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Authors: Leigh Stein
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could be saved with a lobotomy.
Do they perform lobotomies anymore?
I wondered. The doctor was putting on gloves. I was staring at the ceiling, where a picture of a deserted beach had been torn from a calendar and pinned with a thumbtack.
Wasn’t there a Tennessee Williams play about lobotomies and cannibalism? And wasn’t it set on an island?
“When did you say your last pap smear was?”
“That’s not why I’m here,” I said, and sat back up. “I don’t need one. I get them, like, all the time.”
“If you’ve had one within the last year, we don’t haveto do one today,” he said, clearly not a fan of jokes, laughter, or hyperbole. “What can I help you with?”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Or when I do sleep, I wake up throughout the night, feeling panicked. And I forget the right words.”
“Such as?”
“The word I want. The right name for something. The other day I couldn’t remember what Pop Tarts were called and I like kept thinking,
Toaster pastry. Toaster pastry
, but it never came. It’s like I have a brain tumor.”
I was wearing shorts. The white paper on the table stuck to my thighs.
“Deep breath in, please.”
He put the stethoscope above my heart.
“And another.”
My pulse always raced at the doctor’s. I tried to slow my breathing, but I didn’t even know if that would help anything. As I breathed, I wondered if any measure of my physical health could be considered accurate if recorded under circumstances that actually disrupted my health.
The observer effect. The act of observing changes the phenomenon being observed
. Where I had learned that? I could see the textbook page in my mind.
“Any vision problems?”
“I wear contacts.”
“Any blurred vision, double vision, loss of peripheral vision?”
“Not usually.”
“Occasionally?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Any pins and needles sensations? Loss of feeling in your arms or legs?”
“No.” To compete with his cool skepticism, I was tempted to lie, to answer
yes
. I had been on the Internet and I knew what I needed to say in order to convince him I was dying.
The doctor removed the earpieces of his stethoscope and felt the glands in my neck.
“History of depression or anxiety?”
“I’m on Wellbutrin and Zoloft.”
I didn’t tell him that my parents had sent me to a therapist for the first time at my fourth grade teacher’s request because of what happened after we learned the definition of the word “utopia.” Mrs. Taylor told our class that we were each to build a clay model of our own idyllic land and write an essay describing its inhabitants and code of laws. Mine was a lush tropical island full of orphans and small, furry animals, such as guinea pigs and chinchillas, which were kept as pets and never eaten. The animals could speak, in a language the children understood, and they said things like,
Eepity bip bip! Shimminy pop! Slithery twility coo!
In retrospect, the language sounded a lot like a combination of doo-wop and the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky.”
The orphans on my island were egalitarian. They recycled and rode tandem bicycles and looked like Precious Moments dolls. I knew I had to explain what had happened to their parents, to explain the missing adults, so at the very end of the essay, after all my cutesy
bips
and
coos
, I described a horrific plague that had swept the island in the 1980s and killed everyone over the age of twelve by cooking their bodies from the inside out. In my utopia, all the adults were dead and the children survived upon their parents’ roasted flesh.
“More than two depressive episodes in your life so far?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A few. I just had one before graduation.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Northwestern.”
“Good school. My eldest daughter is applying there this fall.”
“Small world,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
Dr. Humorless told me to follow his pen with my
Do they perform lobotomies anymore?
I wondered. The doctor was putting on gloves. I was staring at the ceiling, where a picture of a deserted beach had been torn from a calendar and pinned with a thumbtack.
Wasn’t there a Tennessee Williams play about lobotomies and cannibalism? And wasn’t it set on an island?
“When did you say your last pap smear was?”
“That’s not why I’m here,” I said, and sat back up. “I don’t need one. I get them, like, all the time.”
“If you’ve had one within the last year, we don’t haveto do one today,” he said, clearly not a fan of jokes, laughter, or hyperbole. “What can I help you with?”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Or when I do sleep, I wake up throughout the night, feeling panicked. And I forget the right words.”
“Such as?”
“The word I want. The right name for something. The other day I couldn’t remember what Pop Tarts were called and I like kept thinking,
Toaster pastry. Toaster pastry
, but it never came. It’s like I have a brain tumor.”
I was wearing shorts. The white paper on the table stuck to my thighs.
“Deep breath in, please.”
He put the stethoscope above my heart.
“And another.”
My pulse always raced at the doctor’s. I tried to slow my breathing, but I didn’t even know if that would help anything. As I breathed, I wondered if any measure of my physical health could be considered accurate if recorded under circumstances that actually disrupted my health.
The observer effect. The act of observing changes the phenomenon being observed
. Where I had learned that? I could see the textbook page in my mind.
“Any vision problems?”
“I wear contacts.”
“Any blurred vision, double vision, loss of peripheral vision?”
“Not usually.”
“Occasionally?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Any pins and needles sensations? Loss of feeling in your arms or legs?”
“No.” To compete with his cool skepticism, I was tempted to lie, to answer
yes
. I had been on the Internet and I knew what I needed to say in order to convince him I was dying.
The doctor removed the earpieces of his stethoscope and felt the glands in my neck.
“History of depression or anxiety?”
“I’m on Wellbutrin and Zoloft.”
I didn’t tell him that my parents had sent me to a therapist for the first time at my fourth grade teacher’s request because of what happened after we learned the definition of the word “utopia.” Mrs. Taylor told our class that we were each to build a clay model of our own idyllic land and write an essay describing its inhabitants and code of laws. Mine was a lush tropical island full of orphans and small, furry animals, such as guinea pigs and chinchillas, which were kept as pets and never eaten. The animals could speak, in a language the children understood, and they said things like,
Eepity bip bip! Shimminy pop! Slithery twility coo!
In retrospect, the language sounded a lot like a combination of doo-wop and the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky.”
The orphans on my island were egalitarian. They recycled and rode tandem bicycles and looked like Precious Moments dolls. I knew I had to explain what had happened to their parents, to explain the missing adults, so at the very end of the essay, after all my cutesy
bips
and
coos
, I described a horrific plague that had swept the island in the 1980s and killed everyone over the age of twelve by cooking their bodies from the inside out. In my utopia, all the adults were dead and the children survived upon their parents’ roasted flesh.
“More than two depressive episodes in your life so far?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A few. I just had one before graduation.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Northwestern.”
“Good school. My eldest daughter is applying there this fall.”
“Small world,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
Dr. Humorless told me to follow his pen with my
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