There is a new patient on the ward, Kerry, a tall, black woman who has been harassing me for days and calling me racist every time there is a conflict. She accuses and abuses me in religious terms mingled with hate words like bitch, says fuck God and Jesus, etc, and when I have taken issue with it the approach from staff has been to tell us both to be quiet.
Jim came back on the ward this week, he is doing nights. He seems to think that all he has to do is turn his lovely face on me and all will be forgiven. Or maybe it is just me that thinks it should be that way and I need to free myself from that requirement I have of myself and from the power of the need I want met by being able to do that.
His first night on was last night. He was on with Sue, the nurse who told me to f off then lied about it and has since been calling me love and darling. I find that aggressive and mauling, especially in the particular circumstances with her. Last night (Sunday) I asked Jim if we could have some time to talk. I was upset about things that had happened in the day (I didn’t tell him that), and he said no, he had things he needed to catch up on, but he would try today, but wouldn’t put anything in the diary because ‘sod’s law doesn’t work that way’. So everything is handed over to the whims of sod’s law then, is it, with nothing to oppose or raise as a goal? I noticed that before midnight he had time to sit around the office having casual chats with the members of his team, including one from Eastern Europe, asking her about her family, but he didn’t have any time to talk to me, and he has been away 5 weeks or so. During this time other senior members of the staff have also been doing duties off the ward, following, it seems, my blog post about the ‘bust up’. Ruth, the ward manager, approached me a few weeks ago saying some of the staff were hurt and upset about the fact their names had been used in my blog and that she had been advised that if I didn’t remove the names they could. I haven’t had that in writing. I think I should ask for it, through my advocate. I tried to settle to sleep last night and after midnight I found I couldn’t, so eventually I went out to Jim and said I couldn’t settle and needed either ten minutes to talk or some lorazepam to help me settle. He told me they weren’t allowed to have one to ones after midnight and that I would have to have lorazepam. Last night was at my request, though a begrudging request. Tonight they forced an injection on me.
Tonight Kerry kept winding me up and picking on me and eventually Judita, one of the health care assistants, told me she thought she was doing it on purpose to wind me up. I asked her why she hadn’t tried to stop her if that was what she thought and she asked how she could. I said she should have told Jim, the nurse in charge tonight. Kerry started calling me racist, saying she was black and I am white, I told her it was nothing to do with race, it was just that she was harassing me and being a nuisance. She started saying I thought I was something and saying that everyone was scared of me but too frightened to say so because I had physical bulk. I said no one was scared of me. I felt it in my womb every time she started on me and I interpreted it as something to do with her energy and the nature of her accusations (I think now this might have been wrong, that the fact I felt it there was more to do with the oppressiveness of the whole place and power), and I said I wasn’t a prostitute. She has told me she had been, in what I thought was a good and promising conversation yesterday afternoon, and I felt sympathy for her, because she was on benefits and her father, she said, was a paedophile who had hurt her and her mother had thrown her out. But tonight I realised she had had no moral necessity to go that way, not everyone who has been a victim of paedophilia does, and I said there were plenty of agencies which could have helped her and that being a prostitute had been her choice which not everyone in her position makes. She was also saying she wanted a spliff, so I realised she was a drugs user. Someone else told me they used cocaine, and suddenly I began to wonder why I am here, subjected to everything I get from the staff, whether deliberate or incompetent, when I don’t use drugs, I don’t hear voices, I don’t have a drink problem, and although I can shout when angry to defend myself I am not violent. When I shout it is because I am angry or afraid or FEEL violent. It is a substitute for violence, not a lead up to it. At one point Jim came and told Kerry to behave, but then it started all over again with her being blasphemous and vile, and I was telling her not to attack and accuse a child of God. She was saying she was Satan, and all sorts of things, then when I started telling her to leave me alone she started to mix in Sarah instead of Satan, out of the Bible. No one was moving to stop her. I threw a plastic coke bottle across the room at the floor. It didn’t hit her, but she jumped up to attack me. I was sitting down and I put my foot out to keep her at a distance. I told her I hadn’t thrown it at her and she insisted I had. Jim came out to tell her to go to her room, and I felt immediately calm and safer. Then he told me he wanted me to go to my room. At first I said I would because I wanted to go to the toilet but I said I didn’t want him in my room while I went to the toilet. Jim said he wouldn’t be in my room, they would be outside. I went to my room, then got angry at how unreasonable and unfair it was, and kept coming out shouting things, like they had just given Kerry permission to do that again any time she wanted to, that I had been calm when she was taken away from my space but now I was not calm because what they were doing to me was unjust and the dispeace I now felt was a direct result of their actions towards me. Perhaps it had also, before, been a result of their inaction in what they knew was happening. They said to ignore her, and I said I couldn’t because I couldn’t just walk away and be able to stay away, I had to keep coming back to it. I told them they had no comparable situations in their own lives which were not a matter of their own choice, and that it was unreasonable of them to tell me to ignore it. Staff had said to me on Sunday that they knew she was a problem and that I should tell them if she was upsetting me.
Anyway, I kept coming out of my room and shouting things about respect and dignity and unjustly robbing people of theirs when they had not been the problem, and I kept scuttling back to my room in fear of what they might do to me if I stayed in the corridor, so I came out of my room and confronted it in those words, saying why should I have to stay in my room and not be justifiably angry and say why for fear of what they would do to me. I think they came and asked me to go to my room again and I refused, saying they were causing my distress by their unfairness. I was speaking loudly, if not shouting, I hadn’t touched anyone. Given that the law says I cannot be manhandled if I am not a danger to myself or anyone else I understand what happened next to have definitely been illegal. They grabbed me by the arms and started dragging me to my room. Altogether in the end there were about 8 people involved, one of whom was called Mark, who had hold of my left arm. Adem from Redwood 2 was another. When I said they had given Kerry permission to do what she liked whenever by what they were doing to me he shook his hand off at me and turned his back and started walking away. As soon as we got to my room they told me to get down on the floor, and I said I wanted to go to the toilet, and they said I couldn’t. At first I thought they might let me go but they forced me down face to the laminate flooring and told me to calm down. I said I had good reason to be angry and that I wasn’t going to become calm for them if this was the way they thought they could enforce it. On my way to my room I was telling Jim I wanted a change of key nurse and that I didn’t want another, that he was a hypocrite and however proficient he was in philosophy he was not fit to be in charge of this situation. I told him I would write in my blog. I also told Kerry that I wouldn’t protect her by using only her first initial as I had for other patients, that I had no legal duty and recognised no moral duty towards her.
At one point I said while I was sitting on the bed before they put me on the floor that I hadn’t been violent, and Mark said ‘not yet’. I have never been physically violent to people here, even though provoked, as he was provoking me at that point. When they had me down they wanted to gentle my arms and I told them to stop, saying they should choose between violence and assault and being gentle, but not try to mix the two. I asked them to turn my radio up because it was interesting, but they wouldn’t. It said at one point that if we acted in real life as we might in a lucid dream we would act more kindly. At around that point they withdrew from my room without saying anything. They kept stroking my arm, stroking my hair, and given what they were doing I completely resented it. At one point they told me that this had been my choice, when it evidently had not been, they grabbed me and forced me down. It was their choice. People who act like this often tell their victim of assault that it was their own choice when that is factually a lie. They turned away from reason. At one point someone said something to Mark and he spoke jeeringly. I said that was what they had done to Jesus. I said they were evil and that I was not going to make that any more palatable for them. I told them not to sigh at me but to go and deal with their own relaxation needs away from me. I called him or them bastards and Mark said ‘that’s right, I am a bastard.’ Something was tickling the bottom of my leg and I told them to move their hand. I was told there was nothing on my leg. At the very least it might have been my own trousers. I called them mental sadists who would swear that black was white then call me racist for using that expression.
They came with medication and offered me tablets or it would have to be an injection. Bearing in mind I was calm when Kerry was removed, immediately, and that this second distress was their doing. For them it seems to be all about power and being obeyed and not being seen to back down. They are very high handed then won’t back down even if their unreasonableness becomes apparent, and they just go ahead obeying orders as a team even if personally they think something else. In a situation like this I think that is not acceptable human behaviour. They broke my metal watch strap.
After they had gone I was still shouting, even from the toilet. I passed the office and Jim was laughing with his colleagues. They were taking a position of not needing to acknowledge me while I was shouting, even though they had just visited a physical assault on me. So they sat there pretending, in every way available to them, that I wasn’t there. Jim seemed to be mirroring the rhythms of my voice with his body language. While I was on the floor in my room they wanted me to shuffle so that I was properly inside my door. They said something about my dignity. I said I didn’t care what they wanted and if they cared about my dignity they could restore what they shouldn’t have taken from me in the first place.
In conversations with people I have been told that Jim does not hold grudges. I’m beginning to doubt this or that it was ever an appropriate thing to say anyway, as if there were not issues that needed to be discussed and he was blameless. I think they removed me from that situation because they didn’t want me there calm and rational and back in control of myself without their intervention, but all they did was make me feel worse. I felt no feelings of violence at that point, the feelings of violence, (against my beliefs and convictions?) and practices, came directly out of their assault on me and everything that went with it. If they can perpetrate an act of assault and violence on me, why is it not seen as acceptable if I reciprocate? Even to acknowledge the feelings is to open myself up to detrimental decisions about me from the staff. This tonight has been a deliberate act, out of control or coldblooded, of subjugation and humiliation. I feel that something happened after I wrote my ‘bust up’ entry that took so many key staff off the ward for so long. I think talk about illness is lies, eg back injuries. One person I do believe, I talked to him yesterday morning (yesterday being Sunday).
I confront with words when I feel necessary. They react and confront with threat and physical force and injections. And yet am I to feel I should make exceptions for them and concessions to their so-called humanity? I am supposed to be protected at the moment at least in my room, let alone I think what they have done tonight would have been illegal anyway, because I wasn’t a danger to myself or anyone else. Free speech which is not unprovoked defense or harassment should not be seen as being a danger to anyone. So Kerry is fat-ist, I’m dangerous and violent because I am fat. How many other people are approaching and judging me that way? I don’t blank people, I listen, that is my problem. I listen and think. Thinking that way is her problem, but her communication is so quixotic it cuts me to the quick.
The time when Jim said please in a way which was so painful to me afterwards, something else came up in the conversation and I said that they weren’t the ones being threatened with the closest thing they could get to gang rape, meaning forced medication if I didn’t willingly comply, on a regular basis. He put it in my notes that I had merely meant being asked to go to bed so they could clean the chairs. I don’t want this relationship to be retrievable now, I don’t like what he does. But for me that is hurtful because he has this knack of making me feel as if it is one of the few that does anything like work. His responses were visceral tonight, calling both me and Kerry selfish people, for a start, because people wanted to sleep. But when I continued to be angry until and beyond 12.45 am he made no attempt to stop it, just ignored it, and I believed his appeal to people wanting to sleep had just been self-serving in the first place. He was unreasonable. He was telling me to calm down when he had just made me uncalm again, and he himself was agitated. Unreasonable, unjust and illegal. I said they should join Mugabe’s regime, that what they had done was so wrong and unjust they must be deliberately and knowingly participating in social engineering. Also I said I had won by letting them play out the full extent of their savagery on me, because now I can document what happened. I think Jim must be afraid of me to treat me this way. I still don’t know why he was calling out ‘say you’re sorry, apologise’ from the office that day. It had been one of the things I wanted to talk to him about and find out what it was about. Meeting tonight didn’t happen either. He didn’t even think it was important enough to insist on making 10 minutes for me. He told me he had to do an admission. I’m sure the admission could have waited 10 minutes.
Also the reason it is difficult for me when this kind of thing happens is that my love and trust and obedience kick in just because, for over a year, I haven’t really been touched by anyone else. I can be sitting next to complete strangers and want to rest my head on their shoulders and maybe look for support. I want love and hugs. I’ve heard from the church that physical force is OK and should be submitted to, that it can turn people to obedience, which is where they should be. I find this situation too cruel for words, and also my own requirement of myself within it. I don’t go with this anymore. Adrian Plass said in one of his books that when he had an interview with the main man at work when he was working with troubled children, the man lay on the carpet and let him talk. Something else as well, he didn’t react punitively to someone who broke a window in his home, or something. He loved him, from what I remember. I can’t remember if this is also Adrian Plass, but it is definitely Tommy Boyd, that if someone came at him he would hug them from behind until they calmed down. Those are my values, the awesome perceptions and right modes of operation, in my eyes. A hug without further threat, even though seen as restraint, with no further threat, could easily be accepted as love and the kind of physical contact we are made for. Men who won’t hug me here will restrain me as they did tonight. I am struggling to recover my humanity. I’m 52, childless and menopausal. I feel now as if saying that is just manipulation, but I think and feel that having to feel that way is appalling.
Thoughts and Observations of a Certified Nut! 