engine, thought about it, looked past my front tire at him, revved the engine again, thought about it some more, then with the briefest pang of regret cranked the wheel hard left and bounced over the curb just as he scattered to the other side, nearly spilling his latte.