I'm working on the next blog post in the more science bases series that I started but in the meantime I'd like to start a series of stories about people I met while staying on psychiatric wards. Part of the purpose of this blog is to educate others about the world of mental illness and this is part of that education.
Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine
- Jim Morrison, 1970
"Z”
Z
was about twenty-one or twenty-two years of age in March of 2011. She had
the beautiful high, hooked nose that many people of her native
Afghanistan have, along with high cheekbones and eyes of a pretty hue
of brown that were so deep you swear you could swim in them. She was
small and frail. If her five foot frame weighed ninety pounds I'd be
surprised. If I'm not mistaken, she was the youngest or one of the
youngest in her family. She may have had a younger brother, I can't
remember now. She did have, I know from her family's visits and
through Z's stories, lots of older siblings, about evenly divided
between brothers and sisters.
Z
and her family were from one of the more southern areas of
Afghanistan. I can't recall the name of the area. I think, though,
that it was a suburb of Kabul. Nor can I recall Z's family's exact
religious affiliation. I didn't get the impression that it was
important to her. It didn't seem to be to any of her siblings when
they came to visit either. Z and all of her family dressed and acted
very progressively and with modern sophistication and style. Her
father had been a gold merchant (not bulk gold but of the jewelry variety, something very important in Afghani culture). Her family was not rich but of upper middle class
well off means. Z and her family lived well. Their family was well
known and respected in their neighbourhood. Z told of her father
being a generous man, one who didn't mind rubbing shoulders and
sharing tea with anyone. The life of Z's family was good. They had
everything they needed and were all ambitious as far as education
goes, they were expected to gain a higher education and become
doctors or other such gentrified positions.
Then
one day the Taliban came.
One
day Z's family was “in”, the next day it was “out”. The
Taliban, as Z told it, had targeted her kind of family as “out”.
I don't know what your knowledge of the Taliban is but at that period
in Afghanistan's history, you did not want to be “out” with the
Taliban. So, as with tens of thousands of other similar people at
that time, they were left with little choice but to flee. Z would
have been about eight at this time. Her life went from one of
sheltered upper middle class with everything she and her family
needed to one on the road with whatever possessions they could carry.
For
weeks they traveled over dirty and barren roads through scorching hot
valleys and harrowing mountain passes. All this while her family and
those that they were traveling with had to keep an eye out for the
Taliban and their sympathizers and to look out for bands of thieves.
Much of the gold they'd brought along had to be bartered away for
their safe passage. Several months later, they had crossed the
Pakistan border and had found a refugee camp. As refugee camps go, it
was no different than any such camp around the world. Relief
organizations had done their best to erect tent cities and provide as
much as they could. It was dirty, water was rare and precious, there
was little food and there wasn't a speck of shade outside of the
tents to give any relief to the daily 40C temperatures that seared
down on them in summer. Nor was there much protection from the harsh
mountain winds that sent temperatures plunging in winter. From
playing with beautiful dolls in air-conditioned rooms, Z went to
playing with sticks and rocks and balls of rags in ad-hoc games
played with other children in small, barren, stone strewn patches of
hard, sun baked soil. From being taken care of by a nanny, she went
to having daily chores of scrounging for food and water. She went
from having the finest clothes to wearing nothing more than whatever
rags were left from what they could bring and what they could now
find. Everywhere you looked, there were tents and other large
families like hers. No one had much of anything.
This
was to be Z's home for the next eleven years.
Z's
family were cut from sturdy cloth, however. Somehow through all of
this, they not only survived, but somehow managed to relatively
thrive. And through relatives who'd long ago emigrated to other
countries, connections were made, money saved, refugee relief
procedures navigated. And Z, her mother and father, and most of her
siblings found themselves in Vancouver, BC. Z didn't really know how
all of this happened. She was young and unconcerned with such things.
She just knew her father, mother and family had made it happen. As
she was expected to, Z was entered immediately in school, in a school
in an strange English speaking world where she barely knew a single
word of English.
But,
as immigrants have done for centuries in sink or swim situations in
new lands, in new cultures and among strange people and a new
language, she learned and she learned fast. Within a year she had a
part time job at McDonald's. Within six months, she had mastered
everything there was to know about working in that McDonald's and all
of the English needed to boot. She was promoted to an assistant
manager position. At the same time, she'd graduated high school and
had been enrolled in college.
Throughout
those eleven years in the refugee camp and the ensuing several years
adjusting to Canada, Z's family's expectations for their children had
never faltered. They were still expected to get the highest education
possible and the best careers possible. Not jobs, but careers. Z's
expectations were no different.
All
of her siblings had done well and Z loved and admired them all but
she had special love and admiration for an older sister, “M”. M
had not, for reasons I can't recall, fled with the rest of the family
when the Taliban arrived. I believe she may had already left for
university and been well into her education and that that part of
Afghanistan perhaps had remained in more liberal hands. At any rate,
she stayed there, had become a doctor and in the now more liberated
post-Taliban Afghanistan was practicing medicine specializing in
women's needs (which was in very, very sore need among Afghanistan
women). M was Z's hero and when Z spoke of M, her voice and beautiful
deep brown eyes made this abundantly clear. Z said that they spoke
often on the phone or through Skype. Z wanted very much to be like M.
She
therefore put on herself, aside from the pressure her family put on
her, a enormous amount of pressure to live up to the standard set by
M. But she struggled with school. College was not like the simple
courses of high school. The vocabulary and demands were much higher.
In college she wasn't sheltered in an ESL program like she had been in
high school. The stakes were higher. The workload to keep up with
normal homework and to continue learning English at ever
higher levels and to hold down her part time job at McDonald's
was knee buckling. Delicate and frail Z was having a very hard time
keeping up with it all. She began to suffer anxiety and couldn't
sleep. She saw a doctor and was put on medications to ease her
anxiety and help her sleep.
Then
one day, while suffering from exhaustion, Z had failed a critical
test at college. Utterly distraught and humiliated, she returned home
and wept in despair. And then, and she couldn't clearly remember why
or explain it at all, she took her freshly renewed prescription
bottles and downed their entire contents, about a hundred pills in
all. It was not long before she collapsed. One hundred pills in a
body as slight and tiny as Z's will go to work fast and when her
mother and sister found her, the toxins were already well within her
system and were shutting organs down. She was already incoherent and
lapsing into a coma. Her right hand had already frozen into a death
grip around the bottle of pills she'd emptied. 911 was called, she
was rushed to hospital and put on life support. Through some sort of
miracle she survived. She spent several weeks in ICU.
And
this is what brought Z to the chair next to mine to where our very
disparate paths met in the TV room of the psyche ward of Royal
Columbian Hospital where she had been telling me all of this in
snatches of time in the long, boring, pointless days that we had to
pass. She told her story with such humility, with such lack of
self-pity and with such utter charm and humour, that at times my eyes
stung with tears. The only times her voice showed much emotion was
when she told of how fast she'd risen in McDonald's and had learned
English. She was very proud of that and rightfully so. I've taught
English to many, many people in the last twenty years and the level
of English with which she was speaking to me was astonishing for the
short amount of time that she'd been using it. She scarcely even
betrayed a trace of an accent. For all I knew, she'd grown up here.
The other time was when she spoke of M. It's not that her voice was
flat otherwise, it wasn't, it was very animated (and of course it
would be ... she comes from country with a thousands of years old
tradition of oral story telling). It's just that there were those
times that her voice told of a special emotion.
It
was in the TV room that we'd met and we had become bosom buddies over
the Vancouver Canucks of whom she was an avid and passionate fan (the Canucks are Vancouver's professional hockey team). The
Canucks were on what would be a special run that season and the city
was really fired up and the psyche ward of RCH was no different. Z
and several of us gathered each night of a Canucks broadcast in the TV room and
raucously cheered on our boys.
Z
was therefore in the psychiatric wing of Royal Columbian Hospital
because of a suicide attempt. She hadn't been depressed. There wasn't
a trace of depression or of feeling sorry for herself when I talked
with her. She had told me a lot of detail of what had been a very
difficult life and had never shown a speck of sorrow or of self-pity.
Talking to her, she was as vibrant, humorous and joyful a human being
as you could want to meet. Positive life force verily radiated from her. She
had been under a lot of recent pressure and stress however. I have no
idea what her “diagnosis” might have been. She had been, however, obviously under a great deal of stress.
The story of Z is one of several I'd like to tell of people I met "on the inside". I'd like to tell these stories for a number of reasons but chiefly to give an idea of the kind of people one will find on a typical psychiatric ward. I met dozens of people in my four stays in psychiatric wards no two of them alike. Readers of this blog also will know that I have a particular interest in suicide and the reasons behind it so I also think of Z as an interesting case study. We'll come back to this story, and others, later.
