Much of this, particularly the stuff in the cardio ward or women’s hospital, is not necessarily in chronological order. But if you want to know just how messed up I was this year, this accounts for a lot of it. This took place after the events of Wednesday, March 7. The thoughts are a bit rambling, so I apologize for any lack of clarity. This is just an exercise in getting the recollections down.
• I woke up in a dark ICU… overhearing a nurse behind the curtain who had found something I had written, and was enraged and upset by it. She was spreading her discontent with the doctor and other health care workers. I spent what felt like hours crying. To the nurse who was keeping an eye on me, I told her that there was someone over there behind the curtain who was mad at me. She pulled it back to show me that no one was there. This was the Friday after BabyT was born.
• Around this time, a South African doctor who was treating me (or so he seemed by his accent) was annoyed with me in general. I wasn’t cooperating as he’d like with my treatment. He and other nurses were dealing with a young women in the ward partitioned next to mine– she was pregnant and in a car accident– and they commented on how heroic she was and how helpful she was being, as opposed to me, who had comparatively little to complain about in their view.
• In my final ICU days, it seemed that news of my jerkishness had spread, specifically this thing that I’d written that they’d found somewhere. (Only, strangely, I was sure that the things I was hearing read were not things I’d ever actually written.) But the nurses were angry and derisive… they made copies and actually distributed them to the staff in the ICU.
• My last couple of days in the ICU were filled with noise, dozens of conversations. I could focus on listening in on various ones, and they were filled with invective against me. When I was moved into the cardiac ward, I thought it was over, but it had just begun. The nurse who first read and was offended by my writing was working at the desk, and as I was taken into my room, I heard her cussing me out.
• As I was situated in my new room, I told the nurse that I didn’t think the nurse at the desk (she said her name was Karen) was very happy with me. She told me it’s probably nothing. I lay down on my bed, and I could still hear her out in the hall, muttering about me. At some point on this first day, I could feel someone hiding behind me in my room, spraying some sort of chemical into my eyes that smelled and felt like hair spray.
• Although there were lots of voices, conversations, machines beeping, and so forth, there were three main people I heard talking about me out in the hallway, or sometimes in my roommate’s part of the room: Karen, another nurse, and the doctor with the South African accent. They talked about me all the time, knowing that I could hear them. Much of the rest of the staff conversed with them, too. They seemed to have convinced most of the staff that I was a truly evil person.
• One night, I heard a nurse quietly changing the amount of IV fluids I was receiving. She and other nurses smirked about how this is going to be harmful enough to make me sicker. I called a nurse soon after and asked about what she just did. She said that changing the fluids was the doctor’s orders.
• One of the criticisms I was hearing was that I was staying in bed too much and not taking enough walks to exercise and get stronger. I decided to go out into the hallway (with a walker, I think) and I made it a few feet outside my room. I looked near the desk, and heard and saw (it seemed) the South African doctor, who was talking about me to another doctor, right before my eyes. I almost fainted and was escorted by alarmed nurses back to my room. After this incident, I heard mutterings from the critical nurses that I’m doing too MUCH too soon, and wasting all the hard work they’ve been doing to try to help me get better.
• The language used by this medical staff was shockingly vulgar when they talk about me. They used entendres and expressions that I never knew existed. They also used highly intelligent language that sounded far over my head as they talked about why the things I’d (supposedly) written are nonsensical. The odd thing is, according to what I was hearing, a lot of what they’re reading *was* nonsensical… there are biographical details about me that weren’t true, that I wouldn’t have written.
• When Alex (who they also seemed to hate) came to visit, I didn’t even raise my voice above a whisper, for fear that they’d hear me. Sometimes I wouldn’t talk at all, but just wrote things down. Alex was bewildered.
• I could hear some of the nurses passing back and forth outside my room at night, singing creepy made-up songs, in harmony. During a brief stint in the women’s hospital, I’d also heard a couple of these same people singing down the hallway from my room, with loud techno music in the background.
• When my roommate was taken to surgery for an amputation, the room was being tidied up. I overheard a conversation with the South African doctor and some aides planning to change my meds for the purpose of making me sick so I would have to stay there longer. Somehow their plan was foiled, and I heard the following comments: “It’s not fair!” “She should be stoned.” Not long after this, I hear loud, booming rock music from out in the corridor, and what sounds like a loud party among the staff.
• At some point they figured, from my writings, that I had insulted their entire hospital and practice. They decided get back at me by concocting a weird bit of play-acting that started early in the morning, while it was still dark. My IV started beeping and flashing a red light with some kind of danger warning. I rang the nurse right away, who showed up and dallied for awhile with my roommate before coming over to the IV and fixing it. This was followed a bit later with some sort of strange conversation about three different levels of health care available, represented by three different injections; I was supposed to discern something from this spiel about how lucky I was to be there in their hospital. Between nurse visits, I could hear some of them talking amongst themselves, wondering why I was being so stubborn or too stupid to see their point. They were waiting for something– an apology, maybe? I even asked my roommate what I was supposed to do if I felt that the hospital staff was upset with me. By the sound in my roommate’s room, she even sounded like she was in on this charade. Eventually, this process ended with me getting my breakfast (which was fine, despite me being afraid to open it due to threats) and a male nurse coming in to ask me how I was doing. I shakily told him that I thought that there were some hospital staff who was upset with me, and he assured me that no one was upset with me. I wondered if this meant that I’d “done my time” and satisfied them. I had no idea what to believe, other than that I’d seemed to drop into a real-life episode of The Twilight Zone.
• One night, I actually saw a nurse I knew before me, giving me the same spiel about these three injections that represented three levels of health care. I am so distressed by this and the need to get away, that I started itching all over. As I was scratching myself, it turned out that I’d actually developed a full-body rash. The spiel was abruptly ended, and another nurse came with ice water to relieve the itching. Soon I was red all over. As I looked at my bruises later, I noticed with some amazement that the rash was red and orange, and my bruises were all the other colors of the rainbow. I looked like a sunset.
• One particularly disturbing night, I heard what sounded like people actually hiding in the room, hissing or making other disparaging noises and comments, some coming from my roommate’s room. I talked to a nurse, venting some frustration about how I wished that if someone had a problem with me, they would just come to me in person and get it resolved, so I could apologize or whatever. She innocently told me that she didn’t know of anyone who was upset with me. All the while I could hear the people in the room. She said there was no one there. This convinced me that she must be “in on it,” whatever “it” was. Later that night, at about 4 in the morning, after more maddening antics, I got out of bed, went to the front desk, and told them to put me through to Alex. I got him on the phone and begged him to come get me and take me out of that hospital.
• One evening, the cardio doctor was planning on meeting with me to talk about what had caused the rash I’d gotten. I heard the South African doctor and his two friends talking about the likelihood that I had contracted an incurable disease from all the blood transfusions. The doctor actually toned down his rhetoric and warned them that if this was true, the others weren’t allowed to make fun of me anymore, it was so serious. When the cardio doctor came in to meet with me, I was terrified. But he ended up telling me that they would just try to change my medication, and that’s what probably caused it. The staff in the hallway are audibly annoyed with this turn of events, at least one of them muttering that by rights, I *should* have contracted some incurable disease.
• Not long after I called Alex in the middle of the night, they decided to send in a team of psychiatrists. I was glad to get the opportunity to explain what I was hearing, but it didn’t really register that I might be hearing things that weren’t there. The whole time I explained everything to the doctors, I could hear the three voices, coming from what sounded like a floor above me, who were nonetheless listening in on everything. They were outraged at what I was telling the doctors, denying charges among themselves, making excuses, and continually trash-talking me with foul language. It seemed that they were worried for their jobs. Practically in tears, I told the doctors that I just wanted to see whoever was mad at me and apologize and make amends somehow. By this time I was (as you can tell) extremely paranoid, and afraid of being alone in my room. Shortly after I was left alone again, I could hear whispers of people who actually wanted to kill me, or who managed to sneak into my room. I was incessantly ringing for a nurse. That’s when they asked if I thought it would be a good idea to have a sitter in my room, which sounded like a good plan to me.
• If things were nasty before, they got even worse. The nurse whose name I thought was Karen talked about rallying support from other health care professionals against me in the event that any charges were ever brought against them.
• One time, when Alex, Ruth, and the kids were visiting me, I could hear some of the offended nurses right outside the door, and I wanted to run right out while they were there so I could apologize. Alex talked me into waiting until the family was gone, and when I went out to the hallway, no one was there. Once (it might have been the same instance), I went to the front desk to ask for Karen, and they told me that she hadn’t been in at all that day. I went back to my room, perplexed.
• The staff members were talking about me so continually that I was desperate for absolution, or at least a chance to apologize and see whoever was upset with me. I was starting to believe a lot of what they were saying about me and all my faults. To try to be more properly appreciative, I wrote a couple of thank-you notes for the staff in general and a couple individuals. The people who I saw receive them smiled and said thank you. Later, behind curtains or doors, I heard crowds of people shrieking their disapproval, shredding paper, and continuing to cuss me out, question my motives, and insist that I hadn’t done enough to fix things.
• Some of the things I heard coming from my roommate’s room from the other staff are too vile for words to properly convey. One of the less offensive things I heard was from a male aide who was describing how to rig a gun to go off in my direction so that my murder would somehow look like an accident.
• They also suggested the death of my newborn infant, and voiced a particularly cruel, mock-serious and pitying dramatization about how my two older children would die untimely deaths at a young age.
• Due to something Alex had said that they had found offensive, and the fact that I was hearing conversations that no one else was hearing, they said that they would easily be able to have custody of our children taken away from us. This is something I heard early on, and did make me very panicky.
• They also speculated on Alex leaving me for someone else, though this was probably the one thing they said that didn’t upset me at all– because I knew better than they did and thought it foolish.
• Among the nurses who were sitters in my room, there were a few that I did trust implicitly. One woman, who was sometimes on night duty, actually treated me rather like a young girl– she insisted on braiding my hair and called me “her princess.” I might have thought that a little asinine had I not been so desperate to be around people who didn’t hate me with lethal hatred. One evening, I was lying in bed, and I think there was a TV in my room for some reason. I was trying to sleep, when suddenly the air felt warm and heavy, and I started gasping. I became afraid that someone was trying to kill me, and like many nights before, I only ended up getting a few hours sleep that night. The next time this sitter was with me and took me down in a wheelchair to get an X-ray or some other test done, she told me that I had been upset by noises I heard coming from my roommate’s area last night. I had been freaking out, possibly crying, and clinging to her (the sitter) for dear life. I don’t remember any of that.
• In one strange episode, I was lying in my bed while it seemed that an allegorical fiction work that I thought I’d read before (but which, in reality, never existed) played out in what was happening with my interactions with the nurses who were coming to do tests and so on. It’s difficult to explain, but this work of fiction involved some sort of sinister medical plot. I was so disturbed afterward that I tried to call Alex again on my own, forgetting that I couldn’t get through due to the long-distance call, and panicked some more. I seemed to have weird existential crises: what if I’m sixteen again? What if I’m not really married? Where are my kids?
• In another strange episode, I had some cases of serious deja vu. I felt as though I had clear memories of a sequence of things that happened days before, involving a nurse taking me down for a test, a certain listing of songs playing on a radio somewhere, and another nurse who was looking at family photos on her camera and showed me some. I even mentioned to this nurse that this same sequence of events had happened before, hadn’t it?
• There was one brilliant little thing that did tons to quell the voices: Alex brought my iPod. I don’t know why it took so long for me to think of it, but when I had it on, it didn’t matter to me whether the voices were real or not: I couldn’t hear them. And I started to hear them less and less.
In short, as I told Alex much later, Satan himself couldn’t have written a more evil script than everything that I heard during those weeks in the ICU and cardio ward. I haven’t ruled him out entirely.
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