Sybil Read Online Free PDF Page B

psychiatric help. She wanted desperately to return to school and knew that this was the only way she ever would.
    Sybil said nothing of this to her parents, but on Thursday, in her mother's presence, Dr. Hall remarked, "Your appointment is with Dr. Wilbur for August 10 at 2:00 P.m.
    She's especially good with young people." Sybil could feel her heart skipping, then throbbing. The excitement about seeing a psychiatrist was overshadowed, however, by the pronoun she. A woman? Had she heard correctly?
    All the doctors she had ever known were men. "Yes," Dr. Hall was saying, "Dr.
    Wilbur has had a great deal of success with the patients I've sent her."
    Sybil only half heard him because the initial terror of seeing in her mind a woman psychiatrist almost eradicated his words. But then suddenly the fear lifted. She had had a warm relationship with Miss Updyke, the college nurse, and she had had a devastating experience with a male neurologist in the Mayo Clinic. The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.
    Dr. Hall leaned forward to put his hand on her mother's arm as he said firmly, "And, Mother, you're not to go with her."
    Sybil was startled--even shocked--by the tone that the doctor had taken with her mother and by her mother's apparent acquiescence. It had been a fact of Sybil's existence that her mother went with her everywhere, and she went with her mother. Never, even though she had tried, had Sybil been able to alter that fact. Her mother's omnipresence in her life had been almost a force of nature, as inevitable as the rise and setting of the sun. In a single sentence Dr. Hall had reversed the reality of a lifetime.
    There was something else about that sentence that defied understanding, too. Nobody--not family, not friends, not even Sybil's father, and certainly not Sybil --had ever told her mother what to do. Her mother--the self-proclaimed "great Hattie Dorsett" --was a towering, unrelenting, and invincible figure. She didn't take orders; she gave them.
    Leaving the office with her mother, Sybil fervently wished--irrationally perhaps but nonetheless powerfully--that the woman psychiatrist, whom she was soon to see, would not have white hair.
     
    Precisely at 2:00 P.m. on August 10 Sybil entered the office of Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur on the sixth floor of Omaha's Medical Arts Building, and the doctor's hair wasn't white. It was red, and the doctor was young, perhaps no more than ten years older than Sybil. Her eyes seemed kind-- unmistakably, undeniably kind.
    Still, churning within Sybil was the same set of opposing feelings that she had experienced in Dr. Hall's office, the sense of relief that at last she was doing something about her nervousness but the terror that nothing could be done because hers was a unique, untreatable condition.
    Dr. Wilbur was patient as Sybil, trying to mask these contradictory feelings, rattled on about being terribly nervous and so shaky at college that she often had to leave the classroom.
    "It was pretty bad at college," Sybil recalled. "Miss Updyke, the school nurse, was worried about me. The school doctor sent me to a Mayo Clinic neurologist. I saw the neurologist only once, but he assured me that I would be all right. But I kept getting worse. They sent me home and said that I should not come back until I was well enough."
     
    Sybil found comfort in the doctor's smile. "Well," Sybil continued, "I'm home now. It's dreadful, simply dreadful. I'm with my parents every minute. They don't let me out of their sight. They look at me with long faces. I know that they're ashamed that I was sent home from college. They were counting on my education and centered their hopes on it. But I'm going back when I'm well enough."
    The doctor still hadn't said anything, so Sybil just went on talking. "I'm an only child," she said, "and my parents are very good to me."
    Dr.