Bipolarland, Texas part 11

 

9

The scream exits my mouth without my consent, without even my knowledge at first. My head jerks away from the sight so hard and fast I pull a muscle in my neck, and then I scream again from the pain of the pulled muscle.

And then everyone is here… the nurses, the doctor, patients congregating outside our bedroom door, and some other people too. I don’t know what the hell those people are doing here, and I don’t even care.

I finally look back into the bathroom and see that the girl on the floor is the black one with the blue eyes, the pervert. What happened?

I sit down on my bed and watch the commotion. Now there are too many staff crowding the bathroom doorway for me to see any more, but then Nadine sends Marla running to get the first aid kit and Mr. Clean to call the paramedics. Mr. Clean actually looks angry and annoyed that his role in this drama is just as an everyday worker calling the paramedics, unable to get a slice of the action himself.

“LaShonda! Wake up! Tell us what’s wrong,” says a nice-looking, young, short, angel-faced staff member with hair down past her hips, wearing a Mother Hubbard-type dress. “Who did it? If you did it to yourself, you have every reason not to. We’ll talk it over.”

“She’s still unresponsive,” a male staff member in a scrub suit says to her as they poke and prod the blue-eyed black girl. He looks at the angel-faced woman like she’s crazy and also sounds like he thinks she’s crazy.

“I think she used this, but someone could have just put it in her hand,” an older lady staff member with a compassionate, curious and empathetic look says. Not able to restrain myself any more, I go over to them and peek over their shoulders. The compassionate-looking lady is holding an earring. One of those earrings that every girl seems to have a pair of lately, meant to look like a stick of bamboo bent into a big ring, except that it’s metal and sprayed with a cheap layer of cheap fake gold. She must have slit her wrists, her ankles, the insides of her elbows, insides of her knees, and her throat with the parts that hold the pin part that goes through the ear.

As I knew would happen, they kick me out of my own room because what is happening with LaShonda Clements is confidential. They then shoo us all away from the door and close it in our faces.

The paramedics come in. An Asian female staff member, the only staffer left at the desk, flicks her finger at our closed door.

“I’m going to the restroom to listen,” I tell Johanna, suddenly feeling daring. My mood is on the way up again.

The little one-person restroom I was searched in is right next to our room. I go in there, pretending I have to go to the restroom, as I obviously can’t use the one in my room. I put my ear to the wall.

“Keep those wounds closed… yup… now we’ll have to take her to Ben Taub for proper stitches. Then she can come back here and probably be transferred, to the HCPC.”

So she’s alive, at least, and not badly injured. Was she doing this for attention? I mean, anyone can make a wound in themself and milk enough blood out of it, on purpose, until they pass out.

A male voice is saying, “Twenty-four… twenty-five… twenty-six…” What is he counting? The number of gashes or cuts she made in herself? The number of pints of blood on the floor? The seconds going by?

“Stop doing that,” someone says. “No need to stitch her up here. Just press the wound shut and they'll stitch it up over at Ben Taub.”

Mother Hubbard says: “You do stitches better than that damn doctor did on me when I had my twins. He sewed me up too tight where the sun don’t shine and this doc said I needed surgery to correct it if I ever wanted to have sex or use a tampon again. Trust me on this, it’ll happen to you sometime when y’all give birth. Before you told me about them screwing up, but now I know it’s just the husband stitch. Once the swelling goes down, he can actually get in again, and a tampon too. And man, is he pleased.” I can feel the others staring at this poor woman, when all she’s doing is trying to create an opportunity for light chat.

Then: “We might have to transfuse her. It's coming out fast.”

Then I hear “Uuuuugh—that’s a lot of weight for a little girl like her,” and I hear them putting LaShonda on a stretcher and rolling her out.

I stay in the restroom for a few more minutes, shaking, wondering why so many people choose these messy, dangerous methods when I hear all you need is a huge dose of heroin and you’re dead.

I go back to the dayroom and they’re long gone, probably at Ben Taub by now. The nurses and the psychiatrist and the two strange people (I look closer at their ID tags. The lady is a social worker and the man a therapist…) are congregating at the staff desk, gossiping just like the patients.

“All clear! You can come out of your rooms now!” the Asian staff member shouts, and some of them come out and most don’t. More do when Mother Hubbard goes to all the individual rooms to tell the patients that the crisis is over.

The other patients are not discreet at all. They crowd around me, and poor Johanna too, asking for details. I tell them about the blood, the earring, the at least sixty-seven stitches and them taking her away on a stretcher, while she was unconscious, or appeared to be, the entire time.

“I think she’ll be going to the HCPC,” Sean mutters.

“Cool! I wanna go to the HCPC!” the boy with stunted growth says.

Kenisha says: “The food was delicious at the HCPC. When I was in there, I had just gotten released from jail, and they sent me directly to the HCPC, and I was in the jail unit. The unit for inmates with psychiatric problems. And that food— it tasted like HEAVEN! I felt like I was in a fancy restaurant.”

Mind you, everybody probably thinks that after eating hog slop in jail for six months.

Then: “What did you see? Did you see anythin’?” Kenisha looks at Johanna and me with genuine, obsessed, interested, happy excitement. But somehow it doesn’t seem sick to me. Kenisha is just the kind of person that wants to know everyone and their stories.

I tell the truth. I don’t care about getting kicked out of the NPC. I’m going to tell everyone what I witnessed! Oh, to be the bearer of good news! And she might not be coming back to the NPC to spy on us in the bathroom any more! That means I can take a shower!

Then all the girls, and all the guys too, leap up and run to shower before LaShonda comes back. There’s a fight in every room about who gets to shower first.

It’s nice to have a room all to myself with just Johanna, who is already seeming like a good friend. I wonder how long it will last.

I wonder how long my stay here will last.

I wish I’d brought a journal to write all these amazing stories in. I’ve always found my life dull. Come to think of it, I haven’t brought anything else at all.

There’s a phone in the dayroom for patients to use. I go to it. I’ll call Jules, or Jakub, or Geoffrey, or whoever the hell happens to be at my apartment right now.

Don answers. “Oh, hey, Crazy, you wanna come with me and Zyg and Jules tomorrow? We’re going fishing.”

“I’d love to, Don, but I’m in the mental hospital right now.”

“Shit! What happened?”

“I just went manic and then depressed. I’m still going up and down. I literally can’t get up sometimes, as you know. I felt like laying down in the middle of an intersection once because I was so tired and wanted to lay down and look even more pathetic than I was, and then someone might decide to lay off me, or help me if they’re nice.”

“But what got you into the nuthouse?”

“Nothing! I just told my shrink about what I’ve been doing in the last month. He decided I was bipolar and that it might be because of the Celexa.”

“Well, I hope they find the drugs for you that don’t make you so manic. Just don’t let them give you anything that makes you a zombie.”

“Hey, could one of you do me a favor and bring me some of my stuff? I mean, just like my toothbrush and some toothpaste, and about five changes of clothes. No need to bring the kitchen sink.”

“I’ll go get your stuff now… hey, wait, what’s it like in there? Are they feeding you enough? Are they doing therapy and all that shit or are they just warehousing you in front of the TV until the meds start to work?”

“We have groups and we’ll have some group therapy. It says so on the orientation papers. And I’ve already been to a group.”

“Okay… good! What else? Did they ever use five-point restraints on anyone? You know, when they’re laying in a bed and their hands and feet are strapped or cuffed or chained to the bed, and another strap going right across your neck! Six-point restraints are when you add a strap across their forehead so they can’t even move their head. As if being able to move your head, even banging it on a mattress, is oh so dangerous!” I can sense his eyes rolling from halfway across town.

“That’s awful!” I exclaim. “They don’t do that. Jules said that nobody suffers in the seclusion room because either they’re there to blow off steam, even if it means going to the quiet room and staying there for days… or they’re so rowdy they get an injection—”

“Injection?!”

“It makes them feel better. Or so Jules says. Even if it has horrible physical side effects, they still feel better, because the mental illness the injection treats was worse. Supposedly. I hope. And they give you enough to make you feel alright. And they can lay or sit on the mattress or beat up on it. And none of it’s meant to be punishment. It’s just to move the person that feels shitty away from the other patients. Or so I tell myself.”

“Okaaaayyy… well, if that’s true, that’s cool. Because if I had to choose between living in a war zone and living in a seclusion room, I’d pick the war zone any day. In a war zone, you might get killed. But if you pick the seclusion room, you’re already dead.”

“I totally agree with you! I loved that; where did you get it?”

“I made it up.”

“Really? Wow!”

“It can be your new motto. Like it is mine.”

“It can be one of my mottoes.”

“What are the other ones?”

“Like, you know how 40 percent of Americans are on Prozac?”

“Why are you changing the subject?”

"I’m not. The other sixty percent are on Celexa.”

He’s a little late to laugh, but once he gets going he can’t stop.

“Listen, maybe you can call me back later after you’re done laughing. Some people probably need the phone, and I don’t want to be an outcast here with no friends. Unless you mind, of course. You’re already my friend.”