Always a Solution
I shone the light on her, first her head, then down, then onto her waist, so as not to blind her. I wept like a child, silently and uncontrollably, but I was so relieved.
“Nick, babe, you have to get out of here, get mom away from here,” she demanded, so calmly, too.
She looked behind her and leaned out as if to look at something, and Renee let out a little yelp.
“They’re coming, Nick; go. Go now!”
I stepped forward and began to climb the old wall to reach her despite her screams of protest.
“They aren’t coming any longer, Sof, I promise. We’re here, and nothing will bother you with us here.”
They were lame words from a man desperate to bring his love home and give her the attention she needed.
“Go!” she screamed, which made me flinch unexpectedly.
Her voice, the sound of it, held such pain.
Then Renee moved forward too and climbed upon the wall next to me and reached her hand up to Sofia, still clinging to the old fence a good six to seven feet above us.
“Sofia Isabella Montoya, I will not leave you. You are my daughter, my heart. You belong here. You belong in this world, and you belong with us, pequeño polluelo.”
Renee kept her left hand extended to Sofi, put her right hand over her heart, and began to sing sweetly.
“Los pollitos dicen “pio, pio, pio”
cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.
La mamá les busca el maíz y el trigo,
les da su comida y les presta abrigo.
Bajo sus dos alas, acurrucaditos,
duermen los pollitos hasta el otro día.
The little chicks go cheep, cheep, cheep,
When they are hungry, when they are cold.
The mom looks for corn and wheat for them,
She gives them their food and keeps them warm.
Under her wings, all snuggled up,
The little chicks sleep until the next day.”
And with the old Spanish lullaby sung in the most sweet and gentle tone, Renee reached her. Singing, she called her daughter back from the edge of a terrible precipice. I saw Sof mouthing the words as her mother sang them over and over. Renee managed to tap into something in the far recesses of her troubled mind, something comforting and familiar, and it brought her back to us.
“Nick?” She said pitifully.
“I’m climbing back over. My feet are killing me. I think you might need to catch me.”
I smiled at Renee and squeezed her hand. She continued to hum gently as I climbed off the brickwork and planted myself at the base of the wall, gripping the shaking fence as a very tired but determined Sofi made her way back over the top. I didn’t feel secure, not even a tiny bit, until I felt her and took her arm as she climbed down and clutched her and her mother together. It was quiet, all but the sound of the two women with muffled tears taking breaths of comfort in my arms.
Renee let go of me and phoned Martin, still holding Sofia’s hand. The call only lasted a moment. Martin was told to meet us back at the apartment. Sofia’s feet were bleeding from her climb and the barbed wire and probably glass she stepped on in the brush. I quickly hefted her up to carry her back to the Cruiser. My leg was killing me, forcing a limp, but it didn’t matter at all, not one bit.
Renee held the rear door open for me, and I placed Sof in the back seat. That’s when Renee noticed my leg.
“You’re bleeding, Nick, badly,” she said as I closed the door.
I was, too; my leg was cold and sticky, and the flashlight revealed that blood had soaked my pants. I let Renee drive us home, and I reached behind my seat and held Sofi’s leg the whole way back. Not much was said. We were all exhausted, both physically and mentally, but I was so thankful.
Get Nick Adams 68’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The night wasn’t over by a long shot. Everyone involved met back at our little apartment, kissed, and hugged us. There was too much conversation to remember. I found it hard to take my eyes off Sofi.
Our friend, Fiadh, drove me to the hospital to have my knee stitched up, as I had managed to cut myself pretty badly on who knows what when I fell. The ensuing tetanus shot was an absolute joy, too. When I returned home, only Renee and Martin remained. We talked until morning; rather, he talked. When Sofia began to drift off, I insisted on taking her to bed, much to her father’s chagrin. He was determined to solve all of her problems right then and there. That is the type of world he was used to, and this was not that. I had reached a point where I was through listening, I wanted a shower and sleep, and that is precisely what I had. Sofi and I showered quickly and returned to bed as the sun was beginning to rise. I held her close and watched her fall asleep.
As I said before, I started writing a collection of stories as a way to express all the sometimes bizarre things that have happened in my lifetime; those things gave me pause and sometimes raised the hair on the back of my neck. There are plenty of them, and some I can not explain. The strangest thing I have lived through was the few months with Sofia when she had those terrible hallucinations.
As I began writing, I never intended to get so focused on that time of life with Sofia; it was that it was just so horrifyingly strange. She went from being a fun-loving, vibrant young woman to a fragile, withdrawn, timid shell of the girl I knew. Yet it was just gradual enough for me not to notice the change until she was in the throes of her problem. She had been wrestling with it for a month or two when I finally was made aware that night when I came in and found her on the kitchen floor, throwing things at a horrible apparition that only she could see.
She was brave and always tried to put on her best face, but I loved her and knew her and what she was going through. I still don’t know how she did it. Of course, I never saw the horrors she dealt with daily. I didn’t want to see them either; not sure how I would have handled that. How she often described what she saw was frightening, worse than anything I have ever imagined. She took it in, as usual, a stride as she could. She knew what she saw, heard, and smelled was not real; still, it was real enough to her at times, especially when alone.
She was steadfast. I believed in her, too. I was out of sorts as to how to help her, though. We twice went to seek psychiatric care, and the answer was the same both times: committal, cut, and dried. There would be no path for her recovery otherwise, and no guarantee of how long she would be in their care. She failed every verbal test doctors gave her because she did not believe what she saw was real. That gained her the extra delusional diagnosis along with schizophrenic psychosis. I lived with the girl, and she was none of the aforementioned things.
Even in her diminished mental state, she took extra careful steps to protect me. That was surprising to me. I did not fully realize to what extent she tried to protect me until reading her journals years later. Some of the entries were brutal to read, as I remember her sadness during that time of our lives together. She became upset when she heard the monsters threatening to kill or hurt me. She was determined to keep them away from our little apartment. For whatever reason, they never broached the walls there. Sure, she saw horrible things there, too, but not quite the fearful things she saw elsewhere. Even now, I find it hard to imagine keeping myself sane the way she had to day to day during this period. We talked about it at length when she was able, but she would always look at me with her dark brown eyes, blink slowly, and give me that slight smile that began in the right corner of her mouth, my silent cue to drop it. So I did.
The night she disappeared and her mother and I found her was cataclysmic in many ways. Her father was angry, mainly at me. He loved his daughter, no doubt about it. But, once everything was out in the open, he could see no other option other than to listen to the “experts” and have her committed, where at least she would be safe. In his eyes, I was no caregiver and could not be counted on to protect her at all times. Naturally, she refused, as did I. After nasty threats, we went for quite some time without speaking. Although he and I came to terms later, that episode caused an unfortunate rift in her relationship with her dad that sadly continued for years.
Sofi’s mother, Renee, a beautiful person inside and out, came by more frequently and spent more time with us, as did my friends, whom I had lied to. They forgave me, all of them, and made our lives so much easier than I ever expected or deserved, for that matter. Help also came from an unexpected source in the form of my father. He adored Sofia, and she seemed to bring out the best in him, sides of my dad I hadn’t seen in years.
After the blowout argument with her father, Sof and I put our heads together. We decided only a night or so after her disappearing act to start back at square one. We needed a baseline. We both had been reading texts on physiology and brainstorming every evening together, no matter where we were. I took the vacation I had, and she did the same. From that moment on, I made sure she was never alone, never.
Quite a few things can affect brain and nervous system function. We made yet another doctor’s appointment to get her completely physically checked out, blood work, and even an MRI. We heard the MRI could detect enlarged parts of the brain or other areas, which we hoped would help begin to solve her problems. It was the best decision we made. It saved her.
A physical and bloodwork started the research process all over again. Even before the MRI was scheduled, we were told her blood work returned okay, but her hormone levels were all over the charts! The doctor was surprised she was having no problems related to her hormones. He asked a small battery of questions, primarily related to mood swings and sleep. She answered as well as she could under the circumstances. Finally, the same doctor suggested a thyroid panel. Sof and I discussed it on the way home, and I stopped to pick up a Merck Manual. I read all night practically and off and on all weekend.
She had many symptoms that put her squarely in the hypothyroidism category. The following week, we were back at the doctor’s office for the thyroid panel. As it turned out, it was her thyroid. Sof had suffered a terrible bout with what we believed at the time was strep. It was strep. Her throat was sore, and had all the earmarks of strep, but even with antibiotics, she took a long time to get better. She was a very healthy woman, an athlete of sorts, and that was quite unusual. Whatever infection she had spread unknowingly into her thyroid. The result was Grave’s Disease or a mimic of such.
I had never heard of it, but the more we looked into it, the more we found the culprit. It was such a gradual “thing” that I never noticed most of the identifiers until she was in the full throes of her sickness. Then, of course, I attributed her sleepy red eyes, lack of energy, general nervousness and irritability, weight loss, lack of sleep, to her hallucinations. Her feet had developed red calluses. Not unusual for her work. I mean, she had the world’s worst feet! She danced in point shoes. I was surprised when they weren’t covered in calluses! The signs were all subtle until the hallucinations, and then, of course, that took us in an entirely new direction.
After the thyroid panel, the endocrinologist was fascinated by her case. Because the disease was caused by an infection and stress onset, she recommended a common prescriptive treatment coupled with healthy doses of vitamins, specifically vitamins D and B12, selenium, and L-carnitine.
We were told there might be no way to rid her of Graves completely, but it would certainly get no worse and quite possibly would go dormant for the rest of her life. After two weeks of medication and supplements, the change back to normalcy was enormous. In fact, after just one week of the medicine and supplement regimen, the hallucinations stopped, never to return. It was like a light had turned on inside of her; that smile of hers returned, and her eyes shined, and I realized how I missed seeing her many facial expressions when she talked, which at times was non-stop.
This period lasted maybe four months; for me, we approximated that she had been going through it herself for a couple of months before I became aware. It was a constant struggle, but it brought us together as a couple, probably more than anything else. This happened very early in our relationship, just after our first year together. It was hard to convey the compression of time in some of these chapters. I also cherry-picked the incidents as I remembered them and then used Sofia’s journals to fill in places. We did laugh about some of this stuff later.
We talked once about putting it together as a horror story, and we worked on it for a while, but life got in the way, as it always seems to do. I still think of the hell Sofia lived through at times. What I went through was mild, nothing in fact. She danced in live performances, taught classes, and although we abbreviated our time out of the apartment, she went out and did all the “normal” things she always did, especially when we were together. She often came to the radio station and slept on the couch while I worked during that time.
We would often be out, and I would be reminded of what she was going through. For instance, she wanted some light summer dresses one Saturday afternoon, so I tagged along while she shopped. On one of the round racks, she separated one size or color from another and froze wide-eyed. She then slowly looked at me like a startled child, but kept her calm, just awkwardly moved away.
I took a few steps to catch up to her, and not wanting to be loud and draw any attention, I mouthed the words.
“Did you see one of them?”
She nodded yes and peeked over her shoulder at the rack.
I walked back to the rack and purposefully poked around until she was satisfied that nothing was there. There was something about me physically taking up the space of whatever “thing” she saw that made them disappear, at least for a while. Later, her doctor explained that her damaged thyroid produced almost zero dopamine, and that started a detrimental chemical reaction in her body. Everything she had gone through had all been a struggle between her conscious and her chemical mind. Truly amazing.
