Chase the Rainbow by Poorna Bell

Author:Poorna Bell [Bell, Poorna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Chapter Nine

‘What came first,’ asked Rob’s psychiatrist, ‘the addiction or the depression?’

We were sitting in the Priory, in The Doctor’s expensive office, drinking rapidly cooling tea. It was a rhetorical question.

As we waited in the natural pause that followed, I heard Rob pacing outside while we had this private chat. Wondering what his doctor would tell me. Wondering if I would leave him, when I finally knew the true extent of it all.

After Rob told me the truth about his addiction, I agreed to stay with him and work through it on one condition. If he relapsed or felt close to relapsing, he would tell me and we would get help. The worst thing, I said, was being lied to.

‘I love you, but my parents didn’t raise me to be an idiot,’ I said.

In the nine months following that conversation, Rob relapsed twice. Once on heroin, once on alcohol. Both times had been surrounded yet again by layer upon layer of lies; he had allowed weeks to pass, weeks where I questioned my own sanity, where I questioned him, before he finally owned up.

Although by now I knew the signs – lack of sleep, a reluctance to come to bed at the same time as me, borrowing money and loss of appetite – somehow he had still managed to hoodwink me. He traded on excuses and the trust I had in him, what little was left of it.

Why didn’t I leave him? Why didn’t I just say no, put my foot down and demand utter compliance?

Because I was human and I had feelings. I wasn’t a doctor; I wasn’t dealing with a patient. Because what kind of marriage was it if I became the disciplinarian and treated him like a child?

Rob was a human being, a difficult, obstinate, often aggravating human being, but nonetheless an adult who deserved dignity, and, like other people struggling with a dual diagnosis of mental illness and addiction, he needed it more than most.

I don’t know how I knew this but I did: the reason why Rob had come to this point was because he believed he wasn’t worth anything. The most important thing I could do for him was to help restore his humanity.

While I’m painfully aware how Rob’s battle with addiction ended, I asked Dr Shanahan if he noticed any commonalities in people who managed to stay clean for years. He said that ‘the insulation of hope was very important to people’.

‘The feeling that something better was possible. The maintenance of friendships, however thin and tenuous they were. Just someone who continued to trust and believe in them a little bit. Just believing, as I do, that if there is life, there’s hope.’

I don’t think people realise how hard it is when you are trying to decipher genuine cause from excuses, when your relationship is lost in a moral miasma of grey and half-truths. It’s not as simple as shutting the door, kicking them out.

When you don’t know the truth, when all you

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