A call from the psychiatrist

Not long after the last conversation I reported [see "Do you like being blackmailed?"], Wife took her evening pills and fell into bed. And a few minutes after that, the phone rang. I picked it up out in the kitchen at the same time that she picked it up in the bedroom. I said, "Hello?" She said, "Uh-h-h-h-o-o-o?" The voice on the other end of the line asked for her fairly brusquely. I said, "She's pretty tired right now." She said, "-a-a-a-at's me-e-e-e." I didn't hang up until the voice identified himself as her psychiatrist, and pretty peremptorily asked me to get off the line. So I got.

But from there I walked into the bedroom, to see how this conversation was going. Not well. Wife was lying face down on the bed, with the phone leaning against one ear, grunting "Uh-huh" at rare intervals. Her psychiatrist seemed to be trying to talk to her, but no such luck. [Readers will remember that this is exactly how she gets every night once she takes her sleeping medication. See, e.g., "Calling the paramedics."] Finally I picked up the phone and introduced myself to her psychiatrist. I had been able to overhear that he was trying -- with some considerable degree of concern -- to figure out what was going on with her and why she was so incoherent. What pills had she taken? I explained that I hadn't watched her take them, but that she is like this every night at about this time. He clarified -- more than once -- that he was worried lest she had taken a deliberate overdose of something (presumably he meant one of her narcotics). I answered, again, that I couldn't swear in a court of law to exactly what she had taken this night in particular, but in general she is very much a creature of habit when it comes to her pills and her incoherence tonight is absolutely consistent with the way she is every other night.

He said a couple of other things, all of which were innocuous enough by themselves but interesting in combination. First, he made it very clear that patient privacy laws forbid him to discuss her case with anybody else, so of course he couldn't say anything to me. But then he added that there is no law preventing him from listening [to me, that is], and sometimes that might be useful since all he ever hears is "one side of the story." He repeated that his concern tonight was to make sure she hadn't taken a deliberate overdose of anything; and while that would obviously have been anybody's concern once he heard how slurred her speech was, he never once said, "Also I need to reschedule our appointment next week so please have her call me tomorrow." The unstated implication, I think, has to be that the reason he dialed the phone tonight in the first place was out of a fear that she might be deliberately overdosing. And that, in turn, makes me guess (without his having said so) that she has said something to worry him.

In the end, he asked me to keep an eye on her tonight, just to make sure that she continues to look routine. (She has and does.) I gave him my cell phone number, in case I could be of any further help. He fumbled a little awkwardly at the offer, since of course he can't call me up to say, "Wife tells me that XYZ, and what is your side of the story?" But he took the number down. And then immediately he gave me his cell phone number too. Now, it might have been just a polite gesture, of course. But I wonder.

I'm not completely sure about all of what this conversation meant, but somehow I think it was important.