Dr. A. Part I

Another instalment in my memoir-in-progress about how everything I did when my 20-year-old son was in a psychiatric hospital in 2018 was informed by the secrets, shame, and lies surrounding my dad's suicide 44 years earlier.

The grounds were not nearly this inviting in March when Noah landed in the hospital, but by the end of May, when he finally left for good, it was nearly this green

The aide who showed us around the hospital on the night Noah was admitted said that someone would call us the next morning to set up a family meeting, so we’d know what was going on. But nobody called. I waited all morning. Finally, impatient, I called to ask when we were going to have our family meeting.

“That’s up to the doctor,” the woman at the other end of the phone informed me.

“But the person who showed us around last night—I think he was a psych aide—he said that we’d have a family meeting.” I’m sure that I sounded desperate. I sure felt desperate.

“A family meeting isn’t guaranteed,” the woman said in a tone that implied I should have known better. Then, in what felt like the vocal equivalent of a flyswatter batting away a pest, she added, “When the doctor wants to meet with you, he’ll call you.”

I wanted to cry but I did my best to hold myself together. “Do you know when that might be?” I asked.

Of course she didn’t. That was the end of the conversation. I hung up, completely rattled, the hope that had sustained me overnight gone.

I wanted to know what was going on with my son. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t talk to us, but he was a psychiatric patient. How much did he understand about his mental health? I wanted the expert opinion. I wanted to know how sick he was and when he was going to get better. Even after he signed consent papers giving the medical staff permission to share his health records with us, I got no information unless I asked, and often the nurses acted as if my questions were intrusive and unwarranted.

The longer Noah was in 12A, the Young Adult Unit at Alberta Hospital Edmonton, the more I began to get the sense that the staff believed that we, the patients’ families, were the cause of the patients’ problems, and therefore we did not need to be, nor should we be, a part of the solution.