The Hospital

If walls could talk. We actually do talk to each other here at the State forensic mental hospital. None of the staff can hear our whispers, but at times a few of the patients will stop in front of us with quizzical looks on their faces.

Some of us are captive audiences to discussions by the treatment teams about the patients who have all been found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity. The longer they reside in the hospital, the less likely they are to mention the gossipy walls for the obvious reason that they hope to be released at some point.

I’m one of the four walls in the lobby of the largest unit in the hospital. We keep the other walls informed about reruns of The Andy Griffith Show (a patient favorite) as well as the national news.

Times have changed in the fifty plus years since Andy and Opie strolled down to that fishing hole in black and white. Nowadays there is violence, sex and profanity in the tv series and movies these patients watch. The news is even worse.

For years, we only feared termites, but those ravenous six-legged monsters seem benign compared to earthquakes, floods, out-of-control forest fires, tornados, bombs, wars, mass shootings and shit smeared on other helpless walls by domestic terrorists.

At times I imagine the walls that have been in any of those situations and wonder if they would have preferred swift destruction rather than fetid indignity.

We relish observing the staff, especially the psychiatric nursing assistants. The best PNAs understand how the patients came to be in this situation and treat them with respect and kindness.

Others come to the hospital looking for a paycheck and not knowing what to expect. Even a wall can tell that contempt hurled at a person who is mentally ill will have negative results for everyone involved.

There is rarely a dull moment for us, even on the graveyard shift. That’s when the unit ghost appears to cause some mischief. At times we attempt to engage him in conversation, but he’s more interested in sneaking up on the staff and whispering their names. If I had a dollar for every time a nurse or a PNA said, “Who said that?” I’d be a very rich wall.

Out of respect for the patients, the walls of the showers rarely report to the rest of us what they’ve seen and heard. One of the exceptions was the night the ghost became a permanent resident of this hospital unit. Twenty-three years ago, he stepped into the shower fully clothed, turned on the water and hung himself with four towels tied together.

It shocked everyone because he seemed to be doing so well and looked forward to his upcoming release date. Every wall in the unit heard him telling whoever would listen all the things he planned to do when he got out. Move into a halfway house. Find a job. Go to AA meetings. Take online college courses. Eventually rent an apartment and adopt a puppy. I guess as a wall, I’m not supposed to be emotional, but thinking of that puppy makes me melancholy.

At times patients will turn harmless bickering over which television channel to watch into a full-blown fight. The PNAs can usually talk them down, but occasionally a patient might need to be restrained and this is always done so as not to harm the patient. None of the walls like to see the patients fight. We're not high school mean girls.

As a wall in the lobby, I not only have a great vantage point to observe the patients, but there’s also several big windows to see the many feral cats who live on the hospital grounds. I named the big orange one The Evil Dr. Sprinkles.

Across the hall is the nurse’s station where the PNAs sit when they are not running up and down the unit opening snack cabinets, delivering towels to the patient rooms and any number of other tasks they complete on their shifts. I hear quite a bit of flirty chatter between the PNAs but have never seen any inappropriate actions. The walls in less observable parts of the unit have some stories to tell though.

Being here has given us so much to talk about for over four decades and I personally hope to share many more stories in the future. After all, it’s the only thing we do other than hold up the roof.