This surgery coming up will put me in the hospital for four days.
Six years ago, I was in inpatient in the psychiatric ward for almost three months as I recovered from a psychotic break so severe I didn't even know my own name. Part of me died from being locked up in there. I was mistreated, stripped, drugged, abused, and nobody did anything because who is going to believe the crazy girl? The french nurses yelled at me in a language I couldn't understand. My crying was treated with needles full of haloperidol injected into my leg while I fought the security guard to get away. Code White blaring on the intercom. My clothes: taken and replaced with a loose hospital gown, showing off my fresh bruises. I would find myself locked up in a cold concrete room with nothing but a bare mattress and a toilet.
I begged my parents every day to get me out of there. And they tried. They wanted me transferred to a different hospital. They wanted me under a different doctor, but I was 18 so they had no legal right to dictate my medical treatment and the hospital knew it. The nurses hid thier mistakes by keeping me sedated and afraid.
Think of it like this: there is a patient who is in severe mental health crisis. You can help her by comforting her, talking her down, and teaching healthy coping methods OR you can help yourself and shut her up with some haloperidol so you can get back to your mountain of paperwork because you are an overworked under-paid nurse. I got haloperidol. Every time.
I was never a danger to anyone. I was never a danger to myself. I was a nuisance. I was noisy.
Now every time I walk the halls of that hospital to and from my ortho appointments I am treated to vivid flashbacks, and even though I am floors away from the psych ward, I am afraid. I'm paranoid that someone will sense my anxiety and demand I return there to treat it. Every interaction with hospital staff has me on edge. Even though today was my fourth round of pre-op tests (for my fifth surgery) I stammered through answering thier questions, not trusting myself to know what would happen next and ready to flee at a moment's notice.
In the years since all this happened I have been in counselling. I've been told I have Complex PTSD. It takes constant effort to keep myself from feeling like everything I have will be taken away at any moment.
