Addiction and Schizophrenia in an American Family, Part 7 of 9

 ADDICTION AND SCHIZOPHRENIA IN AN AMERICAN FAMILY, Part 7 of 9

            (Adapted from “A NEW AMERICAN FAMILY: A Love Story,”      

             Published by University of Arizona Press, 2011.)                

 Part 7         

     One can easily get the impression from the media that schizophrenics are dangerous people who hear voices commanding them to do evil things beyond their control.  There may be such people, but John was not one of them.  When not properly medicated John was inclined to withdraw into himself and become extremely passive.  Before the onset of his schizophrenia, John was a vigorous athlete in sports that were inherently violent and he was probably more active sexually than most boys his age.  As a schizophrenic John was quiet, slow-moving, and uninterested in sex.  When he was on the streets and out of touch, he was in a dangerous environment, but our greatest fear was that John would curl up in a culvert somewhere and die of dehydration and starvation.  That fear was not ill-founded.

     One of several California rehabs John entered before his schizophrenia diagnosis was run by Hispanic addicts motivated by religious convictions.  Pat and I visited John there and we were grateful to the good people running that house.  At some point they called our home in Pennsylvania and reported that John had stopped eating, drinking, and talking to others.  I was not at home, and Pat took the call.  She told them to pick him up and take him to the hospital emergency ward, knowing that he was too weak to resist.  In the hospital John was fed intravenously to keep him alive, but when Pat called, the nurse told her that John was comatose and not responding to any stimuli.  Pat insisted that the nurse put the phone to John’s ear, and he cried when he heard his mother’s voice.  So he came home again.

     The house rules were clear to all:  If you use drugs you cannot live with your parents.  As long as John stayed on his medications for schizophrenia, he was able to stay drug free.  But when he decided that he didn’t need to continue his therapy or he objected to the side effects of his medications and abandoned them, he was likely to accept a beer or two and soon slip down the dangerous path to crack cocaine or whatever he found available.

     On one such relapse, in 1999 as I recall, John was on the streets of Riverside after leaving his rehab prematurely, lost to Pat and me for some months.  One Saturday afternoon in the spring I received in Tucson a call from John, begging for help and promising to stay clean. I asked John where he could be found in Riverside, but he was unable to answer. “I don’t know,” he said.  He told me that he was at a public pay phone on a utility pole in the middle of a block, but he was afraid to leave the phone to walk to the corner to read the street signs.  He said he would wait for me.

     I was on a plane within the hour, determined to find my son somewhere in Riverside.  I landed at the airport in nearby Ontario, rented a car, and drove to Riverside.  After wandering aimlessly for a time, I asked local police where the street people lived and walked among them looking for John.  I searched through the night with no success, finally taking a room for a few hours.  I had found a public phone on a utility pole and I planned to go back there by daylight.

     The next morning was Easter Sunday and I had hopes for a miracle, but I was disappointed.  John was not at the pole, nor anywhere to be found.  I called Pat and we decided that I should take the return flight home that I had scheduled, giving up on my fruitless search.  I drove back to the Ontario Airport, returned the rental car, and proceeded to my gate, only to discover that California had switched to daylight savings time and my plane had already gone.

     I was, after all, a university president, so I had a briefcase full of work to fill in the hours before the next flight to Tucson.  While I was waiting at the airport, Pat called and reported excitedly that John was on the other phone to the family home, back at that same pay phone in Riverside.  I rented another car and found John still hanging on to that phone, incoherent and barely able to stand, but grateful to be rescued.  I helped him into the car and raced back to the airport, where I needed a wheelchair to get him to the gate.  It is surprising to me now that he was accepted for the flight with no identification, dirty, heavily bearded, and muttering like a wild man.  I got him back to Tucson and took him directly to University Medical Center, where he responded to treatment very well.

     Safely back on his medication for schizophrenia, John showed remarkable resilience, bouncing back to nearly normal.  He completed two courses successfully at Pima Community College, moved into his own apartment and began the journey to a new life.

(To be continued in subsequent blogs.)