By Melinda Li
Sarah endured lightning storms of electroshock twice a week. After every session, she would return to our shared room, bruised by nausea and headaches. She always declared “never again,” only to find herself walking toward the suite three days later—her former discomfort now a hazy dream swallowed by time.
I had been intrigued by Sarah since the day I was admitted. Unlike the other patients, there was an effortless familiarity with which Sarah made small talk with the nurses and doctors, as if they were all long-lost family members.
“Remember that time the whole hallway smelled like eggs?”
“I haven’t pulled the fire alarm for weeks now, you can trust me…”
“How was Joey’s baseball game last weekend? You promised to take me next time!”
Sarah charmed everyone. For me, it was when she boldly approached the big rolling white board—a meticulously organized grid with all of the patients’ names, medications, and nurse schedules—at the front desk and added “-tonin” to her name in vibrant pink dry erase marker. Her bubbly and crooked handwriting spilled over her grid and into the next patient’s box.
“Sarah-tonin. Serotonin. Get it? It’s my new nickname,” she proudly announced during our group session. There was a sly look on her face, like she had just told everyone a long-held secret.
I didn’t expect Sarah to endear herself to me—a bouncy seventeen-year-old girl diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. There was a hurricane quality to Sarah, but she didn’t care to look backward at the path of debris she created. She had pink streaks in her messy curly hair and did her makeup slightly differently every day, as if she were attempting to reinvent a new persona each morning, in hopes it would be better than the last. I could understand that.
Sarah would also say things like, “Isn’t it kinda cool we’re in the same psychiatric hospital that David Foster Wallace stayed in? We should feel honored, in a way, you know?”
I eyed the Sylvia Plath poem collection sitting on her bedside table, wondering when in the world we started romanticizing self-destruction.
During my first week there, I was an intimate witness to Sarah’s tsunami waves of mania and depression—how rogue currents of emotions rushed through her body in a matter of seconds and how quickly it could all go away, like a high tide retreating back to sea. Unpredictable, irregular tides. On one cloudy day, catatonia held us both captive. We stayed in our beds past noon, stared at the ceilings, and wished we were elsewhere. We skipped breakfast and our morning medications until two afternoon nurses finally dragged us out of the room. After the silence, there lingered a strange solidarity in those moments—an unspoken, shared kinship.
At her insistence, we made a bet about who would get discharged first. In retrospect, this was an awful idea.
“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you came back a few weeks later and I was still here? That would be sooo funny. Well, I would laugh first and then kill myself, probably.”
It was her second week doing ECT treatment when Sarah started to forget things. She stopped initiating late-night conversations where we would gossip about the other patients. She stopped adding “-tonin” to her name on the whiteboard. She forgot that on Tuesday nights we watched reruns of Catfish on MTV together in the entertainment room. She sometimes even forgot how to get to our room, confused and frustrated by the labyrinth of sterile white hallways that looked too similar to each other.
At night, I could hear Sarah whispering to herself the names of family members and friends and phone numbers—as if they too would disappear overnight in her brain, zapped straight out of a core memory.
By the third week, I was told I would be discharged. They said I was “clinically stable” and “in remission.” My mind began to race with thoughts of the future and the outside world. Will I come out a different person? Could it happen again?
My mind inevitably went back to Sarah and what she said about her still being here when I return for my next hospitalization. I hadn’t talked to her in a few days, ever since they moved her to a larger one-bedroom spot. The nurse explained to me that Sarah needed to transition to the long-term inpatient building.
The morning of my discharge, I walked Sarah to her ECT session across the campus. She seemed to be in a lighter mood, moving at a faster pace than usual. I pulled her aside, and she jumped at my touch. I gave her a letter I had written, which contained a few of our inside jokes, and a sloppily written promise at the end that we would meet each other out in the world someday. Sarah looked at me quizzically.
“What is this? Another medical document I need to bring over there?”
I told Sarah she was the best roommate I could’ve had at a place like this and that she should read the letter. It had jokes only she could understand.
“Roommate? I haven’t had a roommate in forever. I thought you were just the nurse walking me over today.”
I searched for answers in Sarah’s eyes, but found only calmness. She was now in the eye of her own hurricane—where there was a stillness, and occasionally, the sun peeked out from above.
“If you’re not the nurse…who are you?”
I watched Sarah walk into the ECT suite. As she lowered her body down to the chair, the nurses fastened the electrodes to her scalp. The whole process looked so smooth, like they had done it a million times before. Then, almost immediately, Sarah dipped deeply into the world of her own subconscious, a realm of shocks and aftershocks—one that was entirely out of my reach.
