Levadopa
Firstly, I apologise for my lack of recent writings. Things have been tumultuous as of late.
This will be a story about someone who was, I call, my first patient. This is despite the technical fact that she was not my patient and that I at the time was not qualified to help her.
We’ll call her L, after Levodopa.
L blew up her life when she was 40. At first it seemed like a very serious midlife crisis; massive spending, affairs, and a complete inability to manage impulses. She was soon diagnosed with Parkinsons, and a few years later scheduled to have a DBS (deep brain stimulation) device installed in her brain. If you don’t know what that is, it is effectively a crude imitation of a pacemaker for the brain, except brains are far more complex than hearts. It involves the installation of a device with a series of electrodes that sends electrical impulses to areas of the brain affected by Parkinsons in an attempt to cancel out tremors and other incorrect signals caused by the disease.
This might have helped her if it was her only problem. As far as I can tell, around this time she also developed late-onset schizophrenia.
L was extremely unstable, and it was at this point that I began taking care of her. She was around the same age as my mother, which somewhat increased the distress around my experiences with her. As far as I could tell she was a passionate individual with a deep investment in her dignity, as people dying generally are. She was proud that she had tempered her disease mostly alone. She had strived to continue her artistry despite her tremors and her episodes where she was racked with immobility and pain, where all I was tasked to do was to hold her hand and give her a sign that she existed, and that her pain was recognised.
I think much of my work has had me recognising pain. It is a sign that our society has become deeply pathologized to suffering.
I would have struggled deeply with her if not for my prescription of benzodiazepines at the time. But, as with all patients, I became glad I knew her. She was blatantly, obviously, even to a layman, prone to paranoid, schizophrenic delusions. The story varied from time to time, but she presumed she had come upon a great conspiracy. She believed that her surgeon, the company that developed the DBS device, and the hospital, were conspiring to cover up that she was a human guinea pig. She perceived that she was being gangstalking, and that the thugs responsible for this were communicating via morse code by flickering the lights in whatever place she currently resided. Despite me considering DBS to be deeply medically immoral and of questionable science, these were certainly delusional. I stayed with her in 3 particular residences, and I took great care to demonstrate that I would try to understand her experience, so that when the lights flickered as they do as result of electrical fluctuations that she saw that I really was paying attention.
It didn't matter. I was there for compassion and comfort, not for any kind of treatment. In 6 months I watched her deteriorate terribly, and our time together was rather routine. When I arrived she would usually be in a rather bitter mood. I would cook her dinner, make tea, and then we would converse. She was self aware to some extent. She would jump between mourning the tragedy of her life, to painful convulsions, to tirades of schizophrenic delusions. Screaming with rage one sentence and sobbing the next. I have never seen a more unstable and fragile person, and I say that with great sympathy. Her brain was eating, starving and killing itself. It is impossible to imagine the suffering she was going through, though it is impossible for anyone to properly imagine precisely another's suffering. I heavily consider that I would have personally preffered death to such a possibility.
Whenever I feel powerless to help someone, to feel that someone's ailment is insurmountable, I try to remember that the very least I can do there is be a person present with compassion and care. A witness, an acknowledgement of another's existence.
Although I am not sure what I believe, I hope in the end you found peace, Levadopa.