Life in the ward

A self-portrait Paul drew while staying in the ward

A guest post from @bobbymanflu Paul Graham .

This is an edited excerpt from Paul’s blog, which takes a light-hearted and honest look at the time he spent as an in-patient in a psychiatric unit. 

Things moved on day to day, the Fife Circle maintaining some sort of order. I lay in bed a lot, so much so in fact that I got bored and decided to lie on the floor instead. Soon Tracy was called who ascertained that I was basically messing around. Which I was.
 
I spent most of the daylight hours that were my own looking out the window. There was a stunted tree near the window that had no leaves. It did, however, have some weather-beaten pieces of plastic that blew in the wind. I stared at them a lot. I got why “High Flying Birds” was a cool band name.

I tried to avoid Clark as much as I could, seeing as he couldn’t hold a conversation, but rather would retell the dreary history of his life at length. Sometimes it was unavoidable though and I found an electronic drumkit for my phone that kept him happy.

Duncan continued to demand my appreciation of his musical masterpieces. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were good, but jeez he didn’t let up. I could see why he was banned from playing his guitar in public places. Disconcerting, that’s what I would describe him as. He would stare at you, but not say anything, making you do all the running. One night he texted his old bandmates telling them that the band would be reformed if they all agreed, but they only had five minutes to reply or it was all off. I wasn’t in a strong enough place to write him off as a pain in the rear end.

There were a few good nights though, one was when Bob – an older guy who was in for suicidal intent set up a poker game, we had no money or chips so we used dominoes for money. The curfew came too early so I pushed all in with not much and lost. Good fun though.

Bob ended up being my favourite person there. He was completely self aware and had lived a life of extreme sports, his body had packed up and he just didn’t fancy living the humdrum existence any more. He had a secret laundrette technique, I’m glad someone did because a lot of the inmates reeked something awful.

At some point I decided the nurses all hated me. I decided to confront them about it. Cue the lorazepam – the cure for all ails it seemed. You can read more from Paul at his blog Sharp n Shiny or let him know what you think @bobbymanflu