The trouble with hospitals.

I will say this about my many experiences with hospitals. There are varying degrees of mental sickness in people and in a psych ward, you can't choose your roommates or even who you're in a ward with. Sometimes it is so stressful just surviving in the ward or halfway house that recuperating and trying to stay positive seem nearly impossible.

I don't have enough money to pay for a private hospital stay and so I am at the mercy of the public hospital system. This time around, my first roommates were an older black woman who kept confusing me for the other woman in the room who really looked pregnant and smelled like feet, and so yelled at me to take showers constantly when I took showers daily. I was given another roommate who was a Columbian woman who used a cane because she claimed she was so fat that she was in a lot of pain, but she was only mildly overweight. I think she was a hypochondriac and just plain lazy and was seeking attention. She was totally superficial bragging on her daughter who is attending Hunter constantly. She left the hospital and then was replaced by this crazed girl named Beatriz who had just been released from jail, wearing the orange jail "Spitzers" (sneakers). She punched Tia (this black pregnant with twins girl who stole from everyone in the ward, took showers constantly) in the face her first day and then terrorized this other girl, Wendy, and a few days from her brawl with Tia, punched Wendy in the face too. Wendy was a drama queen though, and cried the whole night. Beatriz was smoking in the room, so I was given permission to leave the room and switch to Tia's and Olga's room (Olga was a 63 year old woman who talked all the time). Wendy was 26 and Bolivian and complained about her abusive mother and proceeded to tell everyone how she cheated on her husband with a guy just for sex, but was angered with her husband because he was actually having a relationship with a girl he worked with as a waiter. She and her husband were living with her Mom and they both attended City College. Her husband asked her for a divorce and took back her ring during her stay. And then she got together with Edwin. Anyways, she asked me to get involved and to write a letter to the Supervising Nurse in the ward to keep her in the ward because they were trying to move her instead of moving Beatriz after a second altercation where she got slapped in the face. This is after my incident with Beatriz post-moving-rooms. In the Activity Room, I was changing stations on the radio and had earlier been told to ignore Beatriz by the Charge Nurse and so I was ignoring her, but this aggravated her and she didn't want me to change the station and started yelling at me, then threw her sandwich at me and dumped her cup of apple juice over my head. I was calm and was told to stay away from her and to just go and take a shower and wash my clothes. Later, after my shower, I saw her in the hallway, and told her, "Don't you dare throw anything else at me...I'm warning you..." She threw her cup of ice at me this time and that's when I threw my fists up and told her to "Come on then..." She swung at me a few times, but I managed to hit her in the side a few times too...I wasn't afraid of her. And I wasn't mad at her. I knew she was sick. And I didn't have a grudge against her. But Wendy did. And so did Edwin. Edwin was this 41 year old guy from Queens, an early 80's graff artist/DJ (his tag back then was On One and he was down with PCKid and Kane1...). He later worked for the airlines, was also an interior designer, and he was stalked by Beatriz. I thought he got too involved in peoples' business, namely Wendy's, trying so hard to defend her from all the numerous injustices she felt were inflicted upon her in the hospital by staff and by other patients, whining constantly, talking about her "rack" thinking all men were intent on focusing on it. A staff member pulled me aside after the fight and told me that I should stay away from fighting with Beatriz because she was HIV+ and also had Hepatitis C. Anyways, I helped write the letter to the Supervising Nurse and also wrote one to the Hospital Administrator which Mom delivered personally. Beatriz was moved instead of Wendy. The letter I had written to the Administrator also mentioned the other problems I had with a staff member who forcibly put her hands on me when confiscating a magazine another staff member had given me to read. She also yelled at me when I was doing my laundry saying that I was going to break the machine and that I would be on meds the rest of my life. She was supposedly a Peer Counselor, but I wasn't so sure that she was my peer. She bragged on getting stabbed hundreds of times, being on drugs, being molested as a kid, raped as an adult, shot at, claiming that she ruled the hallways. Anyways, I didn't think that was very peer-like. Then Tia was stealing all my stuff, going through my drawers, leaving food everywhere in the room, leaving sheets and gowns behind too, and keeping me up at all hours of the night slamming doors and switching on the lights, which would then wake Olga who would sit up and start talking constantly and then hope for sleep was all over. And I gave her the clothes the social worker had given me when Mom brought me a gym bag of clothes. She left them soaking wet in the bathroom when they got dirty instead of just laundering them and tried to steal more stuff from me. I ended up having to give back my bag to Mom and just take one extra change of clothes which I left at the Nurse's Station. I didn't need much else in the hospital. Anyways, that's a lot of drama to deal with. But the worst part about it is that I had to deal with someone like Wendy. See, Wendy is a City College student with a big head. She thought she was really amazing because she is a Bio-Engineering major. She belittled my quest for my BS in Anthro/Archaeology saying that doesn't make any money and when I told her my first degree was in Art, forget about it...She then said, "I got into Cooper Union, but decided I couldn't make any money with art. Why don't you try Geology? That's the easiest science." She also said, "Your Mom's paying for everything anyway." And I looked at her and said "What? I left home when I was 18 and my Mom only started to help me after school and then again after my last hospitalization, I'm 35 now...you don't know me..." She hadn't even left home yet at 26 and it was taking her 8 years to get her degree. All she was concerned with was material and what she was wearing telling everyone at the breakfast table that I was trying to lose weight just because I made a routine of waking up at 6 to exercise with Gilad on FitTV every morning. Anyways, that's the kind of bullsh*t you have to put up with when you go to the hospital, not to mention I've spent every holiday since Thanksgiving in the hospital. New Year's the first person I hugged was Alex when the ball dropped. Alex is an interesting guy with green eyes. Dominican, he's bilingual Spanish and ANGRY at the loss of his career. He was once a stockbroker at BearStearns and hasn't been so high-functioning since that time period and is extremely bitter about it blaming most of it on the bureaucracy of the mental health system and also his Mom. He went to Tufts and has spent some time in Danville, CA, so we had a lot in common as far as places we've been. Anyways, he is still there and is desperately trying to find a place to get released to. I had much sympathy for him because of my South Beach Hospital experience, but I realize he has to do it on his own, especially after reading his blog.