Timmy had decided he wanted to feel again.
Feel anything.
The last two years of his life had been an amorphous glob of memories, strung together by a haunting routine of one to wake up, one to fall asleep. He has been taking medication to stop the crimson rage from bursting out when he feels the gates beginning to open. His blood would boil and something else takes over his body. His eyes become hollow wells, endlessly deep and black.
When it happens, Timmy isn’t there. He’s somewhere else, in another dimension that’s black in every direction and yet he floats, still… silent…… timeless……… until he wakes. He has no memory, and is exhausted like after a marathon, and often collapsed. He cries for hours in his room with guilt, only knowing details that others pass along.
His hand is broken, again… and he’s suspended from school… again. He lies in his room in agony while his mom argues with school officials on the phone. The district says this is the last straw; they’ve had it, he’s a liability. Timmy’s parents don’t know what they did wrong. Sometimes his mom thinks that it’s because he wasn’t baptized.
The school says he needs to be medicated and seeing a psychiatrist if he ever wants to see their classrooms again. His parents sign an IEP contract with the district and he’s put in special ed., but it gives him another chance at the school.
A long time ago, the psychiatrist promised Timmy’s parents that he’d show signs of improvement within weeks. But for Timmy, those next three weeks were the worst of his life. And after more than a month of throwing up, migraines, and floor melting dizziness, Timmy slid into the routine of one to wake, one to sleep, no memory, no emotion flat-line of the last two years.
The meds are supposed to calm… quell and subdue; which they did well at first. A cocktail of more than a half a dozen, each with a specific purpose. But with time, and the upping of the dosages as per Dr Weitzman, most of them weren’t helping at all. Between insomnia, panic attacks, nerve shocks and muscle tremors, Timmy felt like they might be doing more harm than good. He noticed that the stronger ones that kicked in quick only made it all worse, more quickly afterwards.
Dr. Weitzman says even the thought of stopping is proof enough that it’s not yet time. But there was no right time for Dr. Weitzman. He promised the Wyerk rep thirty prescriptions this year over a fine bottle of Sangiovese and Dominican cigars.
It had been a year since Timmy’s last experience in his dark other plane, and while he hadn’t hit anybody recently, his memory of the last eighteen months was virtually nonexistent. Everyone told him the medication must be working and to stick with it, but they weren’t the ones living like zombies.
The IEP was up, and for renewal, Timmy had to do a summer school semester in a city fifty miles away ‘to be evaluated’ by district specialists. Of the thirty attending, Timmy was one of only two not severely mentally impaired. One of the short yellow school busses filled half with wheel-chair securing devices picked Timmy up at 6 a.m. and drove him and one other boy, who was Down syndrome, all the way to school.
He spent his days sitting in different offices, being asked by strangers with nametags how different pictures of shapes made him feel. He told them he felt nothing…just emptiness, and not because of the pictures, but because of where he was and what he was doing.
They persisted about his dreams but he explained again and again that the drugs don’t let him dream.
He told them he feels foggy and disoriented for most of the day; that he’s unable to focus and struggles to stay awake.
They called Dr. Weitzman to suggest an upper to counter the grogginess.
He concurred.
After two weeks, he could no longer escape the humiliation… He couldn’t explain to his friends the bus in the morning… His growing regiment of medication… Why he had to do it, and why they didn’t…
Or the doctors who think that this feels better … and his parents’ approval of it all… But mostly, that none of them took him seriously. Even the people they paid to listen didn’t do so very well; they were always so busy cross-referencing contraindication charts.
They scribbled arbitrary notes on their legal pads like ‘severe depression’ and offered Timmy scraps of consolation without any solution; and on the Monday of the third week Timmy was so tired of a sedated existence that he stopped taking all of his medications.
Within six hours, Timmy’s brain was a jumble of electric shocks, each one violently jolting his muscles.
His eyes twitched and blurred, flashes of light darting across his vision.
His head felt like it was imploding from the pressure, so much so that he lies tucked in the fetal position on the floor clenching the back of his head with both hands.
He cried for hours, uncontrollably, at nothing at all.
He shivered awake for days with the lights off, locked in his room.
It lasted five weeks.
The brain shocks, six…
But that fifth week Timmy laughed for the first time in years.
