At some point, I must have fallen asleep writing, because the next time I opened my eyes, sunlight was filtering in the heavy mesh-covered windows. My bed was still in an upright seated position, the notebook open in my lap, pencil clenched in my small fist, and cheek resting against my teddy bear Softia.
It took me a moment to figure out where I was. For a little bit, I was hoping that maybe the events of the last two days were just a nightmare, but then I wiped the sands of sleep out of my eyes and got a better look around the room. Sitting in my doorway was a young woman in scrubs on her phone, she kept glancing at her phone and then tapping her foot impatiently like she was waiting for something, her break probably. I was on the psych unit. I had spent that marathon night in the ER waiting to be evaluated first by the ER doctor to be medically cleared and then by the crisis woman to decide what I needed. They had decided that I needed an inpatient psych hospitalization, so here I was.
The young woman in the doorway was my sitter. The psych unit hadn’t been told just how medically fragile I was and they weren’t at all prepared for me when I arrived. After they saw me, and all my tubes, pumps, and bags, and realized I couldn’t walk, they had me explain to them a little bit about myself and they had assigned me a one-to-one so that I could get treatment and still stay safe and keep the unit safe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Three days earlier I had been molested by a man I had thought was my friend. Later that morning I had gotten chewed out for confiding in a friend about what had happened because she was a friend I had made at Hillcrest Commons, the nursing home I lived in for six months before moving into Side by Side, the assisted living I now called home. My friend had reported what had happened to my old social worker, Tanya, and Tanya had called Eve, the owner of Side by Side who chewed me out as soon as I rolled through the doors of the main building for putting the reputation of Side By Side at stake by reporting the sexual abuse to an outside entity which could instigate an investigation, and who knows what that might dig up.
Eve was quick to point out that if Side by Side got shut down, I’d be homeless.
Eve and Chrissy the nurse manager at Side by Side had insisted we have a meeting with them, my mom, me, and John to smooth things over (like you can really smooth things over with a person who just sexually assaulted you!?!?) and made me swear not to tell anyone else about what had happened. They threatened that I would be kicked out of Side By Side if I did.
The meeting was on Tuesday afternoon and it was horrible. After the meeting, I took a nap and when I woke up I was haunted by flashbacks of what John had done to me, and I also couldn’t stop thinking back to how Mr. R had hurt me too and wondering if there was something wrong with me that all of these people were sexually abusing me. My thoughts got really dark and I came very close to killing myself by overdosing but didn’t after getting a GIF from Jeff (my best friend that I had a major crush on) of a kitten saying “Hang in There”. Instead, I called the crisis number and ended up getting admitted to the psych unit.
Shutting my notebook, I looked around the room, it was a plain-looking room, just peach-colored walls, no curtains like on the medical floor. It had a desk in the room instead of a bedside table, and it was stapled down to the floor with metal brackets. There was a closet with shelves in it near the desk, and it was also fastened down to the floor with metal brackets. The mirror attached to the top back part of the desk was made out of plastic, not glass, and the mesh on the windows in the room was quite heavy-duty. I would later learn the windows didn’t open or close either, they were locked shut all of the time. There was no TV in the room like at Mass General’s psych unit. That was kind of disappointing since I didn’t have my phone or laptop either, what was I supposed to do all day?
Just then, as if to answer my question, there was a knock at the rim of my doorway.
“Ms. Pava?” A young man who looked to be in his mid-thirties was standing in my doorway. He had the very beginnings of jet black facial hair like he had forgotten to shave the last couple of days and piercing blue eyes.
I looked over in his direction, so did my one-to-one who was waiting for the cows to come home or her break or whatever.
“Hi Ms. Pava, I’m Dr. Abernaki the psychiatry resident that will be working with you here at Jones, do you have time to talk.
I wondered to myself how I could not have the time to talk. They had taken away all of my personal belongings including my laptop and phone with my kindle books on it, I briefly thought about watching TV in the dayroom, but I had a hard time getting into watching TV unless I was working on a craft project at the same time. All I currently had in my possession was my teddy bear, a notebook, a pencil, and a couple of outfits. Biting back a sarcastic comment I nodded that ‘yes I had time to talk’.
The psychiatrist asked me all of the same questions everyone else had asked me, and I gave him all of the same answers I had given everyone else. I once again danced dangerously around the topic of John, the man at the assisted living that assaulted me, but avoided mentioning what happened, instead only bringing up the abuse from Mr. R and the flashbacks from that abuse and that my current stressors from my chronic illness were causing flashbacks. I also described to him the thick fog of depression that had settled around me due to my life-limiting diagnosis and my uncertain future.
“Do you have a list of medications you’re on?” Dr. Abernaki asked me.
“I do, but it’s on my phone, and you guys have my phone,” I explained. My tone came out somewhat accusatory and I didn’t even care. I shouldn’t be made to feel like a teenager that was getting grounded and have my phone taken away from me simply because I asked for help and got admitted to a psychiatric unit for mental health treatment. That was just a messed-up policy, but unfortunately, it is a common policy to most psych units in the USA.
“Is your phone charged?” the doctor asked me, seeming like he didn’t notice, or at least not letting on that he noticed my tone.
“It should be,” I told him.
“I’ll go have one of the nurses or techs get it and then we can go over your med list so I know what I need to order for you as far as meds go while you’re here, this way I also know what you’re already on and what we might want to adjust and change to get you feeling and coping better.” Dr. Abernaki said.
Once we got the phone and were going through the list Dr. Abernaki was looking deep in thought.
“We’ll have to get a crusher from one of the medical floors so that we can crush your meds, we’ll also have to get 60 ml catheter tip syringes and sterile water, and special containers to mix meds in, from the medical floor as well. We needed to get an IV pump and a feeding tube pump from there anyway. your pumps are going to run out of battery soon. I don’t even know if our nurses know how to work an IV pump. They’re going to have to give you your meds through your J tube once they crush them all up, and mix them with the liquid meds and a little bit of hot water. I don’t know if they know how to do that either” Dr. Abernaki was saying, more thinking aloud than anything else.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked.
“We’re going to have to pull a nurse from one of the medical-surgical floors to be your nurse since our nurses can’t handle that stuff.”
Okay, that’s okay with me,” I told him, honestly, I’d rather a medical-surgical nurse mess with my IVs and tubes because they were my lifelines. If anything happened to them I was screwed and psych nurses may be great at helping people through mental health crises but a lot of them probably hadn’t set up an IV pump or given J tube meds since nursing school, and I wasn’t ready to be their ‘fumbling around to remember:’ person.
Well, I had my sitter stop checking her watch for five minutes and push me out to the day area and park me in front of the TV where an older Hispanic woman in her 70s with a long gray braid down her back was pacing nearby. She noticed me and walked over and introduced herself as Luz.
“Are you a virgin?” She asked me.
I stuttered answering because I was so shocked, but she was obviously quite psychotic and I later heard her arguing with her nurse that ‘those aren’t Haldol pills, those are St. Paddy’s Day pills’ so I knew she had schizophrenia or some other form of psychosis because that’s what Haldol is for. It’s an older generation anti-psychotic.
Once I collected myself enough I answered her “yes”, “Yes, I’m a virgin,”.
I was, because even though Mr. R had attempted to rape me over and over multiple times over the five years that he had abused me, he had never been able to fully enter my body as I was always too tiny.
I thought no more of Luz’s question and my response for a couple of hours and went about my day.
I met a man who made skiing motions up and down the hall and told me he was a world-class ice skater and he was in the championships and going to win a prize.
“Good luck to you, I hope you get the gold medal,” I told him, as my aide wheeled my way down the hall and we exchanged a look and tried not to laugh.
Then another man introduced himself to me after lunch. I had sat at the table with everyone and watched them eat but of course, I didn’t get sent a tray so I just sat there as my feeding pump and IV pump whirred nutrition and hydration into me and I watched everyone eat disgusting hospital food that to me looked delicious. Everyone asked me where my tray was and offered me food and over and over I had to explain about gastroparesis and total digestive tract failure and autonomic SFN.
“Hi, I’m Eric,” this other man said. He was wearing the blue version, to my brown, of the mental patient wardrobe and he had gotten spaghetti sauce all over the front of his shirt. It really completed the outfit.
“Hi, I’m Becca,” I said back.
“Where were you born?” he asked me.
“New York City,” I told him.
“What a coincidence,” he told me. “I own New York!” After announcing this he wandered away still mumbling to himself about owning New York.
I met a few normal people too, who were interested in my medical condition and all of my tubes and bags, so I just kept re-explaining them to everyone that asked.
There were some therapy groups during the day, but I could only go to two because they left me exhausted as there was no recliner chair in front of a fireplace for me to lay back in like at Side By Side. After the second group, I went back to the dayroom where I had gotten permission to lay back on the couch. A bunch of us were just sitting around watching TV when we heard Luz, the Hispanic woman with the long gray braid yell at me.
“Virgin, hey virgin, can you change the channel to CNN please,” we all died laughing, it was just too funny. I picked up the remote and changed the channel for her.
My aide, a few of the young women I’d befriended, and I, watched CNN with Luz, the Hispanic woman for a little while, and then I headed to the nurses’ station to get my afternoon meds,
“We’ve decided we can’t provide an appropriate level of care for you here,” The nurse told me when I got to the window at the nurse’s station.
“What do you mean?” I asked shocked. This was so out of the blue.
“To care for you here, you need a one-to-one, you have to have a nurse pulled from a medical floor, you can only attend one or two groups at the most a day, and Dr. Abermnaki doesn’t think he wants to do any med changes. It doesn’t make sense to keep you here,” the nurse explained.
“But I don’t feel safe at home.” I tried to explain feeling panicky.
“You’re going to have to call your outpatient therapist and outpatient psychiatrist and have them work with you to get through this rough period, we can’t help you, your medical state is just too fragile. You’re too medically unstable to be here.”
“Isn’t there any way you can keep me here? I’m scared I’m going to kill myself if I get sent home?” I said.
“Just keep practicing your coping skills. You’ll be okay.” The nurse told me.
Now I knew our mental health system was totally broken. I was being told because I was too sick I couldn’t get my mental health issues treated. Apparently, medically fragile people aren’t allowed to get adequate mental health care. If they kill themselves they kill themselves, they were dying anyway. That’s how this hospital was thinking anyways.
So less than 24 hours later I was discharged from the psych unit feeling no better than I had when I was admitted. If anything, I felt worse.