“I’m going to write you a prescription,” he said. “Something I think might help you a great deal. Have you ever heard of Katharax?”
Of course I had heard of Katharax. Everyone’s heard of Katharax, and I had even mentioned it in my rambling explanation of why I was a failure. Katharax was the drug I blamed for Sarah’s first infidelity, and I blamed it, too, for helping her to forget me. Sure, I had done plenty on my own to soil her memory of me— I had acted like a whiny, needy, vindictive asshole— but Katharax had created the vacuum which this new image of me rushed in to fill.
I hated Katharax, and not just because of what it had done in my own life, but because what I had seen it do to the lives of people I knew. There was Caitlin Arnold, who’d overdosed on a small amount of cocaine and kx in high school. There was my good friend Friedberg, who’d practically lost his mind. There was Jim Reiss, who’d failed out of college and lost months of his life to an extended blackout. There was Bryan Renner, who’d gotten two DUI’s and narrowly survived an overdose. It was a top 5 addictive substance, one of the only drugs where the withdrawals were bad enough to kill you. Its overdose rates were the highest of any prescription drug in the United States. Then of course there were the neurological disorders it caused— everything from attention issues to dementia and schizophrenia.
I didn’t bother to tell Dr. Bean all that, but instead I gave him my personal opinion on its efficacy as a therapeutic medicine. It was usually prescribed for anxiety and PTSD, the idea of course being that you can overcome your traumas and anxieties by forgetting about them entirely. To me, that was bullshit.
“It’s the worst drug on the planet,” I said. “And the name is as hypocritical as it could possibly be. You know they call it Katharax from the word 'catharsis?' Like what Freud said therapy is supposed to do? But the whole point of the drug is an anti-catharsis— you run from your problems. You try to forget them instead of processing them and working through them. You never really get better, and from what I’ve seen almost everyone gets worse.”
“Oh my,” Dr. Bean said. “Well, it sounds like you’ve certainly heard of it! Listen, I can tell you’ve got some strong opinions about it, but in my experience with my patients I’ve found that it can actually be quite helpful. I’ve actually had more than one patient with panic attacks, like yours, tell me that it helped them to get past them, so I don’t want to completely rule it out as a treatment option for you."
He looked at me with a well-practiced warmth, waiting to see how I might respond. When I didn't say anything, he continued:
"I’m not going to make you do anything, but I think you should have every option open to you, so what I’m going to do is write you a prescription right.... now...."
He scribbled something on a piece of paper.
"I’ve got about a week’s worth of Katharax here, so I’ll give you what I have and write you a script, and if you decide you want to give it a try you can start whenever you want. If you don’t want to, don’t take it, but if you want to, here they are! Take one each night, and take one any time you feel a panic attack coming on, okay?”
I left his office pissed off. What had I even talked to him for, if all he was going to do was hand me a bottle of pills and send me on my way? I needed advice, not a new drug addiction. I didn’t want to throw the pills away, but I didn’t want to use them either. More than anything, I just wanted to go back to Charleston. The one thing I took away from the therapy session— which I had decided only by listening to myself talk— was that my problem lay solely in my self-perception as a failure. The only way to cure myself, it seemed, would be to go back to Charleston and reunite with Sarah— which I’d been failing at consistently for four years— or find love with someone else— which seemed just as implausible. Either way, I had to try. There was nothing for me in New Orleans but a sort of purgatory. My life was meant to be in Charleston, and I wouldn’t be living again until I was back. I threw the bottle of pills and the script into the glove compartment of my car, determined not to look at them again. The only one that could cure me was me, and I knew exactly what I needed to do.
TO BE CONTINUED
