New Beginnings (still cont'd)

So where I left off was March 31st, 2009...the day I was shipped up north to the state hospital. As if it weren't bad enough that I was being taken somewhere 5 hours away from my family and friends to a place that was a complete mystery to me as far as what it was going to be like and what was going to happen, I was handcuffed and put into the back of a car with the divider between the front and back seats. So it wasn't exactly comfortable, and inside all I could think about was how I didn't know how long I was going to be gone. People at the previous psych hospital had told me I'd only be there a month or so...but I had a deep gut feeling that it was going to be much longer than that. But I had no idea. Fear of the unknown. How many of us fear that? It is one the worst feelings to experience because you truly don't know what to expect. And that day, I had no clue what to expect. All I knew is that I was scared, lost, lonely, and very much not happy that I was being taken there. It was a five hour long drive, and of course my driver didn't stop the whole way up, not a single time. I was crunched in the back for five long hours, but luckily I was still in the stage of sleeping excessively, so I slept most of the way up. I woke up about thirty minutes before we got there and when we got there, I was ushered into this small room and much to my relief, they took off the handcuffs. Then a nurse and a psychiatric tech came in and began to ask me a lot of questions and go through the small plastic bag of things I was allowed to bring with me. After about an hour of this, the psych tech (who later became my favorite psych tech out of all of them) took me out on the unit. And talk about fear. I walked onto the unit and everybody was staring. I was the New patient that everyone was checking out. I felt completely naked and couldn't wait to run and hide under my sheets and go back to sleep. After the psych tech showed me around a little bit, that is exactly what I did. In fact for the next three days all I did was eat and sleep. Eat and sleep. The first day I got there I met my doctor and she asked me a lot of questions and I shocked myself because I was actually being honest with her. I guess I figured it couldn't get any worse, so why keep hiding it? And each time I met with her for the next three days, she would encourage me to go "socialize" with the other patients, but as soon as I walked back onto the unit, I went straight to bed. I was still terrified. Finally came the day that I got the courage to go sit out in the unit. I was actually greeted with friendly welcomes (which at the time I scoffed at in my head, thinking "yeah, welcome to the crazy hospital!" but for the most part everyone was nice. There were a couple patients that weren't as kind, but I managed to shrug it off and move on. And that's when it started...life in the mental hospital. They had classes during the week, a couple in the mornings and some on the afternoons. The afternoon classes were usually classes such as fitness, relaxation, yoga, and on specific nights they had crafts. But for the first week or two, I wasn't assigned to anything and I wasn't about to go on my own. I was still in my stubborn mindset that no one was going to be able to help me...that I was simply a lost cause. Finally I had what they called my 'IDT' meeting. I met with my doctor, my clinician, my nurse, and my TR person and we created my treatment plan. It was after this meeting that I had to start going to those classes. Around the same I was going even further downhill. At the previous hospital, I had been trying to find things to hurt myself, and as i stated in a previous post, I was placed on one on one observation for at least half my stay there. When I got up north, they didn't have any one on one supervision, so I had more freedom and much more time to think. This was a bad combination for me. After I fessed up to my doctor that I had a towel strip hidden in my room (to try and strangle myself with), they placed me in close observation. I ended up staying in there for a week. It felt like one of the longest weeks of my life.

I will continue with this further another night. It is late and I am tired. I hope someone is reading this and really, I just want to be able to spread hope that people who suffer from mental disorders CAN recover...it just takes a lot of work and determination. I'll write more later..