There were also lots of people on the ward who I did not really get to know all that well, so my accounts of their stories will be brief. I was so fond of all of them, and missed them when they left.
Billy had been unwell, in a psychotic (mad) state, for almost two years, living in a van and travelling all over the south of England. In the end he was stopped by the police and they discovered that he was in need of hospitalisation. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be unwell for that long. Billy was very kind to me when I first arrived, so I did not mind sitting with him for hours getting him to imagine nice things such as, a robin in the snow, children laughing, the moon on a cloudless night, and so on. It helped him with his strange thoughts to push them out with pleasant things. He was the middle child in his family, and his brother and sister were both high-fliers in their respective fields. This made him feel a bit of a failure I think, as he never really had a career of any sort. He was very good at photography though. Later on when we were both at home, we went to Spain together on a package holiday. But I never felt as though I knew him really, he was a bit hard to read. He was put on very strong anti-psychotics, by depot injection (in the gluteous maximus) as his diagnosis was Schizophrenia. He used to go around without "SENAKOT" written on his hand in biro, to remind him to take it. One of the side effects of some of these drugs is severe constipation. It seems that they slow everything down, even bodily functions.
Barbara looked too young to be on the unit, and she was very young in her ways too. I think she had a learning disabilty as well as mental illness. On the day she arrived she was very upset when her parents left, so I put my arm around her and let her sob on my shoulder. After that, she seemed to think of me as her own personal nurse, and she followed me around everywhere, even leaning over me at night and waking me up with a start. I had to have extra sleeping tablets to get any rest when she started bothering me at night. Eventually I had to tell her to go to a nurse, that I was only a patient like her and I had my own problems, but it was weeks before she finally got the message. Then she wanted me to be her "best friend". She was very sweet really, and so unhappy on the ward. I don't know why she was in there, she seemed pretty coherant to me. One day Paul took her for a walk, and he got into trouble because they went in a "borrowed" rowing boat on the river, and she got really bad sunburn because her drugs made her extra sensitive to UV rays.
Mark was a strikingly handsome young man, who said that he was Jesus. Looking into his beautiful, bright blue eyes, I could have believed him. He had long light brown hair just like Jesus, but no beard. He used to like to massage the feet of any willing females, with baby lotion. We used to queue up! After 3 months on the ward he hardly looked like the same person. A combination of the metabolism-slowing drugs he was on, and sleeping until three in the afternoon out of boredom, had made him extremely overweight, and he had a bad back because of the extra weight he was having to carry around. He used to hobble around with his hands clutching the small of his back, like an old man. He was a brilliant artist, and on the wall of the gents' toilets he painted a fantastic depiction of the crucifixion, complete with brooding clouds and Roman guards and Mary and Peter at the foot of the cross. The reaction of the nurses was simply to make him wash it off "because it might disturb the other patients". I think they should have at least got someone to take a photo of it first.
June was an alcoholic. She had come into the ward to try to get off the booze, because she had almost died after a particularly huge binge. I really do not think that a psychiatric ward is a suitable place to detox and to accept that you have to give up drinking for life. She was on antabuse tablets which make you violently sick if you drink alcohol. However, after every single home leave she went on, she arrived back at the ward totally inebriated. There is hardly any counselling to be had, and I don't know how a person is supposed to get the the root of the problem, the reason why they drink, in such a drug-oriented system.
Mary walked with a pronounced limp, and I asked her what was the matter with her leg. She said, "I had a virus and it affected my muscles". In actual fact, there was nothing wrong with her leg. She had been on the ward for 7 months, perhaps because no amount of reasoning could persuade her that she had a perfectly healthy leg. In the end she went home, still limping. She was very kind to me when I had food poisoning on the ward. It had been mixed grill for tea, and about an hour afterwards I started to have a terrible stomach ache. A nurse said that I had "probably just eaten a bit too much", but later on I was violently sick and this carried on for the whole of the night, even after my stomach was empty and I was just bringing up bile. Mary brought me a jug of iced water. I wonder if her psychiatrist had gone along with the poorly leg idea, and given her sugar pills for it, or even put it in a splint for a while, she might have felt that he was on her side and then he could have said, "Look, it's all better!" Sometimes these psychiatrists just have no imagination.
Edna was an elderly lady who had suffered her first "breakdown" when her husband died. They had no children and they had been together since she was just 16. You can imagine how devastating this would be for anyone. Because she was elderly and therefore prone to get worse side-effects from medication, she was prescribed Electro-Shock Therapy. She rapidly went from being a very smart and tidy lady, to someone with unkempt hair and a tendency to wander around naked. I remember one night in particular when she was being just a bit troublesome to the staff, insisting that she did not want to go to bed or to take her sleeping pills. The nurses do not like people to be up in the night, because it means that they themselves do not get any sleep. They always make up beds using armchairs put together and with their nursing capes for blankets. So they are actually being paid for sleeping. A nurse decided that to stop Edna from wandering around the ward, she would barricade her into one room with chairs, and with herself stationed at the door to make sure Edna did not escape. After a while Edna said that she needed the toilet, but the nurse would not let her out of the room. Eventually the inevitable happened, and Edna peed herself. The nurse got very angry at this point and called her "disgusting". In fact, this particular nurse used to call almost everyone "disgusting" at some time or another. She just did not seem to like us, and I wonder what she was doing in that job, which is not particularly well-paid, except that perhaps she enjoyed the power and being able to be mean to people without reproach. If mental patients complain, they are never, ever believed. Most do not complain because they are worried about repercussions. A vindictive nurse could quite easily lie and say you had been behaving strangely and should not be discharged yet, for example. It therefore pays to have the nursing staff on your side. I spent a lot of time trying very hard to make friends with the nurses, because they have so much power, as they report to the consultants about your day-to-day progress. You only see your consultant once a fortnight so they depend quite heavily on nurses' reports.
Margaret, or Mags as she like to be called, had anorexia and she had been sectioned to make her gain weight because she had been not far from death at only 6 stone. She had to get up to a more healthy weight before she could be discharged, and she eventually complied because she wanted to go home. However, the eating disorder had not in any way been cured, or her problems addressed, and so when she went home she immediately went back to her starvation regime. She used to leave chocolate bars on my pillow, and she liked to watch other people eat. I remember one night hearing her screaming "NO! NO!" because she was being force-fed. I had thought that sort of treatment had gone out with the suffragettes, but it seems they can do almost anything to a person an a section, "for their own good".
Jon had a neurological disorder of some kind, most likely caused by long-term medication. He had a very strange, robotic, way of walking. I found seeing him quite disturbing because it fitted in with some of my current "mad" conspiracy theories about what they were doing to people on the ward. Someone told a nurse that they had seen Jon and I walking hand in hand and that we had gone off into the bushes together. This was a total fabrication, but the nurse believed it and gave me a lecture about "inappropriate emotional attachments". The more I insisted that it was untrue, the more convinced she seemed to be that there was "something going on".
Anna was a "free spirit" type. She had five children, each one with a different father. She had been discharged previously, but the mini she was travelling home in was involved in a very bad accident, and she found herself back on the ward, in a wheelchair with broken legs. She told me one weekend that one of her teenage sons was trying out LSD, with her blessing. She said, "He'll only try it anyway and I would rather he did it somewhere safe". She got very cross one day when there was veal on the menu, and made almost everyone refuse to eat it. One evening I went to the nearby pub with her, and a very strange thing happened. Just as we were opening the door to the bar, somebody got angry and smashed an ashtray, and shards of glass flew everywhere, and one hit me on the lens of my glasses. If I had not been wearing glasses I might have been blinded. We felt so disturbed by this that we could not stay long, and Anna phoned Chris, the night-nurse, who came down on his bike to walk us back to the ward. I am not sure what was supposed to be wrong with Anna, because she never seemed "mad" in any way. Chris was one of the better nurses, and he treated us like human beings. If we wanted to go to the pub he did not see it as his place to try to stop us. I remember one night when I had not been on the ward long, I was very unwell, feeling as though my blood was on fire as my whole nervous system was in a state of collapse, Chris sat by my bed all night long, gently holding my hand. All the patients loved him, and when he was on duty there was a relaxed and caring atmosphere on the ward. He was quite an accomplished guitarist, and would often play for us. Amazingly, he had never met Dr Longton, their paths had never crossed because they worked such different hours.
Robert was a fantatic artist, he could draw almost anything in a few minutes. His eyes darted around all the time. He used to draw things like leopards and tigers, completely from memory. I got him to draw a picture from a photo of my partner, Iain, playng the penny whistle in the woods. He asked me to pay him a fiver for the drawing, and he did quite a few commissions for other people too. He lost the power of speech and used to communicate by writing in a notebook or sometimes sign language. He had been brought up by parents who were strict Jehovah's Witnesses. From a young age, he had been led to believe that the world was going to end soon, and he was terrified of armageddon. He had a problem with numbers. If he was going to visit his ex-wife, for instance, he would have to drive past her house exactly fifteen times before he pulled up. He fell in love with a lady on the ward, Jess, and wanted to marry her and have a family. He had two children with his first wife, but she had made sure that he did not have much to do with them, and he wanted another chance to have children and to be more involved in their lives. He confided his feelings and hopes to a nurse, who immediately suggested that he should not marry Jess because she was Schizophrenic and so the children would probably be as well. "You don't want to bring people into the world who will suffer the way you have", she said. What a Nazi! There is no scientific evidence to support a genetic or biological origin for mental illness. Researchers have been trying to find such evidence for years and keep drawing a blank. And even if they did have an increased chance of having children with mental illness, would we have wanted to rob the world of such people as Van Gough and Tchiacovsky? There seems to be an unwritten consensus among mental health professionals that it would be better if people with mental illness did not breed, or pass on the as yet un-discovered faulty gene that is supposed to cause their illness. Robert never did marry Jess, he took the advice to heart, and he never had another family.
No comments:
Post a Comment