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Date: | Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:29:11 -0700 |
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"Dad took her down to the loony bin in Harare, through the border at
Chirundu, where she now looked less like her passport photo than ever.
"They gave her so many drugs that she lay flattened on the sheets of
her bed like a damp towel. Barely able to speak. Unable, for the
first time in her well-read life, to lift a book.
"'It wasn't so bad. I wasn't really there,' says Mum. 'I was just
sort of floating. Not feeling. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad. It
really wasn't anything. Whenever anything like a feeling floated to
the surface, they gave me more drugs and the feeling went away and I
found I was so heavy and flat. ... I just slept, mostly.'
"Then one morning a fellow patient let himself into Mum's room, stood
on her bed, pulled out his penis, and peed on her. Mum was too weak
to react. She tried to scream.
"'I would have knocked the bloody fellow out,' says Mum. But her
arms and legs and voice wouldn't work.
"'That's when I knew that the only ting worse than being crazy was
being like this ... like a lump.'"
Alexandra Fuller, Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Random House, 2003. p 299
(Mum (Nicola Fuller) is diagnosed with manic-depression. Sylvia)
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