Lithium: An introduction to a work in progress
They would have watched me die. It has been confirmed: there would have been permanent damage to my body, had I not changed course. Had I stayed on the path that they laid out before me, in all likelihood, Shonni Silverberg would've cut out my parathyroid gland. They would've stuck with their line of reasoning and insisted that the discontinuation of lithium wouldn't restore the function of my parathyroid gland. That's what they told me, and they were wrong. I think they knew they were wrong, but I can't prove that or defend it. It doesn't matter. They were wrong. They were stalling. They were trying to push me away. They ignored my requests to see an endocrinologist. When I finally forced the issue, they put me on the calendar with Silverberg three months out.
Shonni Silverberg almost certainly would've cut out my parathyroid gland. I would have stayed on lithium. It wouldn't have solved the problem. There would've been permanent damage to the muscles throughout my body, and I don't even know what else. I don't care to know. I could research it, but that wouldn't be all that productive. What I do know is that the musculature of my body would have continued to deteriorate over time. My ability to walk would've disappeared. I would've been in a wheelchair. My voice would've continued to falter. My ability to swallow, already diminished, only would have gotten worse. It doesn't take much to imagine the worst case scenario from there. The body is a system, and there's no way to rescue the dominoes that are farther down the line once the first ones fall. They would've cut out my parathyroid gland and it wouldn't have done a thing except traumatize me even further, sending me to an even deeper, more intense state of despair.
They would have ruined my body. They would've ruined my marriage. We were already having a horrible time, and I can't quite comprehend what it would have felt like if things had gotten worse, but I do know it would've destroyed my marriage. Worse than that, it would've ruined Katie. Katie was on the edge of ruin already. She was the most optimistic person I'd ever met. I remember one of the first mornings that we woke up together, I made toast with butter, and I brought it into the living room and I gave it to her. I have never seen anybody more delighted by a piece of toast.
She used to say, almost every day, in the first couple of years we knew each other, she would at some point say, "What a special day." It would always be in reaction to something that I would think of as completely ordinary. This is why I fell in love with her. And the sicker I got, the sadder she became. She didn't say that anymore. For years, she didn't say that, so there isn't a doubt in my mind that the path we were on would have destroyed my marriage and would've destroyed her.
Katie grew up in a home with a family that sounds quite pleasant to me, though, in her estimation, it was lacking in many ways. Perhaps most importantly, she never seems to have felt all that connected to her father. But the most important thing to know about that is that her father passed away when she was in her early 20s. He'd had a kidney transplant and he had an adverse reaction to some medication, and he died in his sleep.
Katie knew that she didn't have much of a relationship with her father. She laments it from time to time. And there's no doubt in my mind that an early death of her own spouse would have been traumatic beyond repair for her, or at least set her back decades. It took her mother 15 years or so before she even considered spending time with another man. I figure I might've had 10 or 15 years left, which would have put Katie in her 50s by the time I died. Her life would've been irrevocably altered. I saw, in these first few years, how horrible it was for her. “What a special day.” She used to say it all the time, and then she didn't say it at all.
So this has me thinking about timelines, about life span. I'm 43 years old, and I have survived what I consider to be the most heinous attack on the humanity of an individual that could possibly exist. It was pure evil. It was a collective effort toward the deliberate destruction of a human life, and it was sustained for several months. It was sustained in spite of my efforts to stop it, and in spite of my very honest assessment of their behavior. I thought if I brought attention to the matter, if I told enough people about it, if I told enough doctors about what I'd seen, that eventually I could reach some kind of critical mass, at which point some group or organization would come to my defense. That was a grave miscalculation on my part, and it has all but destroyed my faith in humanity. Entire institutions were aware of what was happening to me and nobody stepped up to help.
My reality, my sense of self, vanished from beneath my feet. I didn't know what was real or what was fake. It was utterly traumatic. And then it happened again a few months later, and then it happened again a few months after that, and I was looking at a pattern that was undeniable. The first time, it seemed like maybe there was a plausible explanation. Some people said, "Maybe it was an administrative error or an oversight." And then again, and then again, and then again. And it was so obvious to me and so hard for me to get anyone to look at it. But having been through so many reality shifts, it does have me thinking about reality. What is reality? What is consciousness? What is free will? What is the purpose of this life? Not just my life, but all life.
The possibility of a multiverse or multiple universes is becoming more and more plausible in the scientific community, and that possibility is now widely accepted in the mainstream. I don't think this level of awareness has really existed before, and I have concluded, through my exploration of this near-miss of a tragedy, that multiple universes do exist. I know because I was on a timeline that was headed in a horrible direction. I saw the damage that had occurred. I saw the patterns in what was happening around me. I could pretty easily predict the future based on all of that information, and the future was not good.
So I think that it's possible for us to travel between these universes if we're willing to take an honest look at our lives, decide what we want, decide what we don't want, and take dramatic enough action to change the inevitability of that future, to buck the odds, because anything's possible. On that traumatic timeline, the path with highest degree of probability ended in disaster, but that didn’t mean disaster was a certainty. If what little I know of science and the quantum realm is true, then nothing in this life is certain. It’s all probabilities. So I think that it's possible to jump between universes if you look past the outcome with the highest likelihood, and you shoot for the edge case. If you take dramatic enough action, you can jump into another universe. No, I don't need scientific proof that this other universe exists. I know that I was in it. I still feel the pain of that timeline, even though it never played out. The trauma of it is real. So that universe exists in my mind. I've seen it. I know that it was there. It was in front of me. I was barreling towards it, throwing haymakers the entire way. And eventually, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. A few things went my way. First one thing, then another. I got off that timeline, and now I'm in this one.
I am in the universe where I made the decision to fight. The universe in which I decided not to fight is out there, if only in my mind. I don't need to live it. I don't need a rocket ship or spacecraft to go back and forth. I don't need to teleport to it. I’ve already been there. I saw it and I felt it deeply. I was so afraid of what I had seen, and what I had seen was so unacceptable that I did everything in my power to try and change it.
Today, I feel afraid. I feel afraid for so many reasons. I'm still afraid of these people and what they might do to me. They chased me from New York to Cleveland to Rochester, Minnesota, and if I'm thinking realistically, I don't have a good reason to believe they'd ever stop. So I am afraid. I'm afraid for everybody, because if they did that to me, they can do it to anyone, and I would bet every last dollar that they've done it before. My experience was 12 years of denial, abuse, and neglect. In those 12 years, how many other people did they attack? How many other people did they dismiss? How many other people did they send into some twisted, fucked up exile? How isolated must those people have felt? How isolated must those people still feel? Because that's what they do. They isolate you. They tell you that your illness can’t be explained. They tell you that there's nobody else. They say they've never seen this sort of thing before, so you don't know where to go. You don't know who to talk to. There is no community around it. They insulate you from everything. They put you in a capsule and they shoot you out into space. Somewhere out there, in orbit around the earth, there are all these capsules, unaware that they're not the only ones orbiting the earth, but they can't see the others. They're all in a slightly different orbit. They may pass disturbingly close to each other, but they’re never aware of the others. I wonder about those people. I wonder about those orbits, and I wonder if there’s a way to bring them back to Earth.
My name is Joseph Peter Farrell, and I may be the American healthcare system's worst nightmare. In the weeks and months to come, I'm going to tell you all about my 30-year engagement with the system, what it did to my mind and what it did to my body, in a series of events that started with a concussion at age 16 and ultimately led to a horrific encounter with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — the direct result of ongoing medical trauma. I'm going to tell you the names of hospitals. I'm going to tell you the names of doctors. I'm going to show you letters and emails I've written and received. I'm going to quote doctors’ notes. I'm going to say whatever I want without fear of retribution or punishment because every word of this story is true. They can come after me if they want to, but there's nothing they can do to stop me. This is what makes me the healthcare system's worst nightmare. I am a writer, and I just picked up my pen.
I'm very aware that even a casual listener or reader would come across this and, quite naturally, start to question the source, maybe start to wonder, “Why is this person telling us all of this? What is this all about?” And some of those people will inevitably jump to conclusions. “He's just in it for the money,” or “he just wants attention,” or something like that. While I am in it for a lot of reasons, money is far down the list and I’m not a huge fan of attention.
Having now gone through the exercise of more or less writing the entirety of this story, I'm aware of a few things upon review. One is just how emotionally charged all of this really is for me. When I go from once chapter to the next, I notice a dramatic difference in tone — the level of anger, the level of sadness, it's erratic, but I think that capturing it in this way is a really effective way of demonstrating the amount of volatility that this experience has injected into my life. I'm also aware of the fact that it's inconsistent, and inconsistency may be hard to metabolize.
If someone is highly erratic, the erraticism becomes a distraction that removes the attention from the message that's trying to be communicated, and I'm nervous about that. Not very nervous, but I'm aware that it's present and I'm aware that I, in capturing it in this way, haven't really made an attempt at setting a tone for the whole thing. And part of that comes from the fact that there's so much in it. There are so many different avenues to explore, and, in my mind, some of them are honestly hilarious. And if Comedy = Tragedy + Time, the frustration for me in all of this is that I've been stuck in the trauma and I haven't really been able to leave it behind, and it's gone on for so long that I've become very aware of how comedically stupid so much of it is. It's hard for me to communicate or convey that right now in this retelling. I think that sort of thing could evolve in telling and talking to other people about it and looking at it and picking it apart for the humorous aspects. And there are parts of this that are just anger. And the anger is actually the thing that does make me nervous, because I don't want this to sound like a revenge fantasy. Do I think that some people should be held accountable for certain actions? Absolutely. And there's so much more to it than that.
I did find, in all of these documents, an email that I sent to my psychiatrist in 2023 that does a pretty good job of explaining where I'm coming from personally, what motivated me to start telling this story and to start putting it down. I'm about to say something that I bet maybe no one will ever believe, which is that I honestly would be satisfied with the effort if it only resulted in the story being down and in one place and told adequately and to the best of my ability and maybe only a few people ever read it. I’m doing this to try and settle my mind, to try and find where I fit in this world that I seem to have departed for a little while. I'm just trying to be here now. Other people are more than welcome to join and discuss. But if it turns out that this is only for me and goes nowhere else, it will have been worth the effort. There's really not much more to say beyond that.
The date on this email is May 4, 2023. This went to Dr. John Tamerin. Dr. Tamerin and I had been talking about passion and purpose and finding meaning in life. He had been trying to help me orient my thoughts to the future — an impossible task, given that I was still living in trauma when I met him. After our appointment on May 4th, I sat down and wrote the following.
Earlier today, when I heard you say “there’s nothing you can do about it” with regards to my physical condition and the circumstances surrounding my health, and that I need to focus on other things, I was a little startled... imagine if someone told Ellison that there’s nothing he can do about racism. Imagine if someone told Frankl to stop thinking about the holocaust.
This past decade, this past year, this moment right now - all of this is source material that I can use to manufacture meaning and find purpose for the rest of my life. What I am feeling right now is deeply human, and I don’t know how I can connect with other people if I’m simultaneously meant to set aside the most vulnerable — and most human — parts of my experience.
I’ve tried accepting the notion that “there’s nothing I can do” about something in the past. I did it 12 years ago. I did it 8 years ago. I can’t do it again, because I look back now and I know I definitely could have done more, but instead, I listened to everyone who told me that I can’t.
I don’t really know what all of this means as far as our work together, but I can tell you that if you want to help me move along with a music project, or a writing project, or any sort of storytelling project, there’s a very good chance that my experience of the healthcare system in the last 10 years is going to be a part of it. Viktor Frankl probably could have spent his life creating gorgeous paintings of the German countryside, but that’s not what he was meant to do. He took the parts of his experience that were unique and he turned it into something.
As best as I can tell, I have a unique ability to make people feel helpless and very uncomfortable. I don’t like that at all. I can see it in people’s faces. I can hear it in their voices, when they reach capacity and start to lose oxygen. It’s a terrible thing to see. It’s a terrible thing to feel responsible for. I’m sure it’s a terrible thing to experience as a person observing me.
That’s certainly the type of thing I would like to dispatch from my life - and, at the same time, there’s something worth holding onto. I think it’s pretty incredible that I’m able to consistently reproduce my emotions in other people. It’s not the emotion I want to be reproducing, but still… it shows me that I’m able to connect with people. In those moments, I’m actually proving myself wrong. People do understand me. It’s powerful, it’s just also unpleasant.
I suspect that it is so unpleasant because it is also relatable.
This is not something to be ignored or turned away from. This is a special ability. I would like to become more practiced in using this ability to benefit myself and others. I don’t think this will necessarily require an abandonment of all focus on my current medical situation - it’s a project of sublimation. How do I take all of that intensely negative emotion and use it to manufacture moments that are just as powerful, just as relatable, and just as honest to the core of my being, while also inviting people in, instead of pushing them away.
So that’s what all of this is about.
I should add that anyone mentioned in this story is more than welcome to comment and refute and request corrections. I am more than open to hearing other interpretations and changing the story to accommodate those points of view. But considering the fact that these doctors are fully authorized to write my medical history and put it into a permanent record without any input from me, and I have no recourse to go back, edit, revise, or remove any of the nonsense that they put in there, I figured I would just do it this way and see how they feel about it. I'm going to make my record. I'm going to put it out there, and then they can try and revise it. And if they choose to do so, I would respectfully request that I have the opportunity to do the same to the story they wrote without me.