Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer Read Free Book Online Page A

pushed out the door of Dunkin’ Donuts and headed north, she thought she glimpsed a man she had pushed to the back of her mind but could never forget.She kept an eye out for him instinctively. A habitual roving third eye. There were many times when she thought she saw him in a crowd, on the subway, on a bus, or across the street. She was always prepared to lose herself, make herself disappear, or if necessary take her own life.
    The Brown family had been gregarious and welcoming. The children, all four of them, were teenagers, well dressed and well behaved. The house was spotlessly clean, with old but well-maintained furniture that shone after being polished every week. The children did their homework in the evenings and then were allowed some television time before going to bed. Chores were divided up evenly and listed in rotation on a board in the small kitchen: garbage, dishes, laundry, bed making, tidying up, washing the kitchen floor. It all seemed too perfect. Tanisha’s symptoms had been better, and she didn’t have a “flipout” more than a couple of times. Lester Brown liked to read to the children at night. After a few months he had asked Tanisha if he could read her a special story. His wife was in the bedroom with a migraine and had taken a sleeping pill. He and Tanisha were in the living room alone with a reading light on, a blanket covering them. He placed Tanisha on his lap and opened Dr. Seuss. He whispered in her ear and she felt something hard between her legs as his breathing accelerated and he moved rhythmically. She had sat totally still as the large man panted in her ear then clutched her to him in a spasm that seemed to last forever. He made her change her pajamas before he put her into bed, whispering, “You are my favorite, Tanisha. We will read together again, just the two of us. Let’s keep this our secret.”
    Tanisha pushed open the doors to the ACS intake building just off First Avenue at six thirty a.m. The building was just north of the main entrance to Bellevue Hospital and part of the original sprawling hospital complex. The morning shift was starting to stream in through front doors. The rectangular silver food carts were jockeying for position on both sides of the avenue. Delivery trucks were triple-parked, and an FDNY ambulance hung a hard right turn down to the main emergency room entrance. She was patted down for drugs and weapons and then fed and bathed. The senior administrator knew her well and stoppedby to welcome her. After six hours of evaluation and innumerable phone calls, two workers took her to the Bellevue emergency room.
    The child psychiatric emergency room had bright colors, flat-screen television sets, and a glass-enclosed nursing station. A nurse and health tech escorted Tanisha into a private exam room. They asked her to undress and gave her some hospital-issue pajamas to wear on the unit. They told her she could have her own clothes back later. The aide searched her carefully and discreetly as she handed her the tops and bottoms and a bathrobe. This wasn’t a new routine for Tanisha; she had been through it half a dozen times before. In her own mind she had run out of options and had to find the safest place possible.
    I was having lunch with Francesca Durat, the on-call child psychiatrist, when she was beeped urgently to the emergency room to see the new admission. We had been deep in a discussion of her experiences with childhood trauma. She was French Algerian, and we had been talking about her years working in the
banlieues
, or immigrant ghettos ringing Paris. The populist anger, economic deprivation, racism, and religious intolerance that had led to riots in the suburbs of Paris resonated loudly in post-9/11 New York City. The overhang from a decade of foreign wars, failure to resolve immigration issues, globalization’s domestic effects, and the growing unemployment and inequality was creating combustible domestic politics here, too.
    We walked back to