Part One: When Life Hands You Lemons, Juggle.

by Alexa on November 27, 2006

Several years ago, I cracked under the formidable weight of unfortunate circumstance and spent four days in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. I had been gripped by what felt like a single undulating anxiety attack for weeks, and showed up at the emergency room with a backpack full of books and my knitting, ready to throw myself upon the mercy of professionals.

Strangely, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would end up in the psychiatric ward—I was thinking of something more along the lines of the “exhaustion ward,” or the “tea and sympathy ward.” Sure, I had stopped sleeping and eating, and had cried myself into dehydration. Why yes, I had spent four hours the night before wandering the streets in my pajama pants, wishing for death. But it wasn’t until I was being wheeled to my room, noticing how far we had traveled from the main part of the hospital, and hey, weren’t there an awful lot of locks on the doors? that understanding flared and I panicked, assuring the nurse that I didn’t belong here, all I needed was an adjustment to my medication, and couldn’t they do that someplace…brighter? Where the hallways didn’t smell quite so emphatically of urine?

To make matters worse, there was no room on the top floor, the floor for garden variety depressives and neurotics, and so I would have to stay on the one below—the floor for people well enough that their rooms were unpadded, but crazy enough that…
Well. Crazy enough.

I was the only one of my floormates new to the inpatient mental health system, and most of the conversation centered around the accommodations at other hospitals around town: which allowed smoking, which had the best snacks (St. Joseph’s), and which visiting hours were longest and most carelessly supervised. Among my fellow residents were a schizophrenic who sat near the television, swiping with her cane at anyone who tried to change the channel; a Hmong woman who roamed the common area, pushing an imaginary vacuum while mumbling fretfully in her native tongue; and my roommate: a chatty 80-year-old named Irene, with a distractingly silky mustache.
On my first night I got up to visit the bathroom and stepped in a puddle of Irene’s urine. She had fallen and broken her hip, and I ran wetly to the nurses’ station for help, wondering how, exactly, I had ended up where I was, and what would prevent me from revisiting this place in the future.

I met with a psychiatrist, who prescribed an antidepressant and a high dose of a new anti-anxiety medication, which I took for the first time at dinner that night. Within forty minutes I felt powerfully, blessedly well, able to access my logical faculties for the first time in weeks. I went to check out a phone. The telephones were kept unplugged behind the desk of the nurses’ station, so that we wouldn’t attempt to hang ourselves with the cord or beat ourselves senseless with the heavy black base. I found an empty jack and dialed the number of my best friend, who answered on the first ring.
“How are you?” she asked, and looking from the phone to my regulation gray scrubs and slipper socks, remembering the look of horror on the nurse’s face when she found the knitting I had packed to help pass the time—tip: don’t pack knitting needles for a stay in the psych ward—I could not help but see the humor in my situation.
Or maybe that was the drugs.
“I’m better,” I said. And I really was.

I spent a lot of time talking to my slipper-socked compatriots, and even got a little Scrabble tournament going. My friends and family had long since stopped playing Scrabble with me, but there in the hospital it was easy to coax people into a game, seeing as how they were heavily medicated. Of course I had to take every other turn for a woman who kept bursting into tears and leaving the table, but I think we all had a good time. At night I lay sleeplessly next to Irene and listened to my thumping heart, and in my head I told the story of my day to an imaginary audience.

I believe I owe my recovery, in part, to the decision to beat back my fear and sadness with the blunt stick of humorous narration. Laughing at myself was easier than wondering whether I would end up like my roommate, and the tragedies of a hapless protagonist are handily made comedy by a narrator, which is why I had always preferred the latter role.

When the nurse left me in my room that first day, I’d asked for a pen and paper, determined to turn my stay into a wry journal entry. I was a big believer in the power of perspective, certain there was no situation so grim I couldn’t undercut it with flippancy. After all, when Lucy Ricardo was desperately stuffing chocolates down her shirt alongside a malfunctioning conveyor belt, I am certain she was terrified, and occupied entirely with the ‘splaining she’d have to do—but wasn’t it funny for the rest of us?

To Be Continued…

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Part One: When Life Hands You Lemons, Juggle.

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