hospital
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I have felt absolutely sick to my stomach. I can’t eat, could hardly sleep. I can’t get my mind off the VA and my job and my healthcare and the fact a far right, obsessively anti-LGBT oligarchy is taking over. I haven’t heard back from my provider yet, so I’m calling back today after work.…
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I always knew this day would come, and it didn’t take long at all. Got another shitty work email this week. This time, a memo rescinding the VHA directive to provide gender-affirming care to trans vets. Effective immediately, the VA no longer provides gender-affirming care. “Unless such veterans are already receiving care from VA” –…
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I got the first 60 pages back of my book, proofread and edited. There are new pages, still blank, for a dedication and acknowledgment. I haven’t thought about the dedication or acknowledgment yet, but it will most likely be dedicated to Ceila and Shelly, who were there for me the whole time I was going…
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My book encompasses the first 100 or so posts of this blog, give or take. I’ve compiled it, formatted it, proofread it, and now it is with the publisher. They do their own editing and formatting to make it look good in book form. I have to pick the typeset I want. Soon I also…
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I don’t even know what to say. My meds keep me going, that is about it. I’m trying to focus on what I can control, like IOP taught me. I like exerting control over my environment, and I’ve been preparing my house for eventual move-in. I got my room painted, two different shades of blue.…
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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…
Documenting my journey through the mental health system 