psych ward rules!
CW: self harm, suicidal ideation
Companion song: Dreams by Fleetwood Mac
The first thing I do when I return home from the psych ward is take a long, hot bath; the kind of hot bath that I wince when I sink into, the kind of hot bath that burns all the natural oils from my skin, leaving me pink and shiny as a lobster.
I scrub the hell out of myself from top to toe, because it stings a little, because I want the buzz of cleanliness to be driven in two layers deep. The only other way to get that feeling is from the blade of a disposable razor, and since I willingly turned over my stash of them this afternoon, this blue scratchy loofah is the closest I’m gonna get.
The worst thing about the psych ward? The constant noise, the fluorescents, the slow-motion shuffle down the line of chairs for medication (morning and night).
The best thing? The cafeteria breakfast potatoes, my brilliant roommate, the constant presence of someone else (be it nurse, fellow patient, or techs doing their sight rounds every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. The constant surveillance was bizarrely comforting).
And neither here nor there was the absolute lowering of filters and inhibitions. The first day, intense introvert that I am, I was an observer- I stayed silent and watched as various patients behaved like Sims; laying on the ground, pacing the hall with one shoe, speaking to themselves or someone unseen in a quiet corner.
Time didn’t really work the same, there, and by the second day I felt braver and more seasoned, witty roommate and I playing a raucous round of Uno on the hard floor of our room, calling out after a tech check -“Don’t worry, we’re not killing each other or ourselves in here!”- and dissolving into semi-psychotic fits of laughter because that was definitely not the weirdest or craziest thing the techs had heard that day.
On my third morning in the ward, an older guy in paper hospital garb careened out of his room and past where I sat in the row of heavy meds line chairs, screaming at the top of his lungs as nurses crashed like a wave into the room. They talked in soothing voices, which he was having none of, and further down the hall he ran out of steam and slid to the ground, one hand sticking out palm-up in a desperate motion for soothing pills.
I tucked my feet underneath myself, swirled the shitty (shitty) coffee in my Styrofoam cup, and said to the pale-faced man in the chair next to me “This is really a bad place to not be a morning person.” He laughed, and told me that’s the first time he’d laughed all week.
Down the hall, some nurses got the man to his feet, guided him back to his room. He’d spilled the water they’d given him for medication down the front of his paper scrubs. I knew how fucking uncomfortable that must’ve felt.
In my 2-day stay at the ER, every basic item introduced to my bare-bones windowless room came with a question- “Are you going to hurt yourself with this?”- which probably was a standard liability procedure but never failed to pierce the hospital-fog of my brain with something close to hilarity. What’s the worst damage I could do with a felt-tipped pen, a paperback book, a bottle of roll-on deodorant that smelled like vanilla puke? Inquiring, intrusive-thought-inclined minds like mine wanted to know. I’m not a violent person, and I was never violent even at my worst (at least, not towards others), but having the probability of harm offered at every turn made me constantly think about the potential damage I could cause.
On my second night in the ER, I was rewarded for my extremely compliant (bordering on teacher’s pet) behavior by getting the luxury of a monitored 15-minute shower. “I’m supposed to watch you in here,” the nurse who’d walked me to the shower said, “but you’ve been pretty with-the-program. You’re not going to hang yourself with the shower hose, right?”
I wanted to make a comment about the shower hose not being stable enough to support my weight, but I also really wanted to shower so I shut the hell up. On the walk back to my room, hair dripping, I feebly attempted a joke by asking the nurse if she had a straightening iron I could use for my bangs. She did not find that very funny.
The day that I was transferred two and a half hours north to the psych ward, I got loaded into the back of a medical transport vehicle that separated me from the driver by a row of black metal grating. I could probably still spit through those bars.
Confined in a small space made me very conscious of how much I smelled- like sharp hospital, like vanilla-bile, ripe like blood. I hadn’t stopped bleeding since the first hour I arrived at the ER- not my period, just… blood. Like my insides were weeping and in mourning.
The rain on the road was thick but I saw a flash of orange out of my eye, the most exciting thing to have happened in days to my white-walled world; it was a leftover Halloween pumpkin, edges melting and oozing into the pavement, carved face bloated and swollen with rain.
The hospital-issued mesh underwear was sticking to my thighs. I closed my eyes and crossed my arms across my bra-less chest (even though I really doubted the confiscation of my worn elastic Target bra was really necessary, they still ziplocked that shit) and prayed to some, any deity that I wouldn’t bleed out onto the hard interior seat.
Even after my transfer north and having the freedom to shower twice a day (the ward shockingly, luckily, had enough government funding for hot water) I felt like my body still carried the bloated, seeping smell of someone who has ended up here- under surveillance, under the fluorescents, under the pressure of a last resort.
The psych ward strived to rid our world of all its sharp edges: the pens they gave us made of flexy plastic (got a 3-year jump on my carpal tunnel from those goddamn pens), the paperclips that held our various case records pointlessly pliable, the smooth clunky chairs with the 60-pound weights built in to mitigate the risk of someone getting bashed in the head.
When I awoke my second morning to find out one of the night nurses had taken away my hygiene kit, I rolled my eyes and pondered out loud to my roommate- “My god, this is a thin line between protection and prison. What the hell could we hurt ourselves with in those kits?”
I mentally catalogued the inventory of my little plastic bin- two packets of Vaseline lip balm, a 3-oz bottle of 2-in-one liquid wash, a bar of “facial” soap that made my hands break out in a rash.
I could see the same intrusive-thought-ticker-board flickering in my roommate’s head, and they said, “I guess we could drink the body wash?”
Jesus. What a way to go. “I’d prefer the shower hose,” I replied. They totally got it. That was the first time I’d laughed all week.
A week later, home and in my own sickeningly hot bath, I look around at all the things I’d missed so much: my big hand-pump jug of unscented shampoo, a stick of real, sweat-defeating, probably-cancer-giving deodorant, bobby pins, my hairbrush with pointy bristles.
There are moments of bright, beautiful things that have happened in the last week, and I try to focus on them as I scrub the soapy loofah over my arms. I think of my roommate’s face, still and peaceful with sleep, the steadiness of their breathing. I think about one of the night nurses, bisected by a pane of glass, asking me what song I wanted her to play since the medication database was being slow (Dreams, by Fleetwood Mac. In case you were wondering). I think about the raised herb garden inside the chain-link fence of our meager outdoor time, the ladybugs sleepy with cold, the rosemary that left a sharp smell on my fingertips.
As I sluice the soap from my arms, I try not to think about the promises the ward psychiatrists failed to keep- how the “referrals” they gave me are actually just for my regular doctor; the fact that the list of their suggested therapists included the one that turned me away the previous week for being “too suicidal”; that the intensive outpatient treatment I am supposed to start tomorrow won’t accept my insurance.
I let my knees slide under the water to shush away the soap and I am trying hard not to think about my mother’s texts unanswered on my phone, I am trying not to think of who told her, I am trying not to think of the fact that this is the first I’ve heard from her in three months.
I wanted to send you flowers but the hospital wouldn’t tell me where you got transferred. Thank fuck for patient confidentiality. Flower stems could gouge, thorns could slash, toxic petals could be ingested. It never would’ve worked.
I drain the bathwater from the tub, towel off and apply copious amounts of gently-scented lotion on my elbows, my cracked lips, in between the webbing of my hands. I look at my pink, raw, swollen body in the mirror, twist my hair into a tight knot and secure with a claw clip (a luxury). I wonder if my cats will accept me as theirs, once they smell me again after I’ve bathed with my own scents.
My phone, counterside, buzzes. I turn it off.
At least I’ve stopped needlessly bleeding.