Sam

Images from Georgia.

Don't ask me why, but these images remind me, somehow, of a story that I told Janelle on our road trip. A story which I will now tell you.

A few years back, when I worked nights on the psychiatric unit at Athens Regional, I had to wear a pager. The reason I had to wear the pager was so that, in the event of a patient emergency elsewhere in the hospital, I could be paged as part of an "emergency assessment team." My role, as a clinician, was to represent and embody the "psychological health" aspects of a given situation. Often this meant crisis counseling right then and there, or a snap decision to try something else.

Once, I got called to Labor & Delivery to help with a new mother who suffered from schizophrenia. She wasn't speaking to the staff, her husband - no one. In the throes of post-partum psychosis, she was also completely refusing and ignoring her infant. The nurses wanted me to try and get her to talk, to acknowledge her baby. To do something. But she just stared back at me in full psychic retreat while a nurse nearby held her shrieking baby.

Another time, a WWII vet woke up in his bed after heart surgery and was disoriented, combative. I was eating my shift meal in the cafeteria when I got the call. With tartar sauce on my sleeve, I had to talk him down and get him back into bed while armed security guards stood nearby, fingering their billy clubs.

I was called into situations like this once or twice a week, always blindsighted, always a little traumatized. Whenever I'd try and talk to the other clinicians, nurses, or hospital staff about ways to improve the system, to support patients more fully, to support one another in such a high-anxiety atmosphere, I'd be met with defensiveness, sarcasm, or even outright anger. "Just stay present and do what you can do, Jon-Dog," I'd tell myself. But I'm more or less a sensitive introvert, so it should come as no surprise that, while I worked well under these pressures, in time, what developed was an intense pessimism and a lot of shock and horror in my heart. I drew cartoons and wrote intensely to deal with this. After two years of employment there, the psychiatric unit was liquidated altogether. And I can't help but wonder who - if anyone - is tending to those codes now...

Anyway, that's not the story. This is the story:

One night, right around the end of my shift, I got paged to a general medical floor. I grabbed my credentials (patients like seeing those) and took off. Turns out I was the first person to arrive on the scene. (The nurse who called the emergency in was working the floor alone and was swamped with other patients.)

I cautiously entered (always cautiously) to find myself face-to-face with a guy I'd scene many times before in the emergency room (for alcohol toxicity.) "Hey Sam. What happened here?" Now, Sam - he's standing in front of me, totally nude, his body full of scars, and blood sluicing from his genitals. His hands are dripping blood and he's got this look on his face like "I'm thirsty. What are you doing here?" I look down at the floor and see, now, that he's standing in a huge freaking pool of blood. And in the pool is a long, snaking tube and urinary catheter, which he'd ripped out. "J., man, I told that nurse I'm ready to go home, damnit! So y'all better let me go!"

Turns out Sam had been admitted earlier in the day for some medical reason (heart palpitations, I think it was) but because he was a severe alcoholic, delirium tremens had kicked in during the night. (the "dt's" are a deadly form of physical and psychological drug/alcohol withdrawal. Features of psychosis often accompany them.) Sam had woken up, needing a drink in the worst possible way. So he got up and scrambled for the door. But when he looked down and realized the nurses had inserted a tube into his cock, he hollered for them to take it out. They said "No, Sam! We need to you to lay back down, hon." So then Sam said "Fuck you" and yanked the catheter out his own damn self. And that's when the blood started to pour. I was paged approx. twenty seconds later.

I forget how it all played out. I was cool under pressure, as always. And I think Sam was discharged immediately. His doctor might have even given him a finsky so he could walk to the Discount Mart across the street and buy a cheap bottle of booze. This did happen from time to time. Fact is, my memory's flighty. Also, I saw so many strange, dark flickers of the human experience in that hospital that, now, they all just sort of meld together in a disordered catalog of suffering.