He Came in With It: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness by Miriam Feldman

Author:Miriam Feldman [Feldman, Miriam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Psychology, Mental Health
ISBN: 9781684425112
Google: LvpTyAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1684425115
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 2020-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

When I arrived home, the answering machine was blinking.

“Hello, this is the emergency room at Kaiser Sunset, and we have a John Doe here that we believe might be someone you know. Please call us back as soon as possible,” the black box told me. It was 1:15 p.m. The message had come in at 9:45 a.m.

I sunk slowly into my desk chair. I listened to it again. In my panic, I kept thinking, John Doe. Isn’t that how they refer to dead bodies?

“Hello, my name is Miriam Feldman, and I have a son who has schizophrenia. I received a message that there is a John Doe there who might … be … him?” My voice faltered.

It turned out that Nick had been sitting outside our neighborhood sandwich shop the afternoon before and had passed out on the pavement. A woman ran inside for help, and they called the paramedics.

He’d been taken to the hospital but had no identification. He woke up and told them our home number, then passed out again. No one knew why. He was in there for two days. He didn’t remember anything. When we left, the nurse handed me a bag with his belongings. It consisted of a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and his favorite “The Who” T-shirt that had been cut raggedly in half by the paramedics when they tried to revive him.

The scene played itself out in my mind as similar scenes I had seen on television: The paramedics have the inert patient on a gurney. He is not breathing. They take out the oddly shaped medical scissors and urgently chop, chop, chop the shirt to access the chest. The shirt is pulled out from under him and thrown aside. It turns out someone retrieves it and returns it. I still have that shirt in a ziplock bag at the back of my drawer today, with the Bob Dylan one.

I just couldn’t get over the John Doe thing. I was more shaken up by the idea that he’d been called a “John Doe” than by the fact that he’d passed out. A John Doe? He wasn’t that. He wasn’t some unknown, uncared-for nobody. He was Nick Fucking O’Rourke.

I went to the shop to find out what had happened. Nick had gotten a sandwich and was outside eating when the woman came in and said he’d gone unconscious. She’d sat on the ground with him until the ambulance arrived, lifting his head off the sidewalk onto her lap.

I tracked her down and called her. I cried (of course) and thanked her for holding his head.

One thing was certain: we had to find a way to make sure Nick had identification on him at all times. I drove to Petco. I walked up to the arcade-style machine and inserted some coins. I left the store with two dog-bone shaped metal tags with our phone number on them. One for Woody, who was clearly our dog now. And one for Nick, which I put on his wrist.

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