Over the last few days, everything in my life had spiraled out of control.
Three days earlier, on Sunday morning, John, a man who I thought was my friend and who I thought I could trust, had taken advantage of my naivety and sexually assaulted me. Ever since then I’d been having non-stop flashbacks and intrusive memories disrupting my life day and night.
Earlier today I’d been forced to have a meeting where I had to sit in the same room as the man who molested me and had to listen to him try to blame me for what he did. As if that wasn’t bad enough, after that I’d had to look at his smug self-satisfied face and offer him some sort of apology.
The thing was, I had no other choice about it, if I went to the police, if I refused to cooperate with Side By Side Assisted Living then I would be homeless. So I’d gone back to my apartment, and everything that had been internalized kind of blew up in my face in the form of a series of flashbacks that led to me almost overdosing through my J tube (feeding tube in my intestine) on a bottle of Phenergan. Had I gone through with it, there would have been no saving me. Jeff’s GIF of a kitten is the only thing that saved my life and prompted me to call crisis and get myself to the ER for an evaluation.
I’d expected the ambulance to bring me to one of the awful psych crisis rooms that I’d experienced while at Hillcrest Commons (the nursing home I’d spent six months at for rehab before going to Side By Side), so I was pleasantly surprised when they unloaded me in one of the regular rooms. They lifted me off their stretcher and onto the gurney in the middle of the ER room and then hung my bags and pumps on an IV pole. The shorter chunkier police officer with the goatee stayed with me even after the EMTs and the other police officers left.
“You’re here on a section 12 based on the crisis clinician’s phone evaluation of your status,” he explained to me. “This means someone is going to be sitting with you the entire time you’re here until you either get cleared by crisis or get admitted. If you don’t give them any problems they won’t give you any problems. You seem like a nice enough girl, I don’t foresee any issues. The security guard is going to come in and search your bags and hold onto your belongings. They will have you change into a hospital gown with no strings. Then you can watch TV or rest or whatever. But because you’re here on a Section 12 you can’t leave. You have no choice, do you understand?”
I just nodded.
It seemed screwed up, that you call and ask for help, and then all of the sudden they take control of you and take all of your choices away. It kind of makes a person not want to ask for help. To me, it seems like a broken system.
After a few more minutes of the police officer just standing there looking rather imposing, a nursing assistant came over.
“Hi, my name is Kayla, I’m going to be taking your vital signs and then sitting with you while we wait for the doctor to come to see you,” she explained. Kayla looked to be around my age or maybe slightly older. Her hair was up in a tight bun with not one single auburn hair astray. She was wearing Winnie-the-Pooh scrubs and white Danscos.
“Hi, Kayla, I’m Becca,” I introduced myself, but my voice sounded gravelly from all of the crying that I’d been doing lately.
Kayla took my blood pressure, scanned my forehead with a thermometer, stuck an oxygen monitor on my finger, and then wrote down all the numbers in her computer on wheels that she had towed in behind her. After that she had me change into a hospital gown that snapped together instead of tied. Because it wasn’t a pediatric-sized gown I was swimming in it.
Once I was all changed, she pulled up a chair and sat down in the entryway of the room.
This was the police officer’s cue to leave.
“Good luck to you Ms. Pava,” he told me as he headed out.
The next arrival in my room was an older man who looked to be in his late 60s. He was dressed in the security guard uniform and carrying a metal detector.
“Hello young lady,” he greeted me, “I just have to scan you with this metal detector and go over what you have in that bag as far as belongings. Okay?
“Ok,” I agreed. This was a rhetorical question, I had no choice in the matter. All my choices had been taken away from me because I was struggling with psychiatric symptoms. As I said, it’s a broken system.
The security guard had me lay back on the stretcher and ran the metal detector up and down over my body. It didn’t go off. I wasn’t hiding any metal anywhere. I felt incredibly violated.
“Can I see your bag now?” The security guard asked me.
I knew if I didn’t let him see it I wouldn’t be allowed to have it at all.
“Sure,” I told him, trying as hard as I could to prove that I was cooperative.
He picked up my bag, unfolded, and shook out each shirt that I had so carefully selected and folded and paired with matching pants. When he got to my laptop and phone he explained to me that while I was in the emergency room I could not use them.
“If you get admitted you’ll be able to use them during specified times during the day as long as you return them when they’re due back.” He explained.
I felt like I was being treated like I was 5 years old again.
“I need to see your bear too,” he told me.
“Softia needs to stay with me,” I told him.
I think he must have heard the bite in my voice because I could almost visibly see him flinch.
“Well let me just wand her and look at her,” he said.
“You have to be really gentle with her,” I insisted. I have special connections with my teddy bears, they are like my children, my pets, my coping skills, my hobby all in one. Softia is one of my favorite bears. When I hold her I feel an overwhelming feeling of loving and nurturing coming on and I feel warm and fuzzy inside.
The security guard wasn’t as gentle as I would have liked with her as he wanded her, so I cradled her extra lovingly when I got her back.
Finally, the security guard decided that the little 4’10, seventy-pound girl wasn’t the biggest threat in the world to the hospital and left me alone with Kayla. I was alone with my dark cycling thoughts for way too long before a nurse came in to do my triage. She asked me all of the same questions everyone else had been asking.
“Why did I go to the hospital? Did I still feel unsafe? Did I have a plan? What was making me so upset? Could I contract for safety?”
I answered that:
- I went because I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to die and that my friend had sent me a message letting me know he cared so I knew I couldn’t hurt him like that
- I did still feel unsafe
- My plan in the back of my mind, was, if all else failed, I could overdose on one of my liquid meds through my J tube
- I was just upset because my life was a series of difficulties and I never got a break (I was too nervous to say the real reason I was so upset. I was scared of Eve and the ramifications of breaking my deal with her)
- I wasn’t sure if I could contract for safety or not
The nurse wrote all that down and then switched to my physical health issues. I explained to her about my Autonomic SFN and all of my various treatments and medications. She examined all of my tube sites and put me on some oxygen because my oxygen level was not going above 92%.
“Normally I wear oxygen overnight,” I explained, “My body’s probably just getting tired.”
I also showed her my extra bag of IV fluid and explained to her about my orders for Dextrose with 40 Meq of potassium and saline, that ran throughout the day in addition to my tube feed.
The nurse explained to me that the medical doctor had to come to see me and clear me medically and then the crisis clinician could come to evaluate me and decide where to go from there.
“Because you’re so medically compromised we can’t send you over to the psych crisis area, even when you’re medically cleared, so we’re just going to keep you right here the whole time. I’ll draw some labs out of your port and have Kayla do an EKG so that when the doctor does come to see you all of the results will be at his fingertips and he can just figure out right away what he wants to do next.” The nurse explained.
That was all well and good, but it still took hours before the doctor came in to medically clear me. It was pushing 2 AM when he finally came in.
I understand that a psychiatric crisis is not life-threatening once the patient is in a safe location, but I had no phone, no laptop, couldn’t focus on TV, the molestation and my previous sexual abuse just kept repeating itself over and over in my head on slow-motion instant replay with the volume turned way high up. It would have taken the doctor five minutes to glance at my bloodwork, my EKG, and my vital signs, and pop his head in my room to chat. That’s all he needed to do to clear me. He could have saved me so much agony.
Instead, I lay there suffering as abuse replayed again and again and I didn’t even have the nighttime meds that I normally take to help soften the blow.
When the doctor finally did come in he looked at me for a long hard moment, laying in a bunched-up ball on the bed curled up around Softia, trying not to cry.
“What brought you in tonight?” he asked me, even though I knew he knew exactly what brought me in and everything I’d said up until that point because it was all in my chart.
“I’m struggling with a lot of bad depression and anxiety and I’m having suicidal thoughts coming and going and I came really close to killing myself, but part of me really wants to live, I just get worried that in the moment I’ll act on the suicidal urges before the part of me that wants to live can stop myself,” I explained.
“Do you think you need to be inpatient?” the doctor asked me.
‘I don’t know what I need, I just knew I needed to talk to a professional before I did something irreversible.”
“Well, I’m very glad you reached out for help. From a medical standpoint, which is my piece, you look good. Your EKG is slightly abnormal but it seems to always be, your bloodwork is also a bit abnormal, but it’s your baseline. Everything else looks good, so I will clear you to talk with Crisis. She should be in here within the next ten to twenty minutes.” The doctor informed me.
I figured I already waited hours, what was another ten to twenty minutes!