Day Seventeen (part 1): Early Morning Blurred Lines

My unconscious mind is roused by a voice calling my name, but I can't put a face to it. "Therese? Therese?...." I am still somewhere betwixt dreams and wakefulness and the heavy sort of confusion of that state clouds my senses. "Therese? Therese, wake up. Wake up, Therese." The voice is insistent and somewhere in my half awake brain, I realise that whoever it belongs to must know me, so I roll over in the bed and automatically reach to turn my CPAP off. My hand grapples with empty air beside the bed and suddenly, a realization hits me. I am not at home. Oh God, it wasn't a dream. Despite my inability to see anything clearly without my glasses, I suddenly know exactly where I am. The voice says, "Therese, you need to go down to the nurse's station for a blood draw." I bristle. My CPAP continues to hum quietly and whoosh with each breath I take. The person belonging to that voice is standing in the doorway of my room and although she is less than ten feet away, I cannot tell that she is a she except for the pitch of her voice. Apparently satisfied that I am awake enough to have heard her message, she disappears. I am not getting out of this bed to go give them any of my blood. Too fucking bad. I lay back down and turn over on the hard foam mattress and refold the thin pillow beneath my head, hearing it crinkle as I lay my head down. I pull the thin waffle weave blanket over my head, close my eyes, and go back to sleep.

"Therese? Therese, wake up. Wake up, Therese..." the voice returns. I don't know how long I have been asleep, but it feels as though some time has passed. I turn over and open my eyes. "Therese, the lab needs that blood and they've gotta leave in a minute. You need to get up and go down there and let them do the blood draw," the voice continues. I tear the covers back violently and sit up. "Good. Now hurry up, they can't stay all day." She disappears. I sit there, looking around the room without my glasses. Everything is blurred and confused looking. I see a human body sized lump in the other bed that tells me that my roommate is there and still asleep. I can't really see her though. I don't even really remember what she looks like or her name even though she introduced herself to me last night. I bend down and turn off the CPAP, remove my mask and sit there cross legged on my bed. I don't want to walk down the hall or give them anything. I don't want to cooperate with them in any way. I just want to go home.

Tears further blur my vision and begin to stream down my face as I remember my conversation with Gray on the phone. I could hardly speak intelligibly because every time I started to talk, I burst into tears all over again. I kept telling him that I wanted to come home. I told him about wanting to sign out against medical advice but that they wouldn't let me leave without someone coming to pick me up. I had even asked about calling a taxi to take me home and they said they wouldn't let me do that, that it had to be someone. By the time we talked, Gray had indeed already gotten home and tucked the girls in and was headed for bed himself. There was no way for him to come get me without waking the girls and I knew even as I asked him that it would be unfair to upset them like that. There was no one to come get me and no way to leave. Gray told me that he and the girls would be coming to visit me the next evening for visiting hours and that we could talk then and figure all of this out. We didn't get much discussing of anything constructive done because he spent most of the phone call trying to comfort me as best he could and reassure me that I would make it through this and come out stronger on the other side. Needless to say, I didn't believe him. How could anyone come out of this place stronger for it?

This is a place that doesn't help people who need help and breaks people who don't need help. This became very apparent to me in the few hours after my settling in as I watched patients coming and going down the hall and in and out of the dayroom and as I watched the staff whose overall attitude toward the patients can be summed up in five words: "We don't give a fuck." I spent the rest of the evening crying and then stopping and crying again. It was an almost continuous crying jag until I finally laid down for the night. The on-call doctor prescribed some Ambien to help me sleep and I took it, but it did absolutely nothing except make me slightly dizzy. I think it was close to 1:00am by the time I finally decided to try and sleep.

Even the process of getting ready to go to sleep is made harder here. At home, when I am ready to go to sleep, I slip on my CPAP mask, lay down and go to sleep. Here, as I discovered last night, I must wait until I am ready to go to bed and then retrieve my CPAP bag with the machine and mask from the medicine room, take it to my room, remove the machine, tube, mask, and cords, assemble everything, go back to the medicine room, hand over my bag, and then go back to my room. I must also put my machine on the hospital floor as there is no bedside table of any kind and the bookshelf that holds my other belongings is too far away from the bed. As it is, I had to move my stuff last night from my original room to this one when I discovered that the room I was in had no electrical outlet. Apparently they only have certain rooms that have outlets to plug in stuff.

Once I got set up with my CPAP, trying to slow down my brain was another issue too. The bed itself didn't help as it is just a very very hard foam slab sitting on top of a wooden platform kind of frame. Did I mention how thin the pillow is? It was so thin that it could barely be called a pillow and was covered in some kind of plastic that crinkled every time I moved. I wound up folding it in half to make it thicker and that helped some, but it was still uncomfortable and noisy. I think the only reason that I finally fell asleep is that my body was so completely spent from all the stress and crying that I literally was unable to stay conscious, despite my brain's best efforts at keeping me so.

The blurry outline of what must be a person appears in the doorway and speaks, jolting me back to the present moment. "They're still waiting to get that blood draw."

"Yeah, I know," I croak, my voice still thick with slumber. What I dearly want to say is, "Fuck you. Go away." Not terribly Christian of me, I know, but in this place, I have ceased to care about anything as high and mighty as my Christian example.

"Well, hurry up," she says and again vanishes from the doorway. I really don't want to go do this blood draw. I don't want to give them any part of me, but I also don't want to be continually hounded and pestered by this stupid woman either, so I acquiesce and walk down the hall in my nightgown and sandals. Someone behind the desk sees me coming and she points me toward the room where Linda and I "talked" last night. I go in and sit down. It is over fairly quickly and soon I am minus about two vials of blood and plus one bit of cotton held down by medical tape. As I pass the nurse's station, I catch a glance of a very old style clock, fixed high up on the wall. I have my glasses now and I do a double take. It reads 6:20am. Since the blood draw took about 5 minutes and I know the saga of them trying to wake me and make me come down here was a good thirty minutes, I do the math...they woke me up at 5:45am to make me come give them some blood? What is WRONG with these people? I scowl at the clock and keep walking down the hall. I am going back to bed.

I wake up a little while later and for several moments, forget where I am. Then I hear a man's voice. "Ms. Moma? Therese? Can you wake up please?" I open my eyes and peer around the tubing and mask on my face. There is a vaguely human shaped shadowy sort of form beside my bed. Without my glasses though, I cannot discern who it is, but I wish he would leave. He must have seen me open my eyes though because he says, "Ah, good morning Ms. Moma. I'm Dr. Hastings." Fabulous. The &#@$ing doctor. "So I'm going to be taking care of you while you're here," he continues, apparently oblivious to the fact that I am, in fact, laying in my bed, braless, in my nightgown, CPAP mask on my face, CPAP running, and minus my glasses so that I can't see a damn thing. I am so appalled by the fact that he doesn't seem to care about any of this that I say nothing in reply. He continues on, "I noticed on your chart, " he pauses and looks down at what must be a folder or sheaf of papers in his hand, "that you're not taking any medication at this time. Is that correct?"

I mumble, "Yeah, that's right."

He keeps on going. "It looks like Dr. Bartlett wanted to put you on Remeron. It's an older drug, but given your history, it might be just the right thing to help with your appetite and help you get more stabilized." Is there no other word or phrase in the English language that they can use to say this other than "get stable" or "get stabilized?" I find a sudden desire to punch this joker in the throat. Instead, I say nothing and just scowl at him through my mask. "So how do you feel about starting Remeron? We'd start it tonight since it sometimes makes people a bit sleepy," he adds.

"I want to go home," I reply.

"Of course you do. And once we get you started on something, as long as you tolerate it well, you'll be able to go home. So how about starting on that Remeron tonight?" he replies and I can tell that it is a reply he has given probably hundreds of times based on the ease with which it slips through his lips.

"Fine. Whatever. Sure," I answer. He goes on to ask me how the Ambien that the on-call doctor gave me worked for me and I tell him that it didn't work. He says I don't have to take it again, but that he has observed that a lot of patients report that their sleep medicine doesn't work the first night they are there, but when they try it the second night, after they're more settled, they see that it helps a lot. I am doubtful that this will be the case for me. He suggests I give it another try tonight and I just shrug in response.

"So, it's about 7:15. They will be calling everyone to go to the cafeteria for breakfast in a little while. Do you want to go to breakfast?" he asks, clearly wrapping things up. Dear God, he came in here at 7:15? What is the deal with all the early waking me up stuff? I have not eaten since noon yesterday, but I am not in any way hungry.

"No, I just want to go home," I reply, as tears start to slide down my face from beneath my mask. 

"Well, let's start that Remeron and you'll be home soon," he replies and moves to go. "I'll see you tomorrow then," he adds and just like that, he is gone. As I watch him walk through the door, my tears begin in earnest. I turn off my CPAP and remove my mask and sob into my pillow.

(click here for Day Seventeen (part 2): ???)