Free Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland Page B

belief, afraid I'd swallow my tongue and asphyxiate. The episode stopped as suddenly as it had come on, and I'd passed out.
    He'd called Dr. Padgett's emergency number immediately, and the doctor said it sounded like a grand mal seizure and told Tim to take me to the emergency room right away. When Tim mentioned the late hour and the fact that Jeffrey and Melissa were soundly sleeping, Dr. Padgett instructed him to wake me up, get me to count, keep me awake, call him back, and go the hospital the absolute first thing in the morning.
    The next morning I sat in the hospital while someone pasted electrodes to my scalp for an EEG. A few days later I was injected with a dye and had a CT scan. A neurologist put me on Tegretol, an antiseizure and antidepression medication. Because Tegretol is known, in some cases, to reduce the white platelet count in the bloodstream and inhibit the body's natural immune system, I had to go to the hospital outpatient center twice a week to monitor my white cell levels.
    I was probed, pricked, zapped, injected, placed in strange claustrophobic devices, referred to a number of physicians, and had various test procedures in Dr. Padgett's thorough quest to make sure that I had no underlying physiological illness or condition that had prompted the seizure. Overkill, I had thought at the time. But his concern for me was obvious—at least some consolation for my newfound status as a human guinea pig.
    There were a wide number of possibilities, the most likely being an adverse reaction to Mellaril. But I was still tested to exclude every other potential problem.
    After a month on Tegretol, my white platelet count was steadily plummeting and approaching the danger zone. In the meantime, I was losing control of my emotions and was out of touch with reality. I exploded into hysterical tirades with increasing frequency at home and in sessions. Finally, in late August, Dr. Padgett and I agreed that I needed to be hospitalized again. This time I would start in the intensive care unit—lockup. Ostensibly the placement was because the facility was better equipped to monitor physical conditions. I wondered, however, if I wasn't being sent there because I'd simply spun so far out of control that I was crazy to the point of no return.

    If the first hospitalization could be summarized as a three-week frat party, the second was like a three-week stint as a laboratory test animal.
    My blood was taken twice daily. I had an EEG. I had an MRI, gaining the distinction of being the first adult in the lab's history to somehow wiggle my way back out of the claustrophobic tunnel after the test had begun. Now I was pricked and probed, injected, and scanned on a daily basis. After a week in intensive care, Dr. Padgett gave up on the Tegretol, switched my antidepressant, and transferred me to the stress unit.
    It was a series of human experiments, described in dressed-up clinical terms as “medication adjustments.” I adjusted to the new antidepressant and different anti-anxiety pills by throwing up, passing out, shaking uncontrollably, and hallucinating my way through a host of medications to find the right combination. It reached the point where I manifested nearly every possible side effect of every medication I tried.
    Finally I demanded to be taken off all of them. Dr. Padgett wasn't sure if I was really physiologically averse to the drugs or if some of the reactions were a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was growing impatient with both him and his infuriatingly calm insistence that this was the trial-and-error nature of determining the correct psychiatric pharmaceuticals for an individual's chemistry. Easy enough for him to say, I thought.
    The demographics of the general psych ward patients this time were considerably older and disproportionately female in comparison to my first stay. Most were veterans of previous stays, as well as psychiatric drug “adjustment” scenarios.
    Because I had gained little benefit from