W Switch Box

It was raining outside. One of those soft, silent days that
ordinarily came as a relief from the summer heat. Tony should have been
happy. Instead he chose to wait till everyone left wrapped up in their
narrowminded self centered selves. Then he shut the door to his room
pulled the Panadol from the mess of cds, dirty coffee cups and broken
headphones, sat down on his unmade bed and swallowed them all one by
one. They stuck in his throat and made him gag. He'd always hated
taking pills. Especially the types that started dissolving as soon as
you took a sip of water and left an awful bitter tongue withering taste
on your buds. That's why he chose Panadol...that and because it was the
only thing lying around the house that he thought would be any good. He
wished he could have found some valium but his
mother had run out.

He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He wondered how long it
would take. He hoped not too long. There was no way out. He'd run out
of all options. No matter how hard he'd tried to work things out his
own way they wouldn't leave him alone. They were always after him with
their stupid rants about "expectations" and "hopes" and how he had to
be what they wanted him to be.He'd tried his best and when he found it
wasn't working he'd even lied so they wouldn't have to worry about him.
So that they could go on living their lives peacefully and not have to
have that awful scene where he'd be sat in the middle and his mother
would scream in one ear, his dad in the other and his sister would sit
upstairs in her room, red eyed and wet nosed waiting till it was over
and she could sneak into his room to beg him to tell her what
happened.

Remembering all these things wasn't doing anything for his peace of
mind and the dammed pills were taking too long so he tried curling up
into a ball and squeezing his head. Somehow he fell asleep.

Shit! Something stank like hell. Was it hell? He felt so comfortable as
if he was lying on feathers and his eyes wouldn't open. Then someone
started slapping his face, not hard but hard enough to make him roll
over and mutter f--- off! He opened his eyes when he felt the cold wet
tiles of the bathroom floor against his cheek. There was a pool of
vomit in front of his eyes and "shit!" he thought "Why's my throat
burning"

Tony wandered into the ER his arm slung around the neck of Joe his
friend and fellow guitar player. Joe's hair stuck up on end even more
than usual today. He spent ages every day smearing gunk on it and
sticking it up in spikes. Maybe it was the fear that made him look like
a hedgehog with a knife up it's backside.
They shuffled in and were taken care of. A nurse pulled Tony off Joe's
neck and had him set up with a needle in his hand hooked to a bottle of
i/v fluids. A pale faced doctor flashed his torch in Tony's eyes and
muttered something that sounded like "you'll be fine kid" They washed
his stomach out and gave him a couple of shots of "Panadol antidote".
Then another doctor marched in and sat down on his bed. "So, how you
feeling? better now? Anything you'd like to ask? No concerns? Ok, well
you'll be glad to know your liver's fine. You could have screwed it up
real bad with that Panadol stuff but that's all taken care of. So we'll
send you home in the morning. Anyone you'd like us to call? Your
friend's taking care of it? That's great. Well...(throat clearing,
confidential voice) Tony I hope you realize that this isn't the end of
it, we're not going to let you go home without more help. Would you
like to tell me the series of events that lead to your swallowing 15
tablets of Panadol?"
Tony muttered no, off course so the doctor cleared his throat again and
said he'd be put in touch with a "coucillor", so they could work on the
cause of his "depression" and figure out what lead to his "attempted
suicide".

Tony's parents were waiting outside and as soon as the doctor left they
swarmed in and covered him with their blankets of emotion, leaving him
smothered.Later the councillor, a nice looking lady with fluffy red
hair invited him into her office and made him cry unreservedly. She put
him on antidepressants and told him she would help him work his
problems out so he could find better solutions than swallowing pills,
which more often than not destroyed vital internal mechanisms and left
you alive but handicapped in subtle and not so subtle ways. He liked
her vague way of talking it allowed his imagination room to breathe and
didn't gross him out the way the doctor's liver descriptions did.

Ten years and one more suicide attempt later Tony gave up trying to
keep his parents happy and decided to become a writer. He grew his hair
down to his shoulders and wandered around in pyjamas all day, unshaved
with a cigarette dangling out the corner of his mouth. He wrote a
couple of good stories and a score of terrible ones and still kept
hoping everyting would be all right. Everything did turn out all right
but only when he lowered his expectations of what could be defined as
"all right".

Meeting Tony and getting to know him was what made me decide I wanted
to be a psychiatrist. Looking at Tony you get the feeling he could have
been something more like a Porche than the battered up VW he is now. I
wonder how much of that is external and how much due to some switch in
his brain that's been turned off when it should be on. And maybe that's
all we are in the end a number of switches varying only in the
differant conbinations of off and on that can be made.
I'll figure it out sometime and let you know.