1 June 2024
Director of Behavioral Health Patricia Kenney
Behavioral Health Unit
Roger Williams Medical Center
825 Chalkstone Avenue
Providence, RI 02908
Dear Director Kenney:
I hope this message finds you well. I was one of your guests in Emergency Room B this past week. I just wanted to thank you for a great experience.
Why am I thanking you?? Because the universe has taught me to engage in gratitude whenever possible. Even though I was created via incest and rape, I still skipped a grade and went to mostly private schools. Us inbred kids are supposed to be dumb, or at least that’s what I was told. Even though I suffer from a number of mental illnesses, I have still managed to stay clean and sober for over 21 years. Even though Sunday was a wild afternoon, your entire team created a peaceful transition and the opportunity for a very soft landing. They also gave me things to think about regarding self-improvement.
How did it all start?? I was at Market Basket on Sunday afternoon. Originally, I thought I misheard something and my brain’s reaction was to send me into an even more intensifying manic episode. I realize now that I was already in soft mania and what I misheard just increased the intensity. My BiPolar 1 brain immediately decided that because I was in an emotional crisis, I must protect my sobriety. The easiest way to do that is to help others who are sick and suffering. The easiest place to find them is in Kennedy Plaza. Within seconds of the “mishearing”, I was walking to Kennedy Plaza.
Of course, being a BiPolar 1 person, I was not going to take a direct route. I ended up walking the entire bike path that runs from West Warwick to Cranston through Warwick behind one of the Extended Stay Hotels. While on the path, something happened that should have been an early clue that I was in mania.
A large puppy was walking towards me. He avoided everybody else. When he got up to me, he tried to jump into my face. He wasn’t growling but smiling rather playfully. It took me a while, but I also remember a couple of days before the incident waking up with my cat sitting on top of me trying to smell my breath. Then she acted very concerned. I’m not sure what chemicals or other enzymes may be involved, but dogs and cats know when a human has entered mania. Dogs get all happy and celebratory; cats get all worried and start guarding you. I can only imagine other animals must notice too. Maybe I should talk to somebody about doing a peer reviewed paper on the “animals can sense mania” topic.
When I got off the bike path in Cranston, I was happy to find out I knew exactly where I was. I walked my way through the West End and then down Westminster Street. Eventually, I ended up at Kennedy Plaza. On one side, I noticed a young lady sleeping in a doorway on Washington Street. I got her to agree to seek help as she was obviously one of us living in the addicted community. Then I planted the seed with two other people on the hill by the bus stops.
However, my Bipolar 1 brain wasn’t done protecting itself. It wanted me to ground myself in my recovery due to the emotional crisis that the misheard statement was going to generate. I never reveal, out of respect for anonymity, which recovery program I engage in. I have helped get sober in just about all of them. Many of them have a practice where you admit your “shortcomings, sins, misdeeds” to another human. That part of my recovery journey took place at Governor Coddington’s grave site in Newport. It was down the block from where I lived at the time behind the White Horse Tavern and him wanting to start a Civil War back in the late 1600s made me happy. So now my Bipolar 1 brain wants me to walk from Kennedy Plaza to Newport to visit the grave, which I stop by now and again just to check in and then off to Newport Hospital since I only have what I’m wearing on me as I’m not carrying my phone or wallet.
So I started walking from Kennedy Plaza down to the George Washington Bridge. It’s starting to get dark. Turns out I couldn’t get across the bridge. No problem, I’ll just walk through Providence around to the other side, cut back over to Route 6, walk down to the Brightman Street Bridge in Somerset, the Washington and Mt. Hope bridges don’t have spots for pedestrians, walk through Fall River and Tiverton, over the Sakonnet Bridge, down into Newport to the grave and then back up to the hospital. Even if it takes 50 miles or so, I should be there by about 7 am tomorrow morning or so. As you can see, my Bipolar 1 brain had it all worked out.
Then something started to happen. All of a sudden, due to mania brain fog, my semi-eidetic geographic memory wouldn’t work. I was literally “just guessing” with regard to the route now in the darkness. Up these two streets, over here, take a right at this corner, up another 2 streets, just all random now. Of course, because I’m in mania, there’s no panic. I just figure it will work out.
Then something else started happening that got a little concerning. I started having paranoid visual delusions. You think you see somebody behind you or up ahead behind the tree, but they’re not there. After a while, you realize it’s just a hallucination. That does mean hypomania is coming. The taste in my mouth hasn’t arrived yet, which is concerning. It should also be noted I have always been intrigued why when you have visual hallucinations connected to hypomania you can tell yourself, “It’s OK, your brain is just playing games via your eyes at the moment.” On the other hand, auditory hallucinations are always real and you can never “dismiss” them. I practice DBT and I still can’t tell the difference between real and imaginary sounds in hypomania. Maybe the reasons behind that should be another peer reviewed paper.
So I’m wandering around and all of a sudden I see a sign that says, “Welcome to Pawtucket”. That’s not the direction I wanted to go in. It dawned on me that I was in deep mania. I realized I needed help. I started looking for a Police Station, a Fire Department Building with multiple garages in the front, or a hospital so I could ask for help. I wandered around for 90 minutes before I could flag down a Police Car. Because I was walking around in an area of Providence under heavy surveillance, if you ever want to see someone in hypomania walking around, just ask them for the video.
The Pawtucket Police Officer listened to me. He called a Pawtucket Rescue Vehicle. They took care of me and took me to your building. Just for fun, I checked out based on what I knew I had done and where it seemed like I had gone, how far I walked on Sunday until 2 am Monday morning. It was just over 30 miles. Not bad for a 57-year-old. Then again, I ran a 13 minute mile at the gym this morning, after running 2 miles in 30 minutes last week, so it’s getting there. I don’t think it’s going to be me in my early 20s club soccer me or year-old me running a mile at 4:32 in JAG AIT at Fort Jackson, but it’s getting there again.
At the end, the entire episode produced gratitude. I managed to go on another adventure and didn’t really get hurt again. I owe my life to the people that do what your staff does daily. At age 5, I got sent for “evaluation” because I was doing “serial killer in training things”. I got diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. At 35, I got sober without wanting to. At 44, I stayed awake for 7 days straight. Then I spent a few days in the “Behavioral Unit”. In 2012, in 4 hours on a Wednesday, I copied a charity’s website, stole their name via legal findings, set up my own Board of Directors, and had my own bylaws put together. Yes, I managed all that in 4 hours.
The Newport Police Department was rather impressed but concerned at the same time. They asked me to get another evaluation. Up until then, I thought I might be a person diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorder due to the 7 day awake episode. I never experienced depression. I didn’t know what rage mania was yet, even though I had engaged in it thousands of times, so I didn’t think Bipolar. My doctor then explained what BiPolar 1 was. Finally, I was diagnosed.
I had always thought BiPolar 1 was cool because it meant I could never commit suicide. Then in 2017, I found out that wasn’t true. BiPolar 1 doesn’t make you commit suicide through depression. It does it through making you want to join a club. The voices would say, “You know Bobby, writers don’t get famous until they die. Along with that, a lot of your heroes – Layne Staley the year you got sober, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Scott Weiland, Robin Williams all killed themselves, you gotta join the club.” I even put together a spreadsheet and gathered what they all used. As I rounded up the items, I put a check in a box. Thankfully, my DBT, that I only learned due to the 2011 event, kicked in and I asked for help. As part of that process, Borderline Personality Disorder and OCD were added to my list.
In 2019, I noticed the hypomania taste in my mouth really early. I knew what was coming. I got to the hospital literally hours ahead of time. The wildest thing that night was a certain light bulb talking to me in German like a mom talking to a newborn’s voice. But I survived it and I was fine.
Thanks to your team and others, I’ve published two books in the last year. I changed a city’s motto. I’ve made a lot of money to go adventuring and drugging with. Yet somehow the universe thinks I should stay sober and help people. Please thank your team for their role in my journey. I wasn’t in your facility for a long time, but they made me feel comfortable and safe. The only downside was I didn’t ask about changing the tv station for over a day. I watched Ion Mysteries channel for all of day one and half of day two. Then I went back to normal ESPN.
Because I have the gratitude I have, I try to be as cooperative as I can. I know lots of folks don’t. Normally it’s the illness. On this trip there was a gentleman who had an issue that I was pretty easy to diagnose and fix. So I have a couple of questions.
There was a guy in the “room” next to me who used the N-word and was really nasty to the staff, especially the women. Because he was so loud, I soon discovered that he had recently, like later the previous day recently, quit drinking. As I heard him mistreat your staff, all I could hear in my head was “Get him a candy bar”. The “carry candy” thing for newcomers has been around since ‘39 or so. It’s even in the AA Big Book. We alkies process alcohol as sugar. When we quit drinking, the liver is constantly sending signals to the brain about “Where’d all the sugar go??” Sometimes the brain misreads the signal and the person picks up a drink, hence the carry candy thing. It’s also why folks detoxing tend to wake up around 4 am. There are some scientists who believe that the body does a status check around 4 am because that’s when “what was today becomes yesterday and a new today starts”. Of course, the liver has something to say and wakes the person up.
Even with my over 21 years clean and sober, I didn’t say anything. First of all, it’s not my place or concern. Secondly, would anyone listen to the Bipolar guy who was just wandering around in Pawtucket trying to get to Newport??
But now it begs a couple of questions. Is sugar prohibited everywhere?? Is it a diabetes prevention thing?? A discrimination?? A “we’d have to keep around” too many flavors thing?? Heck, I’m so olde school that I bring at least candy, and yes sometimes right out of the 40s actual alcohol, when I go to “12 step” somebody. Is there a way I can advocate making candy available in behavioral units everywhere for those suffering from addiction?? It turns jerks like these gentlemen into rather peaceable fellows very quickly. Your staff deserves stress relief.
The second question is about socks. For me, and no matter who else I talk to who has been through the experience, there is nothing better than, and I’m just gonna say it implications be damned, Psych Ward socks. They are the best freaking things ever. I even wore mine at the gym the next day. Yet, I can never find them for sale in any freaking place. Any chance you could make the socks available for sale in the gift shop?? I promise you will have new customers right away.
The end result of all this is I didn’t relapse, and I can go on to continue writing books #3 and #4. Hopefully, I can get both published in the next couple of years. I also know that if I’m 57 now and plan to live to 86 or so, yes – I’ve picked the day in my late 80s unless science significantly changes, that while I can put in work to stay sober, my hypomania kinda shows up when it feels like it. That means in the next 29 years, there could be 6 or 7 more of these. On one side the addictions and the mental illnesses and on the other side, the 167 IQ, seems to go up when I achieve more closure regarding my birth family, my creative skills, the semi-eidetic memory, I am going to be a trip for somebody to take care if I go into early onset dementia as most Bipolar folks do. I hope somebody writes down my adventures in case I forget how to.
Please let the team know I wrote this letter and I will mention them to my Higher Power often. I’m going to put it on my blog. At 57, I don’t care if you call me crazy because, based on how much fun I’ve had and the opportunities I’ve garnered, maybe a little crazy is the path. If it ever happens that you or the team runs into somebody who is really struggling with drugs or alcohol, don’t be afraid to hand out my contact info.
Eventually, those who deny science won’t even be 40% of the population like they are now. COVID and old age are doing wonderful work in that Department – I told you about the Narcissistic Personality Disorder. When you’re lucky like I am and get to celebrate all these things, you have to tell the stories so others can realize that it isn’t helpless. Yes, it requires a lot of work, but it isn’t hopeless.
Thank you for your time and consideration. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
In Hoc Signo,
Robert T. Oliveira
Enjoying East Greenwich instead of a grave today
401-391-6402
Quahogs United 