Is how the day ends when you are emotionally labile, completely suggestible and waiting for drugs to take effect, unsure what sort of psychotic you are. And your imagination is in overdrive trying to make sense of a what you have been told was an episode where everyone was a potential threat and the dystopian book you were just reading appears to be, no wait, is in fact coming true.
I am recovering from a psychotic episode. My first. And am locked up. Alone and agreeing to everything suggested me by staff and family. Two firsts.
“Go for a walk, you say?” Alright, why not?
The ward of thirty something beds is triangular in shape. Someone must have thought the best way to keep the loonies inside was to design like a shopping mall, nothing meets at a right angle, so even less of the physical world makes sense to you.
So a walk around the facility is the suggested activity. How did I used to say, “no”? The only choice is to walk left or right? Left is the way the others walk, except for a young Ethiopian man. That way direct eye contact and confrontation is avoided. It cannot be much different in prison. Indeed some in here speak of murder and of violence to humans as though it were a badge. Scary street cred. games I do not want to play.
There are no people here, just their medications; walking the floor, pacing, arguing loudly, writing on the chalk board or playing music in their rooms. Left or right, those are the choices.
I will walk left. Two circuits a day of about five minutes each. Exercise enough then safely in my room behind my curtain, except for meals.
As a casual weed smoker who used to try to regain control of their sleep due to shift work and bouncing hormones and circadian rhythms none of this makes sense.
Being part of an age and gender cohort which studies show is predisposed to schizophrenia when cannabis is ingested is something that happens to others, not you. I have lost me.
And being detained involuntarily under the Mental Health Act, even when I offered to go quietly, voluntarily to avoid a negative health record- you are psychotic the doctor said, so you cannot give consent now anyway – is completely down to the parent who tricked you into going to the A and E department late at night and without the protection of even a kitchen knife. One minute a protective parent, next thing they turned and gave enough information, my private information, to have me incarcerated against my will.
Maybe I should have waited it out at home and if as they say, the police had come, they could have been part of the problem as well. Instead I am here now a week. At least I can say my name.
Terrified to sleep, needing pills for that as well, and having to stand in front of the glass wall of the nurses’ station along with everyone else with a need from pain relief to blankets to money for the bus, (what bus?), waiting to ask nursing staff for the sleeping pill which they forgot to include in my meds, and having to prove that I haven’t already had it dispensed me.
And completely unable to get any eye contact or gauge the level of illness or hostility toward me from my roommate who appears to have a bikie background, big boots and speaking of sleeping rough. Hiding my belongings while I sleep. And necessary after the staff gave away my mobile phone, taken on admission for safe-keeping and to “assist in the settling-in process”, my only contact with the friends and the outside, other world, to a discharging patient. Why should I or how can I trust what anyone says in here? What is real and what is story? Police say the person who has the phone is a bad egg. What are they doing with it?
I will walk to the left. So along the passage past the electric linen cupboard, the guest toilets, the scuffed and damaged walls where there is a slight change of direction, past the television lounge, the pool table with the same people watching and the same one person playing, the TV emitting varying levels of static according to whether the compressor cooling the Coke machine in the corner is running. The compressor always comes on during the news. Presumably because the news is hardest to fudge.
I read a newspaper and have given it to my parent to take home for safe-keeping from everyone else it is so dangerous. If what is written there gets out, expect pandemonium in the streets and dystopian novels will come true. The same goes for the “Rich Dad” self-help book they left me. I think that there is not much wrong with the chess set.
Past the lounge is the dining room. Locked at other times, it took me no time to eat my lunch today, but ages to eat the pavlova with strawberries. It came from the staff lunch area, they top up by lining up with us, and this seemed only fair. But these are the staff who give wrong medication, did not get me a doctor appointment these last five days in spite of repeated asking and telling them I am fine and just need to go home so that this locked-in environment can stop making me sick, and the same staff who gave away my phone and did nothing when one of the more aggressive men took my hat off my head saying it was his own.
The strawberries may have been poisoned. I ate them, chewed and tasted poison and put it back on my plate. It looked fine and the taste went away. I took the same spoonful up again, and again had to spit it back out. After the fourth time they tasted OK. I swallowed. A great leap of faith. Or resignation. I don’t really know. People were watching me. Looking. Staff said I have to take lunch with the group. It seems to be a marker of wellness so I don’t take my meals back to my room even though no-one objects to this. The medication makes me hungry. I am always hungry now.
The dietician has prescribed, if that is the right word, extra food and a daily, afternoon milk drink. I have to remember to ask twice a day and sometimes they come, sometimes not. Only my allocated nurse can get the extra food and its kept in a distant and strange place, or so it seems. They take forever to bring it and sometimes it never comes anyway. The night nurse suggests that staff get hungry too. I have no idea what this means.
After the dining room is the craft room. There we take turns to colour in. It is wonderful and amazing. A week ago I was completing a law degree, now I can almost stay within the lines and some of it is truly wonderful colouring, like a stained glass window the finished birds and scenery bring a brightness no-one else sees or feels like I do.
Through the craft room is the triangular court-yard where the architect’s design suddenly unravels and you can guess the overall layout. There is an open roof section with grass. The grass succumbs to pacing and cigarette butts. Nicotine potentiates some anti-pyschotic medication. This is a much bigger thing than the full moon furphies. Six months ago, hospital policy forbad smoking in all government buildings. Now staff are of two camps. Prohibition or Look-Away. The grass suggests the Look-Aways are winning.
There is a man pacing one side of the court-yard. Muttering, looking down, brows mono. Just walk to one side and there is the tea and coffee area. The water is set at a safe, tepid number of degrees. The tea bags float on the surface, clinging to the side of the polystyrene cups. But today’s allocation is gone. No tea or coffee to be had. Just a brown and white pile of tags, plastic and wooden stirrers. Not even a sugar sachet. A woman reclines on a couch nearby eyes brown and bleak. A rug around her shoulders although it must be thirty degrees. No acknowledgement. I don’t exist here.
Through the tea and coffee station there is a short walk following the lino edge to a t-intersection. Right to the nurses station, left to the long corridor to the room. Back to the room. The room with a hospital curtain that stops at knee height around each bed. The gracious Ethopian talking in years of travel and not medical history when asked how he comes to be here.
Which “here” indeed? My parent has gone home without me. The nurse is come with my evening medication. (Yes, I can confirm my name and say it together with my date of birth; (how can this matter to anyone or provide any OH and S safeguard when I am here involuntarily and reliably- unreliably?- mad?). It must be eight o’clock. Time to sleep. This time they have brought both pills and there is no debate or argument needed about whether there was prescribed a sleeping pill, whether I will need one tonight as the chart shows such great progress and the main drug is recommended for review, (how should I know?) I cannot argue anything. From a front-on attack such as this I have no defences. I just know they will find me awake on the fifteen-minute, visual check rounds which happen every hour or so. All night unless I have a sleeping pill.
Here there are no reference points, and still no sleep. If I can’t sleep I can’t get well. I need to get out. These people, this atmosphere, is making me more unwell by the day. I was never this bad on admission, not even during the twenty hours in A and E waiting for assessment. There is no way out. I am not sure what outside looks like any more. The book is come true, traffic is grid-locked, people are hoarding, the madness is come.
My wallet is safe in my pillow, my iPod in my pants pocket. I will wear everything to bed. Shoes under the bed, pointed to the door ready to slip on, socks on my feet. I smell of stale food. And fear. Tomorrow I might find a way to take my clothes off and trust long enough to shower.
Good night.
