The Time I Almost Set Myself on Fire

A doctor's mind attempts to figure out a vexing biological puzzle.

This article is about a misunderstanding. It’s a misunderstanding about my own health, in which what I thought was a psychiatric and even suicidal crisis turned out to be nothing more than the wrong dosing in a medication taper for an unrelated sleep condition called restless leg syndrome.

I hadn’t slept well. It had been a couple weeks of not sleeping well. On top of a few years of not sleeping well. This is the kind of not sleeping well that people describe as “not sleeping well” in order to not have to say “I literally didn’t sleep at all, and that’s definitely pathological, so I’m not gonna say that part.” My situation, at least the prior night, which was debatably still going on at 5 AM, involved the “not sleeping at all” variety of the problem.

It was 5:15 AM. There wasn’t a ferry coming to the dock in front of me until 6:25 AM. It’s probably worth noting that this was the dead of early spring. It’s like the dead of winter, in that it’s just as cold, but it’s early March instead of February, so you can’t really say “the dead of winter” and have it be accurate. But it’s still below freezing. I was wearing a coat that wasn’t appropriate. This is also defined according to the situation: no coat is appropriate when you’re just sitting there for long periods of time and not moving if it’s a coat that would be appropriate for moving around. I was wearing the kind of coat that was designed to take into account body heat having been generated over some period of time thanks to robust strolling. I was not strolling. At best, I was robustly sitting. Which was not the intent of the coat designers.

I live next to the East River. Manhattan is flanked by one river on the west side, the Hudson, and one river on the east. That river, the East River, separates Brooklyn and Manhattan. On the Brooklyn side, you can live right on the water, as it were. I do. And I did. And there’s a ferry that comes to a dock. It’s a good boat. It’s a reliable boat. It’s not a far walk from my house. And so I was waiting for that boat to come get me. The other side of that boat ride was a grand total of 15 minutes away. NYU Langone Medical Center has an emergency room with an entrance at 33rd St., and First Avenue, which is one block from the ferry. Instead of taking some more sensible form of transport, something like a cab, that would’ve taken me right there, or a subway, which would’ve moved me on my way, and probably gotten me there at the same time, I decided to allow my ambivalence about the whole situation to dictate my mode of travel, and I selected the mode of travel that wouldn’t come for another hour. In my mind, I had no choice but to wait. My mind, as we will see, was acting quite unreliably at that time. I had headphones on. They were playing music that was dark. There was ice on the ground, and I was wearing converse, which are not appropriate shoes in these conditions. It was quiet and the early morning pre-dawn light was flickering in the presumably halogen bulbs of the street lights positioned on the boardwalk. Frankly, I wasn’t in a rush. Because I knew where I was going. And I thought I knew why I was going. In fact, I couldn’t stop thinking about why I was going. Something was wrong.

The image of pouring gasoline over oneself and lighting a match is not a pleasant one. It’s not pleasant even when you’re thinking about someone else doing it, who is invariably a monk. Monks are in virtually all of the pictures that exist of this activity, because the most viewed image of this is on Rage of The Machine’s breakthrough album. Monks are different from regular people. Monks are not you or me on average. You don’t go to work wearing a monk outfits unless you’re a monk. Monks are conceptually far enough from early-40s, tubby, balding, white physicians as to allow for a sort of emotional and cognitive distance. This distance is what allows people, including myself prior to this moment, to look at these pictures of monks burning themselves alive and not immediately have the uncomfortable imagined experience of it being themselves. It makes these pictures bearable.