I turned around as the door clicked shut behind me: there were now three locked doors between me and the exit. Exhausted, agitated and numb, I followed the nurse towards my bed. Little did I know it would be months before I would be free to walk out of the front door and not return.
My overriding memory of my time in hospital is the hopelessness, the desperation, the pain; the kindness. I don’t think I will ever forget the mental torture I felt, but I know I will always remember the kindness I was shown there.
Not only from the nurses and psychologists, who were seemingly endless sources of nonjudgmental support, but also from my fellow patients. The people who were themselves in unbearable pain yet who nevertheless were capable of empathy the likes of which I had never before encountered.
Like the person who would play card games with me when I was upset, the man who wrote me a card apologising for becoming angry with me, the woman whose company would take away the tedium of walking in circles around the special-care garden.
Or the person who left a tub of jelly beans on my bed when I couldn’t stop crying, the person who wrote me a poem the night before I was discharged, the person who kept me company when I was the only one not allowed off the ward.
While I was on the special-care unit I, to put it mildly, wasn’t doing so well. On one of my worse days I returned to my bedside, puffy eyed and with yet another incident report in my file, to discover a piece of paper on my bed. A patient had written me a lengthy note explaining that they knew how it felt to be plagued by self-destructive urges but that they believed things would eventually improve for me.
I read and reread that note countless times over the next few weeks, and I still do every so often. That someone who was obviously struggling a great deal themselves could find it in themselves not only to show me kindness but also to have hope for me means more than I could ever tell them.
‘I spent hours walking around and playing cards’
Then there was my birthday: I turned 19 while I was an inpatient. Luckily, I was on an open ward for it and was allowed a few hours of freedom with my family. That evening a group of people from my ward organised a party for me, complete with cake, candles and sweets.
In spite of everything that was going on in their lives they cared about my birthday. That was far more important than their carefully chosen gifts of playdough and a stress ball.
I spent hours walking around and around the garden by myself, but I also spent hours playing card games and, yes, colouring, with the other patients. One night we decided to amuse ourselves by setting up a game of Jenga in the middle of the corridor and playing bowling by throwing stress balls at it.
On a few other evenings we would have music sessions; there always seemed to be a couple of musicians or singers among us.
There was always an air of great anticipation on the wards come 7.30pm. We would strain our ears for the trundling noise that meant the tea trolley was on its way. It wasn’t that the decaffeinated tea was particularly enjoyable; it was more the fact that it signalled we had made it through another day.
That and the fact that it brought with it biscuits that we would horse into ourselves. If we were very lucky then a tub of hot chocolate would also appear.
One night we were so pleased to find that precious tub of Cadbury’s on the trolley that we all made ourselves hot chocolate and sat around, sipping out of our plastic cups and trying and failing to muster the concentration to play Monopoly.
‘To an outsider I had failed society’s sanity test’
There were times when I knew an outsider would think I’d officially failed society’s sanity test, and not just because of my thoughts and actions.
Like the moment I held a metal fork for the first time in weeks after being transferred out of the special-care unit. I held it in my hand for a few minutes, appreciating its weight, then gently tapped it against the table, exclaiming when it made a slight noise. All that was left was to be trusted with a nonplastic plate.
That moment was comparable only to my delight at finally being able to store my clothes in my own wardrobe. It really was the little things that mattered.
There were times when I was scared, of course, like when I awoke in the middle of the night, a few days into my admission, to the sound of someone shouting at the top of their lungs.
Or when a patient would attack a nurse and have to be restrained, and the times when we were not allowed into the corridors because someone was flinging things around and trying to kick in doors.
And it was more than a bit frustrating to be confined to a ward with very little to do, to not be allowed to close the curtain around my bed except when getting dressed and to be permitted to walk around the small circular garden surrounded by nonstick walls only when supervised by a nurse.
Then there were the patients who refused to respect what little privacy we had, who would sit on other people’s beds, open the shower door when someone was inside and tell you every detail about their bodily functions.
‘Boredom is like torture’
Once I began to improve the boredom was like its own form of torture. I once spent a solid 40 minutes “exploring” the ward – that is, reading every notice word for word and deriving meaning from the pictures on the walls.
But the people I was sometimes scared of were the same people I would later play a game with or pass the football to. Someone who would one hour be shouting in my face would the next hour be a pleasant source of company. I soon learned not to judge people by their behaviour on any one day.
I also learned the power of a conversation.
I remember many of the things the nurses said to me, but, more than that, I remember how it felt to have someone look me in the eye, listen and calmly respond even when I was in high distress and quite irrational.
To be so vulnerable and to know that someone could still see past the haze of pain to the person I no longer thought existed was a powerful experience. They saw me when I was at my most desperate, yet they cared about me. At the time it didn’t make sense.
The emotional pain I was experiencing, the alternating numbness and utter overwhelm, is etched into my memory. It’s unlikely I will forget how it felt to be in an environment where the door handles sloped downwards, the toilets had no locks, laces were banned and every day an alarm would go off that would send 10, 20, 30 nurses pelting towards whichever one of us had given up.
I would much rather not know what it feels like to struggle through each minute, to be mummified by bandages, to wake up every morning and feel a fresh wave of dread, of hopelessness wash over me. But I do know what that’s like, and because of that I’ve met some of the most decent, genuine people I know.
I also now know it isn’t necessary to understand a person’s experience; what matters is that you appreciate that what they are going through is real and that they do what they do for reasons that make sense to them.
Unless you’re part of their treating team that’s all you need to know.
Sure, you could call us crazy, dismiss us, fear us. But they are the easy options. They ignore how real our pain is, how our states of mind are not reserved for a certain type of person, how we all have the ability to suffer mental anguish.
In the corridors and canteen it was almost impossible to distinguish patient from visitor.
We all looked like humans.
