Chapter Nine - Sertamean

I hazily awaken from my constantly-interrupted slumber (every hour, on the hour, with a blazing hot torch shining in on my face to ensure that I am alive). It has now gotten to the point where I am getting very cranky – but not about anything to do with me.

Lisa hasn’t been able to sleep in nights. Truthfully, I haven’t really been either, but that’s something I’m used to.

I don’t want to frighten her with what I know about her current medications – how they are completely wrong for her, that “that” med is not for depression, that the drug they are giving her for her kidneys will only hurt them more.

I also don’t know how much longer I can hold in my maternal, fiery wrath when it comes to the agony I feel seeing her begging the nurses, doctors and psychiatrists in a frightened, shaky voice to please, please change her medicine.

It’s the medication she came in here on. The damage to her organs, mind and livelihood can attest to the fact that is it not working.

I tell her that many of us are given the option of “PRN” (Pro re nata – Latin for “as needed”) medication. For me, those medications are lorazepam and temazepam for sleeping. They insist on telling her that Seroquel, the antipsychotic for the woman who does not have schizophrenia, will help her sleep. It hasn’t before, and it won’t now. They up the dose.

She can’t stop crying. She can’t stop saying that she doesn’t want to live anymore. That she feels sick. That she is terrified.

No more.

I hug her tight and ask if she wants me to help. She nods whilst crying before laying back down on her creaky bed. I tell her to try and get some rest, and offer some pens and paper along with a selection of magazines and books.

I know she can’t concentrate right now, I know she won’t even pick them up…but if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that small gestures like this mean the world.

I approach Kate, a beautiful student nurse with pearlescent teeth and pants with tiny, adorable marine creatures dotting them if we can have a chat.

We get on extremely well and have hilarious, most definitely considered “inappropriate” chats almost every day. Strangely enough, they’re only considered inappropriate as they involve us speaking to each other as equals. Smashing the shit that is “patient vs. professional” and being undeniably human with each other.

“Kate, I know it’s not my place, but I can’t sit here for another minute and watch Lisa in this state. She has absolutely no idea about anything to do with mental illness and is in a constant state of panic. I know that we are technically here to be observed and to be kept safe, but this is fucking bullshit. She’s too scared to talk to any of you about it, so she’s asked me to”.

Just like I knew she would, she tells me, practically radiating empathy and understanding beneath the surface, that this system is fucked, she is so sorry and that she is going to do everything within her power to get on it immediately.

I sigh with relief, put my hand on her shoulder gratefully and thank her before retreating back to my hospital mother with the good news.

Lisa now has access to 10mg of temazepam at night – something I know for a fine fact will help her a lot more than fucking seroquel. I’m on it too, but that’s beside the point.

I tell her that it is wonderful for sleep and not overly physically addictive, but she doesn’t really mind either way.

We talk for hours about, well, everything as we wait for handover to commence – strangely, only the night staff can give us our medications.

She falls asleep mid-sentence within 15 minutes. I smile knowingly and quietly get up to turn off her light, removing oodles of paperwork from the end of her bed and placing them on her nightstand.

I’m awake for another hour on Reddit’s “No Sleep” forum, enthralled by the intricacies of horror writing. I check my phone, 11:45pm. Probably time to wind down.

Just as I get cosy and relaxed (as cosy and as relaxed as one can get in here), I hear bangs at our door so loud they send gallons of adrenaline down my spine.

“ENVIRONMENTAL CHECK” booms, a…well, boomer as she flings open our door and switches on every disgustingly fluorescent light in the room.

Half-asleep Ruby, especially Ruby who is fiercely defensive over those she loves, is not a woman to be fucked with.

“What the fuck are you doing? Can you not see that she is asleep? That I was nearly asleep? Do you have some issue controlling your decibels or are you unaware of what time it is?” I ask, in a quiet yet incredibly aggressive tone.

I don’t think I have ever spoken to somebody I didn’t know like this before, save for the last time I was in hospital and, aptly, called my psychiatrist, between heaves and panicked breaths, a fucking arsehole with not a singular shred of humanity. To be fair, I was right. Many complaints were put in against him that day.

She scoffs as though I am without a brain and and simply “Inpatient No.7” and continues to go through our shit, before literally citing “a-ha!” when finding a plastic bag in our bin.

She looks at me as though Lisa and I have some miraculous murder-suicide plan with a singular Woolworths plastic bag, the one that my father had bought me clothes in, raises her eyebrows SMIRKING and disposes of it before snapping off the lights, and, before the door closes, I see a student nurse I don’t recognise – she looks at me with embarrassed eyes and mouths “I’m so sorry”. I smile back at her as if to say “not your fault”.

The door is quite literally slammed shut.

That one wakes Lisa up.

“What the fuck is going on?” she croaks, rubbing her eyes.

“We needed our rest, so Senior Sargeant Mary O’Reilly decided to aid that by being a patronising, inconsiderate arsehole”.

Lisa utters some profanities, we sadly laugh at how the mentally unwell are treated as though we have no iota of a clue as to what is going on with us, and fall back into a peaceful sleep…until the next environmental check.