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.

fiction/hospital thoughts...

Finally, the morning routine was over.

Shitty asses have been wiped, washed and clothed for the morning. Mouths stuffed full of food in their required consistency pureed for the toothless yobs who long since lost their teeth falling down from seizures or worse still, the ones old enough who got their teeth yanked for being a bit too nippy. Thicker food for those clients up for the challenge but even then, statistically speaking youd have to leap across a table and fish out a hank of egg at least once a month.
Those were the worst. The "smarter ones", but they would sit silently as they choked on something. You would be in a frantic state trying to set down food and accost others who were trying to steal more never really feeling as though you were keeping up with things and in a pissed off mood because no doubt your apartment partner was picking their nose in front of the tv.
"Oh I put my time in little one. Time for the new staff to work a little."
I could have stomached it if they actually did something occasionally.
You would be supervising the whole mess Thinking in the back of your mind, Thank fuck [insert consistent asshole name here] isnt acting up. What a relief.
And thats when panic sets in and you look at the asshole and realize thats not normal or am I just paranoid? Asshole sitting there, calm and looking at you with wide eyes, fork in hand and no trouble on the horizon.
You get back to work and try to read a little in the log book to see what trouble everyone had been in on your days off. Still, that persistent little twinge, somethings not right here kemosabe. Aunt Wendy called it Indian sense, I just looked at it as common sense, Indian shit be damned.
You turn back and theres six clients at the table. Then the other 3 in wheelchairs looking at you with bovine eyes as their feeding tubes filled up their bellies and eventually into a slick shit pile in their diapers that smells no different than when I poured it out of the can.
Petey is still sitting like a good boy, not trying to steal from anyone, not even attempting to make a scene. Something is terribly wrong.
As I walk towards him Petey's head makes a thwack noise as it hits the plate in front of him. Hes been chocking this entire time and hes been too stupid to let you know. His silence was from a piece of stolen toast turned in his throat and more food stuffed in to try and push it down. Never a good solution, but they're all living in a mental institution, so what do I expect?
Petey slid to the floor and I caught his shoulders to ease him down. I looked up to see the other clients reaching for his plate and yanking food off to eat.
"Fucking vultures! Back! GREG! Get the nurse! Petes chocking."
"Oh gosh darn. Not Pete."
He wasnt even running. he didnt even notice my hands in Petes hepatitis infested mouth trying to keep it open and not biting my non-gloved hand. Got it!
Gahk! Gahk! Gahk!
Phew I sat back and let Petey catch his breath. The nurse can take over from here. Dopey faces peered over the table to look at Pete, most of them still chewing the food they took off his plate and a few bold ones leaned over to dunk bits into the ketchup cup given to him specially.
The nurse clopped in at an alarmingly slow pace and didnt even bend down.
"Well for the love of god Can you please get this patient off the floor?"
No one offered to help me, and Petey, full of life and oxygen had reverted back to his normal dickish ways went limp and turned into a 160 pound lump for me to lift and put into a recliner.
"Aw poor Petey." Damn you, you obese cow with a stethascope! You can't even check his blood pressure because your gel nails are too long to actually manipulate medical equipment. "Must have had quite the scare!" Petey nodded and pointed at me.
"I no supposed to have toasts I almost die from toasts!"
Tisk tisk tisk from the nurse and I grabbed the accident report sheets from the desk and went out to the deck before I killed someone.
My heart beat fast and I tried to talk myself down enough to stop shaking. I turned over my hands to look for bite marks and felt a little surge of calm when there was nothing there. I fumbled around in my pockets for a small bottle of sanitizer to slather my hands. In the process I got a dollop of it on the accident report sheets. Fuck!
The faint sound of synchronized foot steps approached. Bliss. After all this I could at least take the time to watch the police cadets do some laps around the grounds the hospital rented out to the school. It was summer and their shirts were gone by the second lap. Bliss.
My hands quivered still as I parked a cigarette in my lips. The accident report could wait as hard bodies galloped past.
"Haaaaaaaaaaaay beeeeeh-beeeeeee!"
Anthony ran with them every day out of spite. He could out-run any of them, but mostly that was because hes too stupid to know what exhaustion is. I waved to him and yelled back, "Hi behhbee!"
"Woo wooo!! Cahm on behbees! Wun wun wun!"
The cadets looked stunned at Anthonys surge of energy and sprinting past the group. I pulled my sunglasses down over my eyes and gawked at sweaty men. Shit, I deserve something nice after all that bullshit. At least the mornings over.