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There were few rewards for behavior that toed the line at New Britain General Hospital (HOCC). Mostly it was punishment. If I was found with even a stub of a forbidden pencil, I was carried off to the Supermax seclusion cell, stripped naked and left alone.

 

At that point, being teeth-chatteringly blue with cold, I would swat a nurse in such a way that she would feel assaulted and bring on the goon squad of “I want to hurt someone today” guards to put me in four point restraints.

 

Why would I induce this? Because then they would at least cover me up afterwards with the mercy of a sheet, for modesty not warmth mind you, and I would beg for a blanket in vain. But at least my body would be protected from head to toe from the blasts of the A/C up full bore, and I could rest after I had had screamed out my lungs and my despair for a lonely twenty minutes or more.

 

No one cared, no one heard or paid any attention. The doors were double, and the cell was utterly soundproof. NO one ever even knew I was locked in there. When my screaming was too heart-wrenching for the softer ones of the staff down the hall in the room where they had retired to, they simply turned down the monitor and intercom so they didn’t have to listen.

 

I know, because I heard when the telephone rang, telling the person sitting outside the inner door they could turn it back on now (after I had quieted down). This was brutality of the nth degree. But they always called it treatment for safety, though I mentioned the CMS regs to the security guards one day as they were inflicting their usual pain in order to bring me to the room, and they stopped in their tracks.

“You’re kidding,” one said, “Its true that the only legal reason for seclusion is Imminent Danger to self or others?” (I had been brought there for disturbing the peace…)

 

I nodded, Look it up. She looked gravely at the others. but proceeded o do what she had been ordered to do anyway. And I proceeded to behave in a wildly immodest and terrified fashion likewise…knowing I would be left alone and freezing for at least two to three hours, no matter how fast I calmed myself.

 

They didn’t care. it was PROTOCOL…