david the sunshine med nurse

i think i said at some point i said might come back and tell you about him, and now is that time. it sounds maybe like i don't take him seriously, but i do.

i don't know what it's like to be all patients checking in to all hospitals, but i know what it's like to be me checking in to the hospitals i've checked into, and i have talked with a number of patients who have indicated that we have some shared experiences.

one of the things you do is watch the staff closely. when you come in you are often pretty badly strung out and you have to get and idea pretty quickly who can be trusted and who can't. in every population some people are full of shit and some aren't. in every population some people have a sense of humor and some don't. and the thing about people is that some of them are just on our wavelength and some aren't.

the patients can tell you, if you're in good enough shape to talk with the other patients when you come in, who's on the level and who likes rules. the patients will tell you right away if that scary looking patient is really sweet and harmless if that's the truth, but they won't tell you anything if that scary looking patient is really scary. it's kind of a code. the patients will explain a lot of things for you; they will explain for you whether an "offer of a quieter room" means an "offer of a quieter room" or whether it means a "threat of five-point restraint, a dose of thorazine, and a quieter room". the patients will tell you right away if there's a ratched on the floor.

but mostly you have to watch the staff yourself and decide who's full of bullshit and who's not.

david the sunshine nurse seems at first to be way too happy, but my bullshit detector isn't going off. and he's really sincere and pleasant to everybody, and enthusiastic about his work, and on the weekends he runs a music group for which he plays music and that makes me kind of grumpy, but i realize that it has more to do with the fact that i'm grumpy about how i've let my guitar skills slide, because he's really good.

and i'd like to be all snotty about the music he's playing, but i'm looking around me at what's REALLY going on and people are singing and they are smiling and nearly all the patients are there and just about everybody but me loves it and that's where the real healing is, and while i don't care for his brand of music, i am loving his brand of sunshine, but i have to leave anyway because i'm in the middle of that drug reaction and i'm too uncomfortable to sit.

later on i get to have this awesome conversation with him about medications and later i also hear snippets of conversations around the ward, not because i'm trying too hard to eavesdrop, but because the place is kind of built so that there's really no such thing as a private conversation, and i'm really impressed. i don't know what exactly his educational credentials are other than he's an RN and that he appears to have some sort of specialty in medications, because i notice that only certain nurses only ever work the med room, so it would not surprise me if he has as much training or nearly as much training as a registered pharmacist, who, by the way, holds (in most cases) a bona fide doctorate in pharmacology-

but anyway,  the more i see this man work, the more impressed i am. and as he works, he spreads sunshine and music. and it's subtle, but then you notice him using his lunch hours to bring sunshine and music to patients on other wards. and he probably doesn't have to wear ties that make you laugh necessarily, but in his own quiet way he just goes about making his own corner of the world better, and against tremendous odds.

he is not dealing with flowers in a park. he is dealing with addicts and junkies and the flat-out crazy. he is bringing sunshine to broken people in a bleak place in difficult times.

sometimes they get better, and sometimes they don't, but he is not seeing them at the times when they are at their best.

so, david the sunshine med nurse: best of luck to you, and thanks.

one-offs from the blogoshpere

i keep saying that i visit random blogs, or at least that's how i make my introductions when i make comments at blogs i've come across randomly, or how i explain to people i know in real life how it is that i come to read the blogs of hundreds of people i don't otherwise know.

nearly every blogging engine has some kind of random button you can press and voilà, you are reading a random blog, although i think maybe it isn't entirely a random blog, but based on some kind of algorithm that considers where you were when you started, but that's not where i was going with this post (oooh, look, a SQUIRREL!)

anyway, i was thinking about all the blogs i look at once and never return to and thought maybe i'd do a little piece on those. in preparation i spent an hour or two hitting "random" buttons and taking notes.

so, gentle, reader, here are the blog characteristics that will make me click through faster than the preacher's kid leaves the party when the sheriff shows up.

• your formatting hurts my eyes. i won't bother to look for content i like here. i don't care how clever you are, or how deep your thoughts are. it really is that simple.
• your page is not written in any language i understand. i don't insist on english, especially in photo captions where i can make do in several languages, but if you aren't writing in a language i understand, you don't care if i read it, anyway.
• you are using the blog as the home page for your business. fine. i have no objection to it, but unless you also provide some entertaining content or unless it's a business i'm interested in, i won't be reading it. i realize that for you it's a smart business choice in terms of a free web presence, but it's just a bad fit for me as an entertainment source. best of luck to you, though.
• your blog is so cluttered with gadgets that you have no room for any content.
• your blog is nothing more than a regurgitation of cute things you saw at someone else's blog.
• you haven't updated your blog since 2009, and that was only to mention that you're amazed that you still get hits, since you hadn't written anything since 2007.
• your blog is made only of pictures, and none of them are labeled, captioned, or explained in any way. they are also not very interesting pictures.
• your blog contains the words "please vote for this (whatever) every day".
• i scroll down the page a LONG time, i mean a really, really LONG time and i can't figure out what you're on about. is that your band? your favorite band? your brother's wedding? some guys from school? some random pictures? i think you want me to think something about it is awesome, but i just don't get it. can you give me some more information? any information? what's this post about? i keep scrolling, but i don't get any more information out of any other posts. at this point i'm only looking to try to figure out because i know i'm going to be writing about it later in the day and i want to be sure that you're as totally opaque as you appear to be at first glance. in you case, i guess, the blog is about not communicating anything, not even a mood. i'm just guessing about the awesome thing. 
• your blog wants me to know NOW, NOW, NOW some amazing facts i need to know about Jesus. let me tell you, pal, if i need to know those things about Jesus that quick, your blog is not going to be His chosen venue.
• your blog is one more cookie-cutter cute craft mommie blog about your perfect beautiful kids and your perfect hubby that you "wuv" so much and the great bounty of the Lord and all that because while i believe you love your husband and kids and God and all that and that you like crafts there are a lot of people out there writing about it more genuinely than you and by the time it gets to you it's old news anyway so you might as well bring to the table what you bring to the table, which is you, yourself, unvarnished, the way you are.
• your blog is full of this week's internet meme.
• your blog is mostly made up of social media buttons. if you have nothing to say here, why would i follow you anywhere else?

and the biggest reason i run very fast, never to return:

• your blog has auto-play music.

tornado girl

i don't know what her real name was. i never learned it. a lot of people up there got nicknames, like all the bobs, just so we could keep them straight. i mean, you're up there and in the space of a week there's five guys named bob so you give them nicknames. you have to. it's not the sort of place where you're on a last name basis.

but tornado girl was special. really special. you know she's special when a roomfull of junkies looks up and says: "wow. this one's special."

it's hard to convey in print what it felt like to be indoors with her, much less indoors on a locked ward with her. she had obviously stocked up but good JUST before she had come in and the  check in process had gone just a little too long and she was expecting the people in the hospital to replenish her supply of drugs immediately upon her arrival on the ward.

really.

that was her approach to detox.

a refreshing approach, actually. a lot of people when they come for "detox" from one drug ask for substitute drugs or drugs that will ease their pain and take the edge off their discomfort. but not tornado girl.

"i'm here because i really need to get off of adderall", she would tell you, very loudly, and about two inches from your face. "and i NEED MORE ADDERALL. MY DOCTOR SAID I COULD HAVE MORE ADDERALL. OH, MY GOD! I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A DISORGANIZED HOSPITAL. I HAVE A LIST OF DRUGS MY DOCTOR SAID I COULD HAVE. IT'S TIME FOR MY XANAX. I'M SUPPOSED TO HAVE PLENTY OF XANAX. AND I'M SUPPOSED TO BE GETTING OFF ADDERALL. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT WITHOUT MY ADDERALL????"

among us, we had a combined great deal of experience of a great many witnesses of a great many detoxes, and we all agreed that this girl was special. we had to hand it to her that this was one approach to detox that we had never seen before.

and we were lined up for dinner, getting counted, a thing you have to do because they count you against the list of who has walking privilege and they count who shows up at the door and they round up the tardy ones and then they have to hunt up four staff for each traveling patient and they count you again and a nurse has to sign off on it andjust as thy're putting us through the "airlock" tornado girl's psychiatrist comes to meet with her for the first time and we all look at each other and we say "is that who she go assigned to? oh, that's not good" because when you come in the first time you're assigned at random to one of the floor docs but tornado girl has a sense of entitlement slightly longer than all of her DNA if you unwind it and lay it end-to-end and the doc she's been assigned is the one i have cheerfully nicknamed "the arrogant bastard".

now, "the arrogant bastard" is a crack psychiatrist. the man knows what he's doing. i just think that his personality style and tornado girl's sense of entitlement are going to meet in a perfect storm and it's going to be a bumpy ride on the ward.

which of course it is.

the farther tornado girl goes into withdrawal, the more she likes to talk about it with me and anyone else she can buttonhole. and her idea of the perfect conversational distance goes from four inches to about two, and her idea of a perfect conversational volume has increased proportionately.

at some point she starts making a lot of phone calls and we all pretend we can't hear her but we're secretly taking bets as to whether or not anybody will try to dissuade her when she tries to check out.

we hope not.

nobody does.

and nobody misses her when she leaves.

we just clean up the trailer park and get on with it.

what i like today

this morning i woke up and although it hadn't snowed much, it was snowing pretty strongly, so i scrapped my plans to go skiing, figuring i could grocery shop today and ski tomorrow. i do not care to ski while it is actually snowing out; i'm fussy that way. it gets down my neck, my goggles fog up, whine, whine. i haven't the time for all that. i can do it tomorrow.

it turns out i won't be doing it tomorrow, either. it turns out that with such a monumental dump of snow it will take a day for them to groom it out so that i can ski in it without hurting myself (no full set of connective tissue in either knee, besides old and out of shape), but the way it was snowing today i also didn't get to go grocery shopping, either.

so what did i do?

i read this awesome story: cucumber gravy, by susan palwick.  you should read it too. full disclosure: i read her blog, which you can find here. she talks a lot about cats and knitting and writing and chaplaincy and learning to play the viola but mostly why i like to read her blog is that she's a decent person and she can string a sentence together intelligently. i'm not so wild about cats or knitting but if she's writing about it, i'm willing to read it.

today i love creamed chipped beef on mashed potatoes, but if you want some of that, you have to make your own. i make mine with both worcestershire sauce and tabasco.

i also like snow. today i started working on this year's edition of the snohaus, which can only be described as my seasonal monument to insanity. here's an entry from last year describing that and if you're enterprising you can get from there to the photo albums but if i think of it later maybe i'll link you to the full account of last year's two incarnations of the snowfort.

as a result of that i heard the neighborhood children refer to me in awed tones as "that crazy old lady". excellent. i am just barely forty-six years old and i am already "that crazy old lady".

also on my list of what i like today is this sexy little number, an hour-long documentary on how awesome statistics are, which i'm only halfway done watching and which i want to finish watching before i go to bed for the night.

ooooh. talk nerdy to me.

richard

he came in alone, with one small bag of stuff. he walked straight to the nurses' station and did what check-in he had to do quietly and politely. he did not look around him, except that when he was spoken to, he spoke back. he returned greetings. he said his name when introduced but did not seem to be in a condition to learn names.

he looked preoccupied; he stood upright, but his small frame looked weighted and his eyes were sad and clear. sometimes when the new people come in they look crazy or high or terrified or beat up and you know what's ahead of them but this guy looked fine except for the unsettling  feeling you got looking at him that he knew what was coming and that it wasn't going to be good.

i watched him pass; i hadn't seen his eyes or heard him speak a word but it was as if i could feel something good and decent in his heart and i just loved something about him and it felt to me as if he had just very manfully walked up to the edge of hell and said to the charge nurse: "well, let's get this started, then."

in a matter of hours it was started. in a few more hours everyone there knew what he was in for. he was detoxing. and although the staff doesn't tell his business, the other patients know enough about what they give him and how they take care of him to know that he's having a very bad detox from both suboxone and from alcohol.

later on if i feel like it, i'll tell you more about suboxone, but for now i'll just say that it's a replacement drug for heroin and it's used both legally and illegally and that withdrawal (or as they say on the wards, "withdraw") from it or any of that class of drug will be hell, but won't kill you, but withdraw from alcohol very well might.

and because of that, they have to have him out in the public areas of the ward. they have to be able to monitor him closely, and that means we all get a front row seat. he gets jittery. he sees bugs. a lot of bugs. he knew it would be this way, and he struggles beyond reasonable expectation to remain calm and to be polite. he apologizes for his shortness of temper.

and he does a thing i have never seen in a detox patient.

often patients in detox ask for as much pharmaceutical help as they can get. often they ask for as much substitution, as much of an easy way out as they can possibly get, as little of a detox as they can possibly get away with.

but this guy asks the charge nurse if she can give him just barely enough of a mild sedative to take away enough of his anxiety about the bugs to allow him to bear it until they go away. she's willing to give him more, but he only wants just enough.

i can only guess at what his blood pressure is; the veins in his neck are visible at a pretty good distance. his face is red. they take his vital signs every few minutes.  he passes in and out of consciousness. he pisses himself. he wakes up for a few minutes, sits up, and passes out with his nose in a cup of soda. someone gently moves it so he doesn't have a ring on his face when he wakes up.

he never whines. he never complains. it is obvious that he is uncomfortable. he is so uncomfortable that he is going out of his skin but when he can stay awake enough to keep his eyes open the only thing he can think of to do is to play chess.

so that's what he does. i don't know that he loves chess so much, but i do know that chess is a big enough thing to wrap your brain around. bit by bit i begin to realize that when he's not playing chess or working on a chessboard, he is so uncomfortable in his body that it drives him nuts and he can hardly think straight or even think at all.

but he does not complain or blame. he simply does his best with what he's got.

and that's a chessboard.

three things

thing one: today i went skiing for the first time all season. i went to pick up my pass and then i thought i'd have a few runs, but the truth is i'm out of shape and i don't have more than two runs in me and even those weren't very aggressive runs and i had to stop to rest on the second one, but two runs is better than no runs.

i seem to have lost weight since last season, if the photo on my pass is any indicator, which is both awesome and surprising, considering i just spent the last month or so sitting on my ass eating high fat hospital foods in large portions like they give out and not exercising much.

thing two: i follow a very funny blog written by a woman in queensland. you know, the place with all the flooding. today she posted an awesome video her husband shot of floodwaters and it's just gone viral and no i'm not going to link you to it because i'm just not. i found her by accident and although i'm kind of a guest there, i don't think she's prepared for a few million guests.

just by accident a couple of months ago i happened to discover this awesome little blog about an hour before THAT one went all viral and i was all, like, wait a minute! a few minutes ago it was just me and you and a few other people you knew and i was just a random stranger that wandered in here and all of a sudden where did these other forty-four THOUSAND people come from? only since the other forty-four thousand people came in about an hour after i did i hadn't really established much of a claim to permanence there and in a few days there were millions of people and the things was being translated into portuguese and she was giving interviews on french television and MSNBC and things still really haven't calmed down in her household but they will soon, i think. i still read the blog but i think most of the other people have gone.

anyway, i'm not linking you to the lady in queensland. you didn't hear about her from me.

thing three: you know how i love maps. and you know how i love infographics. here's a little interactive map infographic thingy fedex has done that you can play with. ooooh, oooooh! i may not ever have sex again as long as i live, but i can still enjoy a well-done cartogram.

awesome.

plan b

it's hard enough to link together loosely-related elements and make them into a story when my mind is clear and tell it to you, and harder still when the elements overlap or are interwoven through time or across seemingly unrelated concepts or draw together otherwise unrelated people or events or rely on weird little networks of coincidences but for the most part the story falls in some sort of orderly fashion and if you were able to keep track of it, you might be able to diagram it with some success.

unfortunately, during the Indeterminate Time, while things happened that were certainly real, the portions of my brain that processed them are unable to recall them in precise sequence any better than you are able to nail jello to a wall. and even coming out of the Indeterminate Time where my notes may be good (and i took PAGES of notes) it will just make more sense for me to tell the stories in bits and pieces and let you try to pull together the organized narrative if you need to, ok?

intermittently i will also be telling you the other stuff that's on the regular program around here because let's face it, i did not start this blog to be a solid wall of psychiatric story, but rather a catch-all of what's-on-my-mind and while i wish to tell you the story, i also wish to tell you for instance that it's snowing and that tomorrow the skiing will be nice. and that there's soup to be made and toys to try out. and that i still have pictures to clock and video to process. and i still have stuff to tell you about my virginia roadtrip, and the rest of my october roadtrip, and that i think i'm still behind in telling you all the stuff from my MAY road trip, so even though i've been writing regularly, i have serious backlog.

and sooner or later i'm going to get around to writing about some blogs i like.

if i have time.

anyway, during the Indeterminate Time i'm up there and i am powerful homesick and besides that i am howlingly sad for just being sad but i'm trying to get it under control or at least just get my appearance of it under control and not cry and scream so loud because it's really close quarters and that's really uncomfortable for other people to be around, and i really don't want to get my privileges yanked so even though i'm feeling very unstable, and like i want to run around in circles screaming very loudly or like i might spend another three days crying or worse, laugh until i fall to the floor and not be able to stop, i'm trying really, really hard to just walk around with no affect at all rather than let it get out of control and it doesn't leak out much unless someone on staff comes to talk with me about how i feel, which is when it leaks, which i find out later when i go look it up that this kind of plays against me in the sneak diagnosis department.

and when i tell them i am lonely and homesick for my people, whom i miss, and who are special to me, they tell me i can socialize with the other patients, but when i tell the that the other patients are not the same as my friends and my family and my church family and that it's JUST NOT THE SAME, this also works toward the sneak diagnosis.

jiminy. i have learned so much.

so.

during this time i am also creeping toward my birthday. for a lot of reasons i often feel ambivalent about my birthday, but one thing about which i am not ambivalent is that the only thing that sucks more about spending your birthday or any other holiday on a pysch ward is the lame observance of your birthday in which people try to make you feel better or bring some festivity to it and i know not everybody agrees with me on this, but one thing i know is that of those of us who have had birthdays while on psych units, we are none of us lukewarm about it: we either welcome the small kindhearted attempts to make it better, or it is hellish for us.

i know where i stand.

and you do, too.

and you should know that my mom loves me and wants to come visit me for my birthday. in principle i don't have an objection to that. my mom can visit without making a federal case out of it being my birthday. but this unit is weird: it doesn't really have any sitting space where you can really be with your visitors. every other unit i've been on has had some sort of sitting area where i've felt comfortable receiving visitors, but not this one. and i can't imagine visiting with my mom out so much mixed in with this present cast of characters. and i still think i might be going home soon, so i tell her not to come.

but my mom is kind of headstrong. and i'm surprised SHE hasn't gotten a sneak secondary diagnosis, now that i think of it, but they're not paid to diagnose her. she manages to arrange a "meeting" with the social worker. so she comes down to visit.

now, the night before i have given express directions to staff to put it in my chart: there is to be no mention that it is my birthday, and even so, one or two of them still think they ought to say something about it, but i manage to head it off. it is my forty sixth birthday, and in the morning one of the patients, not knowing that it is my birthday, and not knowing what kind of books i like to read, and not knowing a lot of things about me, hands me a book and says she thinks maybe i should read this.

it is plan b: further thoughts on faith, by anne lamott, and it begins with the words "On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless", which evaporated my bad mood pretty quickly by the sheer freakishness of it.

anne lamott is a favorite of my pastor at home, and while i had never before read anything by her, i had heard her quoted from the pulpit, although i had to be a little bit into the book before i realized it.

so my mom arrives to visit and the social worker gets us set up for our "meeting" and she would be welcome to stay (i am only meeting her for the first time) but she has actual work do do and excuses herself. my mom has brought laundry detergent that doesn't make me itch, and some clean clothes, some snacks i can share, and a really beautiful not-marked-for-birthday flourless chocolate cake that later on i will have the nurses cut up so i can share it with the other patients.

i don't need to tell them what the occasion is, but a cake like that is a thing of beauty and graciousness and no matter how good or kind or well-trained or professional the staff is or how well-appointed the hospital is, it is still a bleak place and it is an awesome thing to offer each person a little slice of something that came from a very nice bakery just that morning.

little blessings.

presented without editorial comment

http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/img/325954-18201190524PM

coming out

now, during the Indeterminate Days, i kept crying "i don't even know where we are!" and they kept telling me i was in brattleboro, or if they thought to be more detailed, on (specific ward) of the brattleboro retreat, and they thought fine enough to leave it at that.

and all i could answer was "BUT WHERE ARE WE?", which makes no sense; no sense at all unless you realize that i am a map weenie, that in my car i carry a map bag, a black leather satchel containing very nice paper road maps of all of new england and a good deal of the rest of the eastern seaboard and the maritime provinces besides AND i also collect maps of state parks and trail systems AND i have on my laptop both road maps and topo maps for all of north america and that i subscribe to the google earth blog and this blog and it's hard for me to get in the car and go anywhere without having my GPS navigation going and a lot of my life is kind of defined not so much by the finding of geocaches, but the looking for them, so a lot of me is about geography and when they brought me over in the truck i lost track of where we were after we crossed over in front of the 7-11 coming over route 9 because even though i couldn't see anything in the truck i still could feel where we were coming over hogback and then all of a sudden i had no idea where we were and all through the Indeterminate Time i would pick my head up and cry "i don't even know where we are!"

and nobody could understand it as a cry of great distress and i had no way of putting enough clear thoughts together to explain it to anyone.

and near the end of the Indeterminate Time i knew i needed sunlight. there was no in my room; a fault of the position of the building and (i learned later) a weather pattern that a few days in a  row clouded in the only time of day when sun WOULD shine in my window and partly the fault of the escape proof screening and i noticed there was a little bit of sunshine i could see from the stall in the women's bathroom if i crept up on the safety bar and hung by my fingers and toes and looked out but i didn't think i wanted to be seen looking out the window THAT way no matter how pretty it was, so i went looking for another patch of sunlight because i felt that there had to be some somewhere and whether there was any thruth to it, i thought of the days i spent at dartmouth-hitchcock, an altogether more genteel mental hospital, when i used to sit on the sofa in that patch of sunlight and feel almost not crazy, i thought somehow that if i could find a patch of sunlight to be in for a few minutes that maybe i could just be in it and maybe something in me could loosen up and i might be able to move on to something better.

it's worth a try, you know?

i found exactly one patch of sunlight to stand in. right on the corner of the unit, near the nurses' station. not close enough to be in the way, but close enough to be annoying, i think. i didn't care. it was sunlight. and behind them, behind their desks, was a window, a window without escape-proof screening, so i could see out of it, so i just stared out of it, watching people and cars go by in the sunlight.

completely captivating, and so beautiful i think i cried a little. if anyone had asked me what i was doing, i would have told them, but nobody asked. sunlight. my first view of the outside.

and that may have been a friday afternoon, because i think as i was standing there, things started happening fast. a lot of people came up separately to ask me a lot of questions about whether or not i would be safe to leave the unit, whether or not i would be safe with other patients, whether i was a flight risk, whether i could be trusted with art supplies. these questions were both the generic questions, and they were also asked as if to settle an argument, and in fact i knew that the team was not in total agreement as to whether i should be moved up in privilege, and the weekend was coming.

if you are not moved up on friday, you don't move until monday. and all of a sudden i'm standing there and someone's asking me if i want to go get my coat to go an outside group. what? what outside group? am i allowed to go to an outside group? ten minutes ago i was on checks.

checks? (there's a lot of list checking here. usually you don't go from checks to going outside.) shrug. you're on my list.  turns to charge nurse. she on green? checks big board. board says i'm on checks. there's a lot of conferencing. this all happens really fast, though. nope, green. want to go?

GO? i'm going somewhere? anywhere? you bet.

i have my coat on so fast and am waiting by the door so fast their heads spin.

we are going, it turns out, to lawton hall, which is where much of the recreational therapy is housed. imagine my shock. the building itself is beautiful and dates back to the time when the retreat was attempting to attract more upscale patients with kind of minor nervous disorders to come for therapeutic vacations before they turned into hardcore burnout cases (it's worth reading up on the history of the place) and even though this building has gone through a few changes it still has this old-style charm that makes me think of adirondack summer camp with its pressed tin ceiling and  big windows and there are three pool tables and a foosball table and table hockey and ping pong and a big table next to the picture window with a jigsaw puzzle on it and it's not by any means a wonderland and you wouldn't mistake it for an upscale hotel but everything's in working order and the important thing is that we've come to spend a happy hour NOT ON A LOCKED WARD.

and then we get back and now that i have walking privileges, not only am i getting to go to groups, but i am going to the caf! the caf! that great wonderland of plenty! for a hospital, the food is pretty good here, but in the caf there are choices. the food is actually better in the inpatient caf (omniscient narrator from the future) than it is in the general caf because there are MORE options and if you want to make up a little plate of a lot of tastes of everything AND have the fruit plate too, you get to do that and it's prix fixe, as opposed to being charged per item. they take the trouble to make little cups of hummus and cottage cheese and stuff available all the time, too, so you can be very flexible in there and you can nearly always find something to like. plus if carol is working, she makes it a point to know what's good today.

so anyway, all of a sudden, i'm walking around outside in the fresh air (albeit at appointed times and heavily supervised) and when i ask "where ARE we?" the answer i get is "that's the interstate, and that's the putney road, and that's route 30" and i can go "ohhhhh. 'coz i'm a map geek. an' ever since i been here i have not been able to figure out where i am on the MAP an' that's been driving me CRAZY."

keeping time

in real time (whatever that is), while i'm telling the story of my journey through the worst part of getting better, because really, the part where you're so busted up that you land in the hospital at your bottom is the part where you have no where to get but better;

in real time i'm out here in the "real" world sometimes. today is the second of january and last night i went dancing with the crashcos at the capital city grange. there's no better way,really, than bringing in the new year than going to the dance, the regular dance series, only it's new year's day or the night of and everybody's kind of pumped up and it's a bigger party than usual only not too much bigger but the energy is higher and it just feels good to dance.



it is, as crashco says, "organized chaos", but it is joyful and it is to me a triumph because without getting too far into it, i thought that after the Very Bad Thing i was never again going to be able to go back to the dance; in the grocery store i was a cripple, wincing and cringing every time some guy got too close to me, getting ready to shout at no one in particular and i could not imagine going through these figures again, not knowing who might tough or bump me and not knowing who might receive me or swing me or who i might encounter coming up or down the sets and it turns out it was not just fine; it was FABULOUS.



so there's absolutely nothing to do but ride the waves of the figures going up and down the hall and give myself up to the beautiful geometry of the dance and love the people, all of them, each a miracle of creation. later on in the long epic story of hospitals and therapy i'll tell you about my awesomeness manifesto and i'll look back or forward on this moment: people are awesome. have you looked around you? at how stunningly beautiful they are?

yeah.

go out dancing.  see you out there.

one pair of pants

during most of the indeterminate time i had one pair of pants i was allowed to wear, unless you count the bottoms from the team issue uniform, which i don't. maybe you don't mind walking around all day in the team crazy sweatpants, but i prefer street clothes at home, and i prefer street clothes on the locked ward of the mental hospital. even the staff of the mental hospital prefers it if you wear street clothes if possible. they take it as a sign that you're trying.

ok. so it's been firmly established that i have some chemical sensitivities. we don't need to go into the whole story of all my childhood rashes or that i use deodorants with as few scents and dyes as possible and that my laundry detergents of choice are scent-and-dye-free, an that in general i don't go overboard with additives.

i'm not a zealot and i don't need a completely natural white-fiber naturals-only clean environment, thank goodness, but i have some sensitivities and when i reach my limits there's a rash and i have to back off, hatwipe, or it's going to be ugly.

you can do laundry on the unit, but it's a pain in the ass to wear your one pair of pants while you're washing them, and the only soap you can use is the unit approved combination detergent/dryer sheet and i never use a dryer sheet because they're not necessary and i've never met one that doesn't make me break out, and it's kind of an all day project to get your one pair of pants off and wear the crazy suit down to the laundry room and get it unlocked for you to check and see if some other patient isn't using one of the machines and then ask for the sheet and put your stuff in and i have to wash my stuff with the soap and then wash it again after taking the sheet out to wash the soap out (i hope) and each time i have to leave the locked room and go to groups and get the room unlocked for me and it takes for-honkin-ever and if i wear the same pair of pants two days in a row i break out because i'm sensitive to my own SWEAT.

now, at this point i have privileges to go to the caf, (the cafeteria), which means i can see my car which is parked about fifty feet away from the building. i have a bag of dirty laundry in my car. there are acceptable unit-approvable pants in my car. several pairs of them. and i want them. i don't care how i get them. i don't care if someone goes to get them for me, or if i go get them in shackles, or if they just let me get them supervised. surely a doctor can write an order for me to get my pants out of my car? which is right over there? surely this is a reasonable request? (remember this later. apparently this is a special request made by special people who need special treatment.)

meanwhile, i have a rash on my legs that breaks open and bleeds. it could be the meds. it could be the hospital laundry detergent. it could be the soap/shampoo. when i am having an allergic reaction, the first line of breakdown is usually a skin rash. my best guess, i tell them, is probably the detergent. may i please have more pants? that would help a lot.

they keep putting me off.

now, the funny thing is that in hospitals they keep trying to discourage any drug seeking behaviors. the alternate solution to the rash is lots and lots of benadryl, which i am willing to take. i am not willing to take any disapproving looks over my requests for benadryl to ease my discomfort over the rash, since clean pants would really help clear that up, as would different detergent.

i'm also working on different detergent, but i'm a long way from having visitors to bring it to me, so i'm trying to work with what's available.

finally an order is written to take me to my car. since i have several hours advance warning, i ask a few subtle questions and find out that ther are no hospital rules against the throwing of frisbees and when we go to the car to get the laundry, we also retrieve my golf discs which i immediately turn over to contraband, a thing which i will tell you about later.

anyway, now i have four pair of pants to work with, and can work out laundry without pressure, taking as many hours as i need to to do multiple washes and rinses and the rash does not go away (omniscient narrator from the future) until a change of detergent is brought later and in fact it is still not fully healed at the time of this writing (1 january, nearly a month later), but at least it stops getting worse, which is progress of a sort.

sometimes that's all you can hope for.

today omniscient narrator from the future is going to make some ice cream and later on go dancing with the crashcos. tomorrow i'll go to church, the first communion service of the new year which makes it important to me. tomorrow afternoon i'll make my way down to ripley and start my new year down there and keep getting better.

you get better too, from whatever pains you, and you keep enjoying your blessings, and may they be many.

happy new year.

old year, new year

in a couple of hours the old year will close and without getting too maudlin about it i'm just going to say that i hope the new one will be a far sight better. it's been rough sledding and hard times and some insomniac nights and without telling you where this comes from and with only a little editing i'm going to take a break from telling you the epic inpatient tale and give you a part benediction, part poem, part dream and i'm not going to explain it any but just let it float over you like it was meant for you as a blessing for the coming year.

--

good morning my good friend
may blessings and more blessings fall on you and yours
i have stopped having the dreams and visions
which i think means that i have gotten the message right
which i think means that now it's up to you
to follow the instructions.
remember that in all of the dreams and all of the visions
Jesus had all of his friends,
his mother, the saints, the apostles
your parents, your grandparents
and probably other of your relatives and neighbors and friends
such as he might be able to call on
and there were feasts that Jesus would have been familiar with
and backyard picnics that your people would have been comfortable with
and Jesus did not seem to mind jello cold dishes
and it did not seem weird at all that you were sitting in a lawnchair when he washed your feet
but the thing is that there were a LOT of them, these visions, these dreams
and they came to me at night and during the day
and you were tiny baby and young girl and grown woman and dowager
and you kept asking who you were
and none of us would tell you
and you kept trying to work it out
kept trying to serve
kept trying to fuss
or trying to find out what you should or should not do or say
and the more you struggled the more Jesus and all the assembled company
made you sit and made you be taken care of
and Jesus himself washed your feet  telling you why paul hadn't been invited to the party
telling you just to rest and let yourself be loved.
just listen to the conversations around you and be lulled by the sounds of our voices.
eat what is delicious and sweet.
be wrapped up in blankets, be wrapped in Jesus' cloak.
just let yourself be carried in our arms; let Mary rock you,
let you own mother rock you; you have the time here.
look at the daylight, the starlight, the firelight, the candlelight; fall asleep by its glow.
look at clouds and listen to crickets and watch snowflakes fall and flames jump up
and know you are held tight
let yourself be held tight
i will hold you, you mother will hold you, your Jesus will hold you, his mother will hold you
we will love you, all of us will, no matter what. just let go and let us do it.
let us love you wholly, fiercely, and with full knowledge of all your parts
wrap yourself up against the cold and know that inside, where it's warm
you are wholly, fully loved.
you are passed from hand to hand like a new baby
admired and loved
fresh and and laughing
and that in my visions, at least,
your feet are clean.

so maybe you don't know exactly who you are or what to do or say
but you know the answer to the important question:
you are loved, wholly and fiercely, and Jesus threw a party
to tell you so.

med trial

one of the reasons i need to be in a hospital is for a med trial. i mean, obviously my mood swings have degenerated to the point that i need to be in a hospital for some decompressing which happens periodically every half dozen years or so even under good management (a lesson we have leaned kind of painfully over many years) but we can't try out meds on me unless i'm an inpatient.

it's just too dangerous.

the reason i'm in the fix i'm in is that there are some very good and effective meds that i just can't take anymore because after a couple of years of taking them, my body rejects them. this actually is not uncommon. psychiatric meds (and other meds used to manage chronic conditions) often run their course and outlive their usefulness. then you stop taking them and look for something else.

my case is slightly unusual in that the meds don't just stop working for me; my body rejects them in grand style. we do not part on friendly terms. it involves anaphylaxis, or stevens-johnson syndrome, or some other such thing. sometimes just starting a new med is a white knuckle ride, and no doctor in her right mind puts me on a new med on an outpatient basis.

so it turns out that n the time since i was last inside, three new drugs were developed that were available for me to try. one was a close relative of a drug to which i was already allergic, so that was already off the list. one was a promising new anti-psychotic with mood stabilizing properties and low incidence of side effects, so we started that one.

now, we purposely do not educate me on the possible but rare side effects of new drugs precisely because of both my history and my suggestibility so that IF those side effects show up, i won't have been looking for them.

so somewhere in the Indeterminate Time we start the new med. i don't feel very different. it must be at least saturday the fourth because it's not my first day in the caf and i'm used to eating there but it's still special feeling to me and i'm having trouble really enjoying the food and trouble swallowing it really, as if it gets down my throat just fine but then gets hung up just above my stomach as if those muscles just don't go right and i'm kind of uncomfortable and i'm not breathing well but my lungs are clear so it's not at all like asthma, ust like my muscles there won't really work, like that strider reaction felt sort of all those years ago before it realy got going only my tongue isn't swelling and my jaw isn't pulling and i'm trying to read and i can't make my eyes scan the page and i'm trying to do a crossword but i can't make my eyes focus on the page and they keep getting across mixed up with down even though my mind understands it and maybe this is too much for your dainty eyes but when i first came in i was constipated four days which isn't unusual when i get to one of these places but my bowels had just started moving again and now they had just come to a halt. it was like muscles in my body were just going on scattered strikes and there was nothing i could do about it.

and when i came in my blood pressure was pretty much an even 120 over 80, give or take a few points. that's the way i am. it was now 160 over 90, give or take.

afternoon and i was still uncomfortable, but the group that was allowed to go to the pool room went to play pool (more about this elsewhere). it was a happy, golden psychiatric hour (forty minutes). and i was still uncomfortable, but the wost of it was over. by four o' clock i was nearly better.

at five thirty i took another dose of the med.  all night i lay awake, feeling like i couldn't breathe. there was no comfortable position in which to sit or lie. i tried to drink water, but it didn't make my throat calm down. somewhere in the night i felt better and fell asleep.

in the morning i took the med again. we went to by lunchtime i was already having trouble controlling the muscles of my face. i was hungry, but eating was a nightmare. i had a hard time swallowing; it was hard to choke the food down. i felt heavy; food was not moving through my bowels. my chest was constricted even though my lungs were clear. did you ever have anything too tight around your neck? put your hands around your throat and grip hard and then try to eat. it was like that.

i kept tryign to explain it to the nurses like the beginning of that allergic reaction i'd had when i had the strider reaction, because the beginning of that had felt just like this, only that had progressed to a swollen tongue and this wasn't doing that. i tried changing position. i tried doing yoga. i tried deep breathing. i tried just distracting myself. it was hard. i couldn't keep control of my muscle movements enough to do anything comfortably or reliably. there was only sitting or pacing sort of agitated.

oh. and my blood pressure over those days was a consistent 160 over 90.

no sleeping. no reading. no doing anything. i talked to david the sunshine med nurse (more about him later, maybe) and it turns out that failure to control those muscles and spasms of those very muscles are rare but well-known side effects of this drug. there is another drug that they might be able to give me that might counter that side effect but that's only a "might" and you have to understand that it's sunday afternoon in a large hospital and that order would have to come from the DOC or Doctor On Call and not my regular doctor and that might take a while AND that given my history of allergies in the first place it is a crapshoot whether or not i will have a reaction to that second drug that may or may not work at all to counter the effects of a drug to which i am already having a very unpleasant reaction and my body is already sensitized and it's SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT FOUR O'CLOCK and i'd better decide soon because they're going to want to feed me my next dose of hell in a paper cup at five thirty.

now, torturers know that torture is not effective because of the pain it brings. torture is effective because of the promise that the pain is coming back. my pain has come on and crested and waned and come on and crested and waned and i have just figured out what has in fact caused it and i'm just out from the worst of it and they're about to give me the next dose and i'm willing to take more of this stuff if i have to but IT'S SUNDAY AFTERNOON and i think that really what i'd like to do before i ride that hideous wave again is talk to my doctor about it and if she still thinks it's a good idea i'll do it again but if it's all the same to you guys i'll just take a little break until i've talked to her, ok?

and of course if they get the DOC to order up that other med to give to me i'm all set but if i just wait until tomorrow to talk with my regular doc instead of a night in hell they have to write REFUSED in the book and i'm de facto noncompliant in the book because them's the rules, a thing i only mention now because it'll come up later in the story about the sneak attack secondary diagnosis.

so a few hours later i have control of breathing and swallowing and can focus my eyes and am having bowel movements and for most of the rest of the duration of the trip my blood pressure returns to 120 over 80 (except for one entertaining interval i will  tell you about later) and on monday my doctor comes in to talk to me and she wryly looks over the charts from the weekend and says "i guess we add that one to the list of meds you can't take" and she starts to figure out what to do next, which is kind of what i expected she would do, since she's a competent professional, but it was a hell of a weekend.

foggy timetable

there are a lot of things that happened between my admission and when i started taking notes that i can only place generally, say, that i know happened before i got to go to the caf, so before december 3,  but before my mom came to see me on the seventh so i can only place it approximately, or  know it had to be a saturday and therefore on the 4th, but otherwise no idea of date except i had more than one pair of pants to wear, so it had to be later than sooner.

you count days like that: before the rash started. after vinny bounced. before i got my visit. before i got to go outside. the day i nearly shit myself because someone taped an out of order sign on the restroom. yeah. that was funny. remember that one for later, because omniscient narrator from the future is gonna have a whopper for you on that one. or not.

anyway, i was kind of trying to figure out (omniscient narrator from the future) how i was going to tell you about a few things that fell in the Indeterminate Time, since unlike the Admitting Days, the sequence isn't so clear. stuff happened, but the events aren't so discrete. or rather they have to be, but my perception of them wasn't. and so the storytelling isn't very linear. and then even when my thinking clears up a little, your appreciation for people and events will perhaps be improved if i do not speak strictly chronologically, so i'm thinking about that, and maybe about how i'm going to tie together a few things for the omniscient narrator from the future who will be making some pointy little commentaries later on.

for now, it's movie night back at ripley, and the boys have picked out some promising movies that contain some explosions but not too much gratuitous violence  for plot movement.

at some point

somewhere around the third of december things start to move. i have for the most part stopped crying uniformly. i am still crying, but not uniformly. i have figured out the puzzle of the assignment sheets and have managed to get my little self to all the groups to which i am assigned. i am using my newly-granted tool, the black ballpoint pen, to ease my anxiety about being in public spaces and i am sitting in public spaces doing crossword puzzles. i use crossword puzzles defensively, to stake out acceptable territory and get comfortable seating prior to groups.

i learn to ask before i introduce myself each time nt to have everyone shout out "hi, (my real name)!" in mechanical AA meeting style that just makes my blood boil. it's so hollow that it isn't even a greeting and it's like you're not even there to the extent that when you ask them not to do it they can't help themselves, which only goes to show you how much they're really paying attention, which is why i hate it in the first place.
uh, anyway.

yeah. so. this guy comes in. vinny. and we meet him for the firs time in afternoon community meeting. now, community meeting goes like this: we all sit in a big circle and everybody says their first name and then they say a goal for the day or if it's the evening meeting they might reflect on the morning goal if they remember it or set a new goal for the evening if they're not an advanced player and they name a coping skill they might use and then they say a thing they're grateful for and then maybe  if the person making the agenda had a sense of humor or mercy there might be an oddball item on it like name your favorite piece of furniture and in case you can't remember all the items on the list, they're all written out for you on the whiteboard on the wall:

first name
goal
coping skill
thing you're grateful for
favorite piece of furniture

i'm kind of fuzzy on sequence here,  but i know "piece of furniture" was on the board on december 4.  i know this because it wa a saturday night and my favorite piece of furniture at the moment was "communion table".

i do not know what day vinny came in, but i know what day vinny left. the day vinny came in we got our first look at hi at evening meeting and what he had to say was that he was very happy to be here because he'd been on the waitng list to get in for three weeks and he was really serious about his rehab and that in the time he was waiting to get in he'd had to do all kinds of crazy drinking and drugging and he was tired.

i was thinking that perhaps this was not the soundest reasoning in the world, but once you get to rehab, maybe you get clearer thinking and at least he'd made the trip.

later that evening vinny regaled us with (he thought) very funny stories of how he and his wife had come to admissions together and lied about being married hoping to get put on the same unit. of course they fooled no one.

couples are split up in rehab, for good reason. go look it up if you want to. i don't feel like explaining it. anyway, one thing that they really like from people going into rehab is honesty. no matter what you've done, they consider honesty a really good sign that you're ready to turn yourself  around. so lying at admissions and then laughing about it later wasn't a really good start, you know?

and then there's this thing: you're not supposed to communicate with the other units. when you go to the caf, you're not supposed to talk to the other inmates. it's sort of like prison that way, only friendlier, and it's for therapeutic purposes. but see, according to rules, the staff can't monitor the patient phones. so patients can call the patient phones on other floors so while you're not really supposed to be talking to the other inmates on other floors, you can do it. and no mater what everyone pretends, there's no such thing as a private conversation up there (acoustics being what they are) and it's no secret that vinny and his wife are talking to each other every twenty minutes.

so when mrs. vinny bounced from downstairs, ("bounced" is the term for "left rehab without finishing the program"), vinny swore up and down that she got kicked out for acting out and demanded to be released. of course we all knew that you don't get kicked out for acting out; they simply board you and put you in the quiet area or in a pinch medicate you, but they don't kick you out, but we all knew vinny to be a liar already and we all knew he wasn't really on board with rehab to start with so when he demanded to be released even though it caused a fuss and tied up resources for a number of hours and there was all the usual nonsense of posturing and screener calling and scene making and loud yelling in the end we weren't sorry to see him go.

it was december 6.

split story

it was three days, more or less, that i laid on my bed, holding the blue sweater and howling. if a tray was brought to me i ate. if i noticed that a meal had come up i politely went to get my try myself.  there was no clock in my room, so i had no idea of the passage of time. if meds were to be administered, i took them cooperatively if a med nurse appeared at my door.

i remember going to the center of the unit to look at the white board; it is well known to nearly every veteran of psychiatric units tat the schedule of groups is posted on the white board in a common area, and that the key to the raising of privilege is in group attendance even if one does not wish to socialize in common areas.

this white board was baffling to me. it listed the time of breakfast, but the group schedule read something like this:

9:00
9:30 community meeting
10:20 groups
11:45 lunch in caf -or-
12:00 lunch on unit
1:00 groups resume

so while i'm amenable to going to groups, i can't figure this stuff out and just going to look at the board has used up all of my available energy and i just go back to my room to cry. a lovely mental health worker named yvonne comes to my room at some point and invites me to a group she's doing and i happily (for the circumstances) go. then, since there's another group happening right after that, i go to that. then it's back to my room because i can't figure out what else is going on. i am able to communicate that  i would like to go to groups i am invited to, but i'm  largely uninvited. i keep asking for a black pen, but i keep being told i'm not allowed to have one.

one of the reasons i don't want to hang out in the common areas is that it's a very dense area and, well, i'm still crying. i don't suffer from the common delusion that i'm too good for the psych unit, or that i don't fit in (actually, i don't fit in, but not because i'm not crazy enough or too good for it, but we'll talk about that later) but i'm socially awkward on a good day and i'm also very sensitive to other people's emotional stuff; i pick up what other people are feeling and when i feel really crappy and i'm having my own mood swings what i really don't need is other people's mood problems coming on in here and messing me up.

but the staff is all up in my face for isolation and not going to groups and it's like four days before anyone bothers to tell me that the schedule that tells you what groups you're supposed to go to is posted each day ON PAPER you go get at the nurse's station each day at 9:20 and it gives you your assignments and times and if anyone had mentioned that to me it would have been a big help and later on i found out that yvonne had written on my chart that i was willing to go to any group i was invited to but they were preferring to let me take initiative but man, i was too disoriented and crying plus my strategy for dealing with unfamiliar mental hospitals is usually to take a black pen and my book of crossword puzzles and just sit in whatever room it looks like they're going to have group in and use that as my anxiety reduction strategy and entry to the room but they wouldn't let me have a pen and in my state i could only go so far and finally after four days when twitching i managed to get to one of those goddamn groups and declared that my goal for the day was going to be to get a black ball point pen and i KNOW my mom had been talking to the doctors about why i couldn't have one after four days and some bastard handed me one after four days of me asking as if it was no big deal and he says "we let people have pens here" and i had the sense not to make a fuss over why i hadn't been given one before and all of a sudden i have have the tools i need to get to work now.

meet me halfway, you know?

anyway, in real time it's a long time farther down the road and i am back from christmas break and it's almost dinnertime. a guy got bounced from the house last night for coming home with booze, and it was a hell of a day in therapy. i feel kind of beat up and i've been working hard. it's time for some dinner and then maybe some stupid tv and then in the morning my last full day in the program before i step down to half days because that's what my insurance pays for.

soon i guess, i'll be coming home.

i wuz gonna...

...get back to telling the gargantuan story but it's kind of enough for me that my furlough's up this afternoon and i have to try to beat the storm back there today and i want to tell you that my christmas gifts included items like the "don't die out there" playing card deck and the "worst case survival" daily calendar, so while i DO have an interest in outdoor survival in good years, i think there's kind of a little undercurrent going in my family's hopes for me.

*sigh*.

i'll try real hard not to disappoint them.

on other fronts, it was a lovely time and there was a lovely meal and i got to go to not one but two lovely church services with my own congregation whom i have missed mightily and i got to hear loud and clear from them in person how mightily i have been missed and if you're going to be away the best way to do it is to be missed and yet there's still this mood disorder: yesterday i was driving along to my mom's house and i was somewhere i wanted to be with a sackful of gifts i was happy about giving and basically i was really genuinely happy about everything, but yet i was still crying, which is a little unsettling.

it's less confusing when your affect matches your life circumstances; say, for instance, when there are things you're really sad about and you're crying. when that happens it's kind of a relief for me because things match up nicely, which people with mood disorders don't  have to think about so much.

so that's my story.

i gotta go finish packing.

let's get some things clear.

up until this point i'm been telling things pretty straightforward and chronological, but it's only involved generic admissions workers and police officers and ER nurses and such and things were pretty straightforward. NOW the story is going to get more complex and involve people that are real and interesting (not that the police officer isn't a real interesting person, but for the purposes of my story, he's one-dimensional) and the timelines are going to get blurred if i try to illustrate a concept or stick to one idea that spans a couple of days since i am writing a blog entry and not a novel.

in a novel one may spin out ideas concurrently; in a blog entry one may not. so strict chronology may go out the window.

also since i have already identified the august institution at which i am still a patient, it will be of little use for me to disguise its identity, or to disguise the identity of certain of the staff working with me, or parts of the building or grounds, so i'm just going to say that i'm not going to say anything stupid and that if i have any unkind opinions i will either disguise those identities or i will keep those opinions to myself.

when speaking of patients, i am either changing their names and identifying characteristics or i am referring to them by the nicknames we gave them on the ward (with a little removal of identifiers). "tornado girl" is a good example; we never learned her real name. why should i ever call her anything else? and there was a guy named bob, too. three of them. we gave them nicknames to sort them out. i intend to refer to them by their names, since we only had three and we had to nickname them to keep them distinct. you probably know guys named bob, too. but no, mostly every other patient gets a brand-spanking-new name, which is sometimes funny, because once i was telling stories about a time on a mental ward using cleaned up names and a woman i met on a ward years AFTER i wrote about that story was all proud because she thought i'd told the story about her, using her real name, and no amount of argument, including the copyright date on the publication compared to the date of admission when we had met could convince her she hadn't been part of the story.

oh, well.

talk to you tomorrow.

still on break

i'm still taking a break from the big, big story, but for your listening enjoyment (i hope), i'm re- opening the vault so you can hear the flask christmas album again or even download it. yay! as usual, it's only here for a limited time and then it goes away again until next christmas, so if you don't download your own copy or you weren't lucky enough to get a hard copy, you have to wait until next year to listen again.

yes, those are my own arrangements, and yes, that is my original artwork, and while you're in the waiting room, why not take a trip over to the zazzle store and pick up a bazillion mugs or something and make me rich? or earn me enough money to buy a box of cookies?

that's my hard sell marketing. do you like it? order at your leisure. supplies aren't the least bit limited and while it's a pretty nice design that will look handsome on a table unless you're looking to buy a mug or a greeting card or something like that, you probably already have enough crap in your house.

but if you ARE looking for a nice mug or greeting card with a design like mine it's not too bad of a deal and i make a few pennies off of it which is nice for me.

awesome marketing. the flask christmas tracks are free for you to listen to, free for you to download, and later on i'll get back to telling the gargantuan story.

merry christmas.

short break

i'm taking a short break from my painstaking chronological narrative of my recent adventures to tell you that i am for the moment at home. this is temporary; i left brattleboro this afternoon at four and i am expected back sunday afternoon.


i am currently enrolled in what is called a partial hospitalization program, which means that while i am in intensive therapy by day and dormed by night, i am under my own recognizance between the hours of three to ten each afternoon and evening, responsible for feeding myself, and permitted to sign myself out on weekends. the program is closed tfor a long weekend on account of christmas, so i am signed out until sunday afternoon.

happily i have a home to go to and a family to visit and a church community to be in and friends to be with. my bills are paid and my house is clean. tomorrow i will take my car to my mechanic and do laundry and go to church.

i will brew ginger ale and maybe i will do some light grocery shopping and maybe if i have time i'll play golf before i  go to church. whatever i do, it will be lovely.

and at some point i will return you to the narrative in its chronological offset order. i took notes so i could tell you about it. isn't that swell?

so far

it may help you if i tell you that so far i've only been telling the story as far as it goes from monday evening, 29 november to sometime on the aftenoon on tuesday afternoon on 30 november. in all that while i have not stopped crying. if we fast forward two days later, i am still crying very loudly. someone on staff offers me a quieter area in which to be.

in some hospitals you have to be very careful of this "offer" because it's really a kind of code for "five point restraint" or "locked room" and "offer" really means "threat" but it turns out that at this hospital (i learn much later) "offer" really means "offer" and "quieter area" means a quieter area with three rooms (one of which can be locked) but the central portion has a couch and there's a phone and in general if it isn't being used by someone in great need it wouldn't be a bad spot to go read a book and get away from the noisier areas or the rest of the unit.

there isn't a dining area where meals are brought and i'm not up to eating in the weird multi-use place where real estate is scarce, so i take my meals in my room if someone brings my tray. otherwise, i don't eat. mostly they bring my tray.

i have to go ask for towels to shower at night, and that's a trauma to figure out how to do it and bear in mind i'm still crying, but i do it. and i have to figure out how to ask to get someone to let me into the laundry room to put my towels into the hamper when i'm done, too, which seems insurmountable.

i change for bed.

i am still crying.

the mattress. is very thin. i am too heavy for it. it's like lying on a hard surface. i'm still crying. we're allowed blankets, but no sheets. evey fifteen minutes the night nurse comes in and checks on us. i don't sleep.

i just cry. loudly.

i'm exhausted just thinking about it.

catalog

once we get to my room we begin the tedious and horrific process of going through every last thing i have with me. no matter how pleasant and professional and kind these people are being (and this particular staff is very professional and polite and kind) it is still a very difficult thing and there is no way for it not to feel dehumanizing and humiliating.

i was not packed for a stay in the hospital, so i had with me a lot of things that i knew they were going to take away: camera, razor, assorted stuff not really appropriate for hospital use. of course i expected to have them check all my bags and books and pockets for hidden drugs and weapons and for them to take away my meds from home and catalog them and give me hospital issue later.

what i did not expect was for them to take my pens and pencils, nor to take any clothing deemed too stretchy. these tights? no. they have a string.

ok, cut out the string,

those? i can have those.

nope, too stretchy.

what? i do not point out that they're  no stretchier than the ones i'm being allowed to keep, the ones that have just had the string cut out. i know better. i cut my losses. one pair of pajamas is better than none.

ok. i have one pair of pants to wear when i get my street clothes back.

they take my bookbag. no straps. no pen, no pencil. i can have a golf pencil if i want it.

fuck you, i think.

what i say is thank you.

all right.

next project. the thirteen hour project. if you have been following this blog or if you have spent any time with me at all, you know that i take a picture every thirteen hours. it's an art project. some days it's what keeps me going. one day i was crying so hard i couldn't get up from the floor and still i managed to take a picture. it's hard to tel from the picture where i am but if you look real hard you can tell i'm under my desk.

so i try to negotiate with the nursing staff maybe a supervised picture of a blank wall at the approaching designated time. it would mean a lot to me and it would help maintain continuity of my life which supposedly is one of their stated goals, you know?

but know, they can't work that out, and omniscient narrator from the future knows that my failed negotiations with them over this only earns for me an added diagnosis of personality disorder with histrionic and narcissistic strains which kind of makes me feel sad and ashamed but doesn't make a lot of real sense if you know me.

anyway, i'm so upset to lose my photo project that i think for a while that i'll roll the dice, which is kind of mental patient slang for demanding to be discharged when you're only technically voluntary and then they have to call in  the screeners to evaluate your case and if you pass, you go, but if you don't pass, you get held as an involuntary for at least eight days and then you can try again.

i make some phone calls and end up not rolling the dice. omniscient narrator from the future has some ideas about how to salvage the photo project since for the lost days i didn't leave that one place and i'm still living there and it was beyond my control and i can at least represent it photographically if not present the accurate view.

so.

more tomorrow, eh?

it's time for dinner and then back to the house.

team uniforms

so i'm at the retreat and i'm going through the admissions process, which involves an interview with a doctor and a lot of notetaking. i'm still crying loudly. i only feel it's important to mention because when i started crying it was several posts ago when i got back from the art museum and pretty much i haven't stopped crying and the volume is still turned up pretty loud and there are a lot of other bits of the narrative and while it's not exactly background noise, it's worth keeping track of.

i am most definitively still crying. everyone i meet appears to be considering investing in facial tissues or earplugs. maybe both.

anyway, the one thing everyone is in full agreement over is that i am not to be separated from the blue sweter that i am holding and patting. if i forget for a moment and set it down i only wail louder, and people are very anxious to keep it near m as we go through all the little chores of organizing things.

one of these chores is to strip me down and check my clothes for hidden weapons and drugs, and to check my body for same, along with a medical exam and an examination for scars and tattoos. them i am issued crazy team clothing: a grey sweatsuit, tops and bottoms, which, for what they are, are surprisingly soft and plush. because the shoes i am wearing have no laces, i am allowed to wear those. keep that in mind. it becomes important later.

then a nice lady comes and along with another person we pile all my stuff onto a cart and with me still howling we move thorough a byzantine series of tunnels and ramps and elevators that would have confused me if i had been paying attention and we pass through set after set of doors and onto  a very heavily locked ward and begin the exhausting process of checking my belongings in.

at this point i don't know where i am or even what day it is, so if it's all right with you, i'll save telling you about the check-in until tomorrow and o do a little grocery shooping and then go back to the house where maybe we'll watch a movie before curfew.

omniscient narrator from the future has a better idea of how this comes out, but i'm still a little tired and i need a nap.

i hope you're well.

you can't touch this

this whole time since i've left the motel room in the custody of the nice police officers i have been clutching my favorite pillow from my bed at home. the reason for this is not that i love this pillow; it is because inside the pillowcase is my pajamas and my very important sleeping hat and the real point of my unwillingness to be separaetd from the pillow: cr's sweater is in there and i am holding onto that these days as if i am linus van pelt.

they take me from the bennington hospital in the ambulance which i notice is not as nice a truck as the one they had up in the NEK and even though i'm in the back of the truck i've been up and over route nine i can keep track of where we are just by the feel of it but only up until we get as far as the west b congregational church, which is where i go blank as far as geography, which if you're going to follow this story, you should remember, because omniscient narrator from the future knows tat two weeks from now that kind of props up the punchline as well as sort of feeds a sad little running joke four days from now. stay tuned.




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anyway, they bring me into the admissions entrance of the brattleboro retreat, and in addition to starting to explain to me the admissions process, which is difficult because you need to remember that i am still howling, they very gently try to explain to me that they need to take my pillow away from me because i can't have that here. "the sweater!" i wail. "you can't take the sweater from me! there will be a lot less screaming if i can keep the sweater!"

they look at each other, that look that hospital people and emergency responders and hospital people and even school teachers give each other when they're communicating volumes of information when they have to make an important and critical decision in a big fat hurry.

so when i say that there will be less screaming with the sweater than without, one of the people handing me over nods both kindly and with some amusement and says "we've seen some evidence of that" and for the remainder of the afternoon they take some care to keep it near me no matter what task we are engaged in.

mr. toad's mild ride

it had to have been weird to watch, a little middle aged lady, a little twitchy but otherwise quiet and docile and howling loudly. hey bring me into the ER at the bennington hospital and make me strip down. this is the only time i've ever been in an ER that i wasn't permitted street clothes, which did not improve my mood any. i'm polite, but i am still crying very loudly. and i am a classically trained singer, so i have some LUNGS.

and wen you come in with the police, the police stay with you until you leave, apparently. or until you move to another unit. and they ask me if i can stop the screaming because i'm disturbing their emergency room.

which is of course a serene place.

i ask for a chaplain. i have been asking for a chaplain since i came in. they offer me medications. i'm not opposed to medicine, but what i really want is a chaplain.

they come in and they shoot me full of lorazepam. it really hurts going in. "hey," i tell them. that just honkin' hurts." and that's just the language i use, too. "i would'a' swallowed TABLETS!"

so i sleep a couple of hours. while i am sleeping what i do not know is that my family is frantically trying to find an open psychiatric bed anywhere in the state of vermont so i don't get shipped to albany, which is not a sparkling gem in the constellation of mental health care. there is not a bed anywhere.

there is not a bed anywhere.

there is not a bed anywhere.

after a wile i wake up screaming again.

the nurses rush in and jab another hypodermic in me. "hey!" i tell them. "that STILL hurts! i STILL would'a' taken a tablet given the choice."

and i sleep a while later not so much because it knocks me out, but because there's just not that much to do but sleep or cry and once the edge comes off i have more of a choice and i'm not wild about crying anyway.

after a long time (it probably seems like a lot longer to my family, who are on the outside working desperately than it does to me, because while i'm very sad by this time i'm mostly bored) ONE bed opens up at the brattleboro retreat, which is not just the nearest psychiatric facility; it is one of the nation's finest. it is one of the hospitals i've been trying to get into all along.

apparently when your admission involves nine officers and four squad cars you move closer to the top of the list.

so they put me in the truck and i'm on my way.

falling apart

so i'm far from home and i'm crying and i don't know what to do besides call my mom, who doesn't know what to do besides ask gently if she should call 911. i tell her that i think probably she should.

"but tell them no lights or sirens", i say. these are nice people who run this motel. i like it and i want to be able to stay here again. i tell her to tell the police that i will leave the room curtain open and that when they get there i will keep my hands where they can see them and that i will be docile and come peaceably, although chances are that i will be howling loudly. i can't help it; i'm a loud crier and once i am no longer having to exert self control for the comfort of the other hotel guests, all bets are off.

my mom stays on the phone with me while i wait for the police. i pack my bags. i tidy up my things. i cry. when they come, the curtain is open and i am in full view. the officer knocks politely on the door. i don't remember a lot of it. one officer takes the phone from me and talks to my mom and one talks to me. i cry a lot. i twitch some, but in the very-sad-don't know-what-to-do way, and not in the dangerous-pschotic-about-to-go-off way. we get ready to leave the room.

the officer says "ma'am, i don't want to alarm you, but i have eight other officers with me."
"that's ok.", i say, drooping a little. i notice that although there are no lights or sirens, there are four cruisers. the officer puts me in the back of the nearest one, which for the size of that big honkin' SUV of a thing is pretty cramped. no leg or arm room. i suppose that goes a long way toward subduing the unruly in a pinch, but not so far toward comforting the distressed.

"i am very sorry about this", i tell the driver, " but i am going to cry. and it is going to be loud. i am trying for it not to be so loud, but a lot about my life is out of control right now and i'm doing my best."

"that's ok." he says, and i think somewhere he is thinking that if loud crying is all he has to contend with, he counts himself lucky.

it seemed like a good idea at the time

so after the Very Bad Thing happened and i got myself home and blah blah blah (it's not that it's not interesting, but i'm just not talking about it, so there's no point except to say that i lack the self control to have stayed home without having done some stupid ass thing) so i thought maybe i'd just take a few days and if i couldn't be among my own church congregation at home i could at least be among friends to see the candle lit for the first sunday of advent so after some hemming and hawing i came down to bennington to the east arlington federated church  where they're always nice to me and after church had a short stack at the blue benn and returned to my room at the knotty pine. i've stayed there before.  it's not terribly expensive; it's not luxurious either, but they're nice and friendly and it's convenient and the rooms are clean and they have reliable wifi. i like it there. and i decided to go to the MassMoCA mostly because a piece in the courtyard was written up in a science blog i read and i wanted o see it but also because i'm always driving through north adams and i always mean to go but never do so i read up on the exhibits and downloaded the podcast tours for the sol lewit exhibit and everything and it was AWESOME and i was all happy and everything and then i went to get a pizza that i very much liked and -life's like this for the wildly manic-depressive- suddenly i was crying, and not the  nice controllable kind, either. only i'm three and a half hors from home and i have no friends or family to help me and i supposedly have a doctor appointment in the morning to discuss hospitalization options. my world has just crashed in and i do not know what to do and i need help and there is no one to help me.

and now i am out of time to tell you about what happened next.

the good news is that i have no shortage of material for a long, long while. the bad news is that i have no shortage of material for a long, long while.

talk to you tomorrow, kids!

inside out

this one is going to have to be quick, partly because i'm short on time, and partly because i don't have my notes.

i think i mentioned that things were going bad for me.

then things went worse.

so we were talking about a hospital admission.

but there weren't any beds anywhere. so i decided i needed to get away from home and maybe do a little light geocaching, maybe go to a museum...

then all hell broke loose.

it turns out that when the police are involved, it's easier to get a bed. go figure. i didn't write to tell you about it because they don't let you have your laptop on the locked ward.

or your phone. or shoelaces. 

i'm currently living in what can only be described as a quarter-of-the-way house.  today is day two.

i'm sorry

so things aren't going so well for me these days. it takes me three days to write a blog post, but then again i keep writing blog posts with pictures and long narratives and timelines and stuff.

i spend a lot of my hours just staring out the window, and some days the crazy comes and sits on me like an unfed cat an hour past dinnertime. and for a lot of complicated reasons it's best if i don't try to go to church tomorrow. and for some reasons that are complicated and related to the crazy, it only gets worse if i try not to do a thing and the only thing for it is to be away so i CAN'T go to church at home even if i stop trying NOT to do it, but it's going to be the first sunday of advent and that means something to me.

and it's going to hurt me not to be in my own choir, not to be in my own congregation, not to be with my own church family to see them light those candles, so the best i can do is to be among friends in another choir where they know me and where they're kind to me and it's three hours from home so i can't get into any trouble.

but i've had a hell of a day, you know?

so when i get to the mcdonald's i can be pretty sure i LOOK like i'm not having a good day.

it's kind of busy. not super busy, but the service is going kind of slow. i can sort of see why. there's a guy in front of me who's very talkative but doesn't seem to have quite enough  sandwiches for a picnic and hotshot drivethru guy looks like he think he could run the place by himself and counter guy looks kind of like he's been having a bad day all day and there's an irritated-looking couple, and some guys who went through he drive through and ordered sweet tea but got unsweet tea and he brings it back in and the manager doesn't just give him more of the sweet tea; the first thing she does is check the tea coming from the dispenser and then she checks what's coming out of the unsweet dispenser and she discovers with a minimum of steps that none of the dispensers anywhere in the store have sweetened tea in them and she rectifies the problem kinda speedy. everbody is polite about it.

and the woman is apologizing to everybody, and i get the impression they apologize a lot around there. i get this idea because of the suggestion/comment box on the front counter. in the corners of the computer printed sign are handwritten notes asking people to PLEASE be appropriately polite in their comments; that the staff is trying really hard to improve their service, and they would very much appreciate appropriate language in the notes left for them.

so by the time the manager gives me my burger, she has apologized to everyone else there and when it's my turn she apologizes to me for...

...that's where she breaks off and says she doesn't know what i need an apology for, but she hopes i have a nice night. i kind of laugh a litle.

and you know? it wasn't her that owed me the apology, but the apology owed me isn't forthcoming and it was just nice to hear.

seventeen men, give or take

i'm still processing the pictures and information from my trip to virginia last month. you know, because i can't just show you some pictures and call it done. oh, no. i have to organize it.

before i left home i picked a handful of small stones to take along with me. they were nothing very fancy; small and typical of vermont hillside geology. the thing is that i planned to visit the fredericksburg national cemetery and i had printed up a list of the vermont men who are known to be buried there.

i say "known to be buried there", because of the over 15,000 dead in the cemetery, only 2,473 have been identified. of the identified dead, there are 94 men that i know of who came from vermont. i don't even want to think about how many of the unidentified dead came from here. at wilderness alone 1,234 vermont men died, most of them in the same afternoon in the same small patch of woods. later on i'll tell you more about that, but not now.

so it just wouldn't be possible to go and pay my respects to all of them, but i decided to find as many of them as i had stones for. it's probably been a while since anyone called any of them by name, and for each one i found i looked up his full name and his unit, his hometown, and the place where he died.

i knelt down to place one of the stones on each of the graves, and had a few words with each of the men:

i know where you came from; i've been to your hometown. i know that when you left there you thought maybe you'd get to go back or at least they might send your body home and i know it's a poor substitute for home, but i've brought just a little piece of vermont to leave with you here.

it was hard to find them, all mixed in as they were with men who came from pennsylvania or new york or michigan, some of them buried here after dying on the sunken road, some after dying here in the hospital, some after lying out in the open out in the fields where they fell and brought here later.

so there wasn't much system to which men got my stones; i did not play favorites other than to bring my vermont stones to vermont men. i just walked around until i had given them all out. the randomness was pleasing to me, as if the method of sampling made my offering more properly for all of them, known and not.

oh, my boys, my boys;

each of you, every one

no matter where you came from

all a mother's precious son.

view original

my timeline details events in the war as relate to my seventeen men: their enlistments, promotions, and for all but one, when in the war they died.   the only battles listed are the battle fought by these men, and the only units listed are the units they belonged to. it is a very narrow view.

some of my pictures from that day can be seen here as a slideshow. the seventeen vermont men (and one wife) are posted there in order of their dates of death. the statue of richard kirkland isn't from the cemetery proper, but his story is worth knowing. it's also worth reading william jones's medal of honor citation:

JONES, WILLIAM

Rank and organization: First Sergeant, Company A, 73d New York Infantry. Place and date: At Spotsylvania, Va., 12 May 1864. Entered service at: New York, N.Y. Birth: Ireland. Date of issue: 1 December 1864. Citation: Capture of flag of 65th Virginia Infantry (C.S.A.).