Here’s what my friend Josephine knows about what happened in October, having been my designated “contact person”:

 

According to Jo, I was admitted on Wednesday around noon. Apparently the nursing staff called her, as well as Lynnie, as my emergency medical sheet instructs.

 

She comes up to see me that evening, bringing with her some clothing and toiletry items etc. and while she is there she makes it clear to the staff that she is my “caretaker” and is to be told everything so that she can contact my family, when the need arises…(This seems to work, as it turns out, as she will be kept in the loop, thank god.) Anyhow, I am doing relatively fine, though the nurses say I refuse to take the medication the doctor prescribed, which concerns them. Apparently there are plans already being made for a hearing to force me to do so.

 

Before I fast forward to the weekend, when Josephine next sees me. I want to interlace here what I do recall, which is one conversation with the doctor, in his office, during which he tells me that he wants me to take Zyprexa.  “Have you heard of that drug before?” But then memory gets fuzzy, because I am back in bed,  in a bedroom I think is a double, though I am not sure, because I know that for most of my stay it is a single right off the nurses station where they can keep an eye on me, and just as he leaves, I raise up on one arm and scream, “I will NOT take Zyprexa, you F—ing bastard!” Dr Z stops in his tracks, looks back at me, and says, rather mildly, “That’s not very nice.” I finish off with, “Fu– you!” He has heard this before, clearly, turns on his heel and leaves.

 

The next memory I have must occur also before Josephine returns. I am sitting in a room with Dr Z  and someone I think is a judge or a hearing officer. A woman sits on my left, perhaps a patient advocate or a nurse, I do not know.  I recall specifically that Dr Z (whose name I only learn after I am discharged) seems to have spoken to the folks down at N hospital where Dr O practiced because he quotes what I recognize is their Axis II diagnosis, word for word.  This was created specifically for me by Dr O. in addition to paranoid schizophrenia and always struck me as  malarky but was a sore point too, and cruel as it seemed to blame my illness on me. (I had many words with her about it, and I challenged her  to prove it was true. She agreed it did not hold water, since it was only “true” in hospital, and so was just a convenience to satisfy  staff unhappy with my uncontrollable behavior — yes, there too, and equally unremembered!)

 

Nevertheless, it was written in my chart at N hospital and so now it is repeated as if gospel. In addition, the doc decides that he has seen, in two or threee days and five to ten minute interviews with me, “absolutely no evidence of narcolepsy, and no reason to treat for it.” He believes that my sister’s attempts to influence my treatment,  giving him my history of medication responses etc. constitutes improper interference and should not be permitted under any circumstances.

 

After that, I lose all interest in the discussion, knowing it is not going to go in any direction that will be in my interest, that I am being treated by someone who neither knows me nor cares to learn enough to treat me properly. Furthermore, having been taken off all the medications I have come in on (except oddly enough for my Lyme disease antibiotics) as having been “ineffective, by definition, otherwise you would not be here,” I am already feeling drowsy and distant, at a remove from the proceedings and not quite caring what happens. The proceedings come to an end when the hearing officer, or whoever he is rules in favor of the doctor, who wants to force me to take, not Zyprexa but Trilafon, 8 mg BID (twice a day) or Haldol by injection if I refuse. I may object and say I will not do so and will only take the damned Haldol kicking and screaming. Or perhaps I say nothing.  I don’t really know.  I may  only think this, but it is a prescient remark, or thought, in any event.

 

Memory becomes a series of refrigerator-dim flashes. I vaguely recall one incident: literally kicking and screaming while being held down for an injection by any number of security personnel…But even this memory constitutes no more than just an impulse of light on the confrontation, as if I am looking down on my body as I struggle with the guards, no more. Then just blankness.

 

What Joesphine tells me next is that she returns on Saturday, bringing my poetry book. She is appalled at the change in me and asks the nurses, “What happened to Pam?!” I am not merely irascible, she says, but explosive. I am mean and I am violent to the point that I will not let anyone  come near me. If they attempt to I lash out, not just verbally but physically as well, any number of times actually slapping, smacking or in some fashion hitting the nurse of aide trying to take my vital signs or give me medication. She tells me that even when I appear to be deep in thought, sleepy or sedated, I can in an instant rouse myself to fury and explode, launching into a tirade of invective and even physical abuse.

 

At the same time, I am ataxic ( one nurse gives me red  slipper sock to warn staff that I constitute a “risk of falling” but these are soon lost and not replaced) and while I can be wild and have the strength of a rabid animal, at times I have trouble simply getting myself out of a chair. Once, a big security guard, seeing Josephine struggle to help pull me up from the recesses of a deep armchair, comes over to help and I go berserk. Suddenly violent, I take a swing at him, swearing  and screaming at him as if he were the one to have attacked me, rather than the other way around.

 

Once Josephine looked into my bedroom before she was shooed into the day area with me, where all visiting was supposed to take place, she saw that restraints — big leather cuffs — had been placed on my bed. According to her, they were used as frequently as every time I got medication or even every night in order to keep me from — well, I do not know what! But I can only imagine, given how she tells me I behaved. I do know that restraints are only supposed to be used in cases when violence is imminent or uncontrollable by any other means. Now she does assure me that they were, so far as she could see, only two-point restraints, the wrist ones, but that they were actually placed on my regular bed horrifies me, since it implies that they were to be at the ready and expected to be used, i.e. they were not simply an emergency appliance to be acquired from a rarely used, locked cabinet unopened for months at a time.

 

As an aside, I discovered when I arrived home, many just healing scars on my left leg that were not there before I was hospitalized. Yet I also remembered telling a nurse at the hospital that of all the places I had been, their unit was definitely the most safe, the most secure. I felt that it would be most difficult indeed to hurt myself there, as there were very few opportunities and almost no chances were taken…So how can I square that with these scars? I cannot remember when or how I acquired them. I only know that the summaries of my chart mention that I did injure myself, early on, which resulted in four-point restraints at least once (another being the slip-knot episode already described). But with what, and why I have no idea. Probably because of command hallucinations, and self-hatred. But that is only my surmise.

 

I “came to,” I rose to the surface of my insanity only once or twice that I recall, once to see my father sitting by my bed (why was he allowed  to visit in my room?) and Josephine standing there while I screamed something. I remember she abruptly left. After that, the darkness closed over me again.

 

The only other time I surfaced was when they dropped me on the seclusion room linoleum…about which I have written in some detail. But even then, I cannot really remember if it was one whole incident, or two or three amalgamated by a trick of the brain’s confabulatory instinct, and  the passage of time into a single coherent tale.

 

Then there is my journal , which tells a story that in its own way corroborates this one. Usually when I am hospitalized at least in recent years I  keep a detained record of everything going on around me for reasons of paranoia if nothing else. Because of this, I can read back afterwards and understand what I was thinking or doing. This has not always been true, and during some hospitalizations, further back, I was unable to do so,  and thus do not have such a record, but I am glad when I do because it helps me piece together what happened during times that I otherwise experienced later as blanks.

 

However, during the two and half weeks and longer during which I was  literally out of my mind this past October (Josephine insists that I wasn’t “right” even when I got home, and that it took a good two weeks before I was truly myself again)  there is no written record, not in my journal. I wrote a little during the first few days,  going from a self-loathing that speaks of a desire to burn my face (“deface my face and face up to my sins”) mingled with psychotic ramblings to utter confusion. This is almost indecipherable and devolves suddenly on Thursday to nothing at all, represented vividly if accidentally by two blank pages. It is only on briefly on Saturday and then on Sunday, October 18th and Monday the 19th (which may have been only a continuation on Sunday, as I was still confused as to the date and time), which I firmly believe all day is “Monday the 20th,”  that I apparently find the strength and clarity to “steal” a felt marker from OT and then a memo pencil to write with. All writing utensils but crayons have been denied me previous to this, I remember that much, though I also have not been able to, have not wanted to write either or I would have done so even with a crayon.

 

Now, to my pleasure this marker and then the pencil is not  taken from me as too dangerous for me to have in my possession.d I begin to write. I write all day, literally. I write and write, 41 pages in one or two days. I write down everything that happens, and I write as if I know what has been happening, but really without the slightest inkling. It is clear that I have no idea what I have been through, nor what I have been like. I write of a nurse, one I clearly like, telling me I am “doing great” and my consternation at this, because I do not understand why she is telling me how I feel rather than asking me…

 

I write of my impending discharge, and I believe I write about how I don’t remember the last two weeks, but it doesn’t seem to bother me much. What does bother me is why no one on staff will talk to me, why people seem to avoid me, and why one male nurse seems bent on being nasty to me “for no reason.” (I may have made a point of hurting him during my weeks of insanity, that is all I can surmise as a reason for his animosity…).  I am paranoid — at one point I interpret the constant opening and closing of the weekend Dr H’s door, which I can hear from my room near the nursing station, as deliberate torture, intended to “get back at me.” When I finally get a glimpse of Dr H, I scream at him “You think I don’t know what you are doing, but I do, I do!”  He gives me a truly bemused look. I am thrown into confusion, not sure how to read it.  I  remain fairly certain, however, that he is “doing a number on me.”

 

(End of Part 1. I want to reread the rest of what I wrote during my last three days on the unit before discharge — then I will continue with Part 2.)