The Great Depression

Picture this: you're cooped up in a hospital ICU room and you can't speak. You can't shower or go to the bathroom yourself. The highlight of your day, every day, is when the doctors come to see you on rounds. Every day you look forward to that visit as if those white-coated, fresh-faced young healers were the Messiah. You keep thinking, this is the day I get a straight answer. Every day around 11:00 you see them going around to each patient on the unit. Most of them are unconscious (the patients, not the doctors). Most of them are quite old. At least that's your perception; you can't really see too many from your vantage point. Finally around 12:00 they get to you. Dr. Natalie Yip, a nice, young, pregnant pulmonologist is leading rounds. The doctors come in and smile at you. Despite the fact that you can't really communicate effectively, you have somehow managed to ingratiate yourself to them; you can tell that they like you. You mouth the same question to Dr. Yip that you asked her yesterday, the same question you'll ask her again tomorrow: when can I go home?
Dr. Yip is nice, young, pregnant and patient, but she is not omnicient. She has no idea when you can go home. You suspect she's not even sure if you can go home. Ever. So she just smiles her sweet smile and tells you again, for the umpteenth time, that she doesn't know. Got the picture? How do you think you'd react to this emotionally brutal scenario? Well, I became profoundly depressed. There were times I wasn't sure I wanted to go on living under those circumstances. The only things that kept me going? My grandson Menachem was due to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah in a few months and my daughter Blimie had just had her first baby, a gorgeous little girl named Meira. I wanted to be at the Bar Mitzvah and meet my new granddaughter. Had it not been for those two goals, I would have thrown in the towel. It got so bad, they finally sicced the shrinks on me. First there was Dr. Ramos, a slight young man of indeterminate ethnicity: he looked asian but had a hispanic surname and no trace of an accent of any kind. Despite his small frame he was physically clumsy and walked with a rather awkward gait. He interviewed me (difficult to do with a patient who can't speak) and my answers must have been quite alarming, because the next day he brought along two of his colleagues, one of whom was the chairman of the psychiatry department. They wanted me to give them my word that I wasn't going to hurt myself. I knew that I wasn't, and I suspected that they did too, but I understood that they didn't want anything to happen to me by my own hand on their watch. I gave them my word, watched them leave, and tried to cry. I couldn't.