Member-only story
CHRONIC ILLNESS
That Doctor
Dr. Meathead makes the call
It was 2018. I was seeing a psychiatrist once every two weeks: a meathead Russian guy with a large pot belly, a thick accent, and a disheveled head of bushy gray hair. He was tall. I lay down — fully reclined — in the car to get to my appointments. Severely impaired, I would walk ever so slowly and gingerly into his office building.
Sometimes, as I sat in the waiting room ready to be called, I’d start to violently dry heave — while being riddled with symptoms like severe nausea and malaise, anxiety, brain fog, a distended stomach and tight chest, dyspnea, crippling exhaustion, weakness, etc.
I was also suicidal as fuck. Every single day.
The psychiatrist had convinced himself that I had a somatoform disorder. He would not recognize my diagnosis of severe ME/CFS. I would sit in a chair in front of his desk with either my mother or my wife in the chair next to me, fighting through symptoms to be able to speak.
On one particular day, he asked if I was suicidal. Foolishly, I told him, “Yes, I am.” Before I realized it, he had called 911 and was on the phone with the operator. I begged and pleaded for him to hang up the phone.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “Please! No!”
Not more than ten minutes passed and the ambulance and EMTs arrived to take me away. I was transported to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston, ghastly pale and ill from the turbulent ride over.
I was to begin my two-and-a-half-week stay at the psych ward.
Yet again.
