Three Books Behind the Counter
I hadn’t slept in two weeks.
Not insomnia. Not anxiety. Something else — something systemic, biological, relentless. I was just ON. My body had stopped allowing sleep. My pupils 100% dilated, the muscles that control them simply exhausted after two weeks without sleep. My thoughts were running at triple speed. I was drinking water by the glass, 24 ounces at a time, pounding it down in seconds. When I would eat, things hurt, so water was my escape. I didn’t know I had SIADH. That almost killed me even before I got there. They didn’t know I had it either, because now things kinda worked, just not how they were supposed to but good enough to fool everyone [including me for a while].
I checked myself into a psychiatric facility. Not because I thought I was mentally ill. I checked myself in because I was fairly certain I was going to die from a heart-attack due to lack of sleep. They had drugs to make you sleep, and no one around me knew what to do with what they were seeing. The ER hadn’t run a single test. They’d routed me through intake like a package. I signed the forms. I went in. I gave them the key and said, “Lock me in.”
They assigned me a young psychiatrist. He was smart, professional, and completely wrong about what was happening to me. He thought I was bipolar. He mentioned electrolytes, actually — which meant he was closer than most — and offered lithium. I knew enough chemistry to know that lithium sits just above sodium on the periodic table. Smaller ion. Similar behavior. It wasn’t what I needed, but I banked the thought. Someone, somewhere, had noticed there was an electrolyte problem. They just didn’t know what kind.
He told me I was extremely intelligent. I didn’t find that particularly comforting given the circumstances.
I hadn’t eaten in days. When I did, I felt drugged – literally wondering if they drugged everyone’s food or just mine. It got weirder. Nobody was listening — not in the way that mattered, not about the urination, not about the dehydration, not about the other weird rapid hot/cold spells I had after the polyuria triggered by the meals, or the yellow wax all over my skin when it ceased. No one knew anything about whatever was actually happening inside me. Honestly, they were just babysitting me. So I did what I always do when I can’t get help from the outside.
I started looking.
On the other side of the nurses’ counter, in the common area, there were medical manuals. Just a few. I don’t know why a psychiatric ward had them. I don’t know how long they’d been there. But they had indexes in the back — detailed, cross-referenced indexes — and I knew how to use an index [There is a theme here eventually]. I looked up every symptom I had. I built decision trees in my head, chasing each thread until it either fit or didn’t.
Most things didn’t fit. The basic explanations for polyuria — excess urination — were too simple, too clean, “diabetes insipidus.” They described a single symptom, not a system coming apart. I kept searching.
Then I found something different.
It was formatted differently than everything else in the manual. Set apart. Labeled rare. It had pages — real pages, with charts, diagrams, photographs, detailed clinical notation. Not a paragraph of vague criteria. Not a behavioral checklist. This was a documented case study of a specific, organic condition, and the authors had taken it seriously enough to fill multiple pages with evidence.
I read it. It was complicated. Then I went and checked other things. Then I came back to it. Then I left again. Then I came back.
The origin point of the cases they described wasn’t identical to mine. The path was. The cascade of symptoms — the electrolyte collapse, the fluid behavior, the specific sequence of what failed and in what order — it checked more boxes than anything else I had found. More than that: it described what was happening to people in the exact physiological state I was in at that moment, sitting in that ward, losing fluid I couldn’t replace, and it also said death was imminent.
But it described a treatment.
An old one. Brutal by modern standards. But documented. It had worked. And buried inside the mechanism of why it worked was something that connected to everything else I had been experiencing — not just the fluid and the electrolytes, but the burning in my gut, the systemic nature of it, the way it moved and shifted. For the first time, the pieces were adjacent to each other on the same page.
I remember the moment I understood. Not the full picture — that would take decades. But the recognition that I had found the right door. That this was real, documented, organic, and that someone, at some point in medical history, had seen it before. I wasn’t inventing it. I wasn’t projecting. It was here, in print, in a book behind a nurses’ counter in a psychiatric ward I had checked myself into because I had nowhere else to go.
I made a plan. I demanded discharge. I wrote over the AMA form in my best handwriting [Never very good and at that moment? I had to focus for legibility] that I believed my life to be in mortal danger due to the neglect and failure of care I was receiving. My family begged me to stay. I understood how it looked from their side. So, I made a deal: two two-liter bottles of Diet Coke, and leave me alone.
I had just read how to save my own life, and I had a plan on how to replicate their treatment right where I was, in a psychiatric ward.
In short, it worked.
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The information from that article cannot be found online. The condition I read about has been reclassified, absorbed, and effectively erased from the diagnostic literature. I have spent thirty years trying to reconstruct what was in those pages — from memory, from fragments, from the evidence my own body keeps providing.
This is what I found.
