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…