Snippet About P. #3

A couple of years or so ago, I made my regular birthday call to P. and a woman answered the phone and said he’d had a heart attack and stroke and was in the hospital. When he returned home, he was so anxious that his lover broke up with him and moved out, and then he was there alone, recovering from a heart attack and struggling with a partial plate which made it hard to eat, and worrying himself sick over having lost half the vision in his right eye, worrying about whether he’d lose the rest of his vision, worrying about whether the various medications he was taking had actually caused the vision loss.

I asked what his doctor had to say, but he said he never saw the same doctor twice. P. worried that the medication might be causing side effects—he read the labels carefully, with their alarming details—and fretted that taking them at all was contrary to Christian Science, but he also didn’t dare to stop taking them altogether, or perhaps he experimented with not taking them, to ill effect. Perhaps he was not taking his psychiatric meds as prescribed, thus causing his terrible anxiety.

He was also caught in a bind between Christian Science and AA. AA says, "You’re as sick as your secrets," implying that you should tell everyone everything, or at least tell everything to someone or other.

I gathered from what P. said that Christian Science says that to give voice to something is to make it solid and more intractably present, so he didn’t know whether to say he’d lost part of his vision or not say it, and whatever he did, he felt he’d done the wrong thing and his anxiety increased. He spoke of suicide often in the middle months of 2004.

Yesterday P. called me twice while I was at work. Sometimes he says in his message, "I need to get your number," or "I can’t figure out your number," even though he has just called me at my number.

I called him back and found him watching TV at a paint-peeling volume. He asked, "How are you?" I said, "Good, but you’re making me deaf." As far as I know, he doesn’t have problems with his hearing, so I don’t know why he turns the TV up so high. Later in the conversation, there was a lot of racket outside, and P. said, "God! Every fucking car is going on!"

When I got home, there was yet another message from him, telling me that there had been a lot of excitement since I’d spoken to him a couple of hours before, that the union stewards had been there. But when I called him back and asked him about the union stewards, it didn’t seem to ring a bell.

I could hear the screaming lady in the background. P. said, not without a certain admiration, "She can do that twenty-four hours a day." I said, "I’m surprised she doesn’t lose her voice. It must be very annoying sometimes." P. said, "She deserves that because of all the times women were abused."