Today, I got a copy of my records from the Arbour hospital in Brookline.
On the night of October 11, 2014, I had a bad reaction to medications that I had been taking at that hospital for a couple of days. I never blamed anyone for them being prescribed to me; it was my idea to ask to take two medications together that I had taken at separate times in my life but never together before. I did have a problem, though, with not being allowed to go to a physical hospital when I had the reaction, and with being treated as if I were a difficult patient because I tried and tried to get an ambulance to take me to an Emergency Room. I was able to get 911 to send an ambulance to the mental hospital, but the paramedics were not allowed into the building. Arbour hospital staff told them the situation was under control and sent them away. When I called 911 again, I was laughed at by the operator.
The next morning, I was screamed at by a nursing supervisor and sent to a more disturbed unit; the entire episode was blamed on me. That day, when I continued to experience bad effects, someone at an ER that I called hung up on me when I told her that I was a patient in a mental hospital.
Reading what was written in my chart about the night the incident occurred, the pulse that was recorded for me during the incident was 156. By the time the nurse had taken that pulse, my heart had slowed considerably during the few minutes that it had taken her to get into the room I was in when I had asked another patient please to get the nurse. The high pulse is attributed to a panic attack; it's even written that my neurological reaction to the medication was made worse by the "panic attack."
This is a picture of the description of that incident that was written in my chart the night that it happened:
The nurse who wrote the description was most likely influenced by the way the medical doctor at the Arbour treated me and by the way that I was treated in general while I was a patient there. The medical doctor was consistently negligent; his idea of talking to patients when he was there on the weekends was to walk into their rooms in the morning, turn around, and walk out the door, while saying "You doin' all right?" I knew this about him, and did not know if I could even walk to the phone without having a heart attack. That's why, when he left the room after he first examined me the night of October 11th, I said "He can come back into the room I'm in (the patients' shared TV and group room)" when I was told by the nurse that he had to complete his examination of me in the office. When he did not, I risked walking to the phone and called 911. Hours later, with no other treatment, I woke up at 3 or 4 a.m. My legs felt heavy and my heart immediately began to race. This time, the doctor refused even to come to the unit.
A week or two later, I called a pharmacist outside the hospital to check the interaction between the medications that I was taking when the incident occurred. I was told that the most serious possible interaction was arrhythmia.
Those medications were discontinued the night that I had the reaction. However, there continue to be times that my heart races for no reason, beats irregularly, or pounds in a way that never happened even during exercise before the night of October 11th. I also sometimes get out of breath when I shouldn't be. My concern about being taken to the Emergency Room when the reaction occurred was that, when something bad happens, immediate intervention is usually what is needed to prevent permanent damage.
Almost every page of my records from that Arbour describes me as paranoid, delusionally believing that people are coughing at me or running their noses to sexually harass me. I am described as having "no insight" about the mental disease that is causing me to believe these delusions to be reality.
At Bayridge Hospital, on Thanksgiving, when I was about to be involuntarily medicated with needles of 2 mg of Ativan, 10 mg of Haldol and 100 mg of Benadryl after being harassed by staff all morning, I said that I had had a bad medication reaction a few weeks before, that I had never gotten shots of psychiatric medication before and that I didn't know how the shots would affect me.
Quiz:
Did the doctor:
A) Care
B) Proceed with the plan to make me lie on my stomach in front of a room full of people while my pants were pulled down and I was injected in the butt with all three shots
If you answered "B," you are correct.
They probably make you lie on your stomach so they can hold you down if you try to move. I know that shots can also be given in the arm; I would not be surprised if the entire "shots in the butt" scenario is just something that a lot of people who work in mental hospitals like to do.
Bayridge Hospital likes to give shots more than any hospital where I have ever been a patient in more than 2 decades of hospital admissions. It seemed as if every other day, a patient was being brought to what the sign next to the door calls the "Quiet Room" and given shots.
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Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, December 5, 2014 @ 9:52 p.m.
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