A home with a dog

Annika Brakebill

Now, there you go again, you say you want your freedom…

Well, who am I to keep you down?

Dreams, Fleetwood Mac

Today is a good day. You aren’t angry at us for holding you against your will—or at least, you aren’t thinking about that right now. You’re thinking about the future. All you really want, you say, is to go home and get a dog. A rare good day, a rare shit-eating grin sets your face aglow. Your cheeriness makes me want to cry. All those days of hollow eyes, blank face, and fury. Today, eye wrinkles, big white teeth, chuckling and scratching the nape of your neck. A dachshund, maybe, they’re cute as hell even though they can be naughty. 

We are almost having a real conversation. Your thoughts run together like snowmelt spilling into a mountain lake and mixing. You’re working on a new art piece. You show us the figures, the garden, the flowers. You say it means hope, peace, beauty, God. You’ve burned through hundreds of pastels by your sixth week on the unit, wearing them down to dusty nubs against endless sheets of butcher paper. Maybe you will have time to coat the whole hospital in color, hall by sterile hall.

Any side effects today? You are taking your clozapine, even though you told us for days you wouldn’t, even though you begged us not to make you take it. Thank god. The idea of security coming to hold you down and force you makes me want to get in bed and not come out until my next rotation. The aripiprazole we are coming down on, and you do look less stiff, you can almost turn your head, but you are always in pain, telling us about the broken bones rattling in your body, the ache churning in your guts. 

You were invited to your court date and you refused to go, and now you don’t believe it happened. You were evicted after you got here so you don’t believe that happened, either. The longer you stay sick, the harder it is to get better, and the harder it gets for you to leave this unit. The sicker you are, the less you let people help you. I’ve seen anger shake you as you tell us how your caretaker stole your stimulus check. 

But today is a good day, a hopeful day. Up to this point I’ve only heard “why is it that you keep me here when I am only getting worse?”, “I don’t need any more of your medications, only marijuana works”, “I am not dangerous! I’ve never hurt anybody and I would never hurt anybody so why is it that you have you taken me from my home?”

I want so badly for you to have a home. I want you to have your dachshund. Can we turn down your brain well enough to give you a chance? With these drugs you don’t want, on this ward you can’t leave? In art class, you’re laughing. Always drawing, painting, and today you’re giving your art away to your favorite nurse. You’re mixing peanut butter into your cereal. When you get out of your room and walk the halls of the unit, leaning on your cane and chatting with passers-by, I can almost see it. 

Annika (she/her) is a second year medical student at the University of Michigan. She is originally from Nashville, TN and Austin, TX. Outside of school, she enjoys biking, playing guitar, and wandering around Ann Arbor.