Hospital Days
Chapter 1
The other patients just stood in the hallway staring with vacant eyes. I was on methamphetamines and two men were taking me to my new corridors. First they took all my possessions- wallet, cigarettes, and clothes. I was Stripped naked and handed nothing more than a blue gown with three holes. It wrapped around once and then halfway again. Then they sent me away- but not to the rooms with the other patients. I was spun and therefore locked into the quiet room.
The quiet room was a four sided room with windows containing fields of metal X's. It was not a padded room. Why should it be? What could I do? Run my head straight into the wall and fall back unconscious? No one could be that stupid.
How sad will be those who are not educated,
How sad will be those who are educated but could not utilize their education,
How sad will be those who used their education for destroying humanity,
How sad will be the school, which has given education to them!
-Naresh Agarwal
The psych wing is small. The largest area is the long hallway covered in dull carpeting that’s stained here and there. In the front there stand two large metal doors electronically locked and monitored by security. In the back there’s a white telephone and a window which is one of the only places you can catch sunlight. This is the new place I would begin to spend many days- each day structured more or less the same. When it’s time to wake up it’s always the same message: "It is now 6am. Everyone is to get up and come to breakfast fully dressed. If you have not showered last night you are expected to do so this morning."
For breakfast, everyone gathers into the meal room, located just to the side of the front entrance. The room is about 27 by 42 feet. It accommodates about a dozen tables with plastic wood topped above metal legs. Each table has four dingy green chairs around it. It’s that sick shade of green that says “we come from a distant past”. These tables take up practically a third of the room. A few of the chairs have arms causing them to protrude. This results in a maze where you can't go one way because two chairs are in the way and you can’t go in another because the tables are too close.
The staff is mainly composed of largely built men. There is Louie, a solid 220 pounds; he wears a bright neon biking helmet upon entering each day. Then there is Carl- a black man of enormous proportions. He looks as though he could crack your skull in two if he wanted. There are also other men and women who help get things done on the floor.
The staff never converse with you. The closest you will get to a conversation with them is a morning greeting. The rest of the time they speak in demands and declarations. This isn’t exactly obvious, but if you listen for long enough you’ll realize you've never heard a friendly word.
Before breakfast two staff sit next to two chairs as each patient is called up one by one to have their blood pressure and heart rate recorded onto a chart. Then the food arrives.This routine repeats itself every day. Every day. Every day.
The meals come in a large metal box with wheels. The side door of the box slides open to reveal trays compact inside- one for each patient. Names are called and the trays collected; then the patient passes through the maze of tables and occupied seats. Atop the tray there are some utensils, condiments, napkins, and a metal saucer large enough to hold a plate. Each plate is covered by a top colored the same sick green as the chairs.
All the while the news chatters on about politics through the television set. The tables are just barely large enough to contain four trays on four sides. So, everyone has to agree to distance themselves to the right or left for complacency’s sake. The more inconsiderate ignore this minor gesture and displace the others about the table.
Round and round the riddles flow,
If our thoughts combine we’ll never go
It was my first day so I didn't get anything I ordered- I hadn't the chance to order anything. Under my tray I discovered scrambled eggs, sausage, and a bagel- but no cream cheese. I swallowed the food down slowly. While eating I began to emerge from what I thought was simply a groggy state due to waking up very early, into a coma-like state. The medications were beginning to kick in.
Another pack of cigarettes
What’s a life without regrets?
I’ve thought of you since the day we met
But life goes on and time forgets
Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, Prozac, Effexor, Zoloft, Lexapro, Ativan, Klonopin, Xanax, Buspar- take your pick. They have become the perfect modern-day straightjacket. No one needs to be confined when chemistry can bring your mind to a screeching halt as pills enter your bloodstream and zap across hundreds of neurons, sending alien messages to your body. Of course, you adjust to the pills. That is, you think you've become normal again after awhile. They tell you you're taking them to become normal. But you know you're not the same because you can remember the initial shock of that first dose- like being tossed into a cold vat of chemicals. Transplanted into a new cyborg body. Your arms and legs become disjointed and gravity becomes a new obstacle. Like a cog that needs oiling you enter into a state never before conceived possible. The air around you moves in alien ways. Everything is so uncertain. How could this be a normal reality?
Chapter 2
They don't allow sharp things on the ward. To write, you get a pencil that's half as long as standard. This is important because each morning you are given a "menu" to circle what you want on that day- one of the few choices you’ll have. Just hope the kitchen doesn’t botch your order. Breakfast- eggs, bagels, pancakes, toast, bacon, and sausage. Lunch and dinner- burger, grilled cheese sandwich, salad, french fries, or the specialty of the day. Each day the specialty would switch between cheap steak and a pasta dish.
I tried them both but neither one appealed to me.
After breakfast is over they turn the payphones on. These are located down the hall to the wall on the right. At each phone, another chair sits. Lying adjacent each other in the front just after the meal room are the two television rooms; the TVs are mounted to the upper corners. To switch the station you turn a knob on the wall. Most don’t make calls, they just watch television. In one of the rooms a rickety old piano sits. Some of the keys do not make sounds and some strike the incorrect strings.
Once I was sitting across from Erwin- a normally friendly, wrinkly schizophrenic. He was muttering things to himself under his breathe. You can be quiet, there’s no one around, I say. He stood up enraged; don’t tell me what to do I’ve been collecting these for five-hundred years! I didn’t give people suggestions after that.
Most everyone on the ward is overweight. The fact that all you do is vacate around, docile only makes this worse. Patients just sit in view of the television and watch picture after picture strobe by, it’s a grim sight to see. If you’re tired of television, there are two packs of playing cards in the dining room. Solitaire is popular.
When Annita arrived on the ward we confront each other a few hours later. Just tell him you love him! She’s excited about something. What? I say. Jesus! She says. I should have asked her why Jesus would send her to a decrepit corridor full of the insane, or why Jesus had given her a brain full of bad chemicals. She was psychotic and the deeper her affliction became, the more she would spread the gospel. Later I found out she had thrown the playing cards in the trash because her religion condemned them.
One Sunday she declared one of the TV rooms “church” and invited everyone to attend. There, she sat and watched televangelism for five hours accompanied by a woman who was practically a paraplegic. There was a sickness in that room for sure.
However, organization like that by the patients is a rarity. The few with their wits intact might arrange a card game, but that is all. Every person is so docile the thought of initiating or rallying some sort of event is not even conceived of. The only events that occur are the ones that the staff arrange. There is an exercise routine where everyone jogs in place for awhile, and another where everyone sits in a circle and tries to keep a big beach ball up in the air.
Of course, the staff do not participate in the activities; they just arrange them for everyone else. All the things used for these events are kept behind a staff-only door in the meal room that runs along the same wall as the entrance to the inside of the ward. On either side of the door there lies a sink and a bookshelf. The books, probably missing pages, are never read. They just sit near the outer wall of the dining room, next to the only living object present- a small potted plant. Its leaves droop and it looks as though it’s having a bad day.
In another exercise activity, everyone stands in a circle jogging in place. Then, someone calls someone else’s name and they move to the center, hook arms, and trade places. The ritualistic acts become more elaborate as the activity progresses. Next, small dodge balls are brought out and interspersed among everyone. In this game, you say your own name and then throw the ball at someone else.
Jon was another schizophrenic on the ward. He was friendly, but paranoid and had the strange habit of clapping on random occasion- even if he was asleep. Jon would never say his own name when he threw the ball during the activities, he would say the name of the person he was looking at.
These activities were the most exciting thing to happen on the ward. When you think about hospitals for the mentally ill, you imagine images of people bursting out and doing something bodacious. People just don’t do that. They have no ideas circulating about how they could just do something random at any time. They are too busy living miserably inside themselves, going through the same routine over and over.
No one represented this as well as Terran did. She was a young girl of about nineteen in the hospital for abusing cocaine. She would spend entire evenings walking up and down the hallway. She seemed relatively normal though so I tried to engage her in conversation. It was pretty useless though, she would just say that she missed her family and wanted to go home.
Going home is probably the number one thing on everyone’s mind. However, getting there often involves court since many are held against their will. Even if you don’t have to go to court, you still have to meet with your “team” of supporters, family not excluded. Everyone has to sit around and discuss you for a long time before you can leave.
No one wanted to leave as much as David. David was even younger than Terran, only sixteen. He and I would play checkers while he talked about what it was like at his house or what he was going to do when he got home.
One day in arts and crafts we were given a selection of coloring pictures to choose from. There were six pictures of forests and trees, one picture of clothes, and one picture of an underwater scene. David chose the clothes, I chose the sea.
Chapter 3
You do the same thing over and over again on the ward. Every morning starts with "It is now 6am. Everyone is to get up and come to breakfast fully dressed. If you have not showered last night you are expected to do so this morning," always the same message, spoken in a slow and monotonous voice that immediately reminds you of where you are from the moment you wake up.
When you first enter the hospital, they put a plastic bracelet with your name and a number on you. You wear this the entire duration of your stay. This is so they can identify who to give what medication to. There are so many pills for so many people a large box that stands about four feet high is used to contain them. It has multiple drawers on either side. Each drawer has a name and number written on a little slip of paper in order to make it easy to change. Disposable identities.
At this point most everyone forms a line to the medicine station and waits to be tranquilized. Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, Prozac, Effexor, Zoloft, Lexapro, Ativan, Klonopin, Xanax, Buspar- the pastel rainbow. Everyone is handed their pills in turn with a cup of water. It takes about twenty minutes to get through all the bodies. Planned next is group therapy. This is where everyone comes together and says what’s on their mind while a psychiatrist leads the room. It can be depressing, dull, interesting, mundane, or even lewd- anything and all at once. Everyone has the opportunity to respond to the speaker. Sometimes one person speaks for a long time and other times there are a series of shorter focuses.
By lunchtime you’ve been awake for six and a half hours and the time has not just flown by. The first snack time is between lunch and dinner. You have your choice of vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream in little plastic containers with foil covers. There are graham crackers wrapped two at a time, miscellaneous fruit, and peanut butter in individual plastic containers. For some reason they have peanut butter on hand even though it doesn’t seem to go with any snack item.
Once you get really bored though, you can start making up off the wall combinations. You start utilizing the different anomalies of the strange diet, like peanut butter and graham crackers. Maybe this doesn’t occur odd to you, but I’d never heard of it before.
Funny thing here, discovering anything new or different will gain you followers. So, be the first guy to mix peanut butter and graham crackers and the next day everyone you sit with will be doing the same. If were to talk about, say, how much fun it is to stay awake on Ambien you just might find a teenage girl talking about how she’s getting fucked up every night on her psychedelic sleeping pills. Start playing solitaire and the card decks begin circulating around quickly. Fads- these things are started by the few and emulated by the masses.
Dinner rolls around and the staff repeat the same message, “Do not give away any of your food. Some people are on special diets and cannot eat certain items.” After that, it’s time to round everyone up for the next pill pastime. No after-dinner activities are planned except for the rare occurrences when they show a movie. At movie time you get two styrofoam cups. One of them is filled with popcorn, the other with diet cola. This is the biggest treat you will be given on the psych ward: salt and butter-free popcorn along with diet cola and a movie. There is not much to look forward to past this.
You have to go to bed by 11:00 but by 9:00 most have already showered and went to bed on their own, partly due to the medication, partly due to boredom. It’s remarkable how much some of the patients can sleep. It’s one thing to take naps, but it’s something else to stay in a comatose state only to be aroused by meals. It’s possible you’ll never see someone unless you’re at mealtime.