Second Sight (11 page)

During this period, I was afraid that a part of me was dying. The more I struggled to hold on to my once crystal-clear psychic images, the farther away they seemed to be. At the lab, I had fought hard to reclaim them; they had become a lifeline. But the rigid discipline of medical school seemed to be undoing the progress I'd made. I was caught in a bind, so conflicted that the countless facts I needed to memorize for class wouldn't stick in my mind. The more anxious I became, the tighter I clamped down. Then I failed my first biochemistry test. I was floundering and needed some help.

Angels come in the most unlikely packages. Daniel was an Orson Welles look-alike with a laugh that shook his entire body. The lab assistant in my anatomy class, Daniel supervised the dissection of our cadavers. Soon after we met, we started dating. Once again, a strong man had shown up to be the bridge from one phase of my life into another. Daniel had a wild sense of humor, and I trusted him far more than the medical school philosophy in which we were both immersed.

From the start, I despised anatomy. I was furious that the school hadn't better prepared us to cut open a human body. We were simply handed a scalpel and instructed to slice. There was no mention made of the inherent sacredness of this act or of the emotions we might be having. It wasn't that Daniel didn't sympathize with my dilemma, he just wouldn't coddle me or allow me to wallow in despair. One night he locked us both in the anatomy lab and refused to let me leave until I allowed him to teach me the basics of this class. I railed and complained but when I saw it would do no good, I gave in. With a Bruce Springsteen tape blasting in the background, I learned the technique of dissection. By the time Daniel unlocked the door, it was midnight and an enormous obstacle had been removed from my path.

It was Daniel's energy and unshakable belief in me that got me through my first year of medical school. Every night we would review the class notes together Then he would test me. If I made excuses why I couldn't do it, he shot them down. When I felt I was losing myself, he gave me books to read that kept my inner life alive. Daniel introduced me to the lush intricacies of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
by Gabriel García Marquez, and the irreverent humor of Tom Robbins's
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
works of fiction that fueled my own imagery and dreams. Reading became my touchstone to the psychic, a well I could dip into to fill myself before I went to sleep each night.

Daniel wasn't worried that I would lose my gift. He was more certain than I that it was strong enough to outlast four years of medical school and another four years of psychiatric residency. He believed that my abilities had an inherent integrity. In the long run, it wouldn't matter if I placed them on hold. When the time was right, Daniel was convinced, they would return. How he came to this view, I did not know. But because of my profound respect for his opinions, I chose to believe him.

When, after two years in Philadelphia, I transferred back to USC to complete medical school, I struggled to hold on to Daniel's words, but it became more and more difficult. I threw myself into my studies, living and breathing the rational, the linear, the provable. There was no room for anything else.

I remember dragging myself home late one night after a grueling day of classes. Eager for some fresh air, I took my dog for a walk to a grassy park right by Santa Monica beach. There before me in the parking lot a string of billowing circus tents had popped up overnight. I'd stepped into an enchanted land. In the pale moonlight, a tall man dressed in blue sequined tights suddenly appeared, leading four elephants down to the water's edge. Then, after a wave of his hands, one by one they started to run across the sand, making wild trumpeting cries that sounded like pure bliss to me. I was breathless; I envied these gorgeous creatures. A surge of sadness rushed through me. I realized that my intuitive voice was fading; the sweet freedom I'd tasted while finding it was slipping away.

As a third- and fourth-year medical student, I was on call every third night at L.A. County USC Medical Center, a massive thirteen-story beige monolith hovering over the slums of East L.A. I slept there on a bunk bed in a room I shared with at least four other doctors. Our beepers were constantly going off; I would consider myself lucky if I got one or two hours of uninterrupted sleep. When I did sleep, it was leaden.

One night, at the peak of this sustained exhaustion, I was invited to a Rod Stewart concert at the Forum in Inglewood. I had been on call the previous night, but the tickets had been so hard to get I didn't want to cancel. Surrounded by 40,000 screaming people thunderously clapping in rhythm to a blaring set of rock and roll songs, I placed my head on my date's shoulder for a moment. And fell sound asleep.

As a senior medical student, I did my first psychiatric rotation on Ward 4A, the locked unit that housed the most severely mentally disturbed. We got the patients who had either tried to kill themselves or hurt somebody else. They were usually psychotic and couldn't function. Late one evening, when I was standing in the hallway across from the day room where the patients watched TV and smoked, I heard a woman cry out. It was a piercing scream; it went right up my spine and through my nervous system. Four orderlies dressed in white coats and a cop with a billy club and gun were wheeling a patient on a gurney toward our ward. As she came closer, I could see that she was a beautiful girl, quite thin, about twenty years old, fighting for her life.

The front door to 4A slammed open. She let out a howl. Although her arms and legs were strapped with hard leather restraints that were buckled and locked, she was still writhing violently, her back arched like a wildcat's. With all their combined strength, five muscular men could barely contain her. I had seen other patients on the unit who had been restrained, but I could hardly watch the tortured expression on this girl's face.

Suddenly, the gurney crashed against the wall, all four orderlies momentarily off balance, in danger of losing their grip on the metallic sidebars, and I was afraid that the whole thing was going to tip over. The patients in the day room were wide-eyed. Nobody uttered a word. I stepped away, back up against a corner wall. I didn't offer to help: The situation looked too dangerous.

Then one of the psychiatric residents, who couldn't have been more than twenty-three, came running down the hall, yelling, “Bring me five milligrams of Haldol stat!” Janet, the head nurse, quickly filled a syringe with brightly colored pink liquid and flicked it with her index finger to get rid of any air bubbles. Utterly cool and collected, she handed the syringe to the flustered resident. Janet had been working on 4A for over twenty years, and it seemed that emergencies like this no longer fazed her. I carefully moved closer.

“What in the world is going on with this patient?” I asked Janer.

“She's psychotic. She thinks she can predict the future.”

I swallowed hard.

“Her name is Rae,” Janet continued. “She's schizophrenic. She's a frequent visitor here. We all know her.”

My thoughts exploded. Psychotic? Predict the future? Why was Janet connecting one to the other? The resident plunged the pink liquid into Rae's left buttock, and Rae quietly moaned. A few minutes later, she lay limp on the gurney, which had now been moved into the isolation room. Her struggling had ceased as the Haldol, a strong antipsychotic medication, took effect. The orderlies then transferred her from the metal gurney onto a small, single bed and strapped her down in the same leather restraints, hooked securely to all four corners of the frame. She was lying on her back, her arms and legs spread open as wide as they could reach.

As things returned to “normal,” I took a look at Rae through the isolation room's tiny rectangular window. Now completely knocked out by the Haldol, she was snoring under the blankets. The darkened cubicle reminded me of a prison cell. Since bright colors or lights would overstimulate a person in her condition, all four walls were painted the same dingy shade of green as you might find in the bathroom of a run-down gas station. The intention was to create a calming effect.

The young resident who had administered the shot looked exhausted. He walked over to me. “Rae is your patient,” he announced. “I want you to follow her.”

I reluctantly agreed. I had no choice: Each medical student on the ward was allotted a certain number of patients and it was my turn to pick one up.

It had been my choice to work on 4A, the toughest psychiatric unit in the county hospital. Determined to become a psychiatrist, I was sure I could handle it. But Rae's case horrified me. I strongly identified with her. Rae claimed to be psychic and had ended up in a straitjacket. I recalled the old adage, There but for the grace of God go I. Why wasn't I the one strapped down in the isolation room? Rae was young, pretty, had her whole life in front of her. What made me different from her? I understood that she was schizophrenic. But what else was different? I needed to find out.

The next morning I visited Rae. The nurses reported that during the night she'd been given two more Haldol injections. Trying to pretend I knew what I was doing, I walked in wearing my white coat, her chart securely under my arm. “I'm Dr. Orloff, a medical student here. I'll be coming to talk to you.”

Rae grinned, and didn't seem to mind. She was cooperative, even pleasant. Nonetheless, during the interview I stayed a few inches away from the doorway. I didn't want to risk getting too close to her in case she lashed out: A crazed lunge, even of a patient bound ankle and foot with cloth restraints, could be terrifying.

Over the next few weeks, I got to know Rae well, but she talked about her premonitions with such ferocious intensity it scared me. She clung to them with the resolve of a wild-eyed prophet speaking the word of God. Rae heard voices. They gave her messages. She listened to them. Her voices were mostly wrong, but not always. Her mother, a reliable source, volunteered that Rae's predictions sometimes came true. Rae had recently predicted the death of the family dog, but no one had listened. The next day, in a freak accident, he was run over by a car. But such valid predictions were lost in the endless flow of Rae's psychotic verbal ramblings.

In medical school, my training focused on the biological aspects of psychiatry. This meant that many disorders—schizophrenia, anxiety, mania, and severe depression—were considered biochemical imbalances, treatable with medications (Haldol, Valium, lithium, or antidepressants). Every morning on Ward 4A, I attended an hour-long psychopathology lecture intended to teach medical students how to diagnose and treat psychiatric patients. During these lectures, I was bombarded by a belief system that associated clairvoyance with psychosis. I learned, for instance, that Rae's insistence on being psychic was a “symptom of schizophrenia,” a serious mental “disease.” If Rae stayed on the Haldol, our teachers said, her predictions would go away. And that was the goal. I was floored!

The ward chief on our unit was a soft-spoken man in his early sixties who had been a psychiatrist at the county hospital his entire professional career. Over the years, he had seen every kind of patient, and I trusted his expertise. One morning, I asked him if he thought Rae was psychic. No, he responded, that was inconceivable to him. Along with most other physicians, he simply didn't believe in the existence of psychic abilities. My concern struck him as odd, but understanding that this was my first psychiatry rotation, he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He assured me that Rae's accurate prediction of her dog's death was merely coincidence.

I didn't tell Rae that I was a psychic or share with her my experiences in Thelma's lab. Instead I withdrew, became increasingly detached, and started to question myself. I figured I wouldn't be much help if I fed into her delusions. I would just make things worse, so I kept quiet. I felt conflicted, confused. I couldn't decide if a vital part of her was being crushed or if she was the victim of a terrible illness. What swayed me, finally, was seeing Rae's dramatic transformation on the Haldol. Rational and calm, she was no longer preoccupied with her predictions, nor did she miss them. I was reminded of how relieved I was as a teenager when I used drugs to squelch my psychic abilities. I was so disturbed by them I was glad they were gone. Although Rae didn't articulate it, maybe on some level she felt the same way. She certainly looked better following treatment. Two weeks after she was admitted, Rae was ready to go home.

Through my work in the lab, I had come to terms with the fact that psychic abilities were real. But suddenly new questions had arisen. Were they dangerous to develop? What were the risks? The lab had been an isolated little bubble. In Barry's group, we treated our psychic abilities nonchalantly, almost as if they were a game. Now, as a medical student, I was skeptical about the practical applications of such research. It was true that I had met a handful of well-adjusted psychics in Thelma's lab. But maybe they were the exception. Now I was in the real world. During my medical training, I was to see far more examples of the unbalanced type.

Look at what happened to Rae. She might very well have been a gifted psychic, but so what? She was psychotic. The price Rae paid for her prescience was much too high. I was beginning to feel that it was neither safe nor appropriate to encourage people in this pursuit. Even if they were mentally sound, could exploring this part of themselves destabilize them? The cost suddenly seemed monumental. What I had previously considered so precious was now tainted by the horror of the reality I witnessed each day.

Later, as an intern and psychiatric resident at UCLA, I worked in the emergency room every third night for two years. Such a regimen didn't leave much time to philosophize. The few days when I wasn't on duty at the hospital, I was at home asleep. I was basically running on adrenaline. During my nights on call, I watched many psychotics like Rae pass through UCLA: The locked inpatient psychiatric wards were packed with them. And always the drill was the same. The police delivered them in restraints. Then I had the nurses shoot them up with Haldol, and their psychic claims would gradually disappear. I soon lost sight of the implications of what I was doing. It became a matter of economy. Seduced by the rationality of conventional medicine, and scared by the horrors I'd observed, I was adopting an attitude that deemed psychic abilities a sign of psychological dysfunction.