Felt like sharing
Thanks to Rogers and their unending pursuit of quality in customer care and service, I found myself in an internet-less abyss the other day and came across something I saved on my computer that I thought I would share with you. Our word was:
Prescription
"What’s the first thing that comes to you, how do you feel right now as I show you this..."
As he looked across the desk at the card being held up, only one thing could come to him. Looking past the card being held up by two fingers and thumb, he saw the doctor’s face, cold and unwavering, insistent.
He expects me to think this, he wants me to think this, if I think this, that makes him right.
He looks back at the card then down at his hands folded in his lap. How did those hands land him here in this world of doctors, counsellings, rehabilitation, and prescriptions? Once, he had other kinds of prescriptions to be filled. Psychosomatic, need driven, impulsive. These words drove his life for the past ten years dictating his desires, choosing his actions, landing him here, now, with that card facing him and the doctor waiting for some sort of answer.
The doctor sat patiently waiting for the man to figure out what came to him, what this card meant. The only things the man could think of came from what he had read in various pop-psychology books. A picture, perhaps disturbing to most, will bring about certain documentable reactions in people with certain nervous disorders, and once these reactions are documented, treatment can begin, prescriptions can be written, and institutionalizations can take place. The sooner this man is categorized, the sooner he can begin the process of re-entering normal society. He can buy a house and a car and get a job. He can have normal interpersonal relationships. He will contribute to the economy, vote, and have barbecues during the summer months. The doctor, who did all of these things himself, worked hard to help people become as useful to society as he was.
This man, a drug addict, a thief, and a murderer, was brought to him a week ago. During that week, a cleansing was necessary in order for the institutional drugs to take effect. The man was removed of all street drugs, his system was flushed. He was made pure, and only in the span of a week. The doctor was proud of his staff’s ability to cleanse people so quickly. He could put Betty Ford out of business if the outside world knew of his methods, but the patients he worked with were not voluntarily submitted to his care, they were sentenced to him. People on the outside had no intention of actually becoming pure. If this mad man, this pure body, submitted only a week ago, had been released after that first week, he would not survive. New drugs were administered in order to assure that his new state of purity would take hold.
The man looked up from his hands and faced the doctor again.
He wants me to think this, he thinks again, without knowing what this was.
Something won’t let him. Something inside him was telling him that to think the doctors way, play the doctor’s game, was the wrong thing to do. What was the right thing then? He wanted only to escape back into the streets, run to his water stained apartment, be his own person, but this doctor was somehow keeping him here. To be here was wrong for him. He knew where he was, he was in an institution, a mental hospital, a nut house. He knew that he somehow belonged there, and he felt it fitting that the doctor was there with him, telling him what to think of that card, the picture being held two feet from his face. There was a prescriptions pad waiting on the doctor’s desk with a pen balanced across the top of it, eager to help him, if only he would speak. He could not choose silence, for that had a treatment as well. Outrage was another option, but such violent emotions were not suitable for a productive contributor and voter. Acceptance was symptomatic of a repression and inability to express himself clearly. Either road leads him to the prescription pad.
He thought instead of a note, leading to a chord, coming from a piano being played in an empty hall. The doctor still sat watching him. He played the chord again, resonating it through the space between himself and that lone observer. He played another chord, threw some melodies in on top of it. He played another chord, then returned to the first one, added more melody, and paused. The doctor, now sitting fifty feet away in the large hall, looked at him, at his piano, and simply held up the card again, insistently. The man threw himself back at the piano, giving a loud wail. He peppered the keys as he cried out, trying to forget the card that the doctor was forcing him to look at. The idiot music was equally insistent in its spontaneity as he drove the doctor out of the hall with all his will. He stopped as abruptly as he began and looked out to see the card still facing him, unmoved.
Back in the office, the doctor watched the patient sweat. He was intrigued by this. He lifted a pen out of an old cracked coffee cup turned office supply and wrote on the file: patient resists treatment. The sudden movement brought the man back into the office. The leather chair was becoming sticky as he sat in his clinical white clothes and slippers. He scanned the office with his eyes as if he had just sat down. He looked from the certificates on the wall, framed for posterity and longevity, to the man sitting across from him, to the prescription pad with the pen laying at ease on top, to the outstretched hand holding a card.
"It’s a bird," he said.
"Very good, Mr. Cranston," said the doctor. "Now what is this card?"
"It’s a sunset."
"And this one, Mr. Cranston?"
"A mountain," he replied. They continued on for most of the morning, the man becoming more and more at ease with the exercise.
"What is nine plus eight?"
"Seventeen."
"And, now, who are you?" asked the doctor, leaning forward and placing the cards aside. The man looked up, puzzled. After the mornings exercise, he could only think of one was to answer that, but he knew it was not right. He knew that he was more than one thing, but the tree was a tree, the cloud was a cloud, nine plus eight was seventeen. He looked around for a picture of himself, but he couldn’t find anything. He looked at the picture of the doctor’s family on his desk, searching for familiarity or something to point to, but the children seemed too small, the wife too delicate, and the man in the picture was sitting in front of him, talking to him. He said the only thing he did know:
"My name is Jerry Cranston." As false as that seemed, he continued. "I live at 126 Caprice, unit 4." There was more than this, something deeper and more meaningful, yet he continued. "I was born on March 19th, 1972, in Toronto. I grew up in Toronto. I had my first bike when I was five, smoked my first cigarette when I was seventeen." That was where he stopped. He couldn’t reduce himself to these details, yet he felt good allowing himself the pleasure. The years of resistance faded from his face. The doctor looked at him and smiled a pleased smile. He picked up his pen and wrote a few words on the prescription pad, tore the sheet off, handed it to Jerry, and said; "You can go home now."
Jerry got up and walked out of the office. The orderly had his belongings ready for him. He changed his clothes, got his prescription, and left the hospital as the doctor watched him go, as he watched all his patients, from the barred window of his office.
