After hours and hours of waiting a woman from psychiatric crisis intervention came into my little cubicle room in the ER to evaluate me. I had left for the ER around 5:40 PM, arrived here at around 5:50 PM and it was now 3:00 AM on Wednesday morning.
The last 24 hours had been so hellish that they were almost surreal. Really, I could say the last three days had been days out of hell, but they had had some good moments in between as well.
Sunday morning I’d been molested by a man named John Halipern who I thought was my friend, and was really old enough to be my grandfather. He was a man who lived at the same assisted living as me. Because I was too weak and wheelchair-bound, and he’d had a death grip on my foot I hadn’t been able to pull away. When he finally had gotten scared off by hearing my upstairs neighbor moving around and me screaming “no” and “stop” he’d run out of the house.
I had made the mistake in confiding in a friend of mine I’d made when I was at Hillcrest Commons. I told her exactly what John had done and said to me, but made her promise not to tell anyone, she swore she wouldn’t, but when Lesley, my private duty aide brought me over to the main building Eve had gotten word from my old social worker at Hillcrest Commons that I had reported to my friend that I had been molested at the assisted living. Eve was livid because reports like that made Side by Side look bad and might mean that they would need to be investigated.
I was made to feel like an idiot for letting John in my apartment and was told I was never allowed to have any men in my apartment again. Jeff, the man who I was secretly madly in love with decided to find a way to get around this new rule and we began hanging out at his apartment instead, just the two of us. He kept me sane until the meeting with Eve; the owner, Chrissy; the nurse manager, John, my mom, and me. The meeting was on Tuesday.
John sat there with his smug satisfied face calling me a striptease, saying he thought that he was giving me what I wanted and that he was sorry if he offended me. I was then forced to apologize to him as well.
When I got back to my apartment I briefly visited with my mom, but my heart wasn’t in it, then I fell asleep. When I woke up, I came very close to ending my life by overdosing on a full bottle of liquid Phenergan. I was going to pour it through my J tube, that would have been a fairly quick death sentence. A messenger message from Jeff saved my life and prompted me to call crisis and intervene on myself before I could do anything else dumb when I got swept up by my emotions in a burst of emotional pain.
Crisis suggested I go to the ER to get evaluated by them in person. Because I’m wheelchair-bound and on IV fluids and tube feeds 24/7 I had to go by ambulance, the crisis worker called for the police and ambulance and they dropped me off in room 20, which was one of the general treatment area rooms.
When the crisis woman finally arrived she asked me a whole lot of questions. I didn’t know exactly how much to divulge because I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about what had happened with John. If I did tell and Eve found out (she seemed to somehow find out about everything, then I could end up homeless). I would not survive in a homeless shelter with my IV fluids, IV pump, tube feeding, tube feeding pump, overnight oxygen, catheters, G tube drainage bags, wheelchair, and meds every 4 to 6 hours. A homeless shelter would be a death sentence, and I already knew that my parents wouldn’t take me home, so I had to be very careful of that proverbial eggshell strewn ground.
“My health is really poor, my relationship with my dad is really strained, I have a lot of severe anxiety about pretty much everything in the world, sometimes I worry about what the point of all of this is,” I tried to explain with out mentioning anythhng that was against Eve’s rules. “I was physically and sexually abused for five years as a child and sometimes I get really bad flashbacks and its scary,” I added, getting dangerously close to the real issue, but still managing not to say anything incriminating.
“Do you think you need to be inpatient?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I told her. I didn’t know what I wanted or needed from all of this, I just knew if I had stayed in my room in my apartment any longer I would have killed myself. I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.
“Do you still feel like you want to die?” she asked me.
“The feeling comes and goes,” I explained. “Some of the time I’m sad but I have hope and want to do whatever I can to keep fighting so that I can feel better and do the things I want to do for as long as I can. Other times I feel like there’s no point to anything and I just don’t want to live anymore and I just want everything to stop and I just want to go to sleep and never wake up.”
“Do you have a plan?” she asked me.
“I have a few,” I told her.
“What are they?” she asked me.
“Well, one of them was to pour the whole bottle of Phenergan down my J tube, another one was to inject a whole bunch of air into my port to give myself an air embolus and I have a few others but I don’t want to tell you them all in case I do decide that I need to go through with one of them,” I explained.
We talked a while longer and then the crisis woman said that she had to step out and talk to her boss and the psychiatrist and would be back.
“I’m really worried about you,” the crisis woman said when she came back. “I feel like you are a major risk to yourself and wouldn’t be safe if I sent you home. The psych team here is going to admit you to Jones for further psychiatric treatment.”
“What if I don’t want to be admitted?” I asked.
“Well, right now you’re under a Section 12 which means you have no choice. When you get to the unit to do your admission you have the option of signing a Section 10 and 11 which is a Conditional Voluntary admission. If you sign that it means that you can say you want to leave at any point and then the doctors can hold you for up to three business days at which point they have to either discharge you or petition the court to involuntarily commit you.” The crisis woman explained to me.
My body bristled and my hair stood up when I heard that I was imprisoned here at the hospital for at least three business days. All of this because I was asking for help. It made no sense.
“If they commit someone, how long does the person get committed for?” I asked.
“Up to six months,” the crisis lady answered.
I felt like all the air got sucked out of me all at once. Note to self, do not ask for a commitment hearing, just play along with their game.
The crisis lady explained to me that it would be a little bit longer of a wait while they got my room ready but that in the next hour or two I would be getting moved to my room on the psych unit.