My View with Michael Garrad

This is her song -

My name is Barbara and they watch and wait every day. All of them. They watch if the pills work, watch if the pills do too much, watch if I take too much.

It’s like being under the bare light on Death Row. They monitor my every move, their eyes strain for every sleight of hand. They don’t give me room to breathe!

Will I swallow more than the dose? Will I horde quietly as they glance away, as a squirrel would prepare for winter? Then, on one fine day, in the calm, I consume the larder of oblivion?

Do these people really care about me or are they being selfish? Are they thinking how my death will affect them? What will they do without me? Can they survive? Are they dependent on me? Do they need me for their own survival?

Am I a study case for curious doctors? Do they seek to gauge just how many drugs the body can absorb, perhaps write a paper about it and become famous?

Is that it? Am I the guinea pig?

I am a person. I am a woman. I am a human being! I am me!

This is my end and the end which is the beginning.

They rule my life with these concoctions which I love and hate, which I crave and which I loathe. Too much and too little is this, my living hell!

I have succumbed to the smooth roll of biro on prescription pad and they have found it all too easy to send me away loaded with a time bomb. Just keep taking the tablets, more and more until a week blurs into one day (or is it one day into a week?) until I can only eat and breathe, and exist.

I am safe in the darkened room, quiet except for the low murmur of the television, the stirring of the ever-loyal cat who sits at my feet, snug, oblivious to my agony.

Does anyone out there have an answer? No, the waiting goes on.

Watching, watching, watching!

I pray for the sun to shine on a grey day, when they can be right, when they can say we have done all we can, not a cure but as much as can be hoped for in the circumstances. They have stepped over the line, invaded my mind, intruded into that part of me that is the essential of me. I am a product of what they have created - the prescription that is the beginning and the end of me.

My name is Barbara and I am a woman who lives in the shadow room.

This is my song and it has only just begun.