hsphaven

My stay in hospital hasn’t been easy. It seems that most of the patients don’t sleep, like me. I hear them up in the night making noises. One night I barely got any sleep. At 5am I went out to the nurse’s station extremely frustrated. I asked for some diazepam and to be put in the sensory room, but the nurse gave me neither. Instead he put me in a room right next to the common area. “What am I going to do when the patients start getting up and making noise?” I asked him. He didn’t really think of that. Alas, as I was trying to sleep, a woman came into the common area and started blasting music from her phone. This was the last straw. I went out and asked her to turn it off as I was trying to sleep. She didn’t care, and told me I should put up the other people here.

“Not everyone wants to listen to your fucking music!” I screamed at her. What is wrong with these people? Have some fucking respect and wear some headphones. So many people in psych wards do not have any awareness of other people and the impact they have on them. The nurses all tell me it’s part of their illness, but I just think they’re selfish cunts. We started screaming at each other. Then she got up from the couch and came right up to my face, threatening to hit me. Finally the nurses intervened and pulled me away.

“I don’t belong here,” I told the nurse. “These people are mental.”

“Exactly, you’re not like them, you’re different,” the nurse said.

I felt that same old feeling of not belonging anywhere. No one in this hospital seemed to suffer like I suffered. No one was sensitive to other people like I was. They were all psychotic or manic. I felt like discharging and leaving them all to rot in this miserable place. I could, as I was a voluntary patient and my doctor had been trying to push me out the door ever since I came in. I was moved to the sensory room but I couldn’t calm down after this awful fight. Patients continued to wander past me blasting music from their phone. Another loud patient got up and started talking to the girl who just about punched me in the common area. I felt like I was in school again and they were ganging up on me, saying mean things about me, and trying to provoke me with their music. The nurse refused to give me some diazepam. I realised I do a better job at taking care of me than the staff here, so I went back to my room and took some diazepam I had smuggled in. I then slept until early afternoon.

The following night I didn’t get much sleep either. The volatile lady I mentioned in my previous post started banging and yelling at 1:30am. I had been pissed off with her on Christmas as she was being really loud and didn’t even care when I asked her to lower her volume as it was a hospital and people needed to rest. But this time I wasn’t angry, I was beginning to realise she was just out of her tree. Thankfully she was finally moved to the “high dependency ward”. Things got better since then.

I wanted to stay longer but my doctor kept wanting to discharge me. There is a lot of stigma towards people with BPD amongst mental health professionals. They don’t want to give us long admissions as they think we get dependent on the hospital. We are not given the same level of care or time in hospital that people who are manic or psychotic get, even though our mental health is just as serious and dangerous. Most people with BPD will attempt suicide, and 1 in 10 of us will succeed. The doctor said I could spend a few nights in PAPU, a smaller, short stay psychiatric unit before I went home. Or, she would just discharge me home. I couldn’t believe it. I was still extremely suicidal, distressed and barely eating and she wanted to send me home like that. She increased my NDIS sessions and brushed her hands clean. It is not good enough. My private psychiatrist had referred me back to the case management service I had been with the past few years, but they would not accept my referral, again due to my BPD diagnosis I believe.

Yesterday I was moved to PAPU, and it was one of the worst days of my life. Change is not good for people with autism. There are not many rooms I can tolerate in hospital due to my autism/severe noise sensitivity. I actually had a room in the psych ward which I was comfortable in. I wanted to make the most of it, especially now that the crazy bitch next door had left. I wanted to get better, and I was finding my stay helpful for the most part. The nurses had to pack up all my stuff as I was in no state to pack. The decision left me crying, screaming, suicidal, scratching myself, banging my head against the wall and a complete mess. I had my eyes shut and was in a complete trance. At one point I was on the ground and couldn’t get up nor speak. The nurses left me alone in this state. One of the other patients who heard me screaming came out of her room to help me. She was very kind to me. “You poor thing,” she said, holding my hand.

“Can we have a nurse?” she called out.

She was furious I was not being attended to by a nurse.

“This hospital is disgraceful!” she screamed.

Apparently my neck was swollen.

“Call an ambulance!” she screamed.

“We’re not going to call an ambulance,” the nurse said. The nurse told her to leave me alone. I never saw this other patient’s face or got her name, but she was one of the most caring people I have met. I’m glad there are still good people in this world. I have met some true angels while I’ve been in severe states of distress, but they slip between my fingers like sand. I get attached to them so quickly as they are my lifeline. I finally get the help I’ve needed all my life. Someone finally notices me and takes me seriously. Someone finally holds me, and often that is all I need to calm down. But then I never see them again. And I am alone again, having nightmares of satanic abuse and all the isolation, pain, and entrapment. Sometimes I’d rather people be mean to me, because I can’t deal with having someone be kind and then losing them. I couldn’t explain all this to the nurses. I couldn’t even talk. So I continued to cry and scream. Nothing coming out of my mouth made sense. If only I could show them a movie of my life. If only they could see how change, ironically, has been the only constant in my life. By the time I was five I had lived in more houses than years old. I went to seven different schools. I’m tired of people coming in and out of my life all the time. I’m tired of having to start over again. I’m tried of saying goodbye to people all the time.

The nurse asked me to stick out my tongue as she had an antipsychotic wafer to give me. She put it in my mouth, but I kept pulling it out.

“You need to keep it in,” said the nurse.

I knew the drug was full of shit, chemical words I can’t even pronounce. Usually I would refuse a drug like this as I have OCD and eat a completely natural diet. I worry it’s going to give me cancer. But it in the end I didn’t care. I let it dissolve in my mouth as I dissolved on the floor.

I lay there shaking on the floor as though having a fit. My whole arms and legs were tingly. The nurses kept asking me to get into a wheelchair but I couldn’t get up off the ground. I could tell they were getting frustrated.

“If you don’t go to PAPU the bed will be taken and you’ll be sent home,” said one of the nurses. I couldn’t believe they would just send me home like this. Finally they lifted me into the wheelchair and took me to PAPU as I screamed the entire way. I had lost all sense of self-consciousness.

That night in PAPU I emptied the rubbish bin in the bathroom and tied the plastic bag around my head. I wanted to kill myself, but in the end it got so uncomfortable I had to take it off. People say suicide is the “easy way out”. But there is nothing easy about suicide. The body will fight for it’s last breath, always.

I didn’t sleep the best last night as there is a speaker inside my room which all the hospital “codes” are blasted through. “Code grey outside the emergency department”, it blasted last night. Then the code was updated to a code “black”. Not exactly the most conductive environment to sleep in.

I finally got back to sleep and then was woken this morning to see the doctor. I was pissed off. He asked the same questions all doctors ask. “What do you enjoy?” he asked, as though asking a deaf person what their favourite song is.

“If you send me home and I kill myself it’s on you!” I told the doctor.

I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. I pressed the “call a nurse” button as I felt like I was about to scream and I didn’t want to disturb the other patients.

“Why did you press the button when I am just around the corner?” asked the nurse.

“I’m losing it and didn’t want to bother the other patients,” I told her. I then started screaming.

“I will not respond to this kind of behaviour,” the cold nurse said. She went to walk out the door. “I’ll talk to you when you’re calmer.”

“Do your job!” I screamed at her. She was meant to be a fucking psych nurse for fuck’s sake. She’s meant to be able to help people when they feel this distressed. In the end I broke down crying.

“Life is hard for everyone,” she said. “I have mortgages to pay.”

I would take anything for mortgages to be the most stressful thing in my life.

I paced around the ward. I paced up and down my room. The nurse came back and unsuccessfully tried to take my blood pressure. She then gave me some diazepam and put me to bed.

The evening nurse was more helpful. He asked the psych ward to take me back, but there are no beds free now. It was so wrong of them to send me away.

I don’t know what is going to come of the next few days. I would like to be moved back to the psych ward I was originally in, but I have lost my old room now. I have managed to channel my anger into a complaint against the hospital, but by the time it’s read, I will probably be discharged and may or may not be alive. I don’t want to kill myself, I don’t want to hurt my dad, but I’ve been feeling like I have no other choice. Life is just unbearable.