It is difficult for me to leave the house. I have what I can afford delivered and do without the rest. My multiple mental illnesses are degenerative. Diagnosed in the Prozac Nation nineties? It’s been pills with unknown long term side effects ever since. Enabling whatever hoopla I manage to pull off. Thirty years on nonconsensual antipsychotics that were known since the 1950’s to cause tardive dyskinesia? Unpredictable loss of bodily control. Jerking movements. Motor control difficulties. Dizziness. Accidental difficulty walking until that capacity is lost. I wondered why I was so dedicated to assistive technology and setting up voice recognition within my home.
I swallow what passing pride I have left. Order a recommended shower chair. I slipped and hit my head, so showering became a PTSD trigger. I take baths. Until the addition of Freddie Mercury Lambert, Jasper’s cat. Nevada Jacobson-Lambert, from my first marriage, started shitting in the bathtub to act out. Blended families aren’t easy. Even with these cute little fuckers. No wonder I smelled like a polecat doused in sickly sweet Velvet Tuberose.
All I want to do is bathe and have a cup of coffee. I’m only forty three. Prozac Nation’s Elizabeth Wurtzel was 52 when she passed, as this essay was written.
I can no longer drink coffee without it spilling everywhere. I grit my teeth and drink cold coffee from an adult convalescent sippy cup now. After enduring the “Summer of straws,” where abled’s on Twitter expressed that the Disabled, many who could not drink fluids at all without disposable plastic straws, were acceptable subhuman collateral damage for saving sea turtles.
Cans of unassailable sweet tart tasting energy drinks were my constant sidekick. Cans don’t spill if my hands shake or jerk uncontrollably with tardive dykinesia. Known side effect of a lifetime of antipsychotics. The reason I now walk strangely, fall on hardwood floors when I wear socks. I can only wear flat shoes outside. Exquisite platform heels gather dust behind flat boots. Encouraging agoraphobia because I’m embarrassed of flailing in public and something more humiliating or life destroying happening. The psychiatrists I’ve had must have all known this would happen as it been common psychiatric knowledge since the 1960s. Did they not think I’d live to see it’s full development?
I don’t even have to ask why I don’t matter. Society told me with all those shots of non consensual Haldol in my ass. Long term effects from these antipsychotics were never researched, says my research, yet other recipients of these human experiments must exist if it was being used in the 1950s. That’s how time works. Certainly reads as no scientist in seventy years thought the quality of life for older schizophrenics is worth their time.
It makes me feel like no one can be trusted. The medical establishment relied upon all my adult life for medication pulled Melania Trump, “I don’t care, do you?”
Andrea Lambert 