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

the child unit together, and I asked if I could sit in on the intake interview. Tanisha showed no emotion when I shook her hand and asked if she minded if I sat in with Francesca. She nodded okay, looking me directly in the eyes. It made me feel vulnerable. This sixteen-year-old, five-foot-one Dominican Haitian teenager with a thick Bellevue chart from multiple hospitalizations, evaluations, emergency room visits, and psychological testing was rapidly sizing up the two adults in the room who would be evaluating her and making some determination about her future. I switched roles with Tanisha and felt the weight of her “chart” on all of us, the caretakers over her lifetime. What secrets, tragedies, and small mercies were buried in its pages?
    I had canceled my afternoon and asked Patty not to put through any calls unless they were true emergencies—and even then to come down and get me, since I turned off my phone and beeper. The consultation room was a corporate back office, a cell with a windowed door leading to an outer vestibule. We sat there for nearly three hours while the psychiatrist tiptoed into Tanisha’s life.
    She was very smart with a sharp wit and gradually became more spontaneous and talkative. Monosyllabic answers gave way to short responses.
    “Why did you run away from the foster home in Bushwick?”
    “I did not run away. I left of my own free will at a time of my choosing. I never ran.”
    “Sorry, I didn’t mean run away in that way. Why did you leave?” Francesca practically whispered this time. She was getting quieter and softer as Tanisha was getting more assertive. It was as if there were a scale in the room for affect or emotion. As Tanisha heated up, Francesca turned down her emotional volume.
    Carefully calibrated, Tanisha responded, “ACS has sent me to so many shitholes, with so many assholes that want to fuck with me or fuck me. Just who should you be interviewing?”
    Tanisha did not blink for a long time. She held us in her gaze and kept us there. This was not a usual kid in crisis who was melting down in a rage-fueled episode of “acting out,” cutting herself, homicidal, or suicidal. You could feel her intelligence in the small room. She had a special-education plan or IEP that had put her in small classes with other “disturbed” adolescents. Most of the kids in these special programs had low to normal intelligence; many were severely retarded from drugs or alcohol in utero, and many from sheer intellectual deprivation. Socially isolated, the parents of many of these children were themselves marginally literate. The level of stimulation in a home was limited to shouts, obscenities, and a 24/7 blasting television.
    “I do have a plan to kill myself,” she answered in response to another question from Francesca.
    “What is your plan, Tanisha? Have you had these thoughts recently?”
    “Doctor, I have had a plan for a long time if things don’t work out. If I cannot get out a back door. I won’t tell you my plan, then it wouldn’t be a plan, would it? I mean it wouldn’t be my plan, it would be our plan. I don’t have hardly anything at all in my life. Every time I get moved in foster care I lose half of my stuff and the other half gets ripped off. Like I have nothing except what I have in my head. If that motherfucker had made it into the room again I would have killed him or myself or both of us. That is for fucking sure.”
    After a few hours of conversation with Tanisha, I felt spiritually dehydrated. Like everything had been sucked out of me. It was like watching an accident over and over again in slow motion. Kids like Tanisha are trapped. They will die, and there is nothing you can do to save them. You cannot keep playing that script over in your head without hurting yourself. I had gone through her chart before going in the room and had a sense that a form of soul death was foretold for this young girl. What were her chances of making it out the other side of