by Restin Wells
Chapter One
I was standing in the nurses' station, after returning early from a weekend pass from Orange Memorial psychiatric ward, 8-C. It was just before the two-thirty shift change, on Saturday. I was losing control even at that moment, though desperately trying not to show it. Staff members on the afternoon shift, recently clocked in, greeted me by name, lightly, as they happened by on their rounds; except for Julie, the head nurse on that shift, who was writing in patient records at the desk. When she asked how I had done outside, my mouth felt frozen and I couldn't speak. Julie got a serious look on her face, and very quiet, as she turned back to her writing.
Rebecca, the med nurse, standing at her cart from which she had been measuring afternoon doses, took a stance as still as a starched manikin. The orderly, the only man on duty, was sitting on a castor-wheeled office chair, walking it along with his long legs, crab style, among the patients, to take blood pressures and temps. Patients were milling about with nothing much else to do, or felt like doing, while waiting to get that unavoidable ritual over with. The fluorescent lights above, humming professionally, were casting a soft light upon the beige walls and rose-buff carpeting.
I stood over against a wall just inside the interior square of desks and files, and where patients sign in after returning from pass. I just stood there for what seemed a supernatural moment, then crouched over and gripped my knees with my hands, like someone who' s just been whammed in the chest by a football. I felt chills of a horror-of-death run down my spine, like a laser line sweeping over a graph on a screen. Then an overwhelming surge wave of panic crashed over me.
As best I recall, I leapt forward and my body smashed against Rebecca's desk somehow, which hurled the record book airborne, papers aflutter like a shot hawk. It almost shocked me out of my craze. While the patient record book still clattered off the furniture, I lunged again, grabbed a swivel chair, and yanked it back and forth, for some reason, I don't know what. It fell over backward, then I stumbled over it and ran up to some kind of door, fell to my knees, and grabbed the locked doorknob, yanking it as hard as I could. I think I was yelling something, too. About then, the nurses and the orderly fell upon me, pried my hands off the doorknob and proceeded to drag me by my arms and legs to the lock-up ward. I went limp, and could feel hot steam rising from my back as they dragged me around the corner, into the dark cell. They all let go of me then, to lie on the thick vinyl floor. A nurse shoved a pillow under my face as they backed out and locked the door shut.
After several months of being in and out of the local psych ward, I knew the staff there would treat me well, but I also knew there wasn't any medication they could give that could provide relief. I didn't respond well to any kind of medicine. I probably wouldn't be seeing a doctor either, as they rarely came in to see patients in an emergency admission, but let the staff handle it until the next day. The traditional one-hour therapy sessions weren't usually done in the hospital. The hospital was just a sort of M.A.S.H. unit, where you get patched up just enough to go back out on the front lines--then go to the therapist's private office somewhere else in town, as an out-patient, to talk in depth.
On the floor of the cell, in a half daze, I felt the claim of dark truth that ending it all was a fast-approaching doomsday for me. In the strong arms of the walls there, I lay still in a suspension of numbness as long as I could prolong it. Gradually I returned to reality, stood up, and began to walk alongside the clay-green seamless wall. I could feel the alien horror-and-panic thing clawing into my brain again. I braced against it as always, but it was like trying to paddle a canoe in a hurricane. It felt as terrible as the jaws of a pit bull clamped down on my head. It was the kind of mortal, ultimate terror someone would feel in an airplane that's spiraling down to crash. Yet, I couldn't see anything, couldn't think of anything, that could be responsible for it.
I had always known fear to be the reaction to some obvious danger, which always subsided when the danger passed. "If only I could know what's causing it," I cried within, "I could make it stop." I seemed able to do anything else I really wanted to do--why couldn't I do something about this!?
Copyright ©
Restin Wells