Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [68]
Finally the Voices commanded me to stop taking my medicine. It was poison they told me. So dutifully I lined up for my daily dose, popped the pills in my mouth in front of the nurse, and then walked away. Around the corner, I spit them into my hand. “Cheeking,” it was called. My idea was to save enough pills to do myself in later.
Without my medicine the Voices went wild. After five days I was nearly out of control with madness. The staff found my stash, realized what I had been doing, and immediately switched me to liquid medication.
Liquid Thorazine, the medicine they used against my Voices, burned deep grooves in my tongue. I hated it and so did the Voices. But the Voices knew what to do. The very next occasion, I dutifully poured the cups of medication into my mouth—and then spit the whole mess into the nurse's face.
The Voices howled with laughter. And I wound up in the Quiet Room again.
The Quiet Room.
I first made the acquaintance of this place back when I was in the hospital the last time. The other patients made grim jokes about it. They called it “Hotel California”—the hotel you could never check out from.
The thought frightened me. Where was this place? What did someone have to do to get there? Then one day I saw someone, one of the staff, sitting on a bar stool looking through the window of a closed door. He didn't seem to be having a particularly exciting time, or to be even particularly interested in what he was looking at. The next time I walked the hall, there was no bar stool, no person, and the door was ajar. I peeked my head in. All I saw was a room, empty except for a green vinyl mattress on the floor. The window to the outdoors was covered with a heavy, industrial-quality mesh. Between this mesh and the window was a fan. In the corner of the ceiling there was a mirror tilted so that the person on the outside looking through the window had a complete view of the inside of the room. So this was the Quiet Room.
The Quiet Room was supposed to be a safe and tranquil place, a place where patients could be alone, free to relax and calm themselves down during or after a crisis, or hopefully before one occurred. Some people liked it. It made them feel safe from whatever was tormenting them. Some people walked in there voluntarily, and stayed until they felt in enough control to come out.
Me, I was usually carried there. I hated it. It was almost a routine. I'd hear the Voices, would feel the need to do something, would immediately carry out some destructive act, and be sentenced to the Quiet Room. One or two staff members escorted me there, down the long hall past the other patients, who looked on at my humiliation. I was agitated and jumpy, on the verge of losing control. I struggled with the staffers, trying to keep from having to go back in.
At the door, a two-step routine: A dose of sodium amytal, a big-time tranquilizer, to calm my agitation. Then staffers took everything away from me—jewelry, shoes, anything in my pockets. Thus stripped, no matter how desperate I was to hurt myself, there was very little I could do about it.
Once inside there was nothing to do at all. When I was really agitated, I paced. Eight paces forward. Eight paces back. Sometimes when I was calmer, I lay on the mattress and thought. Sometimes I lay on the mattress and slept.
The worst part of the Quiet Room was how lonely it was. Two patients were not allowed in the Quiet Room at the same time, and staffers usually only entered to bring medication or to check vital signs. If the Quiet Room was successful in stripping me, for the time being, of my Voices, then the silence itself became overpowering. If not, then there I was, all alone with my tormentors.
The idea was to lower my stimulation, to calm me down when I became too hyper. I'd stay there for a while and when I was finally deescalated and back in control, I'd be allowed to return to my room.
But I thought of the Quiet Room as the Punishment