Hot Off the Press from the CVMC ER

'They don’t want let go of the high – so they fight it.’  Just heard that from a very sweet-seeming, soft-spoken ER nurse who moments before injected my secluded, restrained, trauma-survivor friend with another round of neuroleptics. 

She’s been in the ER since Tuesday morning.  The ‘lawful’ 72 hour hold that the hospital imposed ran out yesterday morning.  They say she is a danger to herself or others because she is ‘assaultive’. 

As it turns out, the only ‘assaults’ have been against hospital staff who refused her request to leave AMA on Monday morning, and then began pressuring her to take humongous doses of neuroleptics that, according to our friend, from painful past experience, “would put me out for three days.” 

More painfully, she wasn’t refusing meds altogether. She was willing to work with them – willing to be reasonable.  She simply wanted a chance to try it her way first:  lower doses, certain meds not others, certain times of day.  She did not pull these requests out of thin air.  This is not her first rodeo.  These were meds and doses and timings that she knew, again, from past experience, had a pretty good chance of doing the trick. 

Per the hospital: No deal.  Our way, or else no end to the nagging, no end to the deception, no end to trying to slip 2 pills into the meds cocktail instead of the ½ pill that you agreed to. 

And then when you get frustrated, angry, feel violated, betrayed, dare to express that – Well, you’re becoming escalated.  So time for seclusion until you calm down.

You don’t’ agree? Ok, we’ll just take you down. 

When you fight that – like any truly free person would if people you don’t trust try to take you to a place you don’t’want to go, tie you to a board, inject you with chemicals you experience as poison, and leave you for hours without human contact.  But it’s not seclusion anymore because we’re watching you through a portal.

If you’ve been there before, you know what’s ahead.  We all do.  That’s how the system works.

But, says the on-call doc I talk to the next day  - another kind man who clearly seemed to care, but in all the wrong ways, and in all the wrong directions that modern medicine trains healthcare workers to think of as 'caring': “She’s lucky she’s not in jail.  She assaulted several people.  But of course we don’t do that to them. We understand they’re not in control.”