A rather bare-bones introduction to a story that I'll continue next week.
The first time I saw Ruth, I was sitting on the floor of the ward working on a friendship bracelet. I saw an elderly-ish woman walking toward me, leaning heavily on the arm of her husband. The two of them ignored me as they walked down and up the hallway, and I scooted closer to the wall to let them pass, and pass again. It occurred to me that this woman must be a new member of our small and consistently changing community of inpatients. This piqued my curiosity, but the glances I kept sneaking while pretending to be uninterested did not prepare me for her bland, genteel ignorance or the rage it would provoke in all of us.
To make things a little clearer, I provide you here with a Dramatis Personae of the hospital's voluntary* psych ward, in more or less the order that I met my fellow inmates, and with all the names changed just in case.
Anita was a forty-year-old woman with anorexia who had been there almost six weeks and managed to go from 60-80lbs under constant supervision. Eccentric, bristly, wary of strangers, she became an advocate for me when I was too shy to confront the nurses.
Jerome was a quiet and extremely kind college student struggling with depression. We knew each other pretty well before the hospital, and are still good friends. Jerome is a poet who loves the outdoors.
David: depressed middle aged man.
Jonathan: Very sweet elderly telephone salesman with a death wish.
Emma: Bipolar young woman with fibromyalgia and constant difficulties with parents. Loud, honest.
Kaia: my roommate, bipolar mother of 2 small boys, had been there almost a month. She got electro-shock therapy 3 days a week and missed most CBT sessions.
Diane: Beautiful, depressed fat woman. Knitted elegant shawls. Checked herself in a couple of times a year to stay alive. Same age as Anita but looked 20 years younger.
Sue: Energetic elderly woman, in and out of institutions her whole life.
Sarah: emaciated woman with AIDS. Usually very quiet and polite, confined to a wheelchair. Sometimes I could hear her screaming from across the hall. Occasionally joined us for occupational therapy or CBT, never for meals.
Me: small college girl with constant, extreme panic. Believed she was doomed with a degenerative curse and that she had failed the ones she loved.
Involuntary patients ( I knew fewer of these because I was not in their ward):
Rick: psychotic/angry 30 yr old man with a death wish. Homeless, drug addict, tattooed.
Beatrice: schizophrenic, bipolar young woman suffering from obesity and fibromyalgia. chronic pain, suicidal and paranoid but trying hard to heal.
unnamed portuguese woman who thought we were the fbi trying to attack her.
What made us crazy? We were dangers to ourselves or to others. We could not be trusted around silverware or rope or scissors or concrete tiles. Some of us would have spent day after day in bed if we could; others would run or walk until our bodies collapsed. Our pain made us special. Our inability to handle our pain made us special. In the voluntary ward, we had an understanding: we needed this prison that protected us from ourselves. We shared a vulnerability that comes from losing control of your own behavior and knowing it.
Ruth didn't share any of that. She was happier and more normal than anyone I have ever seen in a psych ward.
*Voluntary in the sense that one could choose to enter; this did not mean that one could then leave voluntarily. However, there were fewer restrictions than in the involuntary ward.
