The Aerie
Well, I needed that like I need a fucking hole in the head. Oh, the
stress! Good thing I start a vacation tomorrow...
So yesterday I'm on the phone with a client when my cell rings. Caller
ID says it's my mother, which is pretty unusual: she's never called my
cell phone before.
I let the call go because I'm talking to an important client, and I
grab her message when I'm off the phone. My brother is missing.
My brother is four years younger than me physically, but has a
learning disability and is about sixteen years old mentally. He's
pretty high functioning, really -- he lives on his own, holds down a
job when he can get one, and dresses better than I do (I have all the
fashion sense of a clam).
But several years ago he suffered his first psychotic incident.
Unfortunately he's smart enough that things like insults and abuse
bother him, but he's hasn't got the vocabulary and other tools to
allow him to verbalize and work out things that frustrate him. So
instead stressful situations make him obsessive, and he works himself
up into a state. In this case, he got to the point where he was
constantly talking to himself, and started hearing voices and
hallucinating.
Well, that time a couple of years ago, the agencies involved
mis-handled him and ended up locking him in a psychiatric ward for a
couple of days before our mother was notified of the situation. Being
locked up was very traumatic for him.
Recently he got a new job after a long period of unemployment.
Apparently some of the people on the job have been abusing him,
calling him names and stuff. And he worked himself up into another
psychotic state. On Tuesday morning at 2:00 a.m. it took three police
officers to restrain him after he woke the neighbors by beating on the
trash dumpster with a decorative sword (18 inches long with an edge
like a butterknife, but he was lucky they didn't shoot him).
The police dropped him off at the hospital and ordered a 72-hour
evaluation, which the hospital completely ignored. They just wanted to
get him out of their E/R, and called our mother at 4:00 a.m. to have
her come pick him up. So she knows nothing of the 72 hour hold, and
drops him off at his apartment.
At noon his social worker arrives to take him to a psychological
evaluation, and my brother panics. We're guessing he was afraid that
he was going to be sent back the psych ward. After waiting until the
caseworker left, he grabs his coat and disappears.
Three hours later my mother gets off work and learns he is missing,
she calls me. So I head up there and my cousin, my sister and I start
searching. In the dark. We search fields and forest until my coat is
clotted with burrs, we scoured strip malls and shopping malls, no sign
of him.
So, hoping that cold and hunger will drive him home during the night,
we head to bed.
Oh, such a wonderful sleep I had! It was as restful as running up a
flight of stairs, and as soothing as Brillo toilet paper. I woke up at
7:00 a.m. and called my mother, and she told me the TV stations were
there and helicopters were overhead. Then I woke up and realized I'd
been dreaming of calling my mother, and I called my mother for real.
No sign of him.
So I'm thinking okay, scan a photo, start printing off posters, and
I'm just setting about to do this when my mother calls back.
My cousin had gone in to the Catholic School where she works that
morning, but she just wasn't comfortable working. So she went to the
school chapel and prays, saying "Where should I be?" Then she got in
her car, drove to my brother's apartment building, followed a trail
that was invisible in the darkness last evening, and spots a small,
dark lump on the edge of the swampy pond.
It was him.
He had indeed fled the building, and ignoring all logic and reason he
had fled in the straightest line he could, away from the building and
the social worker. He made a beeline for the middle of the pond.
Twenty yards from shore, three feet from the water, he started to
sink. He struggled. And he ended up buried in mud up to his armpits.
And there he stuck, all night long. By the time our cousin found him
he had taken off his jacket, because hypothermia had left him feeling
hot.
Our cousin called 911. Men from a nearby business hauled forth sheets
of plywood to make a walkway. When the police arrived my cousin hung
up from 911 and then she called my mother. Who called me.
It took twenty or twenty five minutes to extricate him from the mud,
and his temperature after a (relatively warm for November) Minnesota
night spent in the swamp was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Five minutes
after he was extracted, a freezing rain began to fall: presently it's
snowing.
The family all gathered in the emergency room a couple of hours later,
and after a bit of a wait they let us in to see him.
The E/R was caked with mud. His clothes, in two plastic bags, must
have weighed thirty pounds. He was lying on a gurney under blankets, a
complicated combination air mattress and hair dryer thing blowing hot
air in between his body and the blankets. But he was awake and
apparently alert, at least he could respond to questions with a yeah
or a no. He was shivering, which was also a good sign, as it showed
that his body hadn't given up trying to warm itself.
Barring unexpected organ failures, it looks like he's going to be
okay. THey didn't have to open him up, or give him a warm water enema,
or route his blood through a heater, so he wasn't as bad off as he
could have been.
He was extraordinarily lucky. Yesterday and last night were above
freezing, whereas last week it was below freezing for several days.
And while unemployed he had put on a bit of weight, which served to
help keep him warm. And then of course there was our cousin, and her
apparent bit of divine intervention (says the staunch atheist).
Retrospect is frustrating. All three of us had searched along that
shore multiple times. But after leaving the hospital my wife and I had
to drive over and see where he'd been. I could see that while I had
been within shouting distance of him (and believe me, I can shout
loudly and was doing so last night), I hadn't looked far enough to the
left. None of us had. Still, I kick myself that I didn't look harder,
I was within yards of him.
But even when once or twice I had considered him "running out into the
swamp" it seemed the least likely thing he'd do. It seemed much more
likely that we'd find him sitting in a McDonald's or a library. And of
course, when I was shouting for him along the swamp, he was probably
asleep or unconscious: he had not slept at all the night before.
But he was found, that's all that matters, and he looks like he's
going to be okay.
My cousin left us in the E/R, saying she had better get back to work
before she got in trouble.
"It's okay," I told them, "just tell them you were busy saving
someone's life."
[1]Last
Posted by Albatross at November 12, 2003 12:00 AM