War Stories

Before I finished nursing school, I had a job waiting for me at Baptist Hospital in Columbia on a nice, new psych unit. I had only about three days in psych clinicals before I started to work so I didn't really know what to expect. A couple of nurses at Baptist had worked in psych before, and I watched them to see how they handled the patients, but others were as green as I was. On my first day, another new nurse and I were called to go to a patient's room. The middle aged black female patient was sitting - motionless, staring, catatonic. We looked at each other in ignorance. Neither of us knew what to do. I had never seen catatonia before, and it is not something we see often, but now we know how to treat it. The patients and the learning experiences from that first year are the ones that are most imprinted on my mind. I saw dementia and psychosis for the first time, incest, mania and despair. I learned about medications and ECT and how to accept my co-workers. It was my intern year.

Probably out of eagerness to learn as much as I could, I left that great job (I always questioned my judgment about that decision) and went to another hospital where the patients seemed more damaged by life experiences and needed to process. There I responded to a call bell one day, and found the young woman in the bathroom, ribbons of blood dripping down her arm, saying, "Help me. I can't stop." She had been cutting herself with a broken mirror. Cutting is an interesting phenomena that we see often and somehow helps relieve stress in those who practice it. Once I found a razor hidden in a stick of deodorant that a female patient brought in. In case of an emergency I suppose.