Day One: "This ain't Club Med, Miss Irene."

My clothes and shoes are taken away and the intake nurse gives me scrubs, socks, and white boy-short style underwear to put on in the bathroom. Clothing with zippers, straps, or strings are prohibited here. The socks have little foam stars on the bottom so my feet don’t slip on the floor. The blue scrubs are made of what feels like a recycled cotton/plastic blend and hang loosely over my body, making me feel petite even in my middle-aged pudginess. 

The nurse returns and takes me into a small room with heavy, nearly immovable chairs where I fill out a stack of forms. Then she fits me with what she calls a “beacon:” it’s an ankle monitor. “This is to keep you safe,” she says.

We take the elevator upstairs to the fourth floor and I am ushered into an exam room. A new nurse asks me to strip naked so she can examine me for cuts, bruises, and scars. She asks me to bend over and I take the opportunity to show a complete stranger my asshole. The nurse tells me to get back on the exam bed and she asks me questions to test my cognition. 

“Do you know who the President is?”

“Unfortunately.”

“What’s that?,” she asks.

“Trump,” I say.

She releases me back into the hallway and tells me to wait until a BHA (Behavioral Health Aide) can take me to my room. I sit on the hallway floor with my back against the wall, checking the clock on the nurses station (it’s 3:15pm) and watching the other patients, who walk back and forth before me, their billowy blue scrubs making little whooshing noises as they pass. I hear people singing karaoke down the hallway. For a while it’s non-stop Miley Cyrus, and then some asshole starts singing that Beach Boys song "God Only Knows" and I hold back tears. 

One of the guys walking by stops and says hello. He introduces himself. “I’m Pat, nice to meet you.” He has blue eyes, black hair, and large white bandages wrapped around his forearms.

“I’m Irene, nice to meet you.”

He continues walking, and now someone is singing “Party in the USA.”

A BHA shoves some sheets and a pillow into my arms and takes me to my room. There’s 2 beds, 2 dressers, an empty paper bag with the initials “DJ” on the floor near one of the beds. The BHA directs me to the other bed. 

“Do I get a blanket, too? It’s kind of cold in here.”

“We’ll see - maybe later,” she says as she walks out the door. 

The bathroom door is collapsible and removable with magnets on both sides that stick to the door frame. No door handles and no hinges. A steel toilet, sink, and basin. There is a single window between the two beds with a gray film obscuring the bottom two-thirds of it. The window consists of slatted blinds, encased between two glass panes, that are only half-open and cannot be adjusted. 

I fit one of the sheets around my blue vinyl foam mattress, spread the other sheet on top, and realize I need a pillowcase for the lone pillow, which is made of a tear-resistant plastic/vinyl material. 

After making my bed, I go to the nurses station and ask when I can have the extra sets of clothes I brought with me in my backpack. Not until tomorrow, she says, so I wear my scrubs for the rest of the day and night. I understand for the first time that material you wear on your body does not always mean ‘clothing.’ Only a few other patients here have actual clothes.

Back in my bed, I curl up under the thin sheet, tucking my freezing hands under my armpits. Every five minutes a BHA comes to scan my beacon. I ask again for a blanket and I don’t think they hear me or care. As I lay in bed I hear what seems to be a loud repetitive cough (or maybe it’s a belch?) above the din of voices in the dayroom, two doors down from me. I wish I could see out the window.  

There are no clocks on the wall, the hallway, or the day room. We cannot wear watches so we have to walk down the hall to the nurses station to see how much time has passed since the last movie we watched and when we can make a phone call. 

I hear calls of “Dinner!” “Dinner!” and shuffle into the dayroom. BHAs are distributing towers of styrofoam to-go boxes piled with pints of cranberry cocktail, small bags of Sun Chips, fruit cups, and smaller styrofoam cups of salad. I sit next to an older, skinny black dude who inhales all of his food before I could even register what was in front of me. It looks like some kind of meat patty with a gray sauce, liquid mashed potatoes, a cottony dinner roll. He’s wearing some kind of promotional t-shirt with an outline of a dress form that says “I got my dress at Peaches and I love it!” in a sassy, cursive font. I'm obsessed with it. 

“Where did you get that shirt?” I ask

“I have no idea,” he says. “They just gave it to me. Are you gonna eat that roll?”

“No,” I give the roll to him. “I’m kind of obsessed with that shirt, though.”

“Here, you can have it. I have another shirt in my room.” He takes the shirt off and hands it to me. He has a jagged gray scar running from the bottom of his sternum to the top of his bellybutton. I’m going to call him Peaches.

The dayroom is full and most of the people are my age (or maybe slightly older), and there’s a healthy population of Gen Z patients, too. A group of them sits together, laughing and chatting. The loud belching is coming from that table. The culprit is a short kid with curly black hair down to his shoulders, face and neck tattoos, and broad shoulders. I will later find out that he’s a Pagan meth addict who did time at Pickneyville. He will also become my best friend here. I’m going to call him D.J.

Peaches returns wearing a blue scrub shirt and asks around for leftover salad, fruit cups, or Sun Chips. 

The dayroom is much warmer than my room, so I stick around after dinner and there’s a kerfuffle about what to watch on TV next. A large woman in Grinch pajamas calls out “Cartoons!,” and Peaches yells back, “We’ve done been watching cartoons all day; we gotta watch something else.” A woman with striking blue eyes (I later learn her name is Cathy) sitting in front of me says, “Yeah, let’s watch an actual movie, like a good one.”  

I duck out of the dayroom to ask a nurse about my meds, specifically the birth control I brought with me in my backpack. 

“I need my birth control tonight so I can stay on schedule,” I say.

“We don’t give people any of their belongings for the first twenty-four hours,” she responds blankly. 

“Ok can I at least get a tooth brush, soap, and a towel so I can take a shower?”

“No, we don’t give out toiletries the first night.” 

I turn around and see the Storage Room door is open and there’s a BHA rifling through supplies.

“Excuse me, sorry, but do you have an extra blanket in there?”

Without looking at me, she puts a blanket into my hands and motions for me to leave. The blanket is the same rough material that you put on the inside of an elevator when you move into an apartment building or dorm. But it’s warmer than the single sheet I have on my bed, so I huddle underneath it until I hear loud cheers from the dayroom: “DREAMGIRLS!” The patients have chosen tonight’s cinematic experience.

I haven’t seen it in a while and it’s a superb choice. Everyone is entranced and finally shuts up (except for D.J. with the face tats - he apparently has uncontrollable hiccups) and watches the movie. Around 8pm the BHAs pass around snacks. I sit next to Peaches and watch him eat four bologna sandwiches, five small cartons of raisins, four small bags of cheddar Sun Chips, three half-ounce containers of peanut butter, and two packs of Cheez-Its. 

We only get as far as the part in Dreamgirls where Effie returns to the stage in NYC. It’s 9:30pm and lights out in the dayroom. I lay on my bed and know I’m not going to sleep tonight. I have no ear plugs, no indica edible, no book to read, no skincare routine. Luckily there’s no clock in the room so I don’t have to face how much time I’m wasting. 

A night-shift BHA enters my room to scan my ankle monitor. 

“Hi, I’m Irene. What’s your name?”

“Hi, Miss Irene. I’m Gregory.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Gregory passes in and out of the room several times, and in my restlessness I get curious about what direction my window is facing. I hop up on the other cot and stand on my tippy-toes straining to get a better view outside from the top one-third of the window. I can see traffic on Lake Shore Drive and realize my room faces northeast. I stare at the red and white streaks of light for a while and think about seeing slanted rays of the sunrise in the morning. 

“Miss Irene?”

My body shakes with alarm and I gasp. “Jesus fucking Christ you scared me, Gregory.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“Why can’t we see out the windows?”

“Honestly, I have no idea,” he replies.

“There’s no way to open the windows, or remove the blinds or anything?”

“This ain’t Club Med, Miss Irene.”

For the next several hours, Gregory and another BHA walk in and out of my room every 5 minutes to do what’s called “the rounding:” using a tablet to scan the ankle monitors of each patient in the ward. The BHAs enter each room, their heads slumped down, waving their glowing tablets over curled up bodies, as fluorescent light seeps in from the hallway.

I get up and walk around for a few hours, hearing the snores of my fellow patients and wondering how anyone can sleep in a place like this. I try to do the breathing exercises I learned a while back but the only thing that will help me relax at this point is a horse tranquilizer. I check the clock on the nurses station (it’s 11:44 pm) and read a printed out Excel spreadsheet titled “Daily Schedule” that’s posted on the nurses station and the dayroom door. During each day there’s time blocks for Journaling, Meditation, Mindfulness, and a CBT session to “identify triggers.” I wonder when I’ll get to talk to someone about how and why I ended up here. 

At 1am I talk to the night nurses about getting meds for sleep and they give me a Benadryl and a hydroxizine. I take the pills and get back into bed. 

At 3am I am up again pacing the hallway, passing by patient rooms with their doors open to let in BHAs. My mouth feels thick and sour and I’d kill to brush my teeth right now.

One of the nurses asks, “You’re still not able to sleep?” 

“Nope. Anything stronger you can give me?”

“You’ll have to talk to your doctor tomorrow and they can put in an order for you.”

“Do you have anything to write with?”

“There’s crayons in the dayroom, so you can get those in the morning.”

“Why just crayons?”

“Well, we used to have markers for a while, but there was an incident so we only bring out markers during group activities,” the nurse answers.

“An incident with a marker?”

“Yeah, you’d be surprised the things people can use to hurt themselves,” the nurse replies, not looking up from her computer screen.

I pace the hallway for another hour, thinking about how pissed and worried my husband is; how concerned my friends and family are; how badly I need help but not sure with what exactly. I fall asleep sometime before sunrise, too tired to notice the glow of the BHA’s shadow hovering over me.