fiction

another shift on the ward... hot as steamy piss. no wait, that's just what it smelled like in the back. no matter how often i emptied the trash, wiped things down, wiped the clients down... it always hung in the air. trapped in the humidity that wafted in during the summer.
i would be green in the mornings. literally on the verge of throwing up because i was upright at 6am. the auto pilot would click on and away I'd shuffle to start to wake up the apartment. who am i kidding? most of them were up already. some in bed waiting, others slinking around the back halls which always unsettled me. i had a back pocket full of medium gloves... and flipped on the tub room lights to turn on the beast of tub. the lights always casting an annoying tint to the room, an assault on my eyes.
bath time... always interesting, always different depending on what apartment i was in. i stared off into nothing shampooing hair and becoming more aware at the dampness that got into the gloves... pockets of water that always got in... always created red ruts on my fingers that sometimes split open and I would end up making it worse from wearing gloves more often because you don't need weeping sores working with hepatitis positive patients.
the supervisor i had the first summer worked as a nurse in some tough psych hospitals in England... eventually becoming a nursing teacher and somehow ending up in the Hospital as my bosses boss. She offended some of the sow staff who didn't get her chilly sarcasm or appreciated how skilled she was. everything was a learning moment... but more importantly just some hard skills behind what she was showing me. she talked to me about how i was eerily calm in Big Freakouts and just had made a decent name as a summer student who wasn't too terribly stupid.
her emphasis was on how your actions could make things better or make things worse... jean was keen on getting me aware of what i was actually putting a patient through when i tried to confront someone raging or someone who was having literally a psychotic episode. terrifying for the patient to be sure and made worse by a bad decision. jean was talking to me about how rare it is to use a 4 point restraint in the Hospital now... and only if the patient is ripping the apartment down or practically killing someone. still, it had happened after we had all gotten clobbered by a patient who was so good... except it was like he turned into a different guy for 3 weeks. just like someone had replaced his sweet little personality. regardless it was a hairy situation where we had all been rushed to stop him from tearing into guys who were in that apartment. the force of screaming, the clawing and punching made worse by the fact that he's blind and in tune with anything getting up close to him.
it was difficult to try and help the full timers get him to calm down... he would be still and boom! someone would get hit again... all dramatic recreations aside we finally got the go ahead to put him in a restraint... i wasn't able to do it personally but i had to sit in the room and try to hold down his legs then arms. the final moment before i left i asked him if he was going to be calm... he relaxed his hands and nodded... and as I got up from the bed he dug his nails into my arm and curled them up. Holy mother of god... there's one lesson learned...
so that was over and i was clearly affected by it. it's something where I can't imagine being in that bed, but conflicted because i had a puffy face and a scratched up arm that stung from his nails. i had fallen back when he slapped me and took his hand with me... i was despondant thinking that i had seriously hurt him... or as jean had been trying to teach me, make things worse by my actions.
We sat in the apartment livingroom and chilled out for a moment to try and figure out what caused this outburst. 5 people could hardly get him to stand up and walk without lashing out. what was wrong? why did he do it? did we do the right thing? should be have put the restraints on sooner before he kicked the shit out of everyone? Perry, a roomate of the patient who got thumped as well screamed in his downs syndrome drawl and cut into my thoughts, "he hit mwee!" clearly he was happy at the situation being dealt with.
Jean chatted for a bit and plopped the set papers i had to fill out... any time i got smacked and a supervisor saw it we had to fill something out. the union felt that this would prevent us from filing a claim because the forms would take so stupidly long. or at least that was my conspiracy theory.
i was filling out the forms with an icepack on the side of my face. getting too warm to be of much comfort but had done nothing to sooth the throb of my face. i was getting sweat in my eyes because the a/c was broken and i was depending on a breeze to come through the side patio door. i was awash in thoughts, worry, feeling perplexed as to why this usually calm guy was going ballistic.... and in the background a bigger debate was unfolding.
Perry was defending himself from Mikey's criticisms. "no-ah... you wee-taded" and Mikey with a stutter, "N n n no no NO you're retarded!" Seriously. They were trash talking each other on who was more retarded and it was heating up rapidly until the apartment was filled up with them squalling the r word over and over and over until i stood bolt up right. "you're both retarded stop it!!"
[pause]
"S... s .. s ssee? I told y y y ya you were."
i chucked the forms into the trash and got juice and some cookies for the three of us since it was the universal food and drink of snack time and calm the fuck down time. I appologized but all i got was big goofy smiles caked in oreo cookie brown-black and obliged them in a toast... and then another toast 5 minutes later because, well, Perry forgot that we had already done it. Dah well.