Close Call
That night at the Psych Hospital was like any other. I tucked the children in - after our movie, meds and cereal 'bedtime ritual', and then sat down at the nurse's station.
Once they were in bed it was calm enough to catch up on paperwork.
The teen unit was one section over from our children's unit and both units shared a nurse's station.
It wasn't unusual for a teen or young adult to be brought in by the police for robbery, vandalism or violence & be kept overnight in our locked 'quiet room'.
On this night a young angry man was brought to the room. Our station had a small door which connected to that area, with a wire mesh covering the glass window. It looked very 'safe' and 'break proof' from my vantage point.
He stood inside the bare cement room glaring in at me from his cage. His dark eyes penetrating & painful to look at. He raised his arm and up went a lighter which he lit in the air, showing us all a defiant act of recklessness.
The cops hadn't searched him well enough, he was in the room with fire and daring us to come and get his lighter. We watched him from our station and he watched us from the cage. Soon I was the only nurse in the station, head bent over my charts ignoring the young man trapped and furious.
He'd been caught hijacking a car and here he was, in big trouble. No family calling our phones or knocking the door down to save him. Something burned along the back of my neck and I looked up at him suddenly.
He was intently staring into our station, as if projecting himself right to the center of the room where I sat! My psychic sight caught this & in a flash I dove away from the desk and out the door, just as he leaped toward the mesh window and crashed through it with his fist!
In an instant he'd reached through the broken glass and turned the door knob, screaming for his mother!
I ran down the hallway, locking the children into their bedrooms. A few of them stubbornly refused to let me do this and peeked out into the hallway at the nurses's station. He was screaming and banging away in the station as one by one the staff surrounded him there.
Staff came to the hospital from their beds at home, it was 2:30 am by the time he allowed us to medicate him and lead him away. I was the one who gave him the IM shot which sedated him. I watched as he slowly fell back on his mattress and fell asleep.
This snippet of experience is only section, of one work shift . . . of a series of work shifts- that I had- as a psychiatric nurse in that hospital.
My heart has many stories- yet to tell!