Nausea

So I've been sitting on this story for about 30 years now. I've never told anyone because there never really seemed to be an appropriate time to bring this kind of thing up. Also – and this is probably the real reason – it just scares the **** out of me. I don't like to think about it. And I've never been one to scare easy. I take things in stride and never really get flustered. But looking back, this is the one thing in my big **** show of a life that I just cannot come to terms with. So maybe it will help to get it off my chest this way.
Back when I was still a working man, in between long periods of boozing and bumming around leeching off my friends I spent a few decades as an orderly in hospitals all over the Northwest. It was mostly **** work. Maybe it's different now, but back then the doctors treated you like dog ****. We were like the ****ing untouchables of their caste system. Below the janitors even. The hours were long and there was always the chance you'd be wiping up **** for hours, but it paid enough for me to keep myself alive and up to my eyeballs in gin.
Now, at that point in my life, I had what you could call a sense of morbid curiosity. That might have had to do with some things from my childhood, but that's a different story. So naturally, I loved when I was assigned to a psych ward. I worked in quite a few over the years. To the ordinary person I suppose they're unpleasant places – echoing with the moans and sobs, the screams and ravings of the insane – but I found them absolutely fascinating.
Have you ever left something in the fridge – say, some of your mom's leftover tuna casserole you took home after labor day– for so long that it started to get moldy, but you left it in there anyway just to see how ****ed up it could get? To see the unpredictable blooms of shape and color? To let it fester until it achieved some grotesque form of beauty? There's a certain kind of danger there, a certain brush with the unknown. That's how I felt about the crazies in the psych wards. I was fascinated – I wanted to see just how far a human mind could be taken into the unknown depths of insanity, just what the demons of our souls or the diseases of our brains can do to us.
I saw a lot of really ****ed up stuff. And I loved it. Catatonic depressives who didn't move from their beds unless forced into a wheelchair, minds endlessly ruminating over the meaninglessness of their entrapped lives. These people I didn't **** with. There was no further to go down that black hole. Paranoid schizophrenics, left to rot in the ward until they're completely consumed by their delusions of persecution. I learned these peoples' fears and I drove them home. I was the FBI, almost ready to make an arrest. I was Jesus Christ, almost ready to bring down the fires of heaven. I was their ****ing daddy come home to find them masturbating. Whatever it took. I wanted to see how far they could go. They couldn't kill themselves, not in a psych ward. It was a perfect petri dish to watch the mold bloom.
Now, most of the patients were of course not this interesting. There were your anorexics, to be force-fed and spat back out to starve themselves again. Your angry alcoholics turned over by their families. Attention-starved teenagers who'd made a half-assed effort to kill themselves. But I remember this one guy, Greg. Greg didn't move or speak all that much, but from what I could piece together the inside of Greg's mind was a vast kingdom inhabited by creatures called Quags, all being slowly consumed by poisonous gases from a great underground geyser. The Quags would inhabit him and tell their stories, begging for help. Those were the only times he spoke.
There was a woman named Mary, driven to self-laceration over the fact that her eyes were not her own. They were implanted by the Vatican, and they had eyeballs on the reverse side of them. They looked down into her soul and they knew everything she was thinking. Another guy who was obsessed with squares. Evil squares. All of these people were my little test subjects. I spurred them on, stoking their putrefaction in my secret petri dish. But all of this could be a whole other story. This, I can live with.
This is not what bothers me to this day. Because then there was Jenny.
I was working in a bum-****-nowhere hospital, somewhere up near the border. It must have been about 1989. I was on one of my precious psych ward assignments, the one with Greg the Quag guy. So there I was spoon-feeding old Greg his applesauce, when Jenny is wheeled in by two doctors. Strapped down to a papoose, and ****ing screaming. She was a small girl, brunette, early twenties, very pretty if she weren't so pale and gaunt. As the doctors wheeled her into her room, she thrust up her head and looked over at me. She looked at me with the most desperate, absolutely forsaken expression I've ever seen. No one has ever looked at me like that. Not even when my brother drowned in the quarry. My interest was piqued. Who was this? What was her story? What kind of advanced growth delusion was eating away at this young girl's soul? The doctors left Jenny in her room and locked the door. And as I helped Greg eat his applesauce, change his clothes, and get into bed, all of which took several hours, Jenny never stopped screaming.
But she wasn't just screaming. Was she vomiting in there? Puking all over herself? Through the thick walls I thought I could make out some of what she was saying, between retches. “HELP ME! Oh my God PLEASE HELP! It's AGONY! AGONY!†She used that word a lot over the years. Agony.
When I was done with Greg and just about ready to clock out, I peered through the wire cris-crossed door window into Jenny's room. She was heaving, straining against her leather, ribs poking up against the flesh of her exposed stomach. And she was staring at me with that some ungodly expression. Imploring me for help. But what could I do?
A few more days went by like this, with me not quite knowing what to make of Jenny and her endless screaming. She would scream, between retches, until her throat was raw, and then subside into moaning until she could scream again. I wasn't assigned to Jenny, so I couldn't **** with her even if I wanted to. And somehow, this time I did not want to. This, I knew already, was different. The sheer violence of this girl's affect, as the doctors would say, seemed to betray a kind of disorder I hadn't encountered before.
As time went on I overheard enough from the doctors to piece Jenny's story together. When you're an orderly the doctors treat you like ****, but that also means they'll say anything when you're around because they hardly notice you're there. Jenny was 20 years old when she was admitted. She'd been in college, studying English I think at some place like Bryn Mawr or Sarah Lawrence or one of those fancy girls' liberal arts schools, when all of a sudden, all at once, she'd become sick. Or nauseous, to be more precise. Just nauseous. So nauseous that she couldn't stand it. Her parents took her to a bunch of fancy doctors, but there was nothing medically wrong with her. Everything seemed fine. So they took her to different kinds of doctors. Psychiatrists, eventually. And still, there did not seem to be anything actually wrong with Jenny. She wasn't crazy. She knew exactly what was going on around her. But she was in such AGONY that she couldn't function at school anymore. So eventually she ended up here. A shrieking, shivering, heaving mess of a human being.
Now, it didn't take me long to realize that there was definitely something actually wrong with Jenny. This was not all in her head, some kind of attention-seeking stunt or unconscious hysterical episode. And it was not psychosis or schizophrenia either. She was perfectly lucid, perfectly in touch with reality. She answered the doctors perfectly rationally. She was just nauseous. Very, very, nauseous, and no one could find anything to help her. So they figured she was crazy.
Weeks and then months went by. I was sticking to this gig for a while, Jenny having shocked into some sense of duty. I would peer into her room at night and watch her, writhing horribly, moaning, sweating, shivering, screaming. Vomiting over the side of her bed or on herself when she was too exhausted. I would see her crying, horrible pathetic sobs, mumbling about unbearable nausea. The doctors would keep her alive by force-feeding her and keeping her on an I.V. drip. But her body took only enough nutrition to survive, and she vomited up everything else and then dry heaved for hours.
Then I would go home to my own bed, my own ****ty bed in my own ****ty two-room apartment, and I would lie down and let the drone of the traffic outside wash over me, and close my eyes and feel the warmth and comfort and health of my own body. I would feel that internal stability and goodness that I had never really appreciated before, and I would imagine it being gone.
Just imagine it. I pondered Jenny's situation a lot back in those days. I couldn't help it. Imagine the worst hangover of your life. You're crouched over the toilet all night long, vomiting over and over again, your whole body wracked with tremors as the poison you drank wells back up from your bowels, your soul black with guilt over what you've done to yourself. You shake, you sweat, you're hit by wave after wave of unbearable nausea that pulls your frantic mind into a noxious whirlpool of anxious dread. You lose track of time as you flounder in a toxic internal wasteland that you feel you may never escape. And this goes on, and on, and on, for days, weeks, months, years.
Imagine that you have food poisoning from stupidly eating some leftovers you shouldn't have. You were just hungry and didn't feel like cooking anything. Slowly you feel the life drain out of you as you sink into a whole-body enervation and then an encroaching tide of nausea, washing up with it the awful certainty of what you ate, exactly what it tasted like, exactly what it did to you. And you can't stop thinking about it, you can't stop making yourself sick. On and on it goes, an absurd cycle of self-induced yet compulsory sickness. You vomit until there's nothing left in your stomach, so you vomit up stomach acid until you just dry heave. Anything you try to consume is rejected by your body and seems to create even more sickness. It stretches on for days, your life becomes a desert of disgust and revulsion. You don't know if it will ever end. You don't know if you'll die, but it seems more certain that you'll stay this way forever. Weeks, months, years, decades it goes on and on and on. No one can help you. Every ounce of strength and willpower you once had is chewed down to nothing by the acid of your sickness and despair.
It's something that shouldn't ever happen to anyone, but it's what happened to Jenny. I worked in that hospital for about 8 more years before I moved on, and Jenny never changed. She maintained a lucid understanding of her situation. The screaming and moaning never stopped. Never. The look of utter helplessness that she gave me when I first saw her never left her face. She was just left in her room to suffer her unimaginable pangs of sickness. Her parents would come and cry and yell at the doctors but no one could do anything about it. They tried everything and nothing helped. She's probably still there, a forgotten and hopeless case, helplessly enduring a fate of meaningless suffering that has been compounded a million times over into a dense, black, nauseous pit of despair.
I stopped ****ing with the patients after I met Jenny. I think that my petri dish experiments didn't hold any more fascination for me after I realized there are things that are truly frightening about our world. They don't grow in a sealed dish, observed with morbid curiosity. They come out of nowhere, no one knows why, and no one can comprehend their depths.


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