Bipolarland, Texas part 16

 14

“Good morning, Miss Boring.”

Did that nurse just call me boring?

“Good morning, Miss Kornek.”

Oh yeah; Boring is Shaniqua’s last name. Whew.

Breakfast is nasty breakfast sausage and nasty scrambled-eggs-poured-into-the-frying-pan-from-a-carton, and nasty cream of wheat. The only thing I ingest is the milk. I use the time to talk rather than to eat. It’s like a competition to see who has been through the most shit. They all laugh at my Uncle Matt story just like the staff did. But they have something the staff, as a general group, don’t have much of… empathy. I don’t mean the staff have no empathy. I just mean about stuff like this that happened outside the hospital to some of us.

Tiella talks about racism against her at her school where a bunch of guys, one wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt, forced her to clean out their car. The one in the Confederate flag shirt even said that as a half-black and as a woman she would have had to do this all her life centuries ago, so what was she complaining about?

Ayishah reveals that her husband took a second wife without telling her.

Chantal tells us the real reason she is here: not because the exterminators had to be called, but because one of them raped her. Then he called the mental health people about her to discredit her in case she told on him.

Shaniqua talks about her writing, how she was humiliated so much in her life that she has to be over-friendly to compensate for it and how she puts her real feelings in her writing.

Tiella tells her story about a tech making her his scapegoat and her calling the human rights people (with no luck) and finally the police, but then the nurse cut the phone. I cry.

I realize that I have empathy too.

I thank the higher power that I’m luckier than her.

But it could happen to me next time.

My anger is getting out of control. I need to tell the human rights people I talked to; the decent ones, not the ones Tiella talked to. I mean, about her situation with her trying to call the cops.

“I’m sorry, but that’s hearsay. We can’t do anything about that. If you get the girl you talk about to come talk to—”

Click.

I jump a foot in the air, do a 180 and look up into the face of one of the techs. My eyes travel down her arm; I can’t help it. Her hand is on the hangup thing.

I run into my room, and for some reason, grab Shaniqua’s pen and journal. I write. I don’t know who will find it, but I rip the page out and stick it in my drawer with my toiletries and my patient guide. I take out my patient guide, fold it up and stuff it in my pocket. I write the note again on another page and rip that out too and stuff it into my other pocket. I make a third copy, rushing this time and making it a bit messy, and shove the third copy into Shaniqua’s journal. She’ll find it there. I might not have time to write to Shaniqua that I promise I never read her stuff, so I don’t.

I go back out into the dayroom to wait. I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to hang out with the others for very long, or indeed any more, so I sit next to them and talk with them, listen to them, show them some respect and love and empathy.

I wrote that my name is Anne-Marie JoEllen Kornek. I wrote that I was born on May 14, 1987. That I am a patient at the Harris County Psychiatric Center on unit 2D. And that I'm also an unemployed nobody with a high school education. I had a legitimate complaint about another patient’s human rights. A psych tech on the unit just forced me to hang up on the human rights committee, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

They tell me I have a visitor. Then the visitor doesn’t come up. That’s strange.

Calm down, Anne. What staff do you trust? You liked Frank. You also liked the tech in the black scrubs. You liked Bambi. The med school student and the two nursing students looked nice. Like they wanted to talk and were just too scared. Go to them.

As if on cue, another patient asks out of nowhere, “Have any of y’all seen Miss Bambi?”

“Nope.”

It’s Tiella. She looks at me and says, “I saw you were upset yesterday. I felt so bad they worked you over with all those questions like with words and stuff. You can see Miss Julissa if something is wrong. Talk to Miss Julissa! That’s what I did. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Julissa Standish is standing amidst a crowd of patients asking her questions. About their estranged boyfriends, their poverty, their lack of people coming to see them therefore their lack of toiletries and clothing, their lack of employment, their lack of money, their lack of education, their lack of freedom, living in the hood… their involuntary psych holds.

So there are a lot of decent people here too. That’s nice to know. There’s Julissa, there’s Bambi, there’s Frank, there’s most of the other patients, there’s the good half of the human rights committee, there’s my friends outside, even if I don’t have Jakub. (But what about the refused visit?) I don’t know if I can call the cops or a court or not. It seems that’s out.

Day 4. A woman comes to me while I’m on the phone with the good people of the human rights committee, whom I have finally succeeded in contacting again and telling what I suspect Tiella never told them after the police incident (because if you can’t call the police, who can you call, right?). Then she hands me a paper. I look at it and my mood goes down the toilet.

I’m stuck here for ten more days.

That lady from the NPC, the counselor that admitted me; it says her name is Lenore Jessop; she wrote down a bunch of lies about me. That I stood on a table and gave a speech about patient rights. I bet she knew damn well it was the other girl that did that. With my social anxiety, which she saw and was told about, I can’t imagine her thinking I was even capable of giving a speech or standing on a desk, let alone both.

That I refused to take my medication. I never refused… I just forgot to take my Celexa.

That I had a suspicious mark on my throat. Well, if you’d ASKED, Lenore, I’d have told you what happened.

That I got into two fights on the NPC’s Crisis Stabilization Unit. Sure, if you count me tripping over a chair and yelling “SHIT!” when Kenisha brought out that cracked bottle with the stool sample in it! But it was Kenisha and Mrs. Roundtree doing all the other yelling. Sure I get into fights if you just count me yelling at my parents and brother who weren’t even there.

Lenore Jessop was FLDS… Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints. Polygamist. Straight off the ranch in Eldorado. Wearing a long, loose-waist, long-sleeved, high-necked dark green prairie dress, her hair in this complicated braided thing above and behind her head held in place by hairspray and a piece of material the same color and fabric as her dress. Only had a job in Normal Land because the kids were all taken from the ranch due to allegations of abuse, and the mothers all pretended to leave the ranch forever and get apartments and jobs outside to get their kids back. Then when they got their kids back, back to the ranch they went.

But hey; the court gave me a free lawyer. Lillian March. Her number is on the papers.

Will I be allowed to call her? Will they let me use the phone?

I’m on the phone. The nurse that hung up (white, female, eccentric, shaggy hair, jean jacket, pink silk blouse with a tie at the neck, dangling chandelier earrings I don’t know why she would wear to work on a psych ward) is nowhere to be seen. Actually, she’s not a nurse… Tiella told me she was a tech.

Anyway, I’m talking to Lillian!

“What happened to you was wrong,” Lillian says. “I’m going to repeat that. It was wrong. Nobody should ever have that happen to them. That doctor was out of order and out of line when she said she would detain you indefinitely. She can't do that. And I think you fully and completely deserve to file a lawsuit, in case she tries, because I have had other complaints about her keeping people a long time. One thought he would be staying a week but she kept him for a year, and he didn't know that was illegal until his uncle, who was a lawyer, came to visit him one day when he was in town. Now I’m going to call your friend who you said is going to court, if you’ll give me his number, and tomorrow I’ll come to see you, look around the unit, ask some people, see what might be going on here.”

“So I’ll still be here tomorrow?”

“Don’t worry about your friend who tried to call the police. If you like I can talk to her, but I can’t take on her case. I’m employed by the court, and she isn’t one of my clients. If she’s involuntary, she’ll have her own lawyer. But you are not going to be punished in any way for trying to speak out about that."

“Listen, I know. But the problem is, sometimes I just can’t control it.”

I am going to explode. So much on my mind. I know it’s all falling into place, but I still need to do a lot. And all the things I have to do at home too. It’s depressing. I used to love all that stuff I had to do at home. I loved my interesting apartment and keeping it up. I loved going out and having a good time with my friends. But now it all just seems like chores to me. I’m going to quit it all. I’m going to move, even if it means moving onto the street.

But then I’d be lonely.

I tell the nurse that. I know I’m getting louder and faster, but I can’t stop because I need to air my grievances NOW.

And now this crap at a place that’s supposed to be a hospital. It’s meant to do no harm, yet harm has been done to me here. It’s made me more stressed, not less. I tell her so. So much to do. Seeing lawyers, talking to the human rights people, trying to either get over Jakub or get back with him, dealing with a bad doctor because the people that can actually give me another doctor won’t, getting dragged out of bed at six in the morning to have my blood drawn, worrying the lawyer and human rights people might actually do nothing, hating Uncle Matt, hating Ira, hating my dad, hating my mom, hating George Bush because he made Uncle Matt stab me, dreading my release because I’m too drained to do my share of the housework. Worrying that all that crap from Podemskaya and that Jessop woman will be on my file forever, both here and in court and wherever they refer me to after I’m out of here. Walking across the dayroom is a bitch because of my social anxiety.

The patients are all talking loud too suddenly, and then the staff hold my arm down on the desk and shoot me up with what they say is Ativan, then I say the drugs don’t help so far, and they say to tell the doctor, and I say the doctor is a Bolshevik behaviorist bitch who probably won’t listen to me (don’t get me wrong, socialism and communism aren’t always bad, but she was a fucking Stalinist), and then I’m in the seclusion room.

Banging on the door.

I need a pen and some paper.

Punching the door.

I need my Jakub back!

Kicking and slapping and scratching at the door.

I need my friends NOW. ALL of them. I need a place to stay. But I also need my freedom.

Spitting on the door. How dare it not open for me?!

Sakoya is the tech in the animal print scrub suit. The nurse is one I have never seen before. Even more stern than the tech that hung up the phone when I was talking to the rights committee. Wearing something one might wear to court in the olden days… this black dress with this white ruff, this frill, whatever you want to call it. And she sounds downright mean!

I’m going to have a bruise on my leg. I look at my right thigh. There’s already a bruise there, around the two injection sites. They gave me another injection of Thorazine in here… and I’m starting to get the side effects.

But once again, I escaped the injection in the butt… simple things please simple minds, I guess.

A simple mind can remember better, even if it remembers less. First and foremost, it needs to be accurate.

I remember every word from the conversation I had with the lawyer, Lillian March. And every conversation I had with the rights committee, the good half of it in particular. And every word of the conversations I had with Geoffrey and Zygmunt. And every word on the court order papers to keep me in here. And every word in the Patient Guide.

I’m getting my memory back!

I need to write it down!

No matter; it’s okay if you forget it all again. Nothing you can do to get papers or a pen in here. The best way to remember is to not remember, to be simple and stupid but happy, to be the way you were when some people who didn’t understand called you manic, even though you were perfectly calm. But there was a depth to that calm that they were jealous of. So they called you manic.

They tell me I have a visitor. They ask if I’m calm enough to leave the room. I say sure, and I would like to see my visitor. They believe me.

So Jakub came to see me? They called him to tell him I was in the seclusion room? Maybe he’s out there wanting to make up with me!

My visitor is Geoffrey.

But you know what? That’s even better.