Dora was about sixty, very thin, badly hunched over, with striking white hair and blue eyes and a sweet smile that could sometimes shine strongly though her fear. She walked with a jittery bounce, with head and eyes constantly darting from side to side to check for danger.
         “Can I fix you some tea?” Dora would ask me, peeping out from under eye sockets that were turned into an overhanging arch by her stooped posture. “Sure, Dora, that would be great.” When we sat down with the Lipton, I’d ask, “So, how are you doing, Dora?” “Not too well,” was always the reply. “Why?” Then: “the cops.”
         San Francisco, early 1980s. I hadn’t yet gone to physical therapy school, but worked for slightly better than minimum wage at a board and care home for the mentally ill. The place was licensed for 12 residents. Only three or four seemed truly insane to me; the rest were just mostly older, had various medical problems, were usually alone in the world, and were wierd in some way or other--so that each had at some point picked up the diagnosis of “mentally ill.” I liked them all, but Dora was my favorite. She was the most troubled person I have ever met.
         I’ll never forget a scene from the 1976 movie Marathon Man, where the Nazi dentist (played by Laurence Olivier) is about to torture Dustin Hoffman by drilling his teeth without anesthesia, saying with a demonic grin that “you can feel more pain through the root of a tooth than anywhere else in the body.” Dreadful shivers down the spine. But knowing Dora led me to believe that a human can feel more pain purely through the mind than through any physical avenue.
         Dora had a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Once a month, the psychiatrist would arrive in his expensive red sports car. He went straight upstairs to talk with my boss, to find out which residents had of late been too energetically wierd, and which had been too lethargic, too zombielike. I think he decided on medication changes mostly in those discussions, fine-tuning the neurotransmitters of my wards, my friends.
         Almost as an afterthought, the psychiatrist would then meet each resident for individual private sessions lasting from one to three minutes. I was in charge of lining people up in the kitchen and shuttling them one-by-one to the living room to see him efficiently, without wasting a moment of his precious time. I was also in charge of getting a Medi-Cal sticker from each resident’s file, and would give 12 stickers to this blood chemistry technician when he left. He was in-and-out in an hour or so. I don’t know how much he billed the State of California for each sticker, but I bet it was more than I made in a day.
         Dora was on a high dose of Haldol, which was then and remains today one of the most commonly used chemical straightjackets. I hope that Haldol helped blunt the edge of her pain, but I’m also afraid that it might have kept her stuck, rather than giving her a chance to somehow work through and beyond her deep fear.
         “Why are you afraid of the cops?” I would ask Dora. Her eyes would first widen in fear, then narrow with sharp anger: “Because I will be shot. My head will be shot, my shoulders, my chest, my hips, my legs--my whole body will be shot.” The story was always the same, though in one variation, she would first be taken to Mt. Zion Hospital (right down the road), given electric shock treatments, and then her whole body would be shot. Dora told me that she had indeed been given electric shock treatments many years before, at a place called Agnews State Hospital.
         The board and care home was not a locked facility, and occasionally one of the other residents would wander off. They usually came back on their own, but if they didn’t show up for awhile, we’d make a “missing person” call to the police--who would then come to take a report. These were Dora’s worst days. When the police arrived, she became incredibly agitated and would hide in her room, quivering in terror.
         Though the cops always left without shooting Dora, she was never able to make the logical deduction that her belief was mistaken.
         Still, I loved to have tea with Dora. She was quite interested in my life and in the other residents, to the extent that she could for a few seconds focus on something outside of herself, something other than her fear. I once had her and a couple of other residents over to my own home--I have a treasured photo of Dora, sitting in my room.
         Dora’s brother visited her often in the board and care home. I ran into him many years later in San Francisco, and he told me that she had died a couple of years after I quit working there. I was sad to hear this.
         Since then, at a few difficult junctures in my own life, I have called out to Dora’s spirit and asked for help. I don’t know if she’s heard me, but something has been helping me along. Dora had a powerful spirit, full of love and compassion. I’m so sorry that she had to suffer such torment. I hope that in the grand scheme of things, there was a good reason for it.