Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the day I went into the hospital. Although I relapsed pretty hard after my release, I think of that hospital stay as the moment when I started getting some traction on my psychiatric and drug-related problems. I just wanted to reflect a bit on what went down a year ago.
In the days leading up to the hospitalization I tried to kill myself two or three times (I don't remember clearly). I was shooting heroin four or five times daily. I was hearing terrifying voices, telling me to kill myself, as well as other macabre things. Nobody knew I was using; I had told different lies to various people and couldn't keep them straight. I felt completely alone and backed into a corner by my own dishonesty and my seemingly bottomless need to get high. I'm finding now that there are details of those days that I can't bring myself to write about. Suffice it to say that an old friend of mine got worried when I didn't respond to his calls. He found me unconscious and, once I came around, he convinced me to get to the hospital. That's how I wound up in the emergency room, begging to be admitted to the psych ward.
To my relief, the intake nurses admitted me right away. I'm not sure what they saw in me, but everyone got a freaked out vibe and reminded my armed guard not to leave my side after they talked to me.
Unfortuntely, the there was no room at the inn. The psych unit had no beds available. So I began a 3-day stint of camping on a gurney in the hallway of the ER. I did the majority of my detoxing in that hallway, running back and forth to the bathroom in my ridiculous hospital gown and assuring the guard and the nurses I didn't need to be followed in there. The hours all blurred together. Some stretches of time went really fast. Then, especially in the wee hours, I'd stare at the acoustic tiling on the ceiling wondering what was going on outside. I had no idea how long I'd be in that limbo. But I couldn't do much about it because they had put me on a 72-hour involuntary hold. And then when 72 hours came and went, they put me on a 2-week involuntary hold. Those holds actually reduced my anxiety--I didn't want to be outside. I was afraid of myself and I was still hearing voices.
About 3-1/2 days into my stay, a bed finally opened upstairs. I was whisked up there, riding in a wheelchair and carrying my clothes in a paper bag. I was afraid that I'd freak out--get claustrophobia--when the door shut behind me in the locked ward. But it actually worked quite the opposite: when the door closed behind me, I felt safe from the world. I felt like I'd gotten a reprieve...I couldn't hurt myself, and I couldn't get any drugs. Riding that knife-edge was over.
The next two weeks were incredible. I got really lucky, and the hospital I was in was fantastic; my doctors were also fantastic. (Coincidentally, it was the hospital where I was born. From my window in the unit, I could see the windows of the ob/gyn department where I spend my first nights on Earth.)
One of the most critical things my doctors did was to de-escalate my medications. After years of therapy, I was taking huge amounts of many psych meds. There was consensus that this was not a good thing. So they pulled me down to zero medication the first day. Then they slowly introduced a few meds, monitoring my blood closely to assure that I was taking the minimum effective dose. I'm not sure if the meds were the issue, but once they removed the stacks of pills, the voices I was hearing receded.
I spent most of my days in group and individual therapy. The group therapy was almost all CBT-based. That was when I started getting serious about self care and working on skills to redirect myself from bad habits of thinking. After a few weeks in the hospital, I was discharged to a partial hospitalization program where I spent a month. Then I entered an intensive outpatient rehab program that I participated in for several months in various ways.
Things have never been the same since I went into the hospital, and that's probably for the best. I spent almost a year trying to get myself back to work, but in the end I had to walk away from my career of many years--just too much baggage. Just now I got back from a beautiful walk with my wife and my dog, and overall my life is very good. But everything is still tinged with sadness. The nightmare of the months and especially the days before my hospitalization still haunts me. I'm incredibly glad to have been able to get away from daily heroin use. But I still have a weird feeling that the world is an irredeemably sad place.
