Will's Choice

Gail Griffith

• Verlag: HarperCollins e-books
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062013798
• Thema: Psychologie
• Thema: Psychologie du développement

On March 11, 2001, seventeen-year-old Will ingested a near-fatal dose of his antidepressant medication, an event that would forever change his life and the lives of his family. In Will's Choice, his mother, Gail Griffith, tells the story of her family's struggle to renew Will's interest in life and to regain their equilibrium in the aftermath.

Griffith intersperses her own finely wrought prose with dozens of letters and journal entries from family and friends, including many from Will himself. A memoir with a social conscience, Will's Choice lays bare the social and political challenges that American families face in combating this most mysterious and stigmatized of illnesses. In Gail Griffith, depressed teens have found themselves a formidable advocate, and in the evocative and fiercely compelling narrative of Will's Choice, we all discover the promise of a second chance.

1

THE BEARS DOWNSTAIRS

10:00 AM, March 11, 2001

A mother’s sixth sense is attuned to her child’s atmospherics like a cat before an electrical storm. I sensed something wrong the instant I opened the door to his room. Normally, there were heaps of clothing, towels, and books strewn about. This morning it was preternaturally clean.

In the split second before reason takes over from reaction, I felt trouble on my skin. A branch from the blossoming pear tree in front of our Dupont Circle row house scraped rhythmically against the glass, tapping in code: Trouble, trouble.

“Willo, I want you up now so you can say good-bye to Jane.” I used the tone that leaves no room for equivocation—the tone a mother uses to coax a teenager out of bed.

It was Sunday morning and Will had been up late watching college basketball with his stepsister, Jane, who was home from college for spring break. Usually, I am loath to wake a sleeping teenager on a weekend morning, but I knew Will would want to see Jane off before she and her roommate embarked on the eight-hour drive back to school.

“Will”—I crept closer to his bed—“Jane’s about to leave. You need to go downstairs now if you want to say good-bye.”

Just as I reached the edge of his bed, he lurched violently to one side. I caught a glimpse of what looked like saliva bubbling around the corners of his mouth. I grabbed his shoulder and rolled him toward me. His skin was clammy, his color yellow-gray, and he was sweating profusely.

“Will?” I tensed and my heart accelerated as I grasped one side of his head. I tried to look into his eyes, to see his pupils. “Will, are you okay?”

He sounded like a recording underwater when he tried to respond. I felt his pulse: his heartbeat was off the chart. He mumbled something about needing to “get out of this bubble wrap.” Dread scaled up the back of my neck.

“Oh, God, this is not good,” I thought out loud.

Will had been battling clinical depression since fall, but I was convinced he was much better than he had been just months before. That Sunday morning, March 11, 2001, as I geared up to do battle with whatever was afflicting him, my first thought was: encephalitis. Not suicide. En-ceph-a-li-tis.

Certain viruses affect the brain in ways that render patients tangled and disoriented. My son was certainly disoriented. And feverish. He was delirious. It could be a terrible case of the flu. Or how about meningitis?

There were all manner of ailments I knew nothing about. He could have contracted any one of them. That was it. It was the flu. Or maybe it was a drug interaction with an antihistamine; something he might have taken for seasonal allergies was causing havoc with his antidepressant medications.

I tried to raise his head by placing my hand behind his neck; his eyes lolled back in his head and he moaned.

“Okay, that’s it!” I said under my breath, and ran downstairs to get my husband, Jack.

On the way downstairs, I bumped into my stepson, John: “Something’s going on with Will. Would you go sit by him while I get your dad?”

My husband was loading the last few items into the car for Jane’s trip back to college. I grabbed him and took him aside and said, “Something’s wrong with Will.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean physically, something is terribly wrong—like a virus or something. He’s delirious and foaming at the mouth.”

“I’ll be right there. Just let me get Jane off.”

I raced back to Will’s room, where John queried me: “What’s up with Will?” John’s voice was panicky. He was clearly unnerved by Will’s appearance. I saw the fear and bewilderment in his eyes and thought, “No time for guessing—we have to act.”

“I don’t know, sweetie, but I think we need to get him to a doctor or the hospital quickly.”

John and Will were just half a year apart in age and had been close friends since they were preschoolers, long before Jack and I married in 1999, when the two boys became stepbrothers. John leaned over Will’s bed and implored, “Hey, Will, do you know where you are?”

Will babbled, “She can wear whatever she wants.”

John and I exchanged glances, incredulous. “Huh?”

Jack bounded up the stairs, and I ran past him in the hallway on my way to our bedroom to pull on some clothes. “We need to get him to the emergency room!” I shouted.

I grabbed jeans and yanked a sweater over my head and heard Jack and John in Will’s room trying to coax him to his feet. The boys managed to lumber down the hallway, but at the top of the stairs Will balked. He wouldn’t go any farther.

“I’m afraid of bears and I won’t go downstairs,” he uttered. Jack and I looked at each other, perplexed, for half a second.

Will wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t be coaxed. He repeated the singsong phrase, “I’m afraid of bears and I won’t go downstairs, I’m afraid of bears and I won’t go downstairs,” three or four more times.

The freakishness, the otherworldliness of the utterance propelled our collective anxiety into the stratosphere. There were no family histories of encounters with bears. This imaginary juggernaut, this bear phobia, came from some dark cave in Will’s head.

We managed to reach the bathroom at the end of the hallway. Will collapsed on the tile floor. Straining and pulling, we maneuvered him into our bedroom and laid him on the bed.

Jack’s ex-wife, Charlotte, had been downstairs helping Jane pack up for school and get on the road. Now, she dashed upstairs to see how she could help us. I passed Will’s tennis shoes to Charlotte and she struggled to put them on him, while John and Jack wrestled him onto the bed. I grabbed the phone on the bedroom dresser and dialed 911.

I reached a dispatcher right away. I told her we had a medical emergency, that my son was in dire straits and “we need…we need…” Language failed me. I couldn’t summon the word “ambulance.” I finally yanked it out: “We need an emergency vehicle right away. The one with the lights and siren.” An emergency vehicle with lights and siren…? I was coming unhinged.

Charlotte, overhearing my disjointed exchange with the dispatcher, gestured frantically, motioning me to give her the phone: “We need an ambulance right away!” She deftly gave the dispatcher our address before returning the phone to me. The dispatcher had a few more questions: his age, approximate height and weight. She asked if Will was “armed.”

“Is your son dangerous?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, trying hard not to lose my grip. I couldn’t conjure a situation in which my child might be considered dangerous. “He’s only seventeen; he’s a little over six feet tall. I think he weighs about one-forty.”

It seemed an eternity, but in reality the ambulance arrived within five minutes. The emergency dispatcher sent everything—not just an ambulance but two squad cars and a hook-and-ladder rescue team. I flew downstairs to let them in.

The commotion sent the neighborhood into a freeze frame. Birds stopped twittering and dogs and dog owners alike stood fixed in place and gaped, as if on a theater stage. Four paramedics and two cops barreled through the front door and up the stairs, carrying a stretcher. The medics took Will’s pulse and tried to get him to respond to more questions, to no avail. They tried slipping on an oxygen mask, but Will fought it off, swinging like a prizefighter.

“His name’s Will,” I told them, stifling sobs.

“Will, do you know where you are?” they asked repeatedly. It would not be the last time that day we heard the question.

“Do you know if he took anything?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Does he use drugs or alcohol?”

“Not often; I know he’s smoked marijuana a couple of times, but he’s not a drinker.”

“Hard drugs, cocaine, Ecstasy?”

“No, never. Not to my knowledge.”

The EMT crew moved him onto the stretcher and into the waiting ambulance. I rode with him in the bay, lights flashing and sirens blaring, heading to George Washington University Hospital, about a mile away. Jack followed in our car.

When my kids were little they loved fire engines and ambulances for the noise and excitement. They were raised in the city, so the cacophony tickled them. I thought fleetingly, “Boy, I wish Will knew what was going on. He’d really get a kick out of this.”

But Will wasn’t Will at that moment. He was pawing the air, grabbing at imaginary bits of dust or bugs or light. Who knows what creatures floated into the web of his consciousness?

Every few minutes, he tried to form a question, but it broke apart into fragments before it made any sense. I grew so frightened that I began to feel nauseous. I tried to stay as close to him as physically possible. I whispered in his ear, reminding him every few minutes, “Willo, this is your mother speaking.”

When he was young I used to wake him up in the morning by whispering, “Earth to Will, this is your mother speaking.” It always got a rise. But as the ambulance sped through the city, and I tried all of the familiar mother-son connections, Will was unresponsive. “Come in, Will.” I might as well have been an alien visiting him from another planet.

Most people I know, in the aftermath of a crisis, describe feeling as though they were operating in two dimensions simultaneously. In one dimension, we are active participants, applying the tourniquet, dragging an animal out of the path of an oncoming car, or diving into a swimming pool after an errant toddler. In the other dimension, we are beset by a voice in our head that says, “This can’t be happening,” and the crisis unfolds through a surreal lens.

I was observing my son’s ordeal on a split screen. An Olympic referee held a stopwatch and suddenly, seeing the tick-tick-tick of the hand, he shouted: “Go!” For me, “Go!” was 10:00 AM Sunday morning. Monitoring my progress from the sidelines, watching and waiting to see how my time-trial would turn out, I was in that other dimension—assessing, critiquing, gawking like a stranger. All cylinders were firing. I was doing what I should do, as best I could: addressing the emergency, calling the ambulance, making a mental list of Will’s prescribed medications. At the same time, I was rattled to my core. Oh, my God, I knew my son was in serious trouble and no amount of attention to detail kept me from lapsing into periodic spasms of terror.

We arrived at the emergency room at 10:40 AM. Will was triaged to the front of the line, ahead of Saturday-night drunks, wailing babies, and minor fractures. Despite the rush to get Will from the ambulance onto a gurney and into an examination room, I was stopped at the hospital’s entrance by an admissions clerk.

“Sorry, ma’am. You need to register here…and we’ll need a check or money order for fifty dollars.

You have got to be kidding—a check or money order?! Was it some sort of deposit guaranteeing that I would get my kid back? Did they think fifty dollars was going to be all they needed to fix him? Fifty dollars just to cross the threshold? Why this? Why now? I rummaged frantically in my purse for a checkbook and his insurance card, and at the same time attempted to hold a conversation with Will’s stepmother and father in California on the cell phone I clutched in my other hand.

I reached my ex-husband, Bob, and his wife, Melissa, at 7:45 AM, California time. Sunday morning. I did not expect them to be awake when I called, but Melissa answered cheerfully.

“What’s up?”

“Melissa, I need to talk to Bob…I’ve got Will here at GW Hospital and it seems that he’s got a weird flu or a drug interaction or something.” I tried to sound as matter-of-fact as I could. Bob got on the phone: “Hey, Bud, I’ve just brought Will into the emergency room. He’s delirious and feverish and I got worried so we brought him here by ambulance.” Just then, the admissions clerk motioned me to cut the cell phone call and directed my line of sight to a large sign over the portal of the emergency room, announcing, “Use of cellular telephones in the hospital is strictly forbidden.” Of all the occasions when one might urgently need a cell phone, this was it, but once I had completed the admissions paperwork and written out the fifty-dollar check, the only thing keeping me between the security guard and my son was the cell phone.

“Look, I’ve got to go, they won’t let me use the cell phone; I’ll call back in just a bit when I know something.”

I ducked through the electronic double doors and into the emergency room, filled to the brink with so many people—patients, doctors, and nurses alike—that there were no chairs to sit on. I wasn’t immediately sure where they’d taken Will, but it became apparent he was behind a cloth partition when I heard a doctor shouting, “William, do you know where you are?” I pulled aside the curtain and barged in.

Inside the makeshift examining room, the scene was chaotic and instantly disorienting. I felt as though I’d fallen down a well; voices, mechanical noise, and lights overloaded my senses like an out-of-synch motion picture. Will was flailing at the hospital staff’s efforts to apply an oxygen mask and draw blood. He writhed and strained against any effort to hold him down. When he opened his eyes he stared blankly, without focus, and after a few seconds his eyeballs rolled back into his head. He groaned and uttered occasional non sequiturs, barely intelligible. And every few minutes, amplifying the surrealism of the scene, he would throw back his head and laugh—a hysterical, hyena-like screech, mocking and out of control. It was a scene no parent wants to witness.

Over the din a doctor shouted to me: “Are you his mother?”

“Yes.”

“This is how you found him?”

“Yes.”

“Any history of drug or alcohol abuse?”

“No.”

“Any history of seizures, allergic reactions?”

“No.”

“Any major illnesses, disease?”

“No—well, he suffers from clinical depression—but he’s recovered,” I reported earnestly.

As soon as the word “depression” was out of my mouth, the atmosphere changed. I sensed the hospital staff shooting one another knowing glances. “Goddammit,” I thought, “I’m not going to let them go there.” But the question was forming in their minds like spray paint on the drab blue stucco of the hospital walls: “A suicide attempt?”

Another line of questioning: “What medications does he take?”

Jack had just joined me in the emergency room. In spite of the rush to get to the hospital, John and Charlotte had had the presence of mind to gather up the multiple bottles of Will’s antidepressant medication lying on top of Will’s dresser and hand them to Jack in a plastic grocery bag as Jack ran out the door for the hospital. I was grateful for their quick action and foresight; I was too rattled to have thought of it. Having Will’s medications in hand would help solve the mystery illness and identify a possible drug interaction.

I tried to recall from memory the medications and dosages, but Jack quickly dove into the plastic bag, doling...