The partial hospital program rescued me after we realized that attending regular middle school just wasn’t going to work out for me. My private Jewish Day School had really small classes, but it was like a giant clique where I was left behind alone with only one other girl, who always had her nose in a book and was oblivious to the world around her.
I had gone to most of the sixth grade but bailed toward the end of the year when I couldn’t take the bullying anymore. Then I went back for the beginning of seventh grade, but again, didn’t last long. My gastroparesis flared up which stressed out my parents, who, big surprise! Tried to blame it on psychological causes, even though I’d had extensive testing done at the hospital when I was ten with a gastric emptying study showing that I have one of the most severe forms of gastroparesis possible.
No matter how mentally stable I was, it would be impossible for me to eat and drink normally. The combination of my gastroparesis acting up and the bullying at school had kind of pushed me over the edge and I’d had a meltdown one day in the middle of October of seventh grade. My mom brought me to the crisis center for an evaluation because I just couldn’t calm down. While I was crying in the car, I felt so upset and out of control emotionally it brought back wisps of memories of the hospital in New York City where they had locked me in that awful Quiet Room and took all my toys, clothes, art supplies, phone calls, and visitors away, while I was on the Klonopin. That awful anti-anxiety medication that I’d had an opposite reaction to.
Luckily, the crisis worker helped me calm down by talking to me and doing some breathing exercises with me. She got me all set up to do something called a Children’s Partial Hospital Program.
After getting searched, we’d head to the kitchen for morning check-in where we’d talk about how our night went and make up goals and get our point sheets for the day. We went to talk therapy, art therapy, occupational therapy, medication education, and activity groups. We also had school classes every day. Throughout the day we had to cooperate and work on goals to get points. If we got enough points, we could get prizes from the “store” at the end of the week. I usually chose little notebooks to keep track of poetry ideas in, little stuffed animal keychains, colorful pens, and Hello Kitty socks.
During my time at Partial, I did a lot of talking about my time in the hospital. I spoke about it a little bit in group therapy the first day and other kids spoke up about also having experience with getting forced injections, being taken down in restraints, and having privileges taken away. We spoke about our anger at how we had been treated. We spoke about the wild feelings of loss of control we had felt, and the feelings of fear of loss of control we still felt.
“It’s like always in the back of my head that I breathe wrong that here comes the double-locked doors, the shots in the butt, the getting tackled to the floor and held there with so much snot pouring out of my nose it leaves a thick trail, the straps tying me down to the bed, people yelling at me, my possessions and parents and connections to everything I know and love being torn away from me. it’s all seconds away from me, it feels like. “ I explained to the other kids and the counselors and psychiatrist. They all seemed to get it.
I had gone from one day being in the hospital because I couldn’t eat, took this one pill that they said would help me feel better, and then bam I had gotten this crazed feeling in me where I couldn’t stop moving. My heart had felt like it was body-slamming me, I heard my pulse in my ears, I felt irritated with the world. It was like someone had picked me up shaken me around and then set me free in a dog-fighting cage match to fight to the finish.
It wasn’t that I knew why I was so volatile it was just a completely chemically created feeling, that no matter how hard anyone tried to emotionally, or mentally understand, they wouldn’t be able to unless they had been through it.
“Everyone at the hospital understood and treated you as a behavior problem. They acted like you were just being bad on purpose to get attention.” the psychiatrist at Partial explained to me. “They understood and treated you as a behavior problem. Even if you had been just a behavior problem, you don’t leave a ten-year-old child in restraints for 2 hours. That’s just not okay.”
“Every time I think back to those restraints, to the way, when I couldn’t eat my meals they would say, ‘well I guess you’re here till you turn 18 and we ship you to the state hospital then’. Every time I think about those things, my heart gets really fast, I get really sweaty and I can’t think about anything else, so I start to cry, and then I can’t stop, no matter how hard I try.”
The psychiatrist had me work on building up different places in my head. She would ask me what they looked like and sounded like and smelled like and felt like. Then we would practice going to those places.
The first place I chose was my room at home with my mom reading me a chapter from a book while stroking my back. and getting me ready for bed. I picked the Newcomb Hollow beach in Wellfleet, Cape Cod as my second place. Picturing myself lying on the shore on a towel in the sun after I just got out of boogie boarding in the ocean.
Places far away from any hospital.
“Every time your brain takes you away from that safe place, I want you to just notice that. Don’t beat yourself up for leaving your place. Don’t judge yourself at all. Just notice you left and bring yourself back. I want you to say to yourself. ‘Oh, I left my place.’ Then I want you to go back to your place again. Go back to the details. Notice your mom’s hand on your back. Smell the mild scent of the Dove Fresh deodorant she uses, feel the soft pink hello kitty blanket covering you. See the stuffed animals lined up all around the room like little soldiers gearing up to protect you from harm’s way back.” The psychiatrist told me.
The psychiatrist had me practice going to one of my places every morning when I woke up for a few minutes and every night before I went to bed for a few minutes. She explained to me that if I practiced going to these comforting places when I was doing okay then it would be easier going to these places to help me relax and stay calm when it was one of those times that I was getting caught up and stuck in bad hospital memories. Sure enough, thinking of my safe places helped my heart get less racy and my body less sweaty and the memories less intense. It didn’t make them go away, but it cut down on the crying jags and I was able to stop pulling out my hair from the intensity of it all.
The psychiatrist also gave me a medication called Trazodone to take at night to help me sleep. I had been waking up so many times a night that I’d only been sleeping about a total of four to four and a half hours a sleep a night. She also switched my antidepressant to one that would work better on kids with anxiety.
In the sensory group, we learned about progressive relaxation techniques. The occupational therapist brought mats in and had each of us kids grab a colorful, sticky, yoga mat and lay down on it. Then she turned on some soothing music and had us clench up our muscles and then relax them starting from our forehead, then our eyes, then our nose, then mouth, then chin, then neck, then shoulders, all the way down to our toes. I fell asleep before we finished.
The occupational therapist woke me up, I was so embarrassed but none of the other kids were staring at me or laughing at me. A couple of other kids were asleep as well. Some were goofing off and talking to each other.
“How did doing this progressive relaxation make you feel?” the OT (occupational therapist) asked me.
“Super relaxed, so relaxed that I fell asleep,” I smiled sheepishly.
“How would you like it if I gave your mom a YouYTube link where it walks you through a bunch of different progressive relaxations to listen to either when you’re in crisis or to help you fall asleep?” She asked me.
“I’d like that a lot,” I told her.
In a group therapy that one of the psychologists led, one of the other girls in partial was talking a lot about cutting and being suicidal.
“I really want to just stop cutting, but then I’ll just be so overwhelmed plus I don’t know what else to do to get rid of the need. The urge comes on so strong and I just can’t fight it.” She explained.
After a long discussion about coping strategies and skills, we ended up making lists of all of our best coping skills. I wrote down:
- writing
- talking to my two best friends Corah and Samantha that lived on my street,
- drawing,
- painting,
- reading,
- craft projects,
- going to the mall,
- watching movies and TV,
- coloring,
- playing with my stuffed animals,
- playing with my barbie dolls and Calico Critters
- taking hot or cold showers,
- doing deep breathing exercises,
- going to my places in my head,
- the progressive muscle relaxation exercises,
- taking pictures with my camera phone,
- if I have flashbacks to the hospital, naming three things in the room at the present time that weren’t there when I was in the hospital.
The psychologist was very impressed with my list.
“You’ve done a lot of hard work at learning skills, understanding yourself, and dealing with your emotions. I think you’re almost ready to graduate from Partial.”
I was a little scared when he told me that because I didn’t want to go back to school. No matter how many skills I had picked up, I wasn’t ready to face Natasha and her cohorts. There was no way to prepare myself for the way everyone at school laughed at me, made up stories about me, made gagging noises as I walked by, and refused to sit anywhere near me.
The “Me” before partial would have been afraid to express herself in words and would have let the emotions of fear and anxiety get packed in deeper and deeper.
The “Me” before partial probably would have gone to the next group which was school and then would have done something extreme as the emotions finally imploded and I would have bit myself and pulled out my own hair or something crazy like that because I felt so completely out of control.
However, that was the older version of me. The new, more skilled version was now in operating condition.
“I’m scared to leave partial because I don’t want to go back to my old school where they all bully me and make me feel bad,” I told the psychologist in private after group therapy, right before I went to the school group. We went to “school” in the afternoon where we do all the work our teachers from our regular school sent us so that we wouldn’t fall behind while we were at Partial.
I never had any trouble at school. They got my work from Sinai Academy and I would finish all of it way early and then just journal, read, or do extra algebra problems that the teacher came up with. Because there was no worry about me falling behind in school, the psychologist and I had a long meeting where I described the extent of the bullying. The psychiatrist assured me that we would come up with a solution that would work for everyone.
I left the meeting reassured, but not completely. After all, the adults in my life up to that point hadn’t exactly been that reliable. But this time we had a discharge meeting with my parents, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, the occupational therapist, and the nurse, They all sang my praises, and it was decided that it would probably be better for me if I were just homeschooled. With my mom having a master’s in education and my dad being a dean and professor of a well-known university, they were both more than qualified to teach me at home.