A Broken Circle: Student-Patient

An experience in the life of a student at the Faculty of Medicine can sometimes change into a genuine open wound. About the healing up of such a wound I will try to tell you about. ”Each man is a testimony of everybody else’s crime”.

I was on probation at the Psychiatric Hospital from town B., when I got the change to meet a fascinating patient. She was the carrier of two worlds in herself: one in which everything was a succession of images, of symbols and original feelings, felt with each fiber of her body, and the second, the one who violently broke her dreams, and ultimately threw her out anesthetized in the social world. Her wander about, once so savage and alive, stopped suddenly, leaving her into a painful motionless, into a self-conscientization of her interior tearing apart. Still, her double existence, so sharply contradictory, seemed to me as totally lived by her, and as authentic as I have never seen before. This discrepancy between her two worlds brought her here, at the ”mental institution”. She was brought out by force by her father and she was forgotten here; he got rid of her as she was an useless object. She was almost 30, and she was bearing both her two worlds and the hope that some day she will become again a FREE PERSON.

I tried to find out as much as I could about her, but the information was little or even none (nobody knew exactly where she was born, where she lived, who was her family...). What I knew for sure was that she was abandoned and I found out other things about her from doctor P., the one who accepted me in the hospital and made me possible, through recommendation, the access to her. I needed to understand the case, the signs, the symptoms, I needed to try to solve this paroxistic feeling that she experienced.

Driven by this impulse, I begun to dedicate her more and more time. At the beginning, it was rather a passive implication, as I was mostly interested in reading everything that proved connected with her disease. Afterwards, when I begun to think that I was ready to talk to her, the things got another turn.

When I decided to practice in the psychiatric hospital, this happened also in a period when I was really looking for some new artistic inspiration (I’ve been painting for more than five years), so I thought that that place could be a good one to find new ideas. This happened also in a period of real inner emptiness. Somehow, I hoped that by saving her, I could find my own salvation, my own identity, still hidden to myself by the education and the ”normality” that this world (society) imposes us everyday.

I transformed the images that she sometimes described me and I put them down on canvas, I begun to become fascinated by her stories, and equally by her beauty and the intensity of her ”dreams”. I even began to be emotionally attached to her. I don’t love if I loved her, but I realized that she grasped more and more into my soul. I wanted to show her that I understood her, that she could reflect herself in me as she was, with her true nature, because I felt that her disease was, probably, the most acute form of awareness of solitude - of an absolute and irreversible solitude - which leads to a feeling of alteration pushed to the extreme.

Her moments of losing the emotional resonance, clinically expressed by ”painful psychical anesthesia”, also affected me. I began wandering more and more often: ”Do we really have the right and the strength to wake her up to reality, when this reality is much dirtier then her imaginary world?” I became obsessed by my incapacity to answer that question. After a while I even was afraid that she could heal, I thought that once she was liberated from here, my whole experience about her and her beautiful happenings from ”the immediate reality” will be swept away. My fear sometimes withdrew with the certainty that her disease has no healing but only improvement, which meant a suspension of her state of mind, of her interior decomposition. Decomposition that little by little made way through myself. I spent a lot of time with her, we talked more and more coded, our phrases become syntactically altered, I was playing with her way of communicating, trying to understand each other and most of all trying to adopt myself in her world. In time my game transformed into something almost authentic, I became more and more uncertain in the real world, as I also gradually begun to lose contact with reality.

I was tormented by the thought that I couldn’t really help her and most of all by the thought that I didn’t wanted to help her, even if I could. Basically, I was living between two feelings of helplessness. I was happy as long as I could live in her world, and most of all as long as I could render her world on my canvas. Afterwards, when she woke up to reality or when she was under the influence of the medicines, I regained consciousness with a deep pain in the chest, with a deep helplessness and guilt.

Doctor P., suspecting an affective connection, forbade me to see her again, claiming that she was tired, that she will be better after a few weeks of quietness. I felt as the ground was slipping under my feet, and I left the section really depressed, being myself uncertain of the sense of this new reality.

I tried to take again the course and the life before, but my nights were tormented by her presence, by her unanswered questions- ”this sorrow that shouts in me, where does it comes from? - why am I a stranger to me? - who am I really?”. Those questions started to become more and more mine. I wanted by all means to see her again. I couldn’t do anything, I realized that I unwillingly became addicted to her stories (realities) and I was also really concerned with her sanity (now more than ever).

I finally succeed to get to her, after a few days, bribing some people from the hospital. I felt like my heart wouldn’t want to stay anymore in my chest. She was there, but now more deepen in herself as never before, more conscious of her great interior fissure; our communication seemed now a broken bridge; her enclosure and lack of confidence were as if ungraspable. I felt like I was a traitor and her eyes fed this feeling. I finally showed her the photographs of my paintings. In this way, I hoped that I could make somehow disappear the period we haven’t see each other, a period that enhanced her separation of this world. After all, these paintings came out mostly from her other ”place”...She looked at them for a long time... then, with tears in her eyes, she grab them strongly to her chest. The bridge between us seemed as being re-established. After a long, overwhelming moment of silence, she came closer to me and I accepted this with all the lack of consciousness of that moment. I’ve completely forgotten the place I was, I’ve completely forgotten the reality. I left almost in the morning, running as I have never run before, without knowing from whom and why...

I came back after two days. I was told they found her suffocated with a bunch of photographs. They found with her a note in which she wrote:

”I hear the heart beats of the other world and the stillness of this one... It is only there that I can be alive...”

Nowadays, still the burden of her death weighs on my chest.

One says that each person is the carrier of a suicide. I think that, only being aware of this, we can value the true measure of life, our life and others. Maybe this violent maturation made me better understand the life of a physician (even if now I am only a student), with all its contradictory aspects. This can only make me continue on the professional path I am, a path where death is so close and life is so unsure.

”fortunate (bliss) that suffering that makes you born again from yourself (...) and for that the suffering that raises you up when you accept it”.

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