The Banana Lady

Chapter 2 – The Banana Lady (Food Fads) T he phone rings again in the small parish office and Henry knows who is calling before he answers. He has lost count, but Dawn has called already several times that morning to make sure he buys milk and bananas on his way home. He gazes at the phone in desperation, considers disconnecting it, but takes a deep breath and picks up the receiver. Dawn, the minister’s wife, was competent, socially skilled, musically gifted and worked as a receptionist before her illness. She had played an important role in her husband’s parish, even entertaining the Queen on one of her visits to Canada. She was in her late fifties when she began behaving strangely. She would stand at the edge of a gathering, not talking to people. During other church events, she disappeared upstairs to play the piano. She stopped entertaining and organizing various parish functions and one day she returned home from work an hour early without explanation. She spent a lot of time in bed, complained of buzzing in her head and insomnia and cried when listening to Christmas carols in a strange display of emotional “incontinence”. Her family doctor interpreted her symptoms as depression, but she was not sad and did not improve on various antidepressants. When she began repeating stories tediously, her family thought there was something wrong with her memory, and this eventually led to a neurological consultation two years after the onset of her symptoms. By the time she came to the clinic, she had developed another set of strange, disinhibited behaviours. Totally out of character, she greeted her husband with a sexually provocative embrace, and discussed her sex life with strangers. Impulsively she danced the polka in the house. She would also get up during the middle of the night and go out on to the street for exercise to help her sleep. As part of her preoccupation with insomnia she began drinking “nightcaps,” mainly Scotch. Henry had to hide the bottle from her. When her family doctor suggested she have hot milk and a banana instead of liquor to promote sleep, she began eating 5-6 bananas at a time. Later, claiming other foods upset her stomach, she went on a diet of 3 or 4 liters of milk and several bunches of bananas a day. She called Henry several times a day at the parish office to make sure there would be enough milk and bananas for her. He restricted her milk intake at night, because of a new problem: bedwetting, but she took to knocking on neighbours’ doors to borrow milk or to use their washroom as she roamed the streets.