Tender Mind

By Tiffany Rodriguez

Tender Mind is a story of an intelligent schizophrenic Asian woman who is dealing with relationship issues and sex. It shows how she interacts with men in different episodes and how men relate to her. It will enhance the study of schizophrenic women and sex in different cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984562135

Tiffany Rodriguez

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Copyright © 2018 by Tiffany Rodriguez.

ISBN:            Hardcover                      978-1-9845-6215-9

                      Softcover                       978-1-9845-6214-2

                      eBook                             978-1-9845-6213-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/23/2018

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 1

1998

Visiting Dr. Barlow today on an emergency basis, I began with I was fired by my boss.

He said, Take more Navane than usual and do not go to your former place of employment.

It happened over and over, that is, my being fired because of my past sexual abuse when I thought I was doing fine on the job. Not communicating, they’d say.

For example, it happened ten years before. I was twenty-eight then, and I worked as a medical technologist in an oncologist’s office. It seemed like just today, but it was before I was diagnosed schizophrenic in a Washington DC hospital. It all happened so quickly.

At that time, I was an on-call medical technologist with Dr. Eugene Gibbs. Actually, he had hired me on the spot. I was wearing my favorite red daisied skirt and a cream blouse, only I wished he hadn’t cornered me with the question of where my accent was from. I said, I was born and raised in the Philippines, although I don’t look Filipino. I was all white-skinned, Caucasian in appearance, not with yellowish pigments but with white and red.

He said, Start Monday.

I was a bit excited about my position. It was the first time I would deal with abnormal cells—that is, cancerous cells. I would review all my hematology notes: the whole line of abnormal white blood cells and the structures of abnormal red blood cells. I will learn a lot! Monday of next week is going to be one hell of a homework session, I thought.

After two and a half years with the cardiologists at the laboratory, I was finally moving on. At that point in my life, I wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist. I was not even on antipsychotic drugs. Basically, I was drug-free. I never really liked taking medications. Although I never had side effects except lockjaw with Navane, I didn’t like drugs.

I entered the office a bit early on that Monday morning. Three other people were there—the nurse, the medical assistant, and the former medical technologist Rosemary. At any rate, Rosemary approached me and said, So you are the new medical technologist.

I said, Yes, my name is Lucy. Nice to meet you.

She started showing me the stocks in the cupboard. Here are the syringes, the lavender, red, green, and blue test tubes, the tourniquets, the needles, the slides, and most importantly, the microscope (sitting on one corner by the window). Dr. Gibbs will be in shortly.

As I turned my back, Dr. Gibbs came in.

Oh, good morning, Dr. Gibbs, I said. He just gazed and headed for his desk that was directly across from my chair by the window. I felt it would be a chaotic office once the patients would come in.

For two weeks, it was a busy office. Work training was only for two or three days. Every day when Dr. Gibbs came in, there were no conversations between me and him. The only words I heard were What is the count? (that is, the white-blood-cell count and the platelet count), not even a Good morning! or How was your weekend?

I worked three days a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—and I was a nursing student at College of San Francisco. I would get up at six o’clock in the morning, prepare a mushroom omelet with coffee for my landlady Mrs. Clarks, and be out the house by eight thirty. I had moved into a free room with Mrs. Clarks in March 1987.

Gibbs’s office was getting chaotic almost every day, and almost every day Dr. Gibbs seemed strange. He carried a leather attaché case and usually opened it up at the office, but I didn’t know what he was doing. He would come and go. At that time—free of psychiatrists after two stays at psychiatric hospitals, totaling five weeks—I told myself I was on to recovery. I was very well dealing with this stress, a chaotic office. I was very happy indeed.

For one thing, there were no noisy machines in the office, not even a centrifuge. At my job before, I managed a laboratory during the graveyard shift with all the noises of machines—spectrophotometers, centrifuges, RIA (radioimmunoassay) counting machines, burners, and refrigerators. I was all alone at night, so those noises made me hear voices. The din of all the machines triggered voices in my ears. That was when I would take a dose of ten milligrams of Navane and one milligram of Cogentin. The voices in my ears were children’s cries, patient’s moans, and to tell you the truth, doctors’ orders and nurses’ arguments. Sometimes I could see visions of Mother Mary, all in that white veil and habit, telling me to jump off the stairs. I would try not to be harmful to myself nor to anyone—that was what I preached. I was relieved of all these problems at Dr. Gibbs’s office.

After about a month at his office, the medical assistant Cherry was pestering me. She said that Dr. Gibbs liked me, and she asked why I wouldn’t date him. I wondered if he was asking her to ask for him. I replied, "He doesn’t say anything to me, doesn’t talk to me personally at all, doesn’t even say how beautiful the day was today, nor ask, ‘How was your weekend?’"

Every morning he would just ask what the cell count was. He never even spoke to me directly regarding supplies or lab coats. We, however, sat back-to-back across from each other. At times, we turned sideways together, but not a word was spoken as I counted all the platelets and the white blood cells.

The only moment I was away from my microscope was when I drew blood from patients. Also, from the start of the day, he was always on the telephone. He stepped out of the cubicle only when he had to check a patient.

However, nothing spectacular nor exciting was going on with Dr. Gibbs and me. The medical assistant and the nurse would always go out for breakfast or lunch with the doctor and wouldn’t include me. I was completely isolated by the whole crew. At lunchtime, I would go to Jack in the Box, get a fish sandwich, and drink my diet Pepsi by the counter beside the microscope. This was the actual routine. But I was being teased about being paired with the doctor.

When I would go home, I would cook dinner for Mrs. Clarks and have again the usual routine. For about five months, these routines happened until that one day I came into the office. As usual, I started half an hour earlier than nine o’clock, and I had never included that half an hour in my time slip. This day was the same usual routine, except I was left with about six or seven differential blood cell counts that I had to do. I regularly did the important things before jumping on the less important, which was the differential.

By about twelve o’clock, after coming from a blood draw in the other room, Dr. Gibbs said, Lucy, I have to talk to you. I like you a lot. You do a perfect job. But you do not communicate.

I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t say a word.

I was terminated—fired on the spot. I just said, It’s okay.

He said, Get your paycheck from Cherry. It’s ready.

My whole world had collapsed.

Chapter 2

At home, the same day, Mrs. Clarks said she didn’t want my services because her children were moving her to Texas. I went back home to San Francisco, California, and that very week, we rushed my mother to the hospital to find out she had angina and she then quit her job.

My mother was a hardworking housekeeper for fifteen years. She had one boss who owned six hundred units of apartment houses, which meant almost the whole island of Orange Shores. My mother’s boyfriend who was a carpenter and maintenance man of the apartment units had been fired. In short, my mother was sick, and her boyfriend and I were fired. The thickheaded boyfriend didn’t care. Maybe for a while there, he still thought that my mother could support him and