Psychosis & A Broken Foot
Peace River Inpatient Unit
You are running for your life. Your bare feet slap the uneven brick pavement as you fly down the dark streets of your neighborhood. You are shooting fast looks over your shoulder, trying to gauge if it's still coming after you. Your toes find grass as you cut across the manicured yard of a large white house. The moon rushes besides you, reflected in the many window panes. You chance another glance behind you, and take a mis-step coming off the curb. You feel the buckle-snap in your foot. You slam face first onto the bricks, catching yourself on now skinned, bloody palms.
It's like you’ve been slapped awake. The crack of your foot, like cold water on your face. You look around slowly.
What’s going on?
You feel off, weird, confused. You know your foot is broken.
Why are you outside?
You recognize the yard with the large white house. It's just down the alley from Little Red (the name you all use to refer to your garage apartment.) You can’t remember what you have been doing this evening, who you were with. You have no idea what time is, but it seems late in the quiet dark neighborhood. You don’t have your phone on you.
You pull yourself up onto the curb and try to stand. You can’t manage any weight on the foot. You start hopping towards home, falling forward onto your palms every few leaps. You’ll make it. You can see your stairs now. The lights are on inside. You’re at the base of the brown painted steps now. You begin to crawl up them. Above you, the front door suddenly flies open and one of your best friends, Bran, walks out, looking stressed. He spots you and his expression switches to one of relief and frustration. He helps you the rest of the way up.
You had been running from something out in the neighborhood, though now you can’t be sure what. Some kind of demon, you think. It all feels a bit surreal. It's like you are between awake and asleep, in and out of some kind of dream. Bran and your friend Nate had been looking for you.
It's only been a few months since the overdose in the garden, but your mental state has disintegrated to a massive degree. The layered worlds of reality and delusion are intermingling, dancing with one another, spinning you around and whispering confused truths. Often when you are with your closest friends, you will suddenly not recognize them. They seem to you to be “demon clones” of the friends you know and love. It terrifies you.
Sometimes, you ask friends to leave your home. You run from them. You sit dead still, tucked deep inside the laundry basket in your closet, praying they won’t find you here. Sometimes you are so sure of their evil you start screaming for help. Hearing your shrieks bounce off the walls, disturbs you greatly. The expressions on the faces of the people who you love more than life, disturbs you greatly. Your reflection in the mirror, disturbs you greatly.
You do not recognize her either. You do not trust or know the person looking back at you. You hide from demons within your home. Your greatest confidants are particular appliances within it. The refrigerator is lonely. He hums to you, you hold him and sob, you tell him you won’t forget him. Your favorite chair, the pea green armchair, is a safe spot. She’s close enough to the door to escape if something comes from the back of the house, but her back is to a corner, and she's facing the door, giving you both a clear view of anything coming in from the front.
You sit there in that pea green armchair sometimes all night, muttering to her, crying to her, screaming alone in your home as a fat man appears on your couch. He is gone a moment later. You see glimpses. Glimpses of people, of demons. They are always in the corners of your vision. Then they step into full frame, peeling themselves out of thin air, staring you in the eyes.
You hear whispering, muttering, constantly. Sometimes you can’t make out what they are saying. Other times they speak amongst one another, seemingly unaware of you. Occasionally, they talk about you, taunt you.
You’re also increasingly entranced by cutting. You’ve already had one severe episode, requiring 17 stitches across both wrists. Every new cut itches to be deeper than the last. It's becoming an obsession. You aren’t ever sure what exactly you love about it. The blood mostly; it's beautiful to you. Therapists tell you about endogenous opioids; the body's natural painkillers which are released when you are injured. This is probably a large part of it. It calms you immensely, sometimes putting you right to sleep. Also, it makes you feel invincible. As if, it proves you fear nothing. As if no one can hurt you if you can hurt yourself to this degree.
It does not have to do with others seeing the cuts. It does not have to do with wanting attention. You choose your arms for the cuts, not because the scars are easily visible there, but because arms bleed far more than hips or thighs, and seeing a lot of blood is the major allure for you. The veins are much closer to the surface in the arms. After you do it, when you see it after the craving is satisfied, you are overcome with shame. When you see it the next morning, beginning to heal, your ribs quake under the weight of your regret. No one likes a cutter. It's selfish, it's sick, it's disgusting. You resent yourself for it, and this only further fuels the cycle.
It's a convoluted addiction. It's hard for people to understand. It's hard to explain. Sometimes it's more like this “other thing” inside you is choosing to harm its own body. As if “you” are not a part of the experience at all. There’s just “the being” calling the shots, and its avatar. You are only an observer, floating slightly above and off to the right.
Its also probably important to mention, the cuts are not suicide attempts. It's fairly difficult to actually die from cutting. At worst, you may lose an arm (a horrific consequence to contemplate). But though almost everyone perceived your worst cutting incidences to be attempts at suicide, never once was this the case. You were ambivalent to the idea. If it kills you, oh well. But that isn’t the goal.
So tonight, you’re aware you must have drifted from reality. You won’t remember if you cut that day, but you do remember feeling very bad that night. And so, due to the psychotic behavior, suicidality, and the very broken foot, you're sitting in the ER, in one of those little cots, with the observation window and guards.
Your foot has been x-rayed and is indeed broken. They fasten a little metal splint to it with gauze and bandages, and wrap it from toe to ankle. You wait all night for a bed to open up. Close to sunrise, they tell you they found a bed in the next town over. A cop will take you to the Peace River Inpatient Unit. They do not send you with crutches, or a boot, and you still cannot place weight on your left foot. The unit is 45 minutes away, and you have not slept. You arrive exhausted and spend the next hour sitting on a plastic chair at intake. Finally they finish your paperwork and lead you to your room.
This psych ward is the worst one you will ever have the pleasure of visiting. Though it's at least very old, clearly has not been remodeled for several decades, which you prefer for the aesthetic. Your favorite hospital is also quite outdated. A tech leads you past the common room/cafeteria, down a narrow hallway to your room. It's a very small space, and has two beds. The beds are, for some unknown reason, higher than your waist and require you to hop while pushing with your palms against the plastic mattress in order to heave yourself up and onto the it. This is especially irritating with your fucked up foot. The bed has a hard, inch thick, plastic mattress the exact dimensions of the frame. It is not much longer than you, so how anyone taller could fit is beyond you, and is only a couple feet wide. This means you are in constant fear of turning over and finding you have rolled right off the bed and onto the floor several feet below. There are no pillows, but to add insult to injury, they provide an empty pillowcase as a stand in.
Your couple days at this facility are a blur. You are deeply depressed and do not speak to anyone while there. When you have to walk to the group room or the common area, you drag your right foot behind you. You still have no crutches, but your thickly dissociated mental state dismisses the pain easily. As you drag your foot behind you, hopping from tile to tile, using the wall as support, a woman tech says to you “Abigail! What da hell happened to you??”
“I broke my foot last night,” you reply flatly.
She makes a face. “Ew, oh okay. Yeah I dunno what to do about dat.”
There is not a single actual nurse at the facility. It was staffed purely by technicians, so they could provide no medical care. That evening, when you want to shower, you ask if there is anyone who could re-wrap your foot afterwards, not wanting to get the compression wrap holding your foot together wet. Every person you ask stares at you blankly. A couple look around as if you might be addressing someone more competent over their shoulder. Finally, one tech offers to put your foot in a freezer bag and tape the opening around your calf, to keep the water off the stretchy bandage.
He gave it a good effort, but the water seeps in anyways, and you exit the shower with the fabric wrapping the splint soaked through. That night you sleep with your foot hanging off the bed, water and soap dripping onto the tiles below.
The food was also especially bad even by psych ward standards. All mystery meat mush. One of the men tells you it was exactly what they ate in jail.
At this psych ward, everyone wears what they came in wearing. For you this means you're stuck in a pair of very uncomfortable, too-tight-around-the-waist, brown cargo pants the whole stay. For all but one other occupant, this means an orange county-jail jumpsuit. This turned out to be the ward used when someone is Baker-acted while in the nearby jail.
This, on its own, did not worry you. The issue emerges when a tech pulls you aside and points out a few men in particular to watch out for. He explains that many of these men, being in jail, haven't been around women in a while. There was only one other woman patient in the entire ward. She was also the only other person not dressed in an orange jumpsuit. As you walk from your room to meals or groups, hopping pitifully and dragging your useless foot across the tiles, men stand lining either side of the hallway. Their hands move furiously in their pants. Dark, wet spots visible at their crotches. They post up in their positions and wait, all hours of the day, for either of the only two women to walk by.
There is apparently nothing the staff can, or will, do about this, and to be honest, like the pain in your foot, you block it out of consciousness rather easily. You drag yourself down the hall and hardly register the group of men masturbating on either side of you.
Including some old journal entries from the time period surrounding this experience:
vegetable sandwiches, old curry; expired
my head won’t stop spinning and oh i’m so tired
there’s nothing to do and there’s nothing to say
never dare to wish for a happy day
bloody flesharms stitched with blue hairs
don’t ever look there, it’s a bit hard to care
you grow new heal bloom but never again will you be trueyou
i see crows they’re eating my eyes
they poke with their beaks until i die
my carcass dissolves over months of death eaters
picking and pulling, ive come down with a fever
it’s hot and i sweat i feel pain all night
i cry and i scream and there is no end in sight
we are dying we’re crying “there’s things that will eat you”
from inside or outside they’re going to reach you
pray you die swiftly forget your life missed , pray pray pray
pls don’t exist
[September 27, 2019]
—---
things aren’t quite right, morning and night
things feel different in so many ways
i’m currently dazzling, dizzy and dorothy
“swung up in a tornado in my mind”?
the moon grows smaller as it rises
it was large, yellow, lamp
now it is silver, shining, eye
it seems wisest to me, low and warm
young and bright and full of life as it reaches up
thinking about the moon is good
the moon is beautiful
[April 23, 2019]
—--
woke up into hell
bugs crawl out of my nose and eyes
into my ears, brain, spine
i’m twitching and itching
the house is on fire
watery welling eyes
swelling in the sunshine
swelling swollen POP
and my eyes run down my face
to join the bugs
hibiscus ginger kombucha
bc it looks like blood
[August 25, 2019]
—----
loneliness continues
I create friends out of it all
all the scraps are forgotten souls
refrigerators break my heart
mute so forgotten
refrigerators want friends too
hum and I’ll give you a kiss
abandoned objects
lonely rooms
I’m haunted by their sadness
Oh God everything is so scary all the time
[October 10, 2017]
—-----
the voice inside my head will take on these accents when it’s kind of loopy
different people different places
and sometimes play phrases on a loop
just now it was talking about what it was doing e.g. “she expected to like this cookie, eating this cookie feels like a chore to her”.
it’s my inner voice and it’s not in my control and i can’t make it stop either and when it happens sometimes it keeps me awake for hours. it can be loud and layered. sometimes it gets so loud it’s suddenly sounds like a real person in my room. but then that’s a bit different. i don’t know. the images drop too. once the images get clear i hear someone say something and then i do not look, not because i’m scared, but because it is not real and i am nearly asleep so i calm down and then i fall asleep. that’s the loopy nighty time routine.
12:30am
[September 10, 2019]
wow. that was beautiful
What a journey Scout. Its absolutely so well written.