The knowledge that I have to go to a dinner party fills me with unutterable alarm. By the time I am dressed and ready to start I am chilled, shaking all over and gasping for breath. The drive to the house is almost as full of horror as the drive of the tumbril to the guillotine. By the time I arrive I am so ill I can hardly speak and am convinced that I shall fall down, or be sick, or shall have to cry out. More than once I have insisted upon being driven home again, and my husband has gone to the dinner alone after much outpouring of language.
Possibly my most direful experiments have been at the theatre, to which I have been taken on the ground that my mind needed change and that a cheerful play would “take me out of myself.” My worst terrors have come upon me when I have chanced to sit in the centre of the stalls with people packed in all around me. I have then felt as if I was imprisoned and have been filled by one intense overwhelming desire—the passion to get out. I have passed through all the horrors of suffocation, have felt that I must stand up, must lift up my arms and gasp. I have looked at the door only to feel that escape was as impossible as it would be to an entrapped miner about whom the walls of a shaft had fallen.
It is useless for my husband to nudge me and tell me not to make a fool of myself. If I did want to make a fool of myself I should select some more agreeable way of doing it. It is useless, moreover, to argue. No argument can dispel the ever-present sense of panic, of being buried alive, or relieve the hopeless feeling of inability to escape. I have sat out a play undergoing tortures beyond expression, until I have become collapsed and until my lip had been almost bitten through in the effort not to scream. No one would believe that I—a healthy-looking woman in a new Paris dress, sitting among a company of smiling folk—could be enduring as much agony as if I were lodged in an iron cell the walls of which were gradually closing in around me.
I am very fond of my clothes when I am well, but there are certain frocks I have come to loathe because they recall times when I have nearly gasped out my life in them.
I have taken much medicine but with no apparent good. I envy the woman who believes in her nerve tonic, since such faith must be a great comfort to her. I knew a poor girl who became for a time a mental wreck, owing to her engagement having been broken off. She refused food and lived for a week—so she told me—on her mother’s nerve tonic. She declared that it saved her reason. I tried it, but it only brought me out in spots. I have seen a good many doctors, but although they are all very kind, they seem to be dense and to have but the one idea of treating the neurotic woman as they would treat a frightened child or a lost dog.
I was taken to one doctor because he had the reputation of being very sensible and outspoken. My husband said there was no nonsense about him. He certainly made no effort to be entertaining. After he had examined me he said that all my organs were perfectly sound. He then began to address me as “My dear lady,” and at once I knew what was coming. It was to tell me that I wanted rousing and that all I had to do was to get out of myself. He said I was not to think about myself at all, which is very good advice to a person who feels on the point of dissolution. He told my husband afterwards, in strict confidence, that if I was a poor woman and had to work for my living I should be well directly. He went farther and said that what would cure me would be a week at the washing tub—at a laundry, I suppose. My husband imparted these confidences to me as we drove home from the doctor’s and said what a shrewd, common-sense man he was. My husband quite liked him.
Another doctor I went to was very sympathetic. He patted my hand and was so kind that he almost made me cry. He said he understood how real and intense my sufferings were. He knew I must have gone through tortures. He gave me a great many particulars as to how I was to live and said I was never to do anything I did not like. I wanted to come and see him again, but he insisted that I must go abroad at once to break with my sad associations and afford my shattered nerves a complete rest. He gave me a letter to a doctor abroad which he said contained a very full and particular account of my case.
Something happened to prevent me from leaving England, but six months later I came across the letter and, feeling it was no longer of use, opened it. It began, “My dear Harry,” and contained a great deal about their respective handicaps at golf and their plans for the summer. The kind doctor ended in this wise in a postscript: “The lady who brings this is Mrs. ——. She is a terrible woman, a deplorable neurotic. I need say no more about her, but I hope you won’t mind my burdening you with her, for she is the kind of tedious person who bores me to death. However she pays her fees.” My husband sent the letter back to the doctor who wrote it, because he thought the memoranda about the golf handicaps would be interesting for him to keep.
As I made no progress and as my friends were getting as tired of me as I was of myself, it was resolved that I should be taken “seriously in hand.” I was therefore sent to a nursing home to undergo the rest cure. I had to lie in bed, be stuffed with food and be massaged daily. I was cut off from all communion with the familiar world and was allowed to receive neither letters nor newspapers.
The idea underlying this measure is, I think, a little silly. It is in the main an attempt to cure a patient by enforced boredom. The inducement offered is crudely this: “You can go home as soon as you think fit to be well.” I did not mind the quiet nor the lying in bed. The excessive feeding merely made me uncomfortable. The massage was a form of torture that I viewed with great loathing. The absence of news from home kept me in a state of unrest and apprehension. It was the continued speculation as to what was going on in my household which prevented me from sleeping at night.