I want to apologize for not having this out yesterday.  Up until last night I had not slept in two days and I was feeling out of sorts and could not concentrate yesterday as well as I needed to, to work on the blog.  Most likely, it is the anti-depressant that is causing me not to sleep.  However, since it is really helping with the depression I am not willing to stop taking it.  I see my psychologist at the end of the week and he and I had discussed the sleep issue last time I saw him, so I am thinking he will prescribe me something that will help me sleep.  It is also taking me a bit longer than usual to get the blog done today.  I keep dozing off as I am typing and I keep losing my train of thought. 

This is the next section of how I ended up in a state run psychiatric hospital and my experiences there.

The nurse that took the time to talk to me that morning brought up several things that have actually helped me.  One thing she brought up is that the adult onset asthma, the diabetes and the diabetic complications  would be enough to make anyone depressed.  She also said that in some ways my depression was a sort of mourning for my loss of health.  Up until the time that all those illness started, I had been a basically healthy person.  The illnesses have had a huge impact on my life.  During all of that my son left home in an unexpected manner and I was mourning that relationship.  Years of being on steroids and other medications changed my body and I was mourning the loss of the body image that I had before.  There are also the hormonal changes of a woman my age, as it prepares to enter menopause in a few more years.  She told me there was nothing wrong with mourning all of those things, but combined also with brain chemistry changes and hormonal changes, I developed major depression.  She suggested a small ceremony of sorts where I put those things I am morning on pieces of paper and burn them, as a way of bringing closure.  Especially, for the things like the relationship with my son that has no closure.

She wrote down an exercise for me to do as a way to deal with the changes and loss.  Some examples of the of what was in that exercise were:  I used to be a/an _____________, Now I have time to ____________.
I miss most ___________________.  I look forward to_________________.  and  little essay for me to write based on this topic:  During this healing/grieving time, my brain chemistry dried up.  As it is being replenished…..

Between what she had I talked about and the exercise she gave me to do, it allowed me to put what has been going on with me into proper perspective.  It also gave me a valuable to tool to use when I encountered other difficulties. 

Once again a breakfast of powdered eggs came and went and with the weekend being over it was time for us to head to the day time unit.  I knew I was supposed to see the psychiatrist today and that my husband and sister-in-law were also supposed to meet with him.  I also knew that if things went well, there was a chance I could be sent home.

This time it appeared the nurses were going to be able to keep things organized and running smoothly and keep us all in a group so that there was not so much boredom.  I was even given a group schedule, with the topics being discussed in each group so I could pick and choose which room I wanted to be in.

The first group I picked for that day was something to do with Healthy Personal Habits.  Silly me thought it would have to do with personal habits to help combat mental illnesses or drug/alcohol addictions.  Instead, it was about healthy hygiene habits.  Oh like what do you do when you feel like you have to have a bowel movement.  No, I am not kidding, that was actually discussed.  Of course with the mix of characters in a small room, it was not long before someone made someone else mad, and there was a fight.  Because of the amount of people in the room and the table and chairs taking up so much of the space, it was very difficult to get out of the way.  I did manage to and I went out to the common area and sat on the floor by the nurse’s station and that is where I stayed.  While I was there a nurse let me know that my husband and sister-in-law had arrived and that he was going to go find the doctor so that he could talk with them.

Eventually, the doctor came and spoke with me.  He wanted to know how I was doing.  I told him that I was afraid to be there anymore, “that in my world, people do not go around hitting each other”, and “No, I did not have any suicidal thoughts.”  He took me out to where my family was.  It was so good to see them!  He told all of us he thought I could go home, and that I would be sent home with a five day supply of the medication I had been taking in the hospital.  That was pretty much all he said while I was with them.  He did say it would be several hours before I could leave by the time all my paper work was done and all my things were gathered.  He suggested that they get some lunch while they were waiting.  Julie and my husband said they would wait to get lunch until I was out, so I could eat with them.

After that I was taken back to the day time unit and the nurses were told to start getting my things ready for discharge.  I also let the nurses know that my husband and sister-in-law would still be in the area so when things were ready, if they would call them, they could be back to the hospital in five minutes.  I stayed by the nurse’s station while all my discharge paperwork and orders were being completed.  The male nurse who was on duty that day, took it upon himself to make sure that things were rushed through.  I was then taken back over to my regular unit where I could gather my personal belongings.

Dorthy had not been allowed to go over to the day time unit and she was in the regular unit watching TV.  Since she had enjoyed coloring with me so much, I ended up giving her my coloring books and crayons.  Once I had gotten my things together, we headed back to the daytime unit and the male nurse called my husband and sister-in-law.  I was almost FREE!!!

The male nurse walked me out of the unit to the fenced in outside area and there we waited for my family.  Once they got there, my husband asked me “How it felt to be free?”  I let him know I was not free until I was on the other side of the gate.  The nurse walked us to the gate, let us out and I declared that “I was free”.

One of the things I had missed in the hospital was coke.  Most of the time I drink diet coke or coke zero, but in the hospital we were not allowed any soda of any kind, and absolutely nothing with caffeine in it.  Julie and Farrol had an ice cold coke waiting for me in the car!  I have never had a coke that tasted so good!

As we were driving to the Olive Garden for my freedom lunch, I began to learn a little bit about what had transpired between my parents and my husband with regards to my hospitalization and some of the conversation that took place between the psychiatrist and them.  What I learned made me a little bit angry and a little bit sad, but was not really surprising.

After the first time I tried to commit suicide and I was not hospitalized, I was a huge mess.  My psychiatrist had talked with me a couple of times about hospitalizing me, but he did not want that as his first course of action.  My mother had taken me several times to my appointments with him.  I had spoken with her about how I did not want my daughter with me when we went because the doctor was assessing me each visit to determine if he felt that I needed to be hospitalized.  From what I understand, when my mother learned that I had finally been h
ospitalized, she stated that “this is what she (meaning me) wanted” and I had to live with the consequences. I think there must have been some other things that went on between her and my husband and my grandmother but no one is telling me everything.  I think they are trying to spare me some hurt.  From what I can gather it seemed she implied that my husband (and me when I got out of the hospital) might not be able to focus on our daughter like we should and kept pushing my husband over and over and over again to have my daughter go to her for several weeks.  This frustrated my husband to no end, as he felt that my mother should be focusing more on me (her daughter) than she should be focusing on her granddaughter who was well taken care of.    My husband mentioned to me that on one visit to my grandmother’s house he overheard a little bit of a phone exchange between my grandmother and mother.  My grandmother who hates conflict and harsh words and voices, was talking to my mother with a raised voice, it was something about me and me being in the hospital and obviously my grandmother was upset with what my mother had been saying.

I also learned that my mother had been prepared to come to the hospital on my discharge date and talk to the doctor about me staying in the hospital rather than going home.  So as a result, no one told her when the discharge date was.  My brother text messaged my father after I was out and let them know I was out of the hospital. 

Remember the medical doctor who was convinced that 30 units of Lantus was too much for me and that I was probably lying so I could kill myself with an over dose of my long lasting insulin?  I am thinking that he still did not believe that is what my medical doctor had prescribed me.  The psychiatrist brought it up to my husband and sister-in-law before he brought me to them.  My sister-in-law happens to have a doctorate pharmacology.  She was able to explain to the psychiatrist that considering the fact that I was on a sliding scale for my humalog (fast acting insulin) that 30 units was an appropriate amount of lantus for me to take.  Gotta love those smart, well educated and loving sister-in-laws. 

After that conversation, we all concentrated on the delicious bread sticks, soup and salad that we had gotten from the Olive Garden, me in particular.  I pigged out more than the other two.

This is the end of the journey of my experiences of state run psychiatric hospital care.  It is certainly not the end of my stories.  I do try and end my stories with valuable things I have learned from the experience and from the story-telling itself.

I learned that I never want to go back to a hospital like that again.  I think there are more than just people like me who do not belong there, I think there others who do not have the support I do, that are stuck there for far longer than I was.  I learned that for the most part the staff in places like that are good and mean well and want to make a difference in their patient’s lives, but because of low budgets and too little staff they are not able to effect as much change as they want to.  They end up being babysitters and body guards more than anything else.  My experience at the medical hospital before I was transferred to the psychiatric hospital, showed me that there are medical professionals who still do not have a clue and possibly the desire to treat patients with a mental illness with any type of dignity or respect.  Finally, I learned that my husband, brother and sister-in-law are strong people who love me a great deal.  They are doing so much to help me get through this period of mental unhealthiness.  In some ways, I feel like my mental illness has allowed us to become closer.

Back to Part X

This is the next section of how I ended up in a state run psychiatric hospital and my experiences there.

As soon as I got back from visiting with my family and taking my medication for the evening, my gin rummy friend, Dorthy, decided to start a one woman riot.  She started the festivities off by launching a chair across the unit.  I was too stunned to move from my chair by the nurse’s station, and all of the other patients who had been in the common areas scattered.

The chair was followed by the turning over of a heavy couch or two and some other very heavy chairs were turned over.  By then I had slowly gotten up and kind of moved over to the medication window, which the nurse had locked and closed once furniture started flying.  The rest of the nurse’s were in the nurses station hollering at Dorthy to stop and  watching to see what she would do next.  Dorthy went up to the chair I had been sitting in.  It was like one of those jail house chairs, where a line of chairs are connected together by a steel bar.  She turned those over too.  Then she saw me, walked over, and in my head I am thinking “Oh Shit!”, and all she does is to let me know she will be ready to play gin rummy in a few minutes.  Then Dorthy went after Patty.  Apparently, Patty’s non stop talking aggravated Dorthy as much as it aggravated me.  Patty ran into the laundry room and locked herself in there.  Dorthy then went to the other section of the common area and turned the chairs over there, and also dumped the very heavy picnic table over.  As Dorthy walked past me again, heading for whatever target she wanted next, I asked her how she was doing and she calmly told me she was “just fine”.  There were two large, outside garbage cans in front of the nurses station, one was used for garbage, it was padlocked and had a rectangle cut in the top for us to put our trash into. The other garbage can was for our dirty linen.  Again, heavy objects.  Dorthy picked up the garbage can and threw it over the glass partition of the nurses station.  Fortunately, the nurses were able to get out of the way before hit anyone.  That is when the nurses decided it might be a good idea to call a code, and get help in subduing her.  Dorthy then got a cup and repeatedly filled it up with water and tossed the water over the partition of the nurses station.  On her last time to do that, one of the other patients started hollering “Here she comes again”, that upset Dorthy.  Dorthy took off running towards the other patient and threw the water on her and then proceeded to punch her a few times.  Then she picked up the linen can and threw it over the partition of the nurse’s station.  That time one of the nurses did not get out of the way.  So he started yelling all kinds of cuss words at Dorthy.  A doctor who was on duty that weekend had shown up to our unit and had scrambled to get into the nurses station.  She heard what the nurse yelled and fussed at him.  No one had shown up in answer of the code yet, so the doctor had them call the code again and instructed the medication nurse to fill up several syringes. 

The code team showed up.  Rather than wait for them to go after her, Dorthy charged them.  They ran away.  Then the doctor told them to man up and that is when they began chasing her around the unit.  The idea, I think, was to get her in the isolation room and then inject her with whatever was supposed to calm her down, but that did not quite happen.  At one point they had her on the floor and the medication nurse came and injected her with about three syringes.  Every single one of them thought that this would calm her down quickly and then they could get her in the isolation room with no more problems.  Dorthy popped up and gave them another run for their money.  Finally they got her in the isolation room.

Once in there Dorthy started spitting on the door, and the observation window, she took the straps off of the tie down bed and was beating on the door with them, then she started beating her head against the wall.  I noticed that one of the nurses was standing there with her finger on a button constantly.  I thought it was an intercom button so they could keep track of anything she was saying.  So I asked about it.  That is when I learned that in our state, no mentally ill patient is allowed to be locked into a room without being constantly supervised. The state decided to deal with it in their psychiatric hospital by making it so the isolation room could not be locked unless someone stood there and kept constant pressure on this button.

The nurses were trying to get Dorthy to take some more medication that the on call doctor had prescribed to further calm her down.  Dorthy was refusing and the nurses told her that she could not get out of the isolation room until she did.  Dorthy kept screaming at them and telling them no.  So when no one was looking except the poor nurse holding the button, I snuck over to the observation window of the isolation room, and started talking to Dorthy.  She instantly calmed down.  I told her about the coloring books my daughter had sent me and how I had not seen them yet because the nurses had not had time to go through my presents. However, if she would calm down and take her medicine, she and I could color together.  That seemed to do the trick, after that she took the medication, and the nurses let me have my coloring books and crayons. Dorthy and I sat down and colored together for a while.

A couple of hours after the one woman riot, there was loud shouting and banging and cussing coming from the hallway that separated the men and women’s sides of the unit.  I could only imagine what was happening now.

To be continued…

Scariest Time Of My Life – Part X
Back to Part VIII