Chapter 5: Amelia

Chapter 5

Amelia

Rehab saved my life.  Of this, there is no question.  The people who worked with me at my rehab were innumerable and amazing.  The therapists, the counselors, the techs, nurses, and doctors touched me in a time that I felt I was untouchable.  They were the ones that pulled me out of the depths the first few days as I came off the drugs.

Living without drugs for the first time in years was the most painful and raw experience I have ever felt.  It was more painful that my brother’s death, my other brother’s cancer and all the traumas I sustained in my addiction.  This was the first time I could feel anything in years and the onslaught of emotions that came when I finally stopped were so intense that I prayed for death my first few weeks in rehab.  I longed for it. Begged for it.  I hated who I was and I hated what I had become and I hated the thought of facing myself outside of those walls.

There are two things about this particular rehab that, I believe, saved my life. First, was the piano.  The second was the MD intern named Amelia.  I was forced to take piano lessons as a child and though many of those skills had worn off by years of idle hands I still had enough knowledge to pound out basic chords.  So that’s what I did.  I sat on that piano for hours and hours and played out the emotions that I had buried for weeks, months and years.  I played until my voice ran out some days.  I played until they kicked me out of the piano lounge so that the others could watch a movie or play games.  It was the outlet I needed and looked forward to.

One day when I was pounding away at the piano a girl came in who was not too much older than me.  She was Indian, as in, from India, and she was quite pretty and slender.  She wore a white coat and I knew she was a doctor of some sort.  I kept playing, not caring if she was there or not.  She listened to me for a bit at the door and then sat next to me on the bench.  Not touching but close enough that I felt her calm presence.  It threw me. No one had sat next to me or wanted me close like that (unless it involved sex or drunken revelry) in a very long time.  She didn’t want anything from me but to listen to what I was playing.  Like it mattered.  I didn’t understand that.

Her presence and the lack of anything dirty threw me.  I went off key and became embarrassed and stopped playing.  At this point, I couldn’t handle any kind of emotion whatsoever.  I grew frustrated at myself, stood up, and walked away from the piano and left the lounge. I went through the doors and into the main lounge, leaving the woman in the doctor’s coat sitting on the bench.  I didn’t know who she was, and at that point, I didn’t care.  Someone else’s presence in my space wasn’t something I was capable of dealing with.

In retrospect, I realize that I was learning how to live all over again.  Having normal conversations with people, like my therapists and groups in rehab, was exhausting.  I didn’t understand who I was.  I thought I was an extrovert and yet, I desperately wanted to be alone.  I had relied on alcohol and drugs for so long to help with my anxiety in social situations that I was unable to cope with social interactions on a basic level.  Someone interested in my music or in me for any reason scared me and, unable to deal with the attention, I simply ran away.  In many ways, I was a 12 year old who would run and hide.

Luckily, the woman in the white coat wasn’t so easy to get rid of.  She followed me into the main lounge. I can’t remember now if I was watching TV or playing with a puzzle, but I was sitting alone and trying not to think and trying not to cry.  She sat next to me.  Calm. Composed. Lovely.  

“My name is Amelia” she said, “I’m a doctoral intern from Baylor”.  I told her who I was and what I was in rehab for.  We chatted and talked and she just listened.  I didn’t feel as if I was below her. I didn’t feel like I was above her.  I wasn’t sure what to do with her.  So I didn’t do anything. She was there and there wasn’t much I could do about it.  She was nice enough. So, I stayed and chatted for awhile.

I went to dinner. I came back, did what was scheduled for me to do, and then went to bed, as always.  The schedule gave me structure and the structure gave me peace.  In the next few weeks my rehab continued and my interactions with Amelia were varied and calm.  I cried a lot in those days—I didn’t know how to deal with emotions any other way. I cried and I banged on the piano.  I went to therapy, went to group therapy, went to 12-step meetings, listened to lectures and process groups and worked on myself.  I dealt with my ex-husband a few times and had major panic attacks each time.  The overwhelming sense of doom and fear hung over me like a thick blanket. I really felt like he would haunt me forever.  Amelia and the other staff kept reminding me that nothing was forever—I told them they didn’t know shit.

One day, I was thinking too much.  I allowed myself to dwell in the misery and pain.  I relived the rapes, abuse and overdoses.  My mind was so trapped in the past that I couldn’t stop from daydreaming about them.  Within a few minutes I was crying by myself in my room and, though I wanted to stop thinking about those things. I couldn’t. My mind was telling me how awful I was and how many lives I had destroyed by getting people high for the first time. The thoughts kept coming and I was powerless to do anything about them. Sitting in my room alone, I was faced with me.  

This period in rehab is often hazy. I don’t remember why my thoughts started going there or exactly when Amelia became such a force for me. I’m not sure how long I lay on my bed, crying to myself, unable to move.  

But there I was.

It must have been hours.  I lay on my bed, lost in my daymares.  They were no longer daydreams.  I couldn’t escape it, I couldn’t stop them and they were repeating over and over and over and I was crying and crying.  I soon became debilitated. I could no more move off that bed than I could stop my heart from beating.  I could not will myself to move.  

My body felt heavier than the heaviest thing in the world.  Snot dripped down my nose, but I couldn’t wipe it away. I felt the need to pee but couldn’t move to the bathroom.  I was trapped in the thoughts and emotions that. The drugs had always kept that petrification at bay now, without them I became a prisoner in my own mind. Unable to escape. Unable to even want to escape.

This had happened once before while I was using.  It happened after coming down off of a particularly long run on cocaine and, having missed a therapy session because of it, I was forced to call my therapist during the come down.  I couldn’t face the confrontation and, within a few moments of getting of the phone, I slipped into the drug infested thinking.  During that period of catatonia, I didn’t move for almost 12 hours.  I don’t remember time passing.  I remember finally coming out of it on the empty floor of my apartment in Mountain View, California having soiled myself and needing to vomit.  Our furniture had not yet arrived after moving to California and my husband repeatedly called me pathetic as I lay there.  Only when he left and was gone for hours did I finally come out of the state.  It was only a few weeks later that I finally hit rock bottom, left my husband and entered rehab.

And so here I was again just a few weeks later trapped in the havoc that was my mind. It must have been dinner time because I remember being hungry. But I couldn’t move.  I remember my door opening and Amelia looking at me.

“Hannah, are you ok?”

No response.

“Hannah?” This time as spoke my name she moved closer to me and saw me silently crying, unmoving with snot dripping down my nose and into my mouth. My eyes wide and unable to respond she sat next to me on the bed as gently as she had sat next to me on the bench the first day I met her.  She gently placed her hand on my shoulder.  I wanted to pull away from the touch.  It was like a hot brand to my soul, but I couldn’t. Willing my body to move had no effect. I lie still.

“Hannah, it’s going to be okay.”

Nothing.

“Hannah, it’s going to be okay.”

Nothing.

She sighed and continued touching my shoulder, not moving from my side.  She kept repeating it would be okay.  She kept telling me over and over and over.  I felt if I could just die right there I would. I would stop it all. It was too much. How did she do it? How did she live without something else making her feel better. I didn’t understand how the world kept going when the world in my head never left the past.  I was wrapped in it as it consumed me.  Then, with no explanation as to why, I heard it.

“Hannah, it’s going to be okay.”

And then I heard it again with certainty.

“Hannah, it’s going to be okay.”

For the first time in my entire life I realized that the woman sitting next to me telling it was going to be ok actually believed it was going to be ok.  She knew it could be okay.  It occurred to me that she wasn’t saying this because she was supposed to, but because she wanted to. None of the other MD interns had taken notice, sat next to me, or listened to my chatter. Not one had given two shits about my music or my past, but Amelia had. She had heard a lot about me, never made me feel less than her and still she believed it was going to be okay.  

Not thinking, I wiped the snot from my face while I still stared into the emptiness that I still felt.  She smiled.  I was still crying.  My stomach growled. I hadn’t even realized I moved until after it had happened.

“It’s time to eat.  Why don’t you come?”

I looked at her for a minute. I sat up and then went to eat as if it had never happened.  By the end of the night, I felt back to normal and the black clouds of doom had returned to their normal state of mediocre gray.  I don’t remember how long she sat with me. What I do know is that I realized, for the first time, that things could be okay. This was something I had never even considered.  In the depths of my insanity, I never thought for a moment that things could be okay without the drugs or without the alcohol.  Not for one second was life capable of being “okay” on any level.  But now, for a moment, I had a glimmer of hope.

She was only at my rehab for a few more days.  Before she left she handed me a small piece of paper with a quote on it and her name on the back.  Had she not written her name on it I don’t know if I’d remember it was her who had given it to me. But there it was and in my memory it has remained. The quote was by Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi or someone.  I don’t remember it now, but I remember her name.  I remember what she did for me. She moved on to another internship.  I remember feeling slightly abandoned and hurt that she was leaving.  I was confused, but part of me felt nothing at all. So much of my heart was so dead it didn’t hit me until later.  I would never have an Amelia like her again.  She was simply someone who had given me perspective and hope.  

As quickly as she entered, she left again.  I have that paper somewhere stuffed in one of my journals.  I keep it to remember that this event was real.  It’s easy for me to forget what was real and what wasn’t.  I lied so much and so often for so long I sometimes can’t remember what really happened. That paper reminds me though that someone, for a minute, a moment, believed that things could change and I could change and that things would be ok.  It seems such an easy concept to grasp, but I was not capable of understanding it, let alone grasping it.  I believed that Amelia believed it and that was enough to pull me out the cage that had become my own mind.