Temperature – 37
CHS: Patient refused to cooperate
ME: Mind clear, but patient disoriented
(7) Behavior:
Denied she was ill, hospitalized against will. Pays no attention to her appearance, thin and weak. Ho interest in food or drink. Incapable of managing her own daily life. Unable to sleep at night due to agitation. Refuses to be examined. Frequently throws away prescribed drugs. Cooperates occasionally with nurses. Has nothing to do with other patients, refuses to participate in group activities, staying in room by herself. Talks to herself, says she is surrounded by enemies.
(8) Cognitive Processes: Language fragmented when agitated. Disconnected comments such as: "What am I doing in a planetarium?" "I might as well die, civilization is a fraud." Believes one of her hands is controlled by outside forces. Asked which hand, she replied, "Right hand." Also claims she is held in tight bonds.
Memory fragmented. Says her name is "Miss Nothing."
(9) Intellectual Ability:
Able to explain the apparent contradictions of such phrases as "opposition through agreement," "the poverty of golden dreams," "witching for water to quench your thirst," "rebellion through submission"; can explain such things as why those born deaf cannot learn to speak, why the soles of running shoes are always so uneven, why ice floats on water, and why railway trains cannot run on highways; recognizes the different connotations of such terms as "modesty" and "self-abasement," "fantasy" and "ideals," "respect" and "flattery," "liveliness" and "frivolity"; clearly understands the different implications of the phrases "a wolf in sheep's clothing" and "a sheep in wolf's clothing," and illustrated this rather humorously by picking up a writing brush made of wolf hair with a core of sheep hair, saying that it was a sheep in wolf's clothing. But patient's responses to mathematical questions slow and inaccurate. She was unable to count down from 100 in sevens, and could not figure what the change on a dollar would be when purchasing three eight-cent postage stamps.
(10) Emotional Processes:
Largely keeps to her own thoughts, showing no interest in what goes on around her. Pays no attention to others. Sometimes will not even answer doctor's questions.
(11) Motivation and Behavior:
Generally inactive, spends much time in bed, makes no effort to communicate with others, doesn't look after herself well. Once in a while her old energy returns. On one occasion she suddenly embraced one of the doctors and said, "Yin Han, let's get married." (Yin Han was name of patient's former boyfriend.) When her father unexpectedly came to see her, behaved as if she did not know him, saying, "Leave me alone, leave me alone" – nothing else.
…
Patient's first hospitalization; light care.
Doctor: Qi Luo
I began an intense scrutiny of these records, digging deeply into every entry and taking copious notes.
One day as I was working away at this, I got all excited as I recalled Nostradamus's prophecy. I started figuring the time left.
It was already the spring of 1992, with seven years to go until 1999. I really like the number seven, and nine was my absolute favorite of all numbers. But that wasn't important. I did a little figuring – seven years is 2,555 days, only 61,320 hours, and I had to straighten out all these questions before I died.
Time was pressing, and I didn't know if there were any shortcuts.
Not long after that, I had a perfectly normal dream.
The character in the dream was my then self, but the time was pushed back to when Mother, Father, and I were all still living together. It was at the time in my childhood when we lived in the house with the huge date tree in the courtyard. The wet courtyard was carpeted with lush green leaves blown down by the wind, the branches of the tree stretching like great long arms, the longest arms in the world, from the east wall right across to rest firmly on the west wall of the courtyard, and the ground was sprinkled with sweet dates as fat and round as little pigs.
That opportunistic cat that I had so hated in my childhood also put in an appearance, strutting self-importantly back and forth in front of me.
Everything in the scene was from my childhood.
I dreamed that I was getting ready to go to a palace I had never been to before, a palace with shining golden walls that everyone else knew about but I didn't. And I still didn't know how to get there. From the map I could see that it was a long, long way away. Then that opportunistic cat paraded over in front of me to tell me about a little path. He said it was much shorter and would save me a lot of time and energy. Because I didn't trust him, I phoned the palace to make sure. They said the little path would take me to the palace, but that when I got there it wouldn't be the same palace anymore.
When I woke up, the symbolic message of the dream was obvious.
It let me see that there are no shortcuts in this world, so I started to work furiously on the material on my desk.
How ironic it was that just when I felt that every day might indeed be my last, my story had finally begun.
For an entire year I put everything into my work. I spent the greater part of every day recalling and setting down my personal history, or burying myself deep in thought. Probably because there were so few things in that apartment that had any energy or life in them, the feeling began to affect me. It felt as if my blood were congealing, and even my period was affected, the cycle getting longer and longer, my period coming later and later.
At first I paid no attention to this problem. But after a while, I began thinking that maybe, just as with mental illness, my body was signaling me that it was involved in a struggle against forces harmful to its health. So I decided to go and see Qi Luo.
By this time Qi Luo and I had become genuine friends, not just doctor-patient "friends."
He gave me a little bottle of pills with the medical name "levoromethylnorethindrone," or, in lay terms, birth-control pills.
"What kind of a joke is this?" I asked. "I spend the whole day locked up in an empty house like a vestal virgin, yet you want me to take birth-control pills?"
He laughed. "You don't understand. Aside from preventing the implantation of eggs in your uterus, they regulate your body's production of endocrinal hormones." That, I could understand.
Before I went to bed that night, I swallowed that little round yellow birth-control pill, and turning to look at my empty, guiltless bed, I couldn't stop laughing. I laughed and laughed. I laughed until tears were streaming down my face.
It seemed like that little pill did not want to do what it was told. It stuck in my throat where it jiggled about, refusing to go down, as if it were enjoying some preposterous joke.
After that, my long, arduous research began in earnest, and my dogged persistence at this endless and draining work left me exhausted.
21 The Lonely Are A Shameless Lot…
Life, like grass, needs moisture because our cells cannot survive without it; therefore, life can exist only in mire.
"It's the season of love – everybody, everybody, hug hug hug… the lonely are a shameless lot." Since the beginning of the '90s, everybody in Beijing has been singing this song. You hear it everywhere you go, in the shops and on the streets.
Perhaps they have to give their lives some meaning or purpose in order to carry on.
But I have to admit, I'm without doubt one of the "shameless" ones. Rather than keeping up with the beat of the times and throwing open my door to the season of love, I find that I have closed my door even tighter. And I have a love that runs totally counter to the times – in my bathroom. To be precise, my bathtub.
In such a big apartment, such an unexpected place to find love!
It all began one day when I was having my bath. As I lay soaking in the tub, in the water's warm and eager arms, all my loneliness and fatigue melted away.