Do you have an appetite? Would you care if you died? Who would care if you died? Do you know why you are here? What do you want to do after high school?
It goes on forever, but this doesn’t seem to bother me. I just answer the questions, one after the other. I tell him the truth. I don’t care what he knows. And I tell him everything except for what happened with Giovanni.
“This last one is my favourite,” Warren says, finally putting down his clipboard. “If you could make three wishes, what would they be?”
“I don’t make wishes.”
“If you had to.”
“Okay. Off the top of my head? I wish I could go home. I wish for twenty million dollars. And …” I look at him. “I wish you’d go away?”
Warren taps his pen against the page and closes the binder. “Got it,” he says, winking. “I’m done. Thanks for hanging in there.”
Warren returns a while later and introduces me to the psychiatrist. She’s a middle-aged, nerdy lady with a whispery, soft voice. She explains to me that she’s just here to talk about what happened and assess my current state of well-being. She gives me a fresh hospital gown to put on and then I have to follow her down the hallway and into this little room with two chairs and a desk and a window looking into the nurses’ station. She asks me lots of the same questions as Warren, only she goes more into my mom and Bradley and my counselling with Eric. Somehow, she even gets me to tell her about Michael, which at this point I don’t care about keeping a secret anymore. I just want him over with. I want him out of my mind.
By the kinds of questions she keeps asking me, I can tell she thinks I tried to kill myself. Then finally she comes right out and asks it. “Melissa, do you think there’s a possibility that you took these drugs on purpose? Did you know that this amount of drugs had the potential to kill you?”
“You mean did I try to commit suicide?”
“Yes,” she answers with a warm and open expression.
I think a little. “I don’t know,” I say. And it’s the truth. I mean, I don’t remember thinking, I want to die. But then again, I must have known that taking so much could be deadly.
“Well, I think that’s something we should explore a little more, then.” She says she’s going to recommend that I stay on the “unit” for some observation time, and she’ll make a referral to a psychiatrist for when I get out to see about
medication.
“You think I’m depressed?” I ask.
“I think it’s a possibility, Melissa,” she says gently. “I think you have a lot going on in your life, and that in some ways you’re doing a great job at coping, or maybe masking the sadness. But I think, given this last incident, your fights with peers, your recent breakup, and your family stress … it’s enough to constitute concern.”
“I don’t feel depressed,” I reflect.
“Depression isn’t always just being sad. It comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s anger or apathy. Or sometimes it shows itself through the coping mechanisms, like drugs and alcohol or criminal activity.”
Now that she’s talking about depression, I get scared. I don’t want to take any pills. “I’m not going to do it again,” I assure her, as if that will change anything now.
“That’s good to hear, Melissa. I really hope not.” She smiles and then gets up, indicating our time is up. “I hope to have a chance to meet with you one more time before you go home.”
I’m back in my bed in the emergency room, almost asleep, and my mom is reading a magazine on the chair when the social worker returns with a youngish woman. “Hello,” the ice queen social worker says, “this is Alexis, one of the CYCs from the fourth floor.”
“Hi there!” she says cheerfully, waving at my mom and me.
The ice queen turns to my mom. “So, we are accepting your request for an ASU bed for Melissa here at the hospital.” Then she turns to me. “We feel your ongoing risk-taking behaviour, Melissa, constitutes a significant threat to your own safety.”
She moves in closer to my mom and lowers her voice slightly, as if I’m not going to hear. “Since there’s a history of aggression and threatening behaviour toward others, as well as a history of high-risk activities such