Bink has a date! (I)

2002

Bink was almost a prisoner in her own room.

(Respect for her dignity constrains me from spelling out exactly what that means. Use your imagination. Peek, for instance, into your daughter’s bedroom for the first time in some weeks, and realise with sickening and horrified pity that she hasn’t been able to use the amenities. She often couldn’t wash or clean her teeth for months, either. Our brilliant Bink was almost a caged animal.)

There were long periods – months on end; perhaps years – when she had to wear rubber gloves, even to eat. She couldn’t touch books, musical instruments, a radio; certainly not food or glasses to drink out of. I bought her audio books, but she couldn’t touch a CD player. And couldn’t concentrate anyway.

We had a lumbering computer at the very top of the house, on a little landing lined with bookshelves which we called the Reading Corner. One afternoon when the children were small I had painted the walls (those not covered with books) with rainbows and birds and happy, smiling clouds. It was a comfortable place to be.

(After we left the Vicarage and before Shaun’s post was even advertised, the Diocese slapped magnolia over every surface – C of E clergy aren’t paid enough to justify colours on the walls – and chopped down the Cedar of Lebanon I’d put in the front garden and the luscious vine I’d tended in the conservatory we built. I learnt all this at a sad time, when I was desperately missing our dear home, and mourned the new Vicarage children not being allowed to choose whether to keep our hopping library birds and dripping indoor grapes. The Diocese also pulled down and skipped the large above-ground pool we had spent our first summer building and all subsequent summers swimming in and sharing, which we had specially left spotlessly clean – with a new motor and filter – for the new Vicarage family. Having no house of our own and never having been able to buy a car, it was the most expensive item we’d ever owned.)

Bink spent a lot of time at the top of the house that year, on that family computer. Presumably wearing her marigolds. I had no idea what she was doing, but at least she was out of bed.

Because her school High Mistress had ruled against telling any of her classmates where she was when she went into the Florence Nightingale Unit, she had lost them all. She was now too ill to leave the house, and had no way of meeting new people. She had no occupation, not even reading. A computer was it, really. And although I didn’t realise this then, the only way she could talk to anyone outside her family.

One day she came and found me, smiled sheepishly, and told me she had a boyfriend. 

“Wow, Bink.” I said. “That’s great news! Tell me all about him.”

He was around twice her age, and had recently been discharged from the army. He also had several children. From different women. He wasn’t allowed contact with any of them, though. Probably because he’d put a bloke in hospital with GBH. Presumably the boyfriend of one of his exes.

And he had invited Bink to his place (several hours away) for the weekend.

And. Yes. She had accepted.

Her eyes shone with excitement and pleasure. Poor Bink! She had little enough of either left in her sad life.

Multiple choice good-parent-questionnaire. At this point, do you:

1. Scream, “You must be out of your tiny little mind! What are you thinking of? Have you never heard about meeting serial rapists / killers / psychopaths via the internet? Don’t you realise you are about to be serially raped / killed / psychopathed!”

2. Lock her up.

3. Ring the police. Then lock her up.

4. Breathe slowly, think fast, and say very carefully and kindly and as enthusiastically as you possibly can, “Bink, that’s really kind of him. How lovely. Shall we have a think about the best way to do this?”

All my girlfriends gave variants on the first three, at various levels of decibel above 100.

Did none of them have any heart? My daughter’s prospects, health, happiness, education, everything, lay in ruins at her feet. She had no friends. She had nothing. She had managed, in this terrible and lonely solitary confinement which is the worst punishment custody inflicts, to make contact with a fellow human being, and he had issued her with the first invitation she had received since the Florence Nightingale Unit ruined her life.

My friends were not going to be any help whatsoever. So I rang my kind, imaginative, compassionate and utterly brilliant mother.

And she said exactly what I’d thought.

“Invite him for the weekend.”

“Thank you. That’s exactly what I thought.”

“Obviously. What else can you do?”

“That’s what I thought too.”

So we did.

(And I rang the police. Just... you know... in case.)

Exhaustion

Present Day.

I simply dissolve into tears.

Somebody passes me the salad – my favourite green-leaf-and-avocado salad, which I had surely made a few minutes earlier? – and I make a decision: I give in, and cry. This is so unlike me that there is a bit of a silence. Serena’s new au pair, sitting next to me, kindly strokes my back. My cousin Fleur, opposite, comes round to my side of the table and says, “Come on, let's go inside,” and steers me in.

There is a beautiful sunset over the sea. There usually is, from my father’s back garden at his seaside house. The photographs from yesterday’s post were simply snapped on my telephone – as all my Sunday photographs will be. Ten or twelve of us were sitting have dinner: delicious salmon barbecued by Christian, Serena’s husband, with sour cream and freshly grated horseradish.

“Is it because nobody appreciates you? All your shopping and cooking?” Fleur hugs me on the sofa.

I am wearily astonished that anyone – certainly someone who knows me as well as Fleur – could think such a trivial thing could upset me. I am no martyr: if my family takes me for granted I tell them.

“I’m just so tired, Fleur. Year after year. Unrelenting. On and on and on.”

“I understand.”

“Please tell everyone that they haven’t upset me. No one’s done anything. I’m just worn out.”

Trying to get treatment for her. Protesting at the way she is abused. Visiting our MP to plead for better services. Persuading any doctor, anywhere, to give her the drugs which doctors got her addicted to. Driving half way round the country to get medication I don’t believe she should have. Fighting her corner. Caring, minding, listening, battling.

Utterly, utterly exhausted.

Presumably by anger as much as love.

Three and a half years ago someone, somewhere, made Bink take Lorazepam. She was told she couldn’t leave A&E until she’d swallowed it. (Illegal? Almost certainly. Watcha gonna do about it?)

The stuff is evil. (I once took one tiny pill of it – Bink gave it to me: let’s leave why for another post – and it wiped out my memory for about fifteen hours. I’ve told her I wouldn’t swallow another if my life depended on it.) I am no pharmacist and certainly no psychiatrist but as far as I can see it is a chemical cosh. Somebody somewhere in A&E wanted rid of her, so they knocked her out.

She has been addicted to it ever since. Currently on four a day. (And – that’s right – just one catapulted me into the middle of next week.)

It is a restricted drug. Only doctors can dish it out. Which in turn means:

1. Doctors got her addicted to it, right?

And,

1. Doctors now won’t give it to her.

Simple as that.

Last Christmas I went to our GP, whom we know well. Bear in mind she is one of the better ones. I told her I was about to do a round trip of 6 hours down to South London to get Bink her prescription for the next week or so. I asked if she could prescribe it instead – given that Bink was (or certainly has been, for a lot of the last nine years) one of her patients. (And given that her husband put Bink on some of the most destructive stuff she’s ever had, without giving her any explanation or information as to what it would do to her.)

Nope.

“So what are we supposed to do?”

Cold turkey.

“Really?” I was incredulous.

“It won’t be pleasant, but it can’t do her any harm. I’ve had patients who’ve done it with heroin.”

The consultation was twenty minutes, during which she reiterated her assertion repeatedly.

So I went home and told Bink. And she tried it. Twice. The results were so horrendously, insanely, critically dangerous the doc might as well have taken out a pistol and shot her. It may be technically true that cold turkey from Lorazepam can’t kill you... if you are tied in a straight-jacket and locked in a padded cell and monitored by a team of trained professionals twenty-four hours a day. A friend of ours who owns several pharmaceutical companies told us if he was addicted to Lorazepam he’d request a clinically-induced week-long coma to free himself of it.

Even a sane person could quite easily have killed herself suffering as Bink did during that medically-advised cold turkey. Bear in mind all that put her on it in the first place and how very much more vulnerable she is...

At one point it sounded as if she was about to be on her own (thirty miles away) so I was trying to keep her safe on the telephone while we worked out who could leave what to be with her: it would need at least two people, so one could sleep.

“So,” she was trying to get to grips with what we were concerned about, sounding like a very drunk and confused six-year-old, “the risk is that I might kill myself?”

“Ultimately, yes,” I agreed.

“Well then,” she said, in all seriousness, “why don’t I do that now, and then there won’t be anything to worry about?”

I loathe Bink’s Lorazepam with all my being, but even I couldn’t support her staying off it that way. No psychiatrist I’ve ever come across has ever suggested cold turkey.

Serena has said several times that I must go back to the GP and tell her, in case her advice does indeed end up killing someone as it could so easily have killed Bink. 

Does it make sense that I am too tired, too angry, too busy keeping Bink alive to work out how without recriminations?

Earlier in the day I had rung her latest surgery and requested a conversation with a doctor, about the next week’s supply: a psychiatrist had written to the surgery to authorise this. I simply got a message on my voicemail from the receptionist: “The senior partner says no.”

What is the point?

I’ve got to get it for her. So this doesn’t discourage the use of this dreadful drug. It simply means I’ve got to spend yet another day of my precious seaside holiday telephoning and begging and trying someone else and racking my brains to get the stuff. It doesn’t get her off it. That needs specialist help, which no one will give her.

It just wrecks me.

So, during our lovely dinner overlooking the sea, surrounded by my lovely family, on this occasion I simply took a decision to give up for a moment, and cry.