https://wordsofwomennewsletter.ghost.io/what-happened-last-week-pt-3/
The first two days I spent curled up in the fetal position. Trays of food were brought in, taken out, and replaced with others that would remain untouched. I couldn’t pick my head up off the pillow. Sleep was the only escape I had.
Hours earlier, they’d read me my rights as I sat in a beige ER dressing gown, barefoot, in a wheelchair that had been pushed down long hallways and up an elevator, escorted by two attendings and two guards.
Eventually, an intake coordinator came out from behind a closed door. The psych ward behind it. This was just the waiting room. A desk and a chair. They had me sign a bunch of papers. I wanted to read them, to try and understand what I was signing, then figured it was pointless. It was 2.a.m. The door was there. I wasn’t getting out of this. It was over.
They took my weight and the intake coordinator gave me a sheet of paper with my rights and some rules. I couldn’t read it. I set it back down. She then had me follow her to a large bathroom with no door where I removed my hospital gown so she could examine me for any marks.
They had the clothes I was wearing when admitted in in a plastic bag. They told me I would receive them when I was discharged. I couldn’t have the bra, because it had underwire, or the dress, on account of the belt. I could keep the flip flops. They told me they would find me some extra scrubs until someone dropped off clothes for me.
They told me I’d have my own room. That I was lucky. They told me I would be monitored every fifteen minutes. I thought it sounded extreme, but I didn’t care.
I was tired, so tired, by the time I got to my nice new room. I was exhausted… from all of it. The fighting and explaining and reasoning and justifying. I put on my scrubs, got under the white sheet, and welcomed sleep. I had succumbed and sleep was my only escape at the moment.
You get used to it. The monitoring. The latch on your door would open, the light from the common room would illuminate the side of the room you’ve been staring at for hours – the desk with your tray of untouched food. The unopened carton of milk. The window with the bolts, which looked out at a brick wall with more windows with bolts. By the time you turned your head to see who was there, the door would be closing again. Eventually, you stopped turning to look.
The only time I would fully wake would be when a new doctor, nurse, case worker, or psychiatrist came in. They took my blood pressure and temperature and monitored me for “alcohol withdrawal.” I stopped insisting that wouldn’t happen. I stopped trying to explain myself.
When I did wake up, in those slivers of minutes I was forced to sit up, be present, be lucid, to tell the same story over and over again, to hear the details given back to me, no real information given, then left on my own again, until the next person came in. I was overcome with a fear so great I did not know how to cope. I was shivering. I was so scared, I was motionless. I would wake up covered in sweat or drool. Yet every time I woke up, the only thing I could do was close my eyes, grind my jaw, and will myself back to sleep, out of this nightmare.
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