Necessary Fodder in OD OG

From time to time, I still think about the others I met in the hospitals and crisis centers, in the lowest points of our lives. And I wonder if they’re ok. I wonder if they beat the statistics of failed suicide attempts like I did—or if they finally got their wish to move beyond this earth. I know it’s weird, considering we were strangers before the hospital & only together a short time. They were just the dust of human life you brush up against in random circumstances sometimes…But even dust clings, hangs on, flutters up into sunbeams and falls back down to new surfaces.

The first time I was hospitalized was my junior year of college. My mental health had been failing all semester. Ok, for years. It was finals time. My roommate & I had not been getting along and she had cut me out of her life. I was drinking sun up to sundown. On May 4, 2004, I had gone to therapy, glad-handed & bullshitted my therapist, come home and tried to work on a final project for one of my classes. I remember very little about my day between therapy & my suicide attempt—aside from the fact I had been trying to write a paper for hours, but could not seem to command the English language in any way…Type type type. Delete. Delete. Delete. My roommate came home, walked into the bedroom we shared and without a word to me, went over to take a nap. I stared at her, then the empty word document on my computer screen. And I felt this blinding red rush of rage that slid down to this dark blue resignation. I call it The Snap. It was the realization that it was time to do what I needed to do. Eerily calm, I went into the bathroom, dismantled a razor and attempted to slit my wrists. Upon failing that, I wrapped my wrists with toilet paper and went down to the kitchen of the townhouse I shared with my roommates. As I left rusty streaks of blood all over on the counter, I began counting out aspirin. There were only about 20 pills and it seemed so little, too few, in ratio to this useless body. I remember just cramming them into my mouth ham-fisted, before opening a bottle of sleeping pills and drinking as many pills as I could from that—probably close to 50 pills. Standing at the same counter, I wrote a suicide note on a legal pad with a pencil. I remember being pissed I could only find a pencil downstairs. I hate writing in pencil- but I didn’t know if I would be able to get back upstairs in time, once the aspirin started flushing out my veins. This was my first attempt, I didn’t know long it would take to die. Blood was smearing onto the yellow paper and I licked my thumb and tried to wipe it off—and I remember I laughed at what a silly thing to do that was. And then, I went upstairs, left the note on my roommate’s desk as she slept, laid down, closed my eyes and waited to die.

After a bit, my roommate got up, looked at the note, looked over at me…and then left to go to a recital on campus.

(To be fair to her—English was not her first language and I’m not sure the note was coherent. Also, it was probably a little Boy Who Cried Suicide. I had been breakdown-bound all semester—in her pragmatic and stoic Japanese mind, there was no way for her to know what was real with me anymore. What she didn’t understand was that it was all real. I did intend to eventually kill myself, but suicide takes the kind of bravery you have to build up to, inch closer to, tempt repeatedly. I know that sounds terrible…but it’s true.)

Obviously, I didn’t die. A friend found me, called 911 and EMTs raced me to the hospital. There, nurses shoved a tube up my nose, snaked it down my throat and squeezed charcoal solution into it to counteract the pills. For hours and hours, I laid there with the tube in me. When it appeared I would live, I was moved up to ICU. (Although not before hearing a male orderly tell another one that, ‘the girl in E3 slit her wrists and took 20 aspirin and 50 sleeping pills.” To which the other male orderly said, “Jesus Christ.” And, even with a tube down my throat, I felt a weird sort of pride that saddens me to admit now. In my head, I thought it proved I had really meant it, that this was not just for attention.) In the ICU, a young orderly was sent to sit in my room on suicide watch—although, I had no appetite for further destruction after the charcoal treatment and had come down so hard from the failure, that there was no “try” left in me. (And I mean, what became of that guy? Whose job was to make sure none of the crazies died at Club Mental? What stories did he carry inside for the rest of his life? He had stories that were not even his to share, but only to witness and participate in as a supporting cast member?)

In the end, my parents wanted to return home. Without me. I was sent to a psych ward 30 minutes away from the hospital, from the college I was attending. My parents had already left by the time I was discharged, late at night—in a hospital gown, garbage bag of my bloody clothes on my lap—to Lakeshore Mental Health Unit. Once I arrived there, I was brought into a room with a large hulk of a bald middle-aged man who sat behind one of those mammoth old metal desks that teachers used in my middle school. I was made to sit on a metal bed across from him in my hospital gown and socks with the grips on the bottoms. The man kept asking me questions to assess my mental state. I remember that I felt so small and was so terrified, that I was shivering too hard to respond through chattering teeth. He had to ask another staff member to wrap me up in blankets & they draped them all around me like I was the virgin Mary. I remember the line of questioning was bizarrely specific about my abuse in a way that brought the gray protective curtains of dissociation down. Oral? Given or received? Penetration? Vaginal? Anal? Did it cause any lasting physical issues? How old were you when it started? How old were you when it ended? Who was your abuser? Who knew? Was my abuser prosecuted? What support did I get after the abuse? The more I tried to retreat, the more the man tried to pull me back out to answer. His questions were barbs. I kept disappearing into the back of my mind to avoid answering, only to come out of it to see him staring at me, waiting. In the end, I had no choice but to answer his questions. I lied and said I couldn’t remember details—which he also wouldn’t accept. In the end, I just cried because everything felt so raw. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I was put back in a wheelchair with my bloody clothes and taken to the locked unit…where I would be considered an involuntary committal.

On the unit, my roommate was a 350 lb black woman named Anna. Anna had been sent there from the jail—although, I’m unsure why she was in jail or why she had been transferred to the mental health unit. She seemed perfectly sane and not unhappy—but I think people probably said the same thing about me. Anna had a good, albeit vulgar, sense of humor. I still have pages in a journal where the two of us and another girl played X Rated Hangman. Anna’s phrase we had to guess? Lousy Piece of Shit. Anna and I mostly got along–aside from one night where she threw a t-shirt at my head while I was sleeping and then screamed at me to go get her a fucking tampon from the nurses’ station. When I told her I wasn’t her bitch, she railed against it telling me, “Go get it, you fucking asshole.” When I still refused, because what did I care if she killed me, she yanked me out of bed and made me go to the nurses’ station with her to get her generic Kotex—just to show me, I guess. I think she felt like she probably had to intimidate me, because she always snatched the food off my tray. They had her on a limited calorie diet and she was always hungry. I would’ve let her eat my meals—threats or not—because I was just at the beginning stages of what would later become a rager of an eating disorder. I lost close to 20 pounds from the Anna Steals All Your Food at Lakeshore Diet.

Anna was one of the few people I pal’d around with at Laskeshore. There was little choice in the matter. So few of the other people there were in my orbit. I remember one day the common room had From Hell on the tv & one of the ladies leaned in and asked me if it was really happening. Obviously, I wanted to distance myself from others like that, others who seemed hopeless, because I wanted to pretend I was not as crazy as they were. I wanted to reassure myself that in 20 years, I would not end up in a place like Lakeshore, watching a shitty movie in the common room with a bunch of other chemically induced zombies—unable to tell if it was real or not. I don’t know why Anna was there or what she thought about it, I think it just beat jail…and so we would just be complete dickheads on the ward. She and another girl would dare me to hide under the table during 15 minute checks. (FYI: Nurses were not amused.) Or, she would laugh when I derailed group therapy sessions…one time, misbehaving so badly, my inept social worker dragged me out of the group activity, into his office, where he slammed me into a chair and yelled at me for 30 minutes about “my choices” and tried to get me to admit I had a drug problem. (I didn’t.) He then punished me by bringing up all the abuses I had survived in my childhood with a sarcastic tone. “You said your mom was abusive. I mean, we all get hit. Like was it really that bad?” “She tried to shove my face into a bowl of scalding soup.” “Oh. That’s excessive.” “I’d like to think so, yes.” Even that didn’t touch me, it was fodder to laugh about with a few of the other ladies later. Just like the guy that kept getting sent to the quiet room for explosive behavior. It was Anna’s idea to call him Dynamite and we would all jokingly say “kaboom” anytime he walked by us. Was it smart or safe? Fuck no, but it was necessary fodder. It was fodder for laughter and laughter was protection; protection not from the other patients, but from the truth of the fucked up place your life had taken you to.

I often wonder what happened to Anna. I never knew what she had done to land in jail. Or how she had come to be at Lakeshore. In my comingapartness, I was too young & screwed up to really understand all the ways that life breaks others…that I wasn’t the only one suffering. She didn’t volunteer her story either. While mostly Anna gave the impression of someone who just didn’t give a royal shit about anyone or anything, there were 2 distinct instances where I saw a softer side to her—that is why I still wonder what happened to her, if that part of her survived. The kind, gentle parts are always the first parts of you to die in places like Lakeshore.

On one occasion, she asked me why I was at Lakeshore. I assume she knew from my bandaged wrist & my pretty prevalent jokes about suicidal ideation–not much has changed there, I guess. But we were making some kind of crummy Mother’s Day craft for art therapy and it’s easier to get away with those difficult, emotion-laden questions when absorbed in an activity. Easier to bare yourself, get naked. I was drawing a plant in a misshapen vase with the intent of mailing it to my mother. (Never did, for those of you wondering. That was probably the better Mother’s Day gift—not sending her a shitty picture her daughter drew while stuck on a locked unit.) Anyway, she asked me why I was there, while I was trying to add reflections of light and I said, “Suicide attempt.” “Are you happy to still be alive?” I paused, knowing that the right answer was supposed to be “yes”…but also knowing that was not how I felt. After a beat, I said, “yes.” She looked me in the eye and in an uncharacteristically quiet way for her, she said, “You waited too long to answer… Someday you will say yes immediately when someone asks you that.”

The only other occasion where she showed a sweetness was when my friend, Beth, came to visit me. Beth was the friend who accidentally found me. She had come over to see if I wanted a cigarette. That was what she said anyway. But, that year, everyone knew I was floundering & taking on water…My group of friends had already gone to the Counseling Center and tried unsuccessfully to get help for me a month or 2 before my suicide attempt. As an only-slightly-more-mature adult, I see now that the cigarette was probably a cover, an excuse to check in on me. My friend, Beth, knew the minute she walked in that something was wrong. She refused to come upstairs at first…just repeatedly stood in my living room, yelling my name in a shaky voice, asking me to come down. I told her I couldn’t. She still didn’t come up. Then she quietly asked, “Why?” I could tell she already knew. I started to cry and said, “Because I did something bad.” I tried to walk to the stairs but collapsed, so I tried to drag myself. By the time she 2-steps-at-a-time’d her way up, I was laying in the hallway bleeding out all over the stairs. Aspirin did its job. Beth was the person who called 911. Who sat with me at the top of the stairs begging me not to die. Beth was the person who rode in the ambulance with me, giving the EMTs information. Beth was the person who had to go back in the apartment a couple days later with another one of my friends to wash the blood out of the carpet so my parents wouldn’t see it. Beth also came regularly to visit me in the hospital. At the time, I was so busy just trying to survive the hospital that I don’t think I thought about how terrible it must’ve been for her to find me like that, to sit with me thinking I was going to die right in front of her. Until one night, during visiting hours, when Beth was struggling to do the art activity that staff was making us do that evening…Anna asked her, “You the one that found her?” “Yes,” Beth said quietly, folding the paper to make a triangular head for her origami squirrel. Anna smiled at her, and with simple & great sincerity said, “Thanks.”

Besides Anna, the other 2 main people I hung out with on the unit were Gina and Jenn. Gina came to the unit after the rest of us. She was an alcoholic. And had OCD. She was sweet and seemingly normal, but prone to brief blips of rage on an otherwise placid radar. I remember her one time telling me about an acquaintance who had upset her. “I would like to rip off her head and shit down her throat,” she said with a startling amount of venom. It was probably the DTs wreaking havoc, who knows. She also was in the same warbling sense of reality we were, so she fit right in with us. I remember the 4 of us—Anna, Gina, Jenn (who I’ll talk about next) & me—hooting and hollering one night where they made us play Pictionary and every fucker on the unit kept telling us what they were drawing as they drew it. The four of us would then purposely guess incorrectly. “Is it beef stew?” “Is it a red-headed stepchild?” “The Electric Boogaloo?” “I already told you—IT’S A NAPKIN!” We laughed at everyone else so we didn’t have to admit we were there, too…on the locked unit…of one of the worst rated hospitals in NY. We needed the insulation.

As I mentioned, the 4th in our quartet of the insane, was Jenn. Jenn is the only person I kept in contact with on The Outside, as we called it. Jenn went to the same college as me and saw the same counselor as me. Jenn was also a paranoid delusional schizophrenic. She had some awareness of her disease, of the way it impacted her…but one night she chased a fly around her parents’ house for hours because she thought that the devil was spying on her through the fly. The next day, she committed herself. Because Jenn was my age, we immediately bonded…because we had to…because in our youth, surrounded by other incarcerated people who had probably spent much of their adult life being institutionalized in various forms, we needed someone who hadn’t lived that life.

I don’t think I need to tell you all this-but the hospital was terrible. We were locked in with violent people. One of my first days there, I watched a young man playing ping pong by himself. (Why do they always have fucking ping pong in hospitals and rehabs?! No one fucking wants to play ping pong. Ever.) At one point, he became enraged and threw the ball and paddle at a nurse, screaming, “You are an aggressive mammal.” No, sir. YOU are an aggressive mammal. This was not unusual. Dynamite also was known to go off at random intervals. I stole a pen from the nurses’ station and hid it in the drawstringless waistband of my jammies at all times for writing & stabbing purposes. I wrote a lot. Never had to resort to the stabby-stabby. Besides dodging projectiles & fists, because we were young & cute, we were sexually harassed by male patients. There was nowhere to go to avoid them. Complaining just got you more meds to sedate you. I wasn’t eating because of my roommate, the Hamburgler, so I didn’t have energy to fight anyone off. The staff were incompetent, apathetic, cruel. Therapy sessions included watching The Wedding Singer or reading horoscopes. Drug treatment program (which I was put in by that idiot Will, despite not having a drug problem) consisted of watching some movie that started out with a guy doing a line of coke off a naked chick’s buttock—the man not realizing she had OD’ed. My incompetent social worker, Will, thought I was a vampire-wannabe goth chick because I had dark hair, serious romance with death & self-injury scars. (He greeted me the first time I met him by saying, “So what’s up with the hair? You goth?” “Yeah, can you get my spiked collar and razor blades from behind the nurses’ station?” was not an appropriate response, apparently. Well, fuck you, Will.) So yeah, terrible environment—but at least, Jenn understood and had some of the same frame of references of the outside that I did. I couldn’t go to my finals at Mason Hall or eat chicken fingers at the Williams Center—but I could talk about the memory of doing so with Jenn. It’s amazing the ways that your brain devises to get by.

And again, like Anna, Jenn and I coped by laughing. The less funny something was, the more we laughed. We laughed so much, that at one point, this kindly old nurse, Kathy—who was like the unit grandmother, called us each into a meeting with her to discuss our behavior. She told me she couldn’t tell if I was laughing so much because I was a normal 21 year old or if the laughing was signs of a deeper sickness in my head. I responded by laughing…Jenn had a new order for Haldol the next morning, while the milligrams of my Seroquel were increased. Our heads swam through the days on the pills they prescribed to quiet us. Those fuckers.

Jenn and I were released basically a day apart…We were actually a little sad because after days and days of begging, Anna, Gina, Jenn and I had convinced the staff to let us have a slumber party in the Quiet Room (i.e. padded walls & restraints, baby.) While we didn’t get to enjoy it though, Gina & Anna got to have a party together in there. Gina called Jenn to tell her about it…As well as to tell her someone had actually made a run for it and made it to the parking lot before being taken down by staff. Which, honestly, might have been me if I hadn’t finally gotten released. (Because I was there involuntarily & was deemed “hostile and uncooperative” in all attempts at therapy [thank you, dickless Will-now give me back my black eyeliner & combat boots], I was having difficulty getting returned to society.)

Jenn and I kept in touch with for a bit after Lakeshore…but eventually it became clear that, outside the hospital, our friendship was like an astronaut that made the mistake of taking his helmet off in space…unable to survive in a different environment. I remember we got together over the summer, because I had moved in with my professor and his wife & stayed out in Fredonia. We had plans to meet up with Gina. We walked miles to her house in Dunkirk—only she was not there. Jenn and I sat on her steps and waited and waited and waited—for hours, baking in the July sun. Finally, one of her kids came out and told us Gina was at the bar. We never contacted her again. I still wonder if she ever got sober. Fuck, I wonder if she ever came home. Furthermore, did her unattended kids grow up ok? Are they now alcoholics like their mama, sitting in a hospital somewhere with a pen hidden in their pajama bottom waistband, thinking with false bravado, “I wish a bitch would”?

Jenn and I had a few adventures that summer. She was a case study for the psychologist she was linked with after our discharge from the Banana Ward. Her therapist warned her away from me, stating that they felt I was a bad influence. Me. A bad influence. I went camping with her family in their RV. Her creepo stepfather leered at me the whole time. We went to the mall with her mother a few times—and it took forever because Jenn refused to step on cracks or lines. While most kids jokingly say that doing so will break their mother’s back or crack their mother’s spine—Jenn really believed it. The few times we ate in the mall food court was excruciating—as Jenn had to talk herself out of her delusion that her water was poisoned. (To her credit, Jenn did have an excellent sense of humor about her diagnosis. She was nuckin’ futs, as she put it. She would say, “some people look at the glass as half full, some people look at the glass half empty, I look at the glass and think, ‘whose been touching my FUCKING WATER?!’”) Then, I brought her with me on a weekend camping trip with my friends from college. It was a long weekend of sleeping in mud, ruining my new cute pink sneakers & watching Jenn saying increasingly alarming & uncomfortable things to my non-psycho friends. They were kind, if slightly avoidant. In the fall, when we went back to college-I never ran into her on campus, even though she was supposedly a student there. In fact, a lot of the stories she had told me began to feel…not rooted in reality…like her biological father who had supposedly poured gas on himself and lit himself on fire, appeared completely unscathed when I met him…Her litter of siblings seemed to not really exist…etc etc. Life with Schizophrenic: Prepare Yourself for a Differing Reality by Roxanne V….

The friendship eventually waned, as I mentioned. When I left Fredonia behind and moved home, our friendship honestly seemed like a fever dream…a hallucination…an imaginary friend I had made up to survive Lakeshore. She wasn’t on Facebook. We didn’t have cellphones at college—and I didn’t have a landline number for her anywhere. I didn’t have pictures of her. Souvenirs from her, other than her handwriting in my journal from the hospital…in an X-Rated game of Hangman. In a way, it was like she never existed…until several years ago, when my parents got a letter from her looking for me. Despite the fact we were in our late 20s/early 30s, the letter was written with crayons. She had drawn a rainbow on it. She told me she had gotten a Facebook account and to find her on there. I did friend her, for a little while and she posted excessively, tagging everyone and their brother in “have a nice day” type posts with pictures of cute little fluffy animals. Every time she tagged me, it reminded me not of her craziness—but of my own temporary madness from that time period we spent in the hospital. After a couple weeks of being have-a-nice-day’d, I unfollowed her. Out of curiosity, I looked for her a few days ago & she is once again gone from FB. I wonder if she ever moved out of her mother’s house….or if she went back to Lakeshore or somewhere….more permanent to get help. I don’t judge. Lord knows I bounced around the system a bit with another period of hospitalization for an eating disorder (where I met Alex), time spent at a Crisis Residence, homelessness, CPS involvement, years of unhelpful therapy.

I mean, let me be straight, I think I’m just as crazy as the rest of them…I’ve just been able to find ways to continue to function. And Lakeshore is where I first got an idea bout how to help myself &, ironically, it was not in any therapy session. There was a lady there—Mary Lee (as opposed to Mary G, who was also a patient…who was combative.) She seemed confused and completely removed from reality…and I watched her, terrified, every day…because at that point, I didn’t know if I would go completely under, if I would become so crazy that I would become like her. She would cry all the time—at nothing. This awful, hissing cry…like she was reliving some terrible beyond. I have plenty of terrible beyond myself and the thought of openly reliving it into old age seemed like it might be my fate, too. The staff made me play Scrabble with her once and she just made up words. Tamoot. Yglib. Just slapped those tiles down. I didn’t challenge her, I just let her play them—it didn’t matter. And just sitting with someone that I could still show kindness to and help, even in my advanced state of brokenness, was a glimpse of something life-changing for me. It was amazing to realize that I wasn’t too far gone, too mental. I could still do good, contribute in ways that were meaningful. I could take care of others, even if I couldn’t take care of myself.

One day, the staff told us Mary would be leaving us soon—that she was going to live in a family care provider setting…later that day, Mary quietly sidled up to me and held out her hand. There was a pair of clip-on earrings in it. I asked her if she wanted me to put them on. She just stared past me with those milky eyes, but she moved closer. I gently brushed her hair back and clipped them on her saggy earlobes. Gently. Left side. Right side. Then she handed me a brush & I brushed her hair, pulled the wiry white strands into a ponytail. After assisting with accessories, I helped her with her cardigan. She smiled at me and, even though I was doped up and surrounded by aggressive mammals, I felt good about that. For 10 minutes, I hadn’t thought about myself…about my own needs…about how bad my life was. And I realized that the best possible thing I could do for myself to heal was to take care of others…that the way I could function and find purpose, was to take care of others who needed help….to give back in ways that friends have done for me all my life. It’s no surprise that I have worked at a nursing home with people with dementia & now with people with disabilities for all of my adult life. And despite anything else that has happened in my personal life, I’ve always been good at what I do. At my current job, I’m known for my ability to work with people that other staff find challenging. I’m not going to say that my life has been easy since Lakeshore…It has been a hard road and no matter how beautiful things might be at times, there will always be a lot of sadness & rage & suicidal ideation & mania—because that’s my brain…because both nature & nurture were rabid, diseased cunts to me. And that’s ok. Because I honestly believe taking care of others has been the only thing that has helped me to function and remain upright in spite of all my other fuckedupness.

Sometimes when I think about the hospital, I wonder if the other ladies who were there with me figured that out, too. I hope so. And I hope that they have reached the Someday where someone asks them if they are happy to be have survived & they answer yes. Immediately. Without waiting. I know I have. Go ahead. Ask me-
Yes.

Last updated January 27, 2024