Zoran Drvenkar

The day I realized my medication was no longer having the desired effect was not a stressful day. The weather was summery, I was in a great mood and two fellow students had invited me over for brunch. I came home in the afternoon and took a bath, worked on the computer and was doing a bit of reading when I heard a noise. I looked in the bedroom and then in the kitchen. Nothing. I heard the noise again. It was a loud scraping sound. I went over to the window. It was growing dark outside, the shadows were grey and blurry. I screwed up my eyes so I could see more clearly. And then I saw her. The concierge’s cat was sitting in the yard scratching herself.

That’s all it is, I thought and was just about to turn away when the scent flooded over me. Heavy and sweet. Wild jasmine and the smell of spilt soil from a plant pot. I could smell cigarette smoke and sharp perfume. At the same moment I noticed a figure in the building across the yard. The figure was leaning on the window sill, smoking. I stood there for what must have been twenty seconds and didn’t stir. My flat was on the fourth floor, the window was closed. It was happening again.

Without any further thought I turned away from the window and smashed my head into the kitchen door.

When I regained consciousness, I was lying on the floor and my head felt as though it had split in two. I pulled myself up using the door frame and staggered into the bathroom to throw up. I was so exhausted that I fell asleep next to the toilet. The telephone woke me. I washed my face and looked at what I had done. The wound on my forehead was encrusted in blood. But it had worked. I had reached for the emergency brake in good time.

An hour later I was at my new doctor’s.
“Of course I can increase your dosage if you’re having panic attacks. There’s no need for that to happen,” he said and opened his diary. “We’ll just go back to the old dosage. Come back next Wednesday. I’ll give you a quick examination and we can talk it over again.”
“Next week?” I said.
He looked at his watch, looked at me.
“Is there a problem?”
I don’t know why I shook my head. I think it was then that I realized the normal dosage wouldn’t be any help.
“No, not at all,” I said.
The doctor wrote the appointment down for me on a piece of paper so that I wouldn’t forget, and advised me to get lots of rest. As soon as I had left the surgery, I crumpled up the piece of paper and dropped it in the street. This had clearly been the wrong move. The medication wasn’t enough. I was familiar with the normal dosage, that’s what I’d started off with. It wouldn’t make any difference. What I needed were shock absorbers, strong ones.

Her name was Henna and she’d been a student for four years. She planned to stay on at university for another four because she said there was nothing in the outside world that really appealed to her. We’d often met up for coffee, swapped books and once she came over to my place and we stayed up all night talking. I knew she liked me, but I still wasn’t about to tell her the whole truth. I outlined my problem, told her that I suffered from anxiety, didn’t sleep much and that my doctor didn’t take me seriously.

Henna interrupted me.
“You want something strong, something to knock you out, am I right?”
I nodded.
“Give me three days.”

She got in touch after two. I went over to the flat she shared, her laptop was running, we were alone in the kitchen.
“This,” said Henna, tapping on the screen with the tip of a pencil, “is one of several options. I’ve checked out all the others and I think this is your best bet. It takes a bit of planning. A couple of brief examinations, a few sleepless nights, and you’ll have the entire medical profession in the bag.”
I leaned forward and read the name on the screen: glossodynia.
“Cases like this are the medical profession’s blind spots. It fuels doctors’ imaginations and gets them chasing after professional glory. But you have to point them in the right direction, otherwise they’ll have no earthly clue what you’re talking about. Learn the symptoms down to the last detail. Talk about your personal problems and nothing else. They shouldn’t get the impression that you’re suffering from a vitamin deficiency.”
I nodded and looked at the screen again.
“Glossodynia is a burning of the tongue that spreads to the gums and the lips. It’s mainly menopausal women who get it and it’s accompanied by dryness in the mouth, loss of taste and tiredness. Psychological factors such as anxiety, depression and phobias can also play a role in triggering the illness. There are often no changes in the mucous membrane or the tongue, which confuses doctors. Many women become depressed or suicidal. Doctors prescribe antidepressants and counseling and hope for an improvement.” “Tongue pain?” I said.
“A continuous burning,” Henna corrected me, “day and night, sometimes it’s swollen, sometimes it’s not, but it’s always there. It can wear you down. And because doctors can’t think of anything better, they pump these poor women full of antidepressants. Great, eh?”
I nodded.
“And you think …”
Henna waved aside my objections and printed out the two pages.
“It’ll be easy. I even know the right doctor. He’s new and happy to get new patients. And he’s cute. He’ll be all yours in no time.”

In no time was a bit of an exaggeration.
I spent all week getting ready for my appointment. I didn’t sleep much the night before, was exhausted and had the shakes from smoking and too much coffee. When the doctor asked me what my problem was, I burst into tears and wanted to go home. It was perfect. I was weak and needy, and he was strong and ready to help. I told him a little bit about my childhood and made the stories sound dark and depressing. Then I told him about long years of treatment in Oldenburg, that my medication wasn’t strong enough and about the pain in my tongue which had only gotten slightly better.

From there on in it was so easy, it should have been illegal.
What the doctor prescribed was something that really tuned me out. The dreams and the anxiety disappeared. I lived behind filters and everything took me a little bit longer – I needed more sleep, more words, more time. It had precisely the effect I had hoped for. As far as I was concerned, the more filters the better.
Then I got used to it.

After three months I felt as though my body had adapted to the medication. I became nervous, I needed something stronger. So I went back to the doctor, repeated my tragic performance and finally – just as Henna had predicted – was chosen to be a guinea pig. First the doctor seemed clueless, then he gave me some medication that was still in the trial stage.
“This is unofficial,” he explained to me. “But with your problem, I think it’s worth a try.”
He pointed to the packet.
“This is a new anti-epileptic drug that’s in the trial stage. It has more of a calming effect than the antidepressants you’ve tried so far. With female glossodynia patients, one almost has to take the risk of prescribing experimental medication. That’s why I’m making an exception in your case.”
I realized that he financed his practice with experiments like this and I didn’t have any objections. I was helping him, he was helping me.
“Make a note of any side effects,” he said as I was leaving.

The anti-epileptic drug was precisely what I’d been looking for. Every month I told the doctor how I’d found the previous month’s medication. He wrote everything down eagerly and sent me home with a new test packet. I had allergic reactions with some of them, with others it was nausea and a numb feeling in my hands and feet. But whatever happened, punctually, on the tenth of the month, I went to the doctor’s to pick up the latest product.

The side effects were feelings of sluggishness and exhaustion, sometimes I cried and cried for no good reason, and sometimes I laughed myself silly over nothing. I suffered some hair loss, unpleasant hot flushes and had the funny feeling that electricity was flowing through my teeth. Now and again I lost my sense of time, sat down on the bed and stood up the next moment in the bathroom, without knowing how I got there. Luckily these episodes only happened at home. I could live with that. I could live with so much. Regardless of the side effects, the panic was under control and I felt safe. Nothing else mattered.