This is the next section of how I ended up in a state run psychiatric hospital and my experiences there.
I sat in a chair that was bolted to the floor and used everything within me to keep from bursting out crying. The sheriff deputy was handing paper work, and my medial file over to someone behind the glass partition. When he finished with his paper work, he came over and told me it would all be OK, and to remember to cooperate and I would be out sooner.
I looked at my surroundings and everything was gray. Concrete floors painted gray, cinder block walls painted gray, gray chairs. I am still holding on by a thread, using all my self control not to cry. Still sitting. Finally, a triage nurse takes my vitals, and is concerned because my blood pressure is sky high. In my head I am thinking, of course my blood pressure is high, I am terrified. I am told to go back to my chair and wait for a nurse to examine me.
As I am sitting in the gray chair, looking at the gray walls, feeling terrified, barely able to keep myself from crying, I start shaking. Then one of the men from behind the glass partition came over to where I was sitting and shaking and told me he had to take my picture. Again, a thought pops into my head, I am thinking they need the picture in case I decide to escape they can use it to track me down better. Of course the picture was awful considering the fact that I had done a bunch of crying before I left the medical hospital, and I had no make up on and I had not been allowed to take a shower the whole time I was in the medical hospital. About the time he finishes taking my picture, the nurse who is to examine me shows up.
She calls me into her office. She tells me that she has to perform a medical examination on me so that I can be medically cleared to go into the regular ward. Then she tells me that she has to strip search me. I instantly burst into tears. My second strip search in less than a week. So while I am shaking and crying, the nurse conducts her strip search. When that is done she performs her medical evaluation and I am sent back to the gray chairs in the gray room to wait and see the doctor.
I am not sure when this thought came into my head, but it was in there. I kept thinking that the doctor at this hospital still had to decide if I really needed to be admitted there, and I kept thinking that once he talked to me he would realize that I did not belong in a psychiatric hospital. I convinced myself of this.
After a long wait, during which I could not maintain control any longer ad started crying, the doctor finally showed up. He took my blood pressure again, it seemed the numbers that the triage nurse had gotten from my blood pressure reading earlier was causing them some concern. My blood pressure was still really high. The doctor starts asking me questions, a lot of them were about my first suicide attempt and why I was not hospitalized then. Again, I went through my story of how I got here because of calling my counselor for help and her not being in her office and that I really did not think I belonged there. The doctor starts questioning the medication that my psychologist prescribed me, he did not do a very good job of hiding the fact that he did not like what my usual doctor had been giving me. After ten minutes, he lets me know that we are done, and that I am staying in the psychiatric hospital for two to three days, business days not counting the weekend. I could not believe what I was hearing. I asked him why and he said “that he felt I was a danger to myself”. He also wanted to change my medications in a hospital setting. So then he starts going through the very long list of medications that I have to take for other things, and lets me know that he would be surprised if the unit had the medication I needed for my Restless Leg Syndrome, but he would have them start looking for it.
I go back to the gray chairs, in the gray room. I do not sit there for very long when two women come up to me and ask me to follow them and go back into the nurse’s office. Can you guess what they wanted? If you said to strip search me again, you would be correct. By now, I am so terrified, and shaking, that I can barely walk. After they finish their strip search, I am told to get into the back of the security guard’s car and one of the women gets in. She has a medical mask on her face. I am then taken to the building where I will be staying.
When we get to where I am supposed to be, I notice a huge sign on the door. It basically says that there are patients in this unit exhibiting flu like symptoms and that people are to only come in if they are wearing a mask. Now I understand why the woman with me is wearing one. Then I think, what are these people doing, they are sending an asthmatic into a building where there are people who could have the flu.
We enter the building and the first thing that I notice is the noise. Too much noise. With my anxiety disorder I have a difficult time handling loud noises, lots of people, and it is even worse when there are loud noises and lots of people in a confined area. The woman with the mask hands all my stuff over to the nurses in the nurse’s station and I just put my back up against a wall that is in front of the nurse’s station and take in my surroundings.
The best thing I could think of that it reminded me of was of a certain scene from the movie “The Snake Pit”. “The Snake Pit” is a movie produced in 1948 about a woman and her experiences in an insane asylum, at one point her condition deteriorates and she has to be placed in a special ward called The Snake Pit. In this ward, the patients are wandering around, making strange noises and fighting with each other. When I looked out into the room that I had been taken into, it looked exactly like that.
So with my back against the wall, wringing my hands, my heart in my throat, more terrified than I have ever been before and shaking like I leaf, the reality of where I was finally hit me.
To be continued…