hospital
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The Great Purge continues. Thousands of layoffs across crucial people’s services – social security, FDA…and soon the VA. Today they announced they planned to cut 80k jobs, to pre-2019 levels, before the PACT act and increased services to veterans affected by burn pits, among other things. Cutting 80k people would be devastating to veterans and
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The most bizarre feeling – I’ll never get over it – of watching a suicidal patient. That is my role tonight, on my last night before a couple days off. Every time I peek in on him, I’m taken back immediately to the mental hospital, forced to wear an anti-suicide turtle suit, and an aide
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At work at Sacred Heart – and flashbacks are not so terrible as they were. When I drove by the mental hospital, I was able to keep breathing and eventually slow my heart. When I saw all the ambulances in the ER bay, I looked away and kept moving. When I got up to the
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I can’t get them out of my head, the terrible flashbacks. A violent detainment, struggling in restraints, paranoid and angry and suicidal. Feeling a profound fear that something much worse than death was going to happen to me. Feeling intense anger as I was drugged with a shot to my shoulder. Feeling a profound sense
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I am so absolutely offended right now. That is hard to do. It’s disgusting – an unelected, un-American, out of touch billionaire who has never done a day of service in his life has no business asking me, a veteran, about what I do for veterans here at the VA hospital. But President Musk has
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More psych patients – on a nephrology floor. He tried to hang myself, like I tried to do ten years ago. Family found him, he was intubated, and then extubated, and is waiting on being medically cleared to the psych unit. He’s a 1:1 for safety. I’ve noticed my new coworkers don’t make me sit
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I could not sleep today. I took my meds but tossed and turned, images and memories burned into my brain, playing like a bad movie. I had a half dream/half memory of several people wrestling me into a bed and strapping me in. I could feel their needles as they shot me with drugs to
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I’m leaving early tonight and hanging out with Ceila as we do at this time of night – 3 in the morning – every two weeks. We used to work together on nights and now this is like our homage to that. Usually we go to Dennys but tonight it’s drinks at her house and
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A polar vortex is moving through Washington, specifically, Eastern Washington and Idaho. It has been so bitterly cold, down to 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit. I constantly worry about the pipes freezing at either of my two properties when the weather gets this absurdly cold. I sound like a broken record reminding my tenants to
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My patient is not getting better, he regressed tonight. They had taken him out of restraints and tried to keep him that way. They had also removed the foley catheter. When I got here, he peed everywhere and was trying to get out of bed. He got aggressive and even tried to hit me, but
Documenting my journey through the mental health system 