Morning in the Loony Bin – Part two

March 23, 2016

8:30am

I don’t think there is much I wouldn’t do for a couple pieces of bacon or a thick slice of ham right now. Despite their knowledge of my allergies I have been served two boiled eggs and a biscuit of some sort. The nurses can’t tell me one way or another if there are eggs in it. At least the tea is hot. I’m hoping to scam a fellow patient of two out of their fruit cups so I can get more than a kiddie sized box of milk for my breakfast.

The TV is tuned to the news this morning, perhaps not the greatest choice considering the state of the world right now. The refugee situation in Europe has brought out the worst in some people resulting in three bombings in Brussels last night. At least 31 are dead and over a hundred are injured. I’m hoping they change the channel soon so that I don’t have to watch those numbers tick up, like a telethon’s tote board. They will rise. They always do. This is the earth after all and the human ability to hate and attack each other seems boundless.

The news is talking to people jumping to assign blame to the refugees themselves, not even considering the possibility that it was right wing radicals trying to make their point, and this brings to mind two thoughts.

The 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by sixteen non-refugee men. In the fifteen subsequent years, how many attacks have been on American soil have been carried out by Muslim extremists? One, perhaps two (what I wouldn’t give for access to the internet right now so I could find out for sure) and neither of those were carried out by refugees. Instead, it was men and women living in the country by completely legal means.

I am trying to focus on something of consequence rather than the minutiae of life but my brain has other ideas. Did the Canucks win last night? #teamtank My blood pressure was way down this morning. 131/81 is almost normal and far less terrifying than the artery bursting 171/104 reading that I got last night while being admitted. It makes me wonder what meds they gave me last night. While my heart beats are better, I have heart burn. I really do need more than milk. Dry toast is even appealing at this point.

I know I had a second point to make about the bombings but it has left my mind. My brain is often like this and it’s why Dr Jahmeel tried me on Ritalin when I first got my depression diagnosis. Even as a small child, I remember my mind being four or five steps ahead of where I was. Every possibility opened before me like a branching tree, reaching skyward for the sun. Early in grade school, this meant that I was not only ahead of where the class was in whatever lesson we were doing, I was often ahead of the teacher. When we were doing addition, I could already see how subtraction worked. I was reading at t third or fourth grade level while the concept of “sun”, “fun”, and “bun” rhyming was just becoming apparent to the rest of the class.

This skill had its advantages but, while I didn’t know it at the time, it had far more disadvantages. I was so far ahead in my assignments that I was often extremely bored and would get myself in trouble while trying to occupy my mind. I often found something in my bag to surreptitiously damage my desk, just to see what was under the next layer of fake wood. I got good at it. In the third grade, I drilled a hole into the front edge of my desk that was deep enough to fit an entire crayon in it, lengthwise. My chairs were a monument to scratching with makeshift shivs and extreme boredom. It’s hard to convince an 8 year old to do the lessons being assigned when he’s read six chapters ahead in the textbook and could teach the class if necessary, so the habit of not bothering with homework was well established, following me into high school. It was never that I was lazy but rather I was quite bored with most of school and what few topics and subjects which interested me never challenged me in any way. I really don’t like this about myself and it is something I have fought against nearly constantly since my diagnoses.

It is why going back to school and getting my high school diploma meant so much to me. It was the first time in decades then I had set a goal and followed through on it. It’s also why writing down these thoughts are important to me right now. I don’t know if they’ll be useful in the future but, at least for now, they are something I’m working on which has no specific purpose and is also a means to try and slow my mind down. Right now, in this place it doesn’t seem to be working.

My bed is in a specified area, my very own five by five space, separated from the person on my right by a curtain and a wall to my left. Halfway up the wall are stains in the paint looking suspiciously like a splatter of some bodily fluid. There are five or six of these of these spaces in a row, making privacy flexible and important but a complete illusion at the same time. However intrinsic and flawed the uncomfortableness of this situation is to me, I am one of the lucky ones. Just outside this are three gurneys lined up along the wall with no privacy whatsoever. I wonder if I get a curtain because I am not likely to need emergent care or if it’s because I just happened to get here first. There are also patients to whom a bed is an unattainable luxury for they await a better situation sitting in a hospital style recliner chair. About a half a dozen people have been in those all night. For them, I’m sure a goodnight’s sleep must have been a fantasy, unless of course the nurses were able to knock them out with a cocktail of meds. The only one I’m sure slept well in those chairs is the young man with the mark on his face. He seems to have been comfortably asleep throughout the night, his hat pulled over his eyes as a shade from the pulsating fluorescent lights above that I doubt are ever turned off.

There is one thing about the curtain beside me that I have not mentioned. I have been reluctant to do so for it is a reminder of why I’m here, more than the bed situation, or the bracelet on my right wrist. I could have easily deluded myself, created a delusion as to why those things are present. The curtain is of a cheap artificial fabric of some source, although I doubt it’s nylon as it has a tendency to go up in flames like a flamethrower. It must be thirty or forty years old, perhaps even the surplus from Super 8 motels from across North America bathrooms. I am in a section of the hospital where clean, new and soothing is not a concern because those states are reached through the use of Thorazine, Xanax and Valium. I am not meant to be comfortable. I am meant to be alive.

The nurse has taken pity on my empty stomach and found me a fruit cup and grabbed me a tea from her private stash. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I wish it was decaf.  It makes me feel completely uncomfortable because I feel like I’m getting special treatment as it is so to but in a special request is completely out of the question.

The mental image of me being on a fat camp reality TV show has jumped into my brain. I feel like I’m getting ready to do my last-chance-workout, all the contestants sleeping in the same room but I won my bed and curtain space in this week’s reward challenge. The state of curtain betrays that thought.

As I turn and lean on my left shoulder to hide these thoughts, I am faced by the discoloured wall. Twisting to keep my legs on the bed I am face to face with the one foot square section of wall which is now clearly a stain from arterial spray. I am currently both glad and upset at having seen so many episodes of CSI over the years. I can falsely speculate on speed and directionality based on the size and shape of the droplets. I think I can discern a void in the stain, as if there used to be something in the way; a person perhaps.

This is the beginning of page twelve in my notebook, which means I’ve written more in the last 16 hours than I have in a very long time, perhaps ever. Doing it curled up on a hospital gurney is very uncomfortable and my back is beginning to get sore. I only hope that, if not today, it helps me at some point. Otherwise, I’m just spinning my wheels again, distracted by my seething mind, destined to end up in the same place I began.

Morning in the Loony Bin - part one

March 23, 2016

7:30am

Morning has come, far too early for my liking. While snoring is rampant here, my little corner is full of people very much awake and yet somehow making less noise than those sleeping. In the hall are two people sleeping on the thinly mattressed gurneys they put you on in here. Presumably, mobility can become unexpectedly important, even in the psych ward. I'm curious if there are leather straps stowed under these but I'm just too nervous about the truth to try and find out. The small size could explain why I am curled into a ball, hugging my chest, trying to keep my bulky front from spilling over the side of the gurney. It's more likely that my extreme mental discomfort has me craving the fetal position. It also explains why my back and hip are killing me, although not literally. A large, vocal part of me is sad about that literally thing.

Close to me is a new recruit to our little encampment. Sitting up, he is talking to himself, embodying the lostness I feel inside. He is mumbling in Punjab or Farsi, I can't tell the difference. His face is frozen in a mask of concentration, as if spending all his energy trying to comprehend what is happening to him. In this matter he is a kindred spirit and I feel a little less alone.

Two curtains over is a young girl talking in her sleep. Her words alternate between those expressing terror and bliss, like a scene from Fifty Shades of Grey, unable even in her sleep to escape whatever it is that put her in this place. Before I had realized she was asleep, I found myself wondering if she was masturbating but although I am quite sure that is not uncommon thing to happen here, I am now leaning to her being a scared little girl trapped in a no longer naive young woman's body. She's in pain, likely both physical and mental, her dreams desperate to understand anything that is going on, whether that be out here or in her mind. I doubt her perception of reality can tell the difference anymore. After all, they are both prisons.

I haven't eaten in over 14 hours, getting down only water and extremely unconcentrated orange juice. I don't find myself overly hungry but the bottle of Ensure I was offered a couple of hours ago is beginning to sound appealing, despite my distaste for them. I know a headache from not eating will be coming on soon, along with the stress and mindlessness which will accompany it. I am the person in the Snickers candy bar commercial who is "not himself" when he's hangry.

Mindlessness. In a world that seems to be pushing the concept of mindfulness on everyone, the idea of existing in an exact opposite manner sounds appealing right now. It is the premise behind self-medication, which I have done many times. The tears live just below the surface, held back now only by the paper I am writing on. They are a pressure bomb in my chest and I'm terrified of looking weak in here. I'm terrified of the meds the nurse will give me. I'm terrified of the others here seeing me as a target. I'm terrified of having to acknowledge that right now, this is where I belong.

~

The Ensure is like a mouthful of Buckley's Mixture cough syrup mixed with a pound of chalk dust. Buckley's was my mother's go to cough treatment and I half suspected that it's terrible flavour was her way of determining if we were truly sick and deserving of a day off from school. Over the years I had learned to tolerate it, even looking forward to the soothing feel of it running down my throat. I find it exceedingly doubtful that I should ever expect to get to the point of respect with Ensure like I am with Buckley's.

"What am I going to do now?" has popped into my mind and the tears I have been holding back are moistening the pillow beneath my head. I am reminded of the scene from Terminator 2, when right before leaving the group to kill the engineer Dyson, Sarah Connors carved the words "No future" into the top of the picnic table where she had been sleeping. I am that lost as to what will become of me. Do I have a future? What niche will I fill in the world if I even find an opportunity for another chance and a new direction? People have told me to be like Dory, the fish Ellen DeGeneres voiced in Finding Nemo. "Just keep swimming" they would tell me but keep swimming in what? If you drop a fish into a vat of Sulfuric acid should it just keep swimming or is it logical for it to panic? Where can it go? Even if it ends up in plain water, what would swimming accomplish? Is a life of simply being enough? Existence for the sake of existence? Without a destination, there is no journey to learn from unless you account for a final destination.

It's hardly a new idea or question. Is life's journey towards death a sufficient reason for continuing life? Is life for its own sake reason enough to keep moving from one moment to the next? While I don't have an answer for that question it is something worthy of further exploration.

As a bit of a hobby, I dabble in religious counter-apologetics; the examination and refutation of religious reasoning and justifications of believers' views. There is a concept within this sphere of study which deals with the sufficient and necessary. Specifically, is the concept of a god sufficient to account, not only for the universe we experience, but the entire universe we could ever experience? Can god completely explain the 5% of matter and energy we have an understanding of as well as the other 95% which we know is there but have virtually no understanding of, AND any materialistic or non-materialistic reality of which we may have no concept, imagination or ability to experience.

Further, it must also be shown that god is a necessity, that there is and could never be any other proposition which would account for existence. If anyone can propose a logically and rational concept which would account for our local presentation of the universe, then the idea of necessity is immediately falsified.

While I have opinions on these questions, I have neither the intelligence nor the education to take them on when dealing with the massiveness of our universe, let alone the possibility of the multiverse which has popped out of current attempts at super-unification. I can, however, apply these ideas to the question, "Do I have an obligation to live? “As I am an experimental materialist, I have no belief in a god, an afterlife or an immortal soul so the question of necessity can only apply to the universe I can experience and account for. To whom or what would a necessity of life be related to? When it comes to the nonliving world, it couldn't care less if I was alive. Further, when my eventual end comes, microbes and insects will likely be very glad to fulfill their destiny and consume my non-animated flesh. When considering the living world, I have no pets, no children, and no dependents of any kind. I hold no financial obligation to anyone. No one will end up on the street starving if I cease to be.

The emotional stability of those in my life, as far as I can see, is the only consideration which may satisfy necessity. I have few close friends, most of whom struggle with these same thoughts. Those who do not understand from experience have done well to understand by talking to me and have come to accept how hard my struggle has been. So, if my life were to end, by any means, it is safe to say that my friends would be able to move on with an understanding, and while it would in no way completely relieve the resulting emotions, they would be minimized with the knowledge that I had likely struggled as much as I possibly could. Their lives would move on without me.

Obviously my family adds another level of thought which must be considered. My brother and sister have attempted to help me in the best way they can. Both of them being in the medical field give them an uncommon perspective on how my thoughts work and I have been very lucky to have them around. My Nephew has struggled with depression as well, including stints on anti-depressants over the years. My nieces are teens and have been brought up in the social media age where open discussion of topics once taboo are now commonplace. LGBTQ rights are a comfortable topic for them. So is personal sexual responsibility. Mental health is also a topic of which they are well versed and although I'm sure they want the best for me, they understand that the best for me may be ending my life someday.

My mother is, perhaps, the only trump card which I have to deal with. We have lived together since my first collapse in late 2012 and it has become obvious that she is uncomfortable with my illnesses in every way. She wants to listen, to be the one I can talk to but it is awkward and distressing for her, so I try to keep it to a minimum such as when things directly affect her or our relationship. I suspect that the anxiety issues hit far too close to home and that she's been dealing with many of the same relationship problems and thoughts as I do throughout her life. It just hasn't been acceptable acknowledge them personally, let alone discus them with others, until very recently. I'm guessing that watching so many people discuss so many personal issues without shame is off-putting, to say the least. While it is the one final thing that saved my life, is it necessary to remain alive because of the emotional turmoil that my suicide would cause to my mother.

I know she would do almost anything to want my suffering to end but does that list include accepting my death. I simply don't know.