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Visiting My Sister In The Psych Unit
I tap on the window glass of the art therapy room to get my sister’s attention. Her big brown eyes, magnified by drugstore reading glasses, look up. She sees me but doesn’t react, goes back to painting a naïve scene of the East River. So I wait for her, as I have for decades.
My sister embodies the grit of a bullfighter. She has a big heart for small dogs and a guttural laugh that defies her petite frame. And she has a serious and debilitating mental illness, which led her — again — to a New York hospital after a distressing incident at her neighborhood senior center. The hospital’s acute care psychiatric unit did not have a bed available at the time. But, fortunately, a positive UTI result allowed her to be admitted — the kind of twist, both serendipitous and tragic, that has followed my sister since childhood.
Her traumatic journey began when she was nine years old and contracted a rare case of measles encephalitis. It was 1960, three years before a vaccine could have made her disease preventable. One out of 1,000 children who got measles back then suffered a lifelong disability. My sister was one. She suffers permanent brain injury and lives with complicated mental health psychoses.
This insidious disease has been a struggle for my sister her entire life. She rejects treatment, counseling, family assistance and government aid…
