Documenting my journey through the mental health system

There is a construction zone around 4th avenue, and I must detour on my way to work. The mental hospital is on my route to work, so now instead of driving by it, I drive with it looming in front of me. I don’t know that I will ever get over it. I have a lot of issues with PTSD. I even had a nightmare last night about being taken away again by police. It was insane and I’m on medication for bad dreams.

I go through a lot of effort to not attract attention to myself. I am unique among people; I see things others don’t see. I can get through most situations like a chameleon.

I have a weird variety of patients tonight. One transplant, those are fun. We have done over 80 kidney transplants this year, beating last year’s record. But sometimes they fail. There is the next patient – newly placed nephrostomy tube and a brand-new kidney, failing in his body. Sometimes I get the random shit that has no place, the patients with problems that go beyond the physical into the mental and social. Patients with persistent and chronic anxiety, borderline behaviors, and mental issues exacerbated by the reason they were driven to the ER in the first place – merciless nausea and vomiting, blood sugars bouncing around all over the place, festering wounds in their sacrums and coccyx, infections, sepsis, encephalopathy, and of course, the suicide attempts.

They have to get stable before they can go to psych, willing or unwilling. Hangings, overdoses, cutting, all manner of self-destruction, desperation, and despair. I was in all their shoes. I’ve never told a patient about my own demons or the fact a detainment experience mirrors my own, or anything like that…but in my head I’m screaming and triggered and again wondering what the fuck got me here? I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t be here.

Ceila says that’s bullshit and I’m very good at what I do, especially since I’ve been through life as a patient. Maybe, but the triggers and trauma are all consuming sometimes. I didn’t ask to bear witness to the worst day of a psych patient’s life! Today I laid in my bed after work, door shut, staring at the ceiling under my weighted gravity blanket and wondered what the fuck am I doing here? Patients’ traumas replayed in my mind as though my own. Was I depressed? Maybe a little. I dissociated so hard I never took my meds.

I get so tired, so depressed, the littlest things are supremely overwhelming. Everything feels so silly and pointless. Hopeless. The world is just getting worse. Maybe I am too. More jaded. More afraid. Definitely more depressed.

The littlest things are overwhelming but I’m trying to do big things. Like grad school. I don’t know what I will do with it and that doesn’t really matter. But the enormity of the project is bearing down on me. It hasn’t been so terribly difficult so far, some points of frustration along the way, but my GPA is 3.6 and I’ve stayed ahead of schedule on the schoolwork. The hard part is yet to come – the applied practice experience. I have to figure out some way to work that into my Sacred Heart job. SH also comes with tuition assistance, and I put in my application for that last night. It’s a reimbursement, so I think I’ll end up with a check for 5k, the maximum allowable under the rules for graduate school assistance.

Right now, I just want to sleep. And forget. Riley from IOP says to remember the glimmers when the triggers get to be too much. Remember their opposites…go look for them if you have to. They are hard for me to notice; I do a terrible job acknowledging them. My cats, my coffee, chocolate (I eat too much of it) and the little moments I steal for myself on breaks at work, or alone in my room. I need a lot of solitude. I am grateful, really – I’m doing better now than I ever have – but that feeling is so tenuous.