All I could do was stand there and shiver. I don’t know if it was the fact that all I was wearing was a hospital gown and a pair of socks or if it was the fact that I was in a mental hospital. I was standing there, waiting to be put in a room for the night and I would be reassigned in the morning. Laying down on what felt like a stone with linens thrown on it wasn’t very comfortable at all. Sleep was the least of my worries at this point though; I was wondering how to stay warm. Looking around in the dark at my room, everything was bolted directly to the floor.
The beds, dressers, and desks were made of cheap oak and the walls were cement covered in an inch and a half of squishy white padding. Inside this room with me lay two brothers, who I came to find out have been in this place for a very long time and weren’t leaving anytime soon. I didn’t want to be there. When I awoke, the two brothers were playing some sort of fake soldier game and running around the room like animals and hitting each other with pillows. They couldn’t have been older than thirteen. It was very sad that people so young should ever need to be put in a place such as this.
I introduced myself to them. One of the brothers, Beau, got on my nerves right from the start. He was a very annoying little boy. He spent most of his days in a corner in “time-out” because he was the one kid out of all of us who never listened and never stopped talking. Sitting down in the discussion room after breakfast was very uncomfortable for me. I was the new kid and I didn’t like being looked at by these people. We were all in here for something, but none of us talked about it unless we were forced by the counselors in the room. These people were crazy.
Running away seemed pea-sized in comparison to the other things these kids had done in here. There were kids with white stretchy bandages on their arms to cover up the cuts. Other kids just had like severe ADHD and were on high doses of Ritalin. There was this little boy named Tyler, he was the smallest, youngest boy there. He always seemed spaced out. Come to find out, his parents left him there and he is a resident of the hospital now. He is always on some sort of sedation drug to keep his mind elsewhere. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for everyone, including myself.
After lunch came, we were supposed to mingle and do group things with everyone, I couldn’t. I was way too scared to talk to these suicidal, homicidal, insane people. I was huddled in a corner shuffling cards, when I saw two kids, Wesley and Z. They wanted to play spades, so I signaled them over here; they became the only two kids in the entire ward that I would consider ever talking to again.. These kids also happened to be my new roommates in the ward. It was fun because in the middle of the night, we used top play cards or talk about out lives on the outside.
We talked about it like we were in jail. It was actually pretty funny because so did everyone, even the nurses and psychologists who came in three times a day. It was jail for some people, and hell for others. Wesley, Z, and I were playing a game of poker when we heard this ear piercing scream from the other common area. Followed by incessant shouting and talking on the 2-way radios, I went to see what was going on. The cold floor seemed to stick to my bare feet as I ran across the hall into the other room where the girls were.
I saw Sabrina, a very feisty homicidal girl, was throwing chairs, books, pens, videos, anything she could get her hands on around the room. It took four gigantic men to hold her down and give her a tranquilizer. I couldn’t see the needle itself, all I saw the look in her eyes as she became more sedated and began to calm down. I froze where I stood. It was at this moment, frozen in time, where I realized pain. Mental or emotional pain never really occurred to me until this very moment. Sabrina may have been a feisty girl with a hard shelled exterior but she never meant anyone any harm.
I didn’t know much about her or myself until I looked into her eyes and all I saw was pain. I saw her pain. It was if she cried out to me. More importantly, I realized my own pain. I realized everything that I have been going through for seventeen years wasn’t good enough. That I was good enough and it was the world around me that was messed up. My parents, school, friends, everything just came crashing down at this very moment. I collapsed to one knee and tried to gather myself long enough to run to my room.
Huddled in a corner of my bed with my notebook and pencil I was writing down everything that I was thinking or that came to mind. The pages seem to fly by like the seconds that were passing. One, five, fifteen, twenty three, by the time I went to bed, two hours had passed and I had written twenty five pages of emotion. This was good and bad for me at the same time. Although these pages were filled with my emotion, bad emotion was on these pages as well, and if anyone read it, I would be kept in here longer, which was exactly what happened.
The next night, I was up all night, not writing this time, but I planned on it. I couldn’t sleep so I whipped out the black and white journal that I had and began to write. One of the faculty members came into my room to change the dirty towels and I didn’t hear her. She caught me writing and took the notebook. I couldn’t fight it, if I did, I would have been thrown in jail. So I let her take my thoughts and share them with the head nurse, who in turn showed them to my doctor. My stay went from three days, to two weeks.
By the middle of my second week, I was more comfortable talking to everyone who was in the ward. I saw new people come in everyday and old ones leave. I could tell by the looks on the new ones faces that they were scared and didn’t know what to do, much like myself. I helped these poor souls the best that I could which in turn helped me out as well. Several of them, were just in there for running away and such, but there was one, Steve, who was in there for detox. The thing is, all of us were not in this hospital by choice and we couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Steve was in the hospital by choice. He was addicted to Oxy Cotins and he needed a drug-free place to stay for a week or so he could flush them out of his system. At almost the end of my second week, Wesley was leaving to go home. As he was packing his large black duffel of his clothes and things he snapped. Screaming yelling, crying, emotion. He too was sedated, much like Sabrina was the first week I was there. It turns out that Wesley never got to go home that day. Instead, Wesley was put in another ward of the hospital to sit and rot for another few months.
This made me wonder, “Have I gotten so used to this place that I would fear going home? ” After lunch, Z got his letter or release and he was happy as a clam. He was jumping up and down and smiling all day. Just before dinner, his mother came to get him and he shook my hand and said “John, I’ll see you on the inside. ” Realizing what he meant, I cracked a smile and said “Yea man, definitely. ” As he walked down that lit up, off-white hallway I just starred because I knew that soon, my day would come.