^audio version of this post if you prefer to listen :)
You stick a finger down your throat within a tiny and overgrown neighborhood garden. Your best friend sits across from you, a crumble of tears and pleads.
“Throw up, Scout. Just try.”
Bent double, you gag and splutter, but have little success in puking up the bottle of Klonopin and several bars of Xanax you swallowed. Your best friend, still crying, calls the cops.
As you climb the stairs together to your garage apartment down the street, your lungs are swept with a kind of horror. You meant to really do it. But Kenady’s heartbreak spilled all over her face, and you had to stay.
It had been a messy evening. It started with red wine in the early afternoon. Dancing and spinning across the hardwood floors, manic laughter floating out open windows. You’ve been awake for several days, with Ken by your side every moment she wasn't at her internship. As alcohol soaks into blood streams and makes your muscles soggy, death invades your mind.
It has been a rocky couple years. A floating suicidality that is in no way new to you, has grown to a kind of chronic fervor and now is something near constant compulsion. The majority of waking moments hurt. Both physically and mentally. You have a chronic pain disorder, leaving you squinting through pain most days. But more destructive, are the chemicals wreaking havoc on your brain. You were diagnosed with Bipolar during a psych ward visit the year previous. The doctors explained they couldn’t be sure which kind because some of your symptoms are unusual. You spend your weeks pendulating between euphoria so great, that in the entirety of your future you will never find a drug that can induce its equal, and crippling depression that leaves you in bed days or weeks. Eventually the doctors will land on the diagnosis “Bipolar 1, with psychotic features, rapid cycling”.
In mania, everything is beautiful. Potential blooms from every idea, thoughts race and skip over one another, fumble noisily to be heard first. You don’t sleep at all for up to a week at a time (and then often only nap for a few hours before the next stint of sleeplessness). In these times you paint the walls with flowers, steal fancy undergarments from department stores, begin the writing of many a novel, swim in public fountains, climb buildings, chase trains, spend all your money on any kind of available drug, skip classes, cut up your clothes, talk so quickly it becomes hard to distinguish your words, sing and dance embarrassingly shamelessly, and laugh endlessly.
When the swing back into the depths comes, its like your mind has suddenly plunged into ice water. Your thoughts become muffled, slow, and hard to hear. You have no hope, no dreams, no plans, no wishes. Words seem to float out of reach. Misery is the only thought. Every perception is tainted by darkness. You know you are hated and despised by the world, forgotten and lonely, helpless and worthless. Sunlight becomes frightening and you get out of bed only to pin blankets over the windows. A couple weeks will pass, you slip in and out of sleep and dream of death, you eat either a lot or nothing at all. No showers or change of clothes.
And then one morning, you wake up early, your eyes fly open, crisp and alert. Laughter comes immediately, then blankets are torn from the windows and music turned all the way up. Mania always comes back for you.
Now you’re about to spend another several days within the cold, empty, frightening halls of the psychiatric ward of some hospital. Things are blurring fast, your eyes are melting and thoughts dulling. Sirens and heavy footsteps on the stairway tell you and Ken the paramedics are here. Someone is helping you down the stairs, hands under your arms. Something between fear and curiosity swirls in your overdose-blurred head. You flip that switch in your mind, hardwired sometime in childhood; turn off fear, decide nothing exists, this is all a game, pain is in the mind.
Get over it. Get over it.
You remember flipping this switch when you were sent to a juvenile crisis center at the age of 17. It was your first time in any situation like that. There was a strip and invasive body search as soon as you stepped foot in the facility, followed by being led to the open showers and handed a bottle of lice treatment.
“Wash your hair. Then come out here and I’ll give you your clothes.”
The moment you were alone you turned towards the smeared plastic mirror and said firmly to your reflection,
“You need to get over this right now. You need to toughen up and be okay.”
The pep talk worked. You walked out of the bathroom, in front of 30 teenage boys and girls, in nothing but a half sized towel without batting an eye. You made friends and got the numbers of several drug dealers. That first night you started to lose it, banging your head repeatedly into a cinderblock wall. You only stopped when they threatened you with a Baker Act: an act passed in Florida in the 70s which allows for the involuntary institutionalization of someone for psychiatric reasons. You had heard horror stories about Baker Act facilities and the fear of having to experience such a thing was enough to keep you from furthering your concussion.
A year after that, you were held under a Baker Act in a psych ward in your hometown (turns out they are actually a better time than the juvenile center). Now, riding in the back of an ambulance, you are being placed under the same Act, headed towards an unknown amount of time locked up, drugged up, and wandering the hospital halls in uniformed pajamas.
Now the blackout is coming in earnest. You, lying in a stretcher, are lifted out of the back of the ambulance and pushed through the swinging hospital doors. Every time you blink, hours seem to slip through your grasp. Lying in a bed. Blink. Ripping an IV from the crook of your elbow, blood spritzing on to the sheets, reminding you of a feeble squirt gun. Blink. Three orderlies are holding your arms to the bed, you're kicking and screaming. Screaming something about aliens. Blink. You’re staring at a door as they close you into a tiny, padded, windowless room. It’s hardly large enough for you to lay flat. You are crying in desperation. You can’t handle small spaces. There’s little you fear more than this. Blink. A large, kind faced male nurse is tightening a blood pressure cup around your bicep.
“Am I alive?” you ask.
He chuckles good naturedly and replies with the affirmative. Blink. You're in the group room, watching a movie. A guy around your age is sitting next to you drawing on a spare sheet of paper. He’s really good. You must have told him so because before the end of the movie you're holding a pen drawn rose. Its in the style of an American Traditional tattoo. You will still have this torn piece of paper years later, tucked in the fold of your journal along with several other psych ward souvenirs.
Now you are all in the grass courtyard. You are sitting facing the guy who drew the rose, his name is Cody, and a middle-aged man. You’re all chatting amicably. You feel quite happy and endless, like a piece of sky. You’ve found an old styrofoam cup and filled it with dirt, pulled a weed out of the ground and are trying to plant it inside. You think it would be nice to have a potted plant in your room. As you talk with Cody, the middle-aged man is looking at you strangely. You dismiss this as something to do with whatever mental illness got him stuck in this place. He continues staring at you, head tilted, eyes slightly squinted, as if you confuse him. Finally, he interrupts your conversation with Cody.
“Do you remember me?” he asks abruptly.
“No… What do you mean?” you ask pleasantly.
“I was in the bed next to you. When we came in.”
“Oh! Sorry! I don’t remember anything from then. I was out of it.”
Cody has a slight smile when he leans back and says, “He said you were like freaking out, bro. Like punching the walls and shit.”
“Oh fuck. Really?” you look back and forth between them feeling bemused. You touch your hand to your knuckles, and sure enough they’re tender and bruised. Cody starts to tell you something about “yesterday during the movie” and your head begins to reel slightly.
“Yesterday?” you exclaim, “That was today, look I have the rose you drew.” You pull it out of your little brown journal.
They exchange a look.
“Yeah, but I gave that to you yesterday,” he insists.
You feel bewildered. You thought this was your first day in here. You woke up this morning in a shared room in the ward. You assumed you spent the night after arriving within that tiny padded room, and then this morning they moved you to the ward. You begin to query further, asking what's been going on for the last two days. Cody tells you that he saw you come in. He says SIX orderlies escorted you to the isolation room. He had asked the nurse why they were taking you there and the nurse told him, “She's a violent patient.”
“I thought ‘All six of those grown men for this girl?!” Cody explained, laughing. “Your hair was all in your face. You looked so fucking sad, dude.”
“You’re like… a completely different person now,” the older man added, wonderingly.
You pull up your blue pajama sleeve to examine the large bruises on each forearm, understanding dawning. You must have been fighting them. The orderlies must have been trying to restrain you. In future years you will realize they shot you up with booty juice, a term used in psychiatric facilities meaning an intramuscular (IM) injection of Haldol (an anti-psychotic and strong sedative) given in the glute or shoulder to pacify violent patients. Cody tells you he didn’t see you for a whole day following that, so you assume you were locked in the dark, tiny room for about 24 hours. What happened the day following that first in isolation is a mystery.
You are in the psych ward this time for five nights and six days. Within this hospital there are three wards, connected by hallways. The first ward is tiny, just three rooms with two cots each. It's a holding ward where you stay once you have left the waiting area with the cots in the ER, while waiting for a bed to open up for you in the main wards. There is no outside time in the holding ward, no snack times, not much socializing, since there are very few people inside it at a time. It's very boring. Then there are two wards running parallel to one another, with a nurses station in between. The nurses station has a plexiglass curved wall that passes through the central wall in the first ward, and curves into the ward beside it. The nurses handle both wards from behind this plexiglass. Each of these two wards have eight or nine rooms, each holding up to two patients at a time. Both wards are co-ed, though the rooms are organized by sex. The ward on the right side is for “high intensity” patients. Dangerous patients.
During this stay you are on the high intensity side. Cody and the other man are both in the “normal” ward, so you only see them during outdoor times, or group room times (where you do various crafts, color mandalas, or as on that first day, watch half an hour of a movie.) Each room has a tall, wide window (one reason this hospital becomes your favorite one.) The “normal” side’s windows look out into the courtyard. On the high intensity side, the windows are covered floor to ceiling in colored plastic. So you can’t see outside, but a certain amount of tinted light comes in.
You often stand with your cheek pressed to this window, feeling the sunshine beyond it. In the common room (a wide hallway with tables for meals) outside of your room there is one narrow window, above the metal sink, facing out towards the road. This window is also covered in stick on window plastic, but this plastic is designed to look like stained glass. You adore stained glass. In certain parts of the day, when the sun is shining against that side of the hospital, the stick on stained glass casts wavering, colored diamonds onto the tiled floor of the common area. You think this is gorgeous and often run your hand through the air in that spot, caressing the colors.
You meet many wonderful people on this trip, and in psych wards in the future. Psych wards actually become very special places to you, because of the relationships you get the privilege of forming. The people you meet inside their walls are in incredible distress, massive pain. You all have no one to lean on but one another. And this creates a great measure of vulnerability, and in turn allows for even greater degree of love and kindness.
All dressed alike in blue pajamas, you meet one another already assuming a certain understanding, while unhindered by the assumptions generally created, by clothing and appearance.
The perspective you gain while in and out of these hospitals is one of the more precious gifts you will be given in life. There is such a wealth of sadness in this world, great depths of injustice. Pain beyond what you want to believe.
You just fall in love with so many people here. You are banded together in fear, searching for comfort and a friend. And you understand each other deeply.
In rehab, there’s a phrase “microwave friendships” that’s often thrown around. What it means is that you get to know people very quickly, all thrown together in the worst points in your lives, surrounded by people you will most likely never see again, in a place where your personal and traumatic stories are welcomed and expected. It’s very much the same in psychiatric hospitals, although there are less prerequisites determining who you get to meet and their backgrounds (health insurance being the big one).
Also, because visits to psych hospitals become nearly routine for you, you're in a very unique position to care for and connect with those around you. The shock and fear of suddenly landing in some locked facility, fades after your second or third Baker-act. You learn what to expect, how to best make it through the days. And this lack of anxiety around those basic feelings of unfamiliarity and uncertainty, leaves you open to focus on the people close by, who do not know what will happen to them here. Who are terrified and confused, who have no comfort nearby. You rarely feel as much purpose as you do in a psych ward. It's a place where you can be useful, where your experiences have the capacity to comfort others, where your own “craziness” only serves to convince those you speak with that you can be trusted with their stories.
You often find the hospitals very stressful, but the people you meet inside, the other patients, are full of the most genuine healing. You meet people who make you feel a part of something, keep you from feeling as alone as you might believe you are, daily surrounded by a society that is so disquieted by pain.
In the months following this stay, you will write little profiles on a few of these people. The first entry talks about the two people you probably spent the most time with during those five days: your roommate, Kimmy, and a man named Tim.
my roommate kim, kimmy, was mentally handicapped. When i met her she said right off the bat “I’m retarded and bipolar”
she was sweet. she had soft light brown little whisky hair. she was in her 50s or 60s. second to last day they weighed us and she lost two pounds. i lost some weight too. she said we were sexy now. kimmy wanted boyfriends. it started with robert who they said had autism. robert and kimmy were the only two in my ward who had to wear these padded helmet things whenever they walked around. their wrists said “FALL RISK”. robert kept his chin up and the helmet always fell over his eyes. there was an orderly with him around the clock. robert spoke some days, but i had a hard time making out the words. one day (i was down the hall in visitation) he apparently got upset, punched the orderly assigned to him, and ran down the hallway naked.
so kim was in love with robert. when I first got there I think they had just ended things. she screamed at him every night. and at the nurses. at everyone. kim was so upset at night. “NURSE, NURSE, GIMME MA PAIN PILLS”, “NURSE ITS HURTIN REAL BAD” “I FUCKIN HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! YOURE A BITCH” “ROBERT I FUCKIN HATE YOU!” a couple minutes would pass in quiet and i’m lying still. “I HATE YOU NURSE! I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU”. different sequences of this every night. i would get up and hug her and scratch her back and hold her and tell it’s ok. sometimes she calmed down for a second. a lot of times we both just cried while i held her. one night she said she we were like sisters. i said “love you, baby”.
(In these days you are in the habit of calling everyone “baby”)
a few minutes passed and she started screaming at me. i ignored it. “you just keep your stuff in your half of the room, and i’ll keep mine in mine!” she told me. it went quiet for a bit and then “I FUCKIN HATE YOU!” it was close to 3 am. i flung off my sheets and told kim that “it’s hard to sleep with you yelling like that, baby!” and slammed the door behind me as I walked into the common area.
i sat with tim. he was a talk black thin man in his 60s with greying short cut hair. he was in the military. navy or marines. i’m thinking navy. he was as chill and level headed as people were in there. he just said he was bipolar and had “just too much of the whiskey and the rye…now you know what i’m sayin don’t ya? whiskey, that’s the whiskey, and the rye? that’s the beer”.
he loved to flirt with me and we bantered back and forth. he couldn’t sleep like i couldn’t so we paced the same steps up and down the hallway with scattered conversations and the occasional teasing comment. but he was totally harmless, just silly. he took care of everyone in there. he always kept his blue pajama shirt tucked into the matching pants. and the 4th day i was there he finally attained a much sought after nail file to keep himself in order. he wanted his VA something. something to get his benefits. that night after kim’s screams i was sitting against the wall with tim at 3am talking. he told me about Twighla, the day time nurse. she had “a nice rump” and tattoos of xoxoxos around her neck. “ooo x’s and o’s!” i said. “hugs anddd kisses!” he said back, and then mimed kissing a women. she wouldn’t be back to work until friday so he hoped to stay in the hospital until then. he wanted to show her he was responsible, dependable. and said once he got his VA stuff in order, maybe he could make it work with her. He said (referring to children) “if she’s got two, i step back. one? ok. None? ok. if there’s one i can get one of my own, if i can perform” and then he raises his eyebrows.
kim came out maybe 20 minutes later to talk. she said she heard me say i hated her. i told her i didn’t and she scuffled back to bed. that night the yelling didn’t end so i slept on this hard couch in “the quiet room”. it was very bright (they kept the lights on all night) and stale and cold. i slept for maybe 2 hours that night.
[June 22, 2019]
You also become very close to an older woman named Sandy.
sandy was 72 years old. she was tiny, 5 foot maybe. shocking bright blue eyes, white curly hair framing her head. she spoke with intensity, her hands balled into fists. she was a dance teacher for twenty years. she’s planning a dance she’s going to do on point for her religious leader at her mosque. she was muslim, and i asked her that first day what her god looked like. she couldn’t quite verbalize him, she explained some feelings and thoughts. i pointed at the shatter and paint of colored lights against the wall and floor from the press-on stained-glass window in the common space and told her that my god looked like that light. she gasped, grabbed my arms and began to cry. “yes that’s my god, that’s Allah!”. we talked about beauty and light and dance and our gods all that week. she prayed five times a day, facing towards the east, kneeling on the floor, her blue pajama jacket pulled over her head to hide it.
we cried together and I helped her through the days and she hugged me often.
she was in there by accident. she was strong and fierce and loyal. both her and her husband suffered from ptsd, but besides her intensity i think that was it. she lost it one night and yelled at her husband, he walked out. “he’d done it before. i know him. he needs time, and then, once he's ready, he will come back. i know this because i know my husband.” this time when he left, she was fearful of being alone in her house. “i live where there are, drugs... and shootings.” i asked where she lived and i think it was somewhere on the north side of memorial. i told her i knew the area and it made sense to be fearful, there alone. “i locked every door, and, every window. the front, and the back, and then i called my husbands friend”
she told me she called her husbands friend to ask to borrow a gun to keep herself safe. the friend in turn called sandy’s own husband who called the police claiming he feared she would try to kill herself. they came and baker-acted her
she was terrified
[August 4, 2019]
Beyond this you only will have a short list of the others you spent precious time with. You write it immediately after being discharged, desperate to never forget these special people.
kimmy- first roommate, wore one of the padded helmets, bipolar
timmy - 57, flirty funny was in the navy or marines, took care of everyone
scott- 57 reddish hair bad ass looking guy
devon- young looking early 20s. i think schizophrenic. bugging out pretty bad when he got in. muttering and writing numbers and codes
mike- we made a paper chess set. really kind. smart. in his 30s. truck driver. was in the military
jacqueline- quiet, 30s, dark hair. unipolar depression & psychosis . she never ate, always took her food to her room. she was the one who first scratched the hole in the stained glass so we could look out
sandy- 72, muslim, husband with ptsd. very sweet very emotional
hector - tear drop face tat. sweet soft smile always. quiet. his dad put glass in his soup when he was a child
cody- works at tattoo shop near your house, artist, 24
Big tony - day time nurse in brown scrubs
[May 24, 2019]
Cody will go on to give you the three large tattoos on your left arm that cover a majority of the scarring from your cuts. He is the one who drew you the pen rose. The first tattoo he gives you, a moth in black ink, he does for free as a gift. You are still friends today.
Big Tony will continue to work at this hospital throughout all your visits in coming years and is, you are pretty certain, the only employee working with psych patients who lasts this long. He really cared about the patients.
During your six long days in the ward, Jacqueline and you often stand together at the little “stained glass window.” You ask her why she’s in here. She says “I don't know, I just really just needed to get my eye out”. She gestures at her face and mimes cutting her eye out. Then she shows me the tiny hole in the stick-on window covering she has been chipping away at with her fingernails. She’s widened it just enough that if you lean over the sink, you can put your eye up to the gap and see out to the cars speeding past in the road beyond the hospital. You grin widely, drinking up the glimpse of the outside world.
There is a telephone on a pole in the center of the group room where you can call people for ten minutes at a time. You speak every day with Kenady. You desperately want to see each other. You are inseparable best friends who share every part of your lives with one another. She technically lives in an apartment across town from yours but you both sleep nearly every night piled on top of one another in your twin bed. You are never apart for this length of time. One evening on the phone you tell her you now have the ability to see outside to the street. She has you describe exactly what you can make out.
“There’s a sign right across the street that says ‘Sunshine Optometry’. It's orange and has a big pair of glasses on it”, you tell her.
“Oh my god, okay. I’m coming right now!” she cheers. You stay on the phone, heart beginning to race with excitement, while she runs out to her car and speeds towards the hospital. “Okay, I see the sign. Holy fuck. Okay. I’m parking. I see the window with the stained glass.” She’s sprinting across the four lane road. You slam the phone back into the phone box and bound across the tiled room to press your face to the little hole in the stick on plastic. You see her running full speed across the lawn. Her phone is lifted up in front of her, filming the excitement. You’re face to face and both sobbing through laughter.
Then hands are on your shoulders jerking you away from her. Nurses and orderlies are rushing towards you. Everyone’s yelling. Kenady is yelling too, though you can’t hear her through the glass. Her hands are waving as if to say “Wait! Stop! I’m sorry!”. Her phone is still lifted as if videoing. The orderlies pull you back towards your room and you’re yelling apologies and desperately explaining, “She was there the night I overdosed! She’s my best friend! She hasn’t seen me since that night! I’m sorry! We just needed to see each other!”
You’re crying wildly into your bedroom wall. The nurses are furious. She had a camera, for Christ sake. That’s a major violation of patient privacy. They could get in trouble for this. You feel sick. You cry and scream silently into your fist for a moment longer, then suck your tears back into your eyes and take a steading breath before returning to the common room to apologize. You tell the nurses you are very sorry. You weren’t thinking, she’s your best friend, you miss her so bad, you didn’t know she was going to be videoing. They sigh and nod.
The next day the hole has been covered with duct taped from the outside. This is a real bummer. It was a delicious treat to watch the world go by out there. You tell Kenady and your other best friend, Juli, about this loss. That afternoon they go together back to the hospital, sneak up along the wall beneath the security cameras, and rip off the duct tape from the outside so you will have your little hole back.
Little victories!
this was incredible, scout.
seriously, thank you for this.
I met hector too & had forgotten his name..so that was such a special detail to read
so proud of you for putting such a vulnerable, life-shifting experience into words.
🤍
“she was muslim, and i asked her that first day what her god looked like. she couldn’t quite verbalize him, she explained some feelings and thoughts. i pointed at the shatter and paint of colored lights against the wall and floor from the press-on stained-glass window in the common space and told her that my god looked like that light. she gasped, grabbed my arms and began to cry. “yes that’s my god, that’s Allah!”
This one brought me to tears, Scout! Beautifully written. Thanks for sharing. <3