Magic Potions (Spring 1995)
By David Anderson
 
Into the wine of which they were drinking she cast a medicine of heartsease, free of gall, to make one forget all sorrows, and whoever had drunk it down once it had been mixed in the wine bowl, for the day that he drank it would have no tear roll down his face.... Such were the subtle medicines Zeus' daughter had in her possessions, good things.... (Homer, The Odyssey, 4.220-28; Lattimore trans.)
 
I'm not really what you'd call an "opera queen." I don't swoon over La Callas. I don't engage in heated discussions on OPERA-L over the merits of questa o quella donna. Give me a nice bass or baritone any day. At the end of a moving performance of Elektra I have to dash out to find a corner to have a good cry before the bravo, brava, bravis break out. (Didn't Caesar start that?).
 
But I do like opera, despite its frequent pretensions and occasional hoary plot devices (but, then, have you been to the cinema lately?). One of the most notorious of these is the "magic potion." On the simplest level, it's just a magic drink, familiar to us all from fairy tales. On a deeper level, scribblers on music like to write that it's really a device to accentuate psychological processes, to bring up feelings that were there all along. Tristan und Isolde contains the most famous example: Tristan and Isolde supposedly hate each other, they drink what's supposed to be a death potion, it turns out to be a love potion, and the rest is legend, if not history. In Götterdämmerung, four operas and many hours into Wagner's Ring, Siegfried is slipped a Mickey Finn and forgets all about Brünnhilde, with whom he had a rapturous You're My Aunt and I Thought You Were a Man at First but I Love You Anyway duet at the end of the previous opera.
 
In some musicological research I've done, I've written about a little-known opera by Richard Strauss (not Johann, the other one) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal called Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen). In short, it's a convoluted attempt to explain what happens to Helen of Troy and her husband Menelaus between the end of the Trojan War and when they arrive home in Sparta. Menelaus bellows his way through the opera, wondering if he loves Helen enough to let her live after all the grief she's caused, and she stands around looking beautiful and wondering what all the fuss is about. It was the gods' fault, after all. In this opera there are not one, but two, magic potions. One is the drink of forgetfulness, which makes you lethargic and helps you forget unpleasantries, including unpleasant truths. The other is the drink of remembrance, which has the opposite, almost deadly for Helen, effect.
 
All this digression on opera is my long-winded introduction to a story about my participation in a research study at the National Institutes of Health (but you figured that out, right?). They were testing two drugs usually used for psychiatric purposes, one of which is similar to Prozac. These drugs release certain chemicals in the brain that have some effect on neurotransmitters, and the researchers wanted to see if they have any effect on stutterers. I never did figure out how they planned to determine if any effect is a physical one or a psychological one, unless they implanted some device in my head the first time I was there and I didn't know it. Just call me Laurence Harvey (though my mom sure doesn't look like Angela Lansbury; kiss?).
 
The study was supposed to be 18 weeks long, and each participant was flown to Washington eight times (your tax dollars at work): an initial visit for evaluation, then a visit to get the first round of drugs, and then every three weeks after that. The 18 weeks were divided into three 6-week periods. During each of these periods they had me on something different: It was Drug 1, Drug 2, or a sugar pill. By the time I was finished I would have taken each of these, but since it was a double blind study, neither the doctors nor I were to know until after it's over what I was taking when. The pills were a pretty generic pink capsule, in eight or nine bottles, each labeled with a different letter, and a calendar to let me know what combination to take every day, five in the morning and five in the evening.
 
I had my initial evaluation in early November 1994: speech tests, physical tests, blood tests, psychological tests. The cardiology department is interested in the effects of these drugs on the heart, so I was also wired with a heart monitor on each visit and had to wear that for 48 hours. This means that going through airport metal detectors I had to strike a crucifixion pose and get patted down. (I want that security guard to do it.) Every few days I also had to hook up a simpler heart monitor to record information; I called them, and it transmitted over the phone. Someone in the pharmacy department, the experts on side effects (or so they said), called every week or so to check up. On every return visit, they always gave several speech tests, and occasionally I saw the physician and psychiatrist involved in the study. I always stayed in the Dupont Circle area (more interesting night life than in beautiful downtown Bethesda), but usually I got in too late to do much more than go out and have a bite to eat and hit the SuperCrown book store, which was open until midnight. Fortunately, on my first two visits it was unseasonably warm, so I walked around a lot.
 
During the first six weeks I was in the study, I knew I was on some drug, not a placebo: I was lethargic, taking two-hour naps (one-hour ones at work), feeling pretty mellow. Just before Christmas, I started on the second six-week period and got a new cabinet-full of pills. At my parents' over Christmas, my family commented I seemed to be in a bad mood. I was barking at people, impatient, and just generally irritable. My sister said to tell the doctors to keep me away from sharp objects. The Tuesday after Christmas I returned to work. I was growing increasingly agitated on the bus. When I got to work, I threw my things down, began banging doors, hurling things around my cubicle, kicking my chair across the floor. My boss, who shares a wall with me, thought I was just in one of my moods (a thundercloud over David's cubicle, as one friend referred to it). She came in and said, smiling, what's the matter? I broke down in tears and said, "These drugs are driving me nuts." I managed to calm down, and put in messages to the pharmacist and the physician at the NIH. The pharmacist called first. "Did you have any coffee?" he asked! I had. "Oh, well, that's it. Just cut out any caffeine." The physician was slightly more realistic; he told me to try skipping a dose every day for a while.
 
I was OK until two days later. Coming to work, I stopped to do some shopping. First, I went off at a clerk. Then I caught myself starting to shoplift something. I called them again, and they changed the dosage. My family, friends, and lover were appalled at what was happening. They told me to drop out immediately, but I said, no, this is important, I've made the commitment and put in this much time already, and I want to finish it. Things were fine for about a week. Then one evening, I was working in my office in the basement and decided to go to the bathroom. The cat box was in there (we called that "the cats' bathroom"), so I grabbed a little plastic garbage bag and decided to clean up after them. I was sitting there, with the bag in my hand, and suddenly I found myself putting the bag over my head. I quickly realized what I was doing. I went upstairs and told my partner. "You mean you poured cat sand on your head?" he asked. Just like Helen, I like 'em cute but dumb. He finally figured out what had happened. Later I just about threw myself down the stairs. I called my boss, and we agreed I should stay home the next day so I wouldn't throw myself in front of a bus.
 
The next morning I called the NIH. They finally realized that it was more serious than simply a conflict between Mystery Drug 1 and Mystery Drug 2, or a too sudden withdrawal from Drug 1. They told me to discontinue the pills immediately (as if I hadn't already). I said I'd call again Monday, and when I did, we agreed I should withdraw from the study. They were a little too nonchalant about the whole thing for my taste, as if this sort of thing happens all the time.
 
A few weeks later, I was looking at a friend's copy of the Physicians Desk Reference, the standard source for detailed information on drugs. I found the second drug that I suspected I was on when I began going over the edge. The side effects listed there were similar to those I had experienced, and it said 1 percent of people in the initial study of that drug had severe side effects. A month or so later the physician from the NIH called and said a second person in the study had just had to withdraw because he'd had a reaction like mine. Later I learned that they decided to cancel the study altogether because of our averse reactions. They couldn't risk someone being more efficient than I was.
 
My speech began to get difficult again shortly after I dropped out of the study, and I began having some conflicts in my personal life. One day I thought, well, the first drug helped my speech and it got me through some similar personal problems last fall. So maybe I should get my doctor to prescribe Drug No. 1, and things will be great again. Naps are a small price to pay. But then I started to worry that if I turned to the medication again, life would be imitating art in another way, resorting to a quick-fix drink of forgetfulness and avoiding facing problems "squarely." That good old Protestant Ethic. Would I be relying on the drug--however much it may help my speech, whether physically or psychologically--to smooth over more basic problems in communicating with others?
 
All these issues are intertwined in my stuttering like plot lines in an opera. The mystery drugs were like the magic potions in Helen. The first drug made me drowsy and mellow (Helen), the second one turned me into a raving maniac, almost suicidal (Menelaus). Were they really just bringing up deeply submerged feelings and traits in my personality that I usually keep suppressed? Do I want to? Or is it better to let slumbering psychological processes lie? And how do the emotions tied into my stuttering interact with the emotions tied into communicating and relating to family, friends, strangers? Does having more difficulty talking increase my frustration level and make me more irritable and less patient with other people? Or do the personal problems lead to more stuttering? If there really are some physical misfirings that lie behind the stuttering, should I be ashamed of taking a "quick fix" or just a nip of the ol' lotus to mellow me out so I don't have them as often?
 
In short, is a quick fix the right fix? Or if--so the experts say--you can solve a problem by struggling with it for years, is that ethically or psychologically preferable? I don't have the answers yet and may be looking for them all my life. Helen and Menelaus came to realize that it was no good blaming all their misfortunes on the gods or pretending that ten years of horrific bloodshed had never occurred. At the same time, they could never forget, which, however painful, wasn't a bad thing for them, and isn't for us either. In Strauss and Hofmannsthal's retelling of the story, they talk through their problems first, without a magic potion, then take a little nip now and again to take the rough edges off day-to-day life. Menelaus had a reputation among the ancients of being a bit of a dope, so I sure ain't identifying with him! Helen, well, maybe .... We can learn from how this famous couple solved their problems. The magic is in the communicating and connecting with other people, however difficult and however long it takes. Just ask the most beautiful girl in the world.

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