Honeybee's Hive

Chapter 11: Homestretch?

My period started and I was very unhappy about it because I didn’t have the freedom to grab a heat pack or take Tylenol as needed. So, I just suffered through the cramps. While I waited for breakfast, the morning news program was on in the background, and I started writing to my parents in my journal. There were fewer and fewer people to talk to, even though there were still so many patients around, so griping about things, like my cramps, in written form, helped me vent my emotions. Wait, did they just say George Harrison died? I was stunned and promptly added this news to my journal, though it would be old news by the time anyone read it. It really hit me hard, though, because I was already feeling cut off from my loved ones and The Beatles, through my Dad’s love of music, were a huge part of my childhood. I had chosen a favourite Backstreet Boy (AJ, obviously), so it felt natural to have a favourite Beatle as well. Mine was George. I liked his voice, he was handsome and his solo works were my favourites of the members’ individual endeavors. It made me homesick and also very sad. The gloom outside the window didn’t help.

The gloom persisted inside me as well. I grappled with what it meant to trust God. I thought that it meant He would get me out of there, and had even convinced myself much earlier in my stay that I was going to be released that very day. “God is telling me,” I insisted in my journal, “It’s going to be today.” I did not go home that day. 

Days turned into weeks. I had been admitted the evening of November 20th, and I awoke on December 1st, still stuck in place. I felt a longing for fellowship that I just wasn’t getting in the hospital. “Everytime a group ends,” I wrote, “ I feel like we should close in prayer. It’s an odd feeling. At meal time everyone digs in. I’ve been trying to remember and say my own grace. I really miss the God emphasis in my life. I feel so lost when I don’t hear His thoughts on how I feel.” 

I was startled by someone shouting and looked up to see one of the newer girls smashing buttons on one of the payphones and slamming things around. From what I could tell, she was annoyed it wasn’t giving her her coins back. Unfortunately, due to her tantrum, we were now down to one payphone for all of the patients to use. 

The following day, I was anxious to get answers. It was very difficult to get those from anyone it seemed. For one thing, I had been running a low grade fever off and on for over a week. As I mulled over which questions were most urgent, I overheard part of the conversation happening next to me. “I feel sick,” the girl was saying. I felt my body tense up. She started to go into detail to the person she was talking to, and I immediately started praying, selfishly, that it was nothing contagious. I say selfishly, because I wasn’t thinking of her, I was thinking of myself. 

“Courtyard!” Whenever I heard that now, I was grateful because it meant I could escape the stuffy ward and breathe in fresh air. Most of the people who had earned the privilege used that time as a smoke break, so I usually just sat or stood off to the side and talked with Violet. She was one of the few remaining people from the original group of women and girls who was already there when I was admitted. Since we were both kids, we both avoided the secondhand-smoke. On this particular day, she had company, though, so I found myself standing alone looking around the courtyard. It was a large area of grass, with some plants and a picnic table. It was situated in the middle of the building, so that we were outside but walled in by red brick on all sides. Above us, the sky was gray, and the trees stood naked in the crisp December air. A little squirrel was scurrying about on one of the roofs. It had a little hole in the tower, beneath a window that it kept darting into, but then would run back out of. It entertained me for a while and inspired me to draw a picture when I got back inside. It was quite chilly when it was time for our evening courtyard break, but I made a point of going because it made me feel alive for a brief time. 

That chilly December air also meant that Christmas was fast approaching, and my restlessness only increased. I was told to look at each day as, “I’m one day closer”, rather than “It’s been this many days…” It wasn’t very consoling when there was no end in sight, though. They never said, “You will be here until x day.” They just strung me along, telling me to keep at it, chiding me when I slipped up and leaving me alone without any answers for long stretches of time. “One day closer,” was as vague as, “It will all be better someday.” 

“Those one days are long,” I sighed, “They go by slow. Christmas is nearing, and I’m feeling rather desperate.” There was no one to answer me, of course, just the silent pages of my notebook. 

God still tugged at my heart, though, trying to get my attention in little ways. After expressing the weariness of waiting, especially because of where I was waiting, I went on to say it was a beautiful day. A girl named Carly and I had been admiring the trees during our time in the courtyard. All I could think was, “God is truly amazing to have created all this!” 

Still, it was hard to shake the desire to be home so desperately once the Christmas songs started playing on the radio. We even began to deck the hospital halls with Christmas decorations. “I want to go home and celebrate Jesus with my family. For the first time in a while I’m looking forward to Christmas.” I associated Christmas with illness, and so it was not a holiday I greeted with enthusiasm, but I was so homesick that I was looking forward to the celebration that year. 

Sometimes, there were pleasant distractions to help the time pass a little more quickly. I was able to join Ginger for another off unit craft project. She reminded me of Rizzo from the movie Grease. Together, we whipped up quite a few pot-potpourri filled sachets. Being able to focus my mind on creating something was wonderful, but what got me truly excited was when Ginger said she needed to escort another patient back to their unit first, before she could walk me back to mine. No rush, really. Please take your time. We took the elevator and I was elated by this simple activity because I was not confined, I felt free for a time. 

The question hung in the air, though. “When will I get to go home?” I just wanted a date, a goal to get to, assurance that this wasn’t going to last forever. Emotions ran high in the unit, and people acted out pretty regularly. Just like the phone being broken because of one patient’s outburst, and another attempting an escape, or even the absolute wreck I was upon arrival, were all examples. It was a very tense place to dwell, and one spark could ignite a fire. All it took on this particular day was one of the girls finding out she was not on the list for courtyard, even though she had been going out with us before. In response, she yanked the flowers from a nearby vase and screamed as she ripped them apart. She ended up in the “quiet room”. It was easy to judge how it could have been handled better from the outside, but I know in her shoes I probably would have been devastated too to be told I couldn’t go get that little bit of fresh air. Those moments always left me unsettled.

If it wasn’t the patients yelling, it was the staff. Everything was shouted. “Vitals! Lunch! Smokes! Commodes! Etc.!!” And of course, we can’t forget the early morning wake up call. 

My fifteen-year-old senses were flooded with too much stimuli and situations I would rather have not been exposed to ever. The people around me were all mentally ill, so a lot of  the things that came out of their mouths were shocking and upsetting. I was struggling with mental illness as well, of course, but I was still horrified by how dark it was for the people I was surrounded by. I was doing the best I could to be upbeat, and have a positive outlook. I didn’t alway succeed but I was driven and determined to get out. However, I wasn’t the only one desperate to leave. One woman said, “If they don’t let me out by Friday, I won’t be leaving here alive. I have something.” They let her leave on Thursday. 

“I went outside for courtyard. I sat and breathed in fresh air.” Appreciating all of the little things was a bittersweet side effect of being in the hospital for so long. Before we went in the staff member told us to go take a look at some huge mushrooms that had grown on one of the trees. My excitement was in the fact that I was allowed to walk, “I sit so much it makes me sore. Last night I had to ask for Tylenol.” 

“C’est mercredi le 5 decembre 2001. It is Wednesday the 5th of December 2001.” Whether I wrote the date in French or English, it was still the start of my fifteenth day waking up to my never-ending confinement. As my eyes adjusted to the idea of me being awake, I noticed the beds had been slightly rearranged. And why is there a chair in the doorway? Later, I learned it was because one of the new girls was dubbed a “c /o patient”, which given circumstances I could only assume meant “constant observation.” So, there would be a lady there each night…observing. 

I did a lot of things I didn’t want to do, all in the hopes it was going to get me out of there soon. I followed the embarrassing bathroom rules, didn’t skip meals even if I didn’t feel like eating, never refused a group session (even though I wasn’t fond of them), lined up for vitals on time, and made my bed every morning just as I was told to. Still, I felt like there was some code I couldn’t crack. People would arrive, have the worst attitudes or have serious restrictions placed on them, but be discharged in a week. It was all so discouraging and I struggled to keep treading water. “It’s after breakfast. I hardly felt able to eat. I’ve lost my drive,” I confessed, “I’ve lost my determination. I’m going insane here. I felt so good, but now I feel nothing, but everything at once. I’m so confused.”

The seeming injustice of it all was more than I could bear. Being in the hospital because anxiety had manifested in an eating disorder was really difficult when the staff was constantly putting so much pressure on you to eat, but in a certain amount of time, and you didn’t get to choose what you ate. Did I mention I was a picky teenager? I managed to get my portion of Nubasics down the night before and decided I would attempt to eat my snack as well. So, for every half of a cracker,  I would eat a scoop of cheese. However, I had already spent part of my allotted time drinking the vanilla-esque nutritional supplement, so this slow eater didn’t have much time to work with. 

I reported my food intake to the lady in charge of taking down the information that night and she scoffed, “It looks like you just moved it around.” She questioned me as if I was lying, and I wanted to scream. I was honest to a fault at times, all because I had one singular goal in mind: get them to let me go home. I was livid. Instead, I had the powers-that-be questioning why I was “restricting” my intake and doubting me. I don’t know, maybe it’s because you rush me and feed us the worst food? Honestly, I didn’t think I was restricting my intake, even choking down some of the foods I didn’t like, like strawberry blintzes, all in the name of getting to go home. If I didn’t touch it, it was because I really really didn’t like it. Even if you attempted to make something more palatable, you were chided. Carol, another girl in the unit, got in trouble for mixing yogurt in with her Cheerios. “You can’t substitute anything,” I griped, “When they say ‘30 min’, you stop eating or drinking immediately…This is why I’ve been leaving stuff. Time runs out so fast.”

They again served something spicy and I couldn’t eat it, so they marked down that I didn’t eat anything. Strike. Strike. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right. One of the staff started barking at us about picking up our things before they would distribute linens, so I gathered my belongings and set my bag by the door to my room. The door was open, though, so I thought I could put my bag inside. Nope! It was only open because one of my roommates was on bedrest, and I got yelled at for going in. 

“Will I be here forever,” I wondered, “It feels very true.”

My weight plateaued for a bit, and it did nothing to alleviate my worries. I just hoped they would make good meals on Thursday, my sixteenth day stuck in my own personal purgatory. To my great relief, they served bagels with cream cheese. That was something I could get behind. I also had a banana, some pineapple juice and some milk. My friend, Violet, and I both left the thing we weren’t excited to eat for last. For her it was a banana, but for me it was the cold scrambled eggs. They weren’t cold because it took me a while for me to get to them either. Ew.

As time wore on my desire to be home only grew stronger, but my hope of ever returning there grew weaker and weaker. “I came in here with anxiety and depression,” I wrote, “My weight had dropped significantly. Food was good, but hunger became a stress. The anxiety filled my body, depression took up any extra spaces. When I felt hungry I’d freeze up and my hunger became nausea. I’d be so hungry, and yet full.” In exasperation, I continued, “Now, I’m here in a hospital. They notice how down I am. Do they realize I’ve been less anxious? Do they care when I am happy? No!” The pigeon-hole I’d been shoved into was very evident in the doctors’ and therapists’ inability to address me where I was personally. They treated everyone like a faceless, textbook patient, regardless of their motivations, or demotivators for that matter.

“All they say to me is ‘you have control over your weight.’ I had told her, just awhile ago, that I was disappointed when I didn’t gain. She’d asked if I feared gaining weight. They really don’t get it. If they did, she wouldn’t have responded with this, ‘Well, have you been eating everything?’ Hello! No, I haven’t. I told her I run out of time (or don’t like it).” I was beyond frustrated with her answer, “She said force yourself to do the 80%-90%. I have been. Don’t they get that? I keep telling myself my best is good enough, but they sure make me doubt myself. I feel like my best isn’t good enough. I am so discouraged.”