Dive: Chapter IV
By: Vivian Norris
Tags: Mental Health, Hospital, Recovery, Eating Disorders, Depression

I lay on my stomach on the shag carpet, exhausted and slightly delirious. The yarn tendrils of the rug grazed my face and I looked out of the glass doors at the sun shining on the grass in the backyard. I looked up when I heard footsteps on the stairs. The program director, Aileen, stood halfway down the last flight.

“Ok Vivian,” she said sharply, as if she’d decided just then,”it’s time for you to go to Herrick.”

I felt a jolt of disappointment. Herrick was a mental hospital, not a medical hospital. The fake sick people went to mental hospitals- the people who were only sick in their heads and not in their bodies. And as we all know, being sick in your head doesn’t count. But it was better than nothing. Alana went to Herrick. I said a calm goodbye to the other girls.

“Say hi to Donna, Nicole, and Jack from me!” Nia requested. I promised I would.

I packed up my giant turquoise suitcase and dragged it with effort down the carpeted stairs. My mom arrived at the door, a pained expression on her face that almost made me regret my decision. We drove for about two hours, across a long gray bridge over the blue water of the bay and under a maze of overpasses. It would have been beautiful. When we arrived in the city, tents and shopping carts were strewn along the sidewalk. We pulled up to a dingy, off-white building covered with water stains and smudges of dirt. I stood beside the car in my pajamas and slippers. I wore my hair in a bun. I felt like a dancer. Hunger always had a way of making me feel elegant. We walked to the side entrance and up a slanted hallway with purplish carpet. We took an elevator with a mirrored ceiling to the third floor and turned right and right again. A pair of metal doors stood imposingly before us. Two reflective wooden benches sat against the wall. A window opposite the benches looked out onto a courtyard and a street criss-crossed with telephone wires. My mom pressed the intercom button by the doors.

“Three East B, how can I help you?” A woman’s voice crackled over the intercom.

“Hi. Umm, I’ve brought my daughter Vivian. She’s being admitted here.”

“Ok, I’ll buzz you in.”

The doors clicked open audibly, and my mom pushed them inwards. We entered a lobby with three offshoots, each ending in a menacing metal door. We looked around, attempting to discern which door led to the correct mental ward. We started walking to the left.

“Yes, that one,” the voice of God boomed out of the intercom.

We pushed open the second set of magnetically-locked doors. This place was clearly not taking any chances. We stepped into a hallway of indeterminate length. My feet crunched on the brown-gray-black carpet. The air was thick and smelled faintly of plastic. The right side of the hallway was divided by a piece of molding into an upper and lower section. The lower part was covered in a hand painted mural: colorful fish were dotted across a dark blue background. Several foreshortened scuba divers stared out at me. Great, this doesn’t make me feel like I’m trapped in a fish tank at all. A brunette nurse led my mother and I to a long white built-in table on a lone patch of hardwood. Several turquoise plastic chairs with silver metal armrests were pulled up to it. The table was in front of a walled off room, the nursing station. Large panes of glass formed the top half of the walls. My mom and I sat at the table. The brunette nurse stood on the other side. Her hair was in tight ringlets and her skin was light brown. My mother filled out yellow and white paperwork. I was given a white bracelet with my name and a barcode on it. I stared at the nurse. She had the most impressive false eyelashes I’d ever seen. They were heavy on her eyelids and curved up to touch the skin beneath her eyebrows.

“Will you go change into this gown please?” she said gruffly. She handed me two gowns and led me to a bedroom. One of the beds was unmade, the other empty. Alana was wrong. The walls were white, not yellow. The bathroom was divided from the rest of the room with a foam board held onto the door frame with magnetic hinges. The board was covered in a blurry technicolor picture of a monarch butterfly. I changed into the gowns; one on the front and one on the back.

The blue-green patterned fabric swayed loosely around my legs. The nurse shook out my clothes and waved a black and yellow metal detecting wand over them.

“I’m Nicole, by the way.”

“Oh, Nicole! Nia said to say hi to you.” She cracked a smile.

“Oh, I remember Nia. She was a sweetheart.”

Nicole had me show her my arms and legs. She marked the locations of my scars on a piece of paper. She traced me with the metal detector. She brought me out of the room to the table and handed me a thick white book with a black binding.

“I’m going to need you to fill out the safety contract and read the unit rules. She unfolded the book, pressing it open at the second page. “Then you need to take the unit rules quiz.”

I put a finger to mark the place and folded down the cover. A green graphic of a woman/tree filled the center. Herrick Hospital H.O.P.E. program, it read in unironic orange and purple Comic Sans. Who the fuck writes in Comic Sans? It’s a thing not to write in Comic Sans. You’re only supposed to use it as a joke. This is what happens when people try to relate to teenagers. What a meme. H.O.P.E. program? What the hell. I wondered how many H.O.P.E. programs there were in the world. It seemed like the most generic possible name. I opened the book. Oh God, even worse. It was an acronym. “Honesty, Openness, Practice, Education.” They definitely came up with the word first and then came up with what it stood for. I wondered if they had compromised the efficacy of the program just to build it around a single stupid acronym. I dutifully read the unit rules and filled out the safety contract.

My mom sat beside me, signing a stack of yellow and white papers. A tall Asian man walked over and stood on the other side of the table. He was pear shaped with wide shoulders that strained against the fabric of his white checked shirt. He had a thin gray-white beard and a coarse mustache, which I have concluded after some research is most likely called an extended goatee.

“Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Dr. Anzai,” he said in a low voice, reaching out to shake my mother’s hand. “I’ll be Vivian’s doctor while she’s here. I’ll meet with her every day.” My mother smiled back and I looked at the floor.

“So, Vivian,” he peered at me. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay. Sure. Nice to meet you.” He turned and walked away, running his fingers through his stiff, short, gray-white hair.

My mom handed the stack of papers to Nicole, who left to file them while we gave each other a stiff hug.

“I love you mom.”

“I love you too sweetie.” I watched her shrink as she walked down the endless hallway. The metal doors sealed shut behind her.

Nicole placed a tray with a burger on it in front of me.

“You’d better eat this. If you don’t, you’ll have a tube by Thursday.” That still did not appeal to me at the time. I took a tentative bite of the burger. It was pasty in my mouth.

A girl appeared in front of me. She was thin and tall with wild, light blond hair and an impish nose.

“Hi,” she smiled. “I’m Lex.” She planted her arms on the table, fingers pointed towards her and forearms twisted out to display the long red abrasions running down her pale skin.

“Hi,” I smiled back. “I’m Vivian.”

Journal Entry, Undated. October, 2017

“There is a window in my room. Fairly big. A window ledge as well. The view outside is marred by power lines. A pair of tennis shoes sways from their laces, caught mid-flight. The trees, as they surrender to fall, waver softly in the breeze like flickering candle flames. And my own patch of sky. “

I could barely sleep the first night. The sheets were cold and the blue blanket was thin and coarse. The beds were shiny yellow wooden boxes glued firmly to the wood floor. The off-white curtains hung stiffly from an inset groove on their plastic safety hooks. I later realized that this setup was created to prevent anyone from hanging themselves from a curtain rod. Pretty much everything in that place was specially built so nothing could be tied around it. I wondered how they figured that stuff out. Did they just let a suicidal person loose in the room and see what they went for? I looked over at Milo, my roommate. She was already asleep. She’d introduced herself to me before she went to bed. She had the air of someone who was not new to all of this. My sleep was disrupted by a nurse who opened the door and flicked a flashlight at me every fifteen minutes.

The next morning, a nurse flipped on the lightswitch, filling the room with searing light, and drew my blood while I faded in and out of sleep. I was re-awoken an hour later. The same nurse tossed a gown onto the foot of my bed. It landed with a thunk, regulation length string tied hanging off the edge. “Time to get your weight” she said in a coarse voice “Will you pee in this and then put on the gown backwards please.” I tiptoed out of bed, careful not to wake Milo as she had somehow slept through all of this. I plucked the serrated urine collection cup from the nurse’s hand and shut the foam door of the bathroom behind me. It clicked softly as the magnet met the frame. I turned the light on, staring at my drawn face in the metal mirror. It was full of dents and dimples, scratched with names and phone numbers. My face was a mess of dips and mounds, slit with words. I pulled on the gowns, shivering. The sleeves were cropped and deep, each draft blowing up into my chest. I brought the cup out into the hallway and huddled timidly outside my door, grimacing at its uncomfortable warmth. The nurse saw me and strode up, taking the cup wordlessly. “Follow me.” She led me to a door at the end of the hall, only a few feet from the first set of double doors. She unlocked the door with her key, and tugged a standing scale away from the wall. “Step on, facing backwards.” The scale beeped menacingly behind me. “Ok. Come this way.” We walked back up the hall. She gestured at a chair, beside the vitals machine. They took my vitals already yesterday, after they had me put on the gowns and shake out my underwear. I sat, holding out my arm for the nurse to cordon off with the blood pressure cuff. It hummed dissonantly. She told me to stand, we took my blood pressure a second time, and the narrow metal probe of a thermometer was pushed between my lips. I walked back to my room, the carpet scratching my bare feet.

By then the sun had risen just above the horizon and filled the room with hazy, early morning light. I picked up a gray bin containing my toiletries from the table in front of the nursing station. I stripped in the tiny bathroom and stepped into the shower, pulling the curtain closed. The showerhead was a nub of metal slanted into the wall. I pressed the button in the wall experimentally. Water sprayed out from the nub. At least it was hot. I discovered that each burst of water lasted only about twenty seconds before the button needed to be pressed again. I stood in the shower for half an hour, counting the seconds until the warm jets of water collapsed with a shudder. In the silence before I pressed the button again, I listened to the dripping of the stream of water as it echoed inside the drain. I dried off my hair with the rough, thin towel. It was small, and by the time my hair was half-dry, it was soaked. I pulled on sweatpants and a loose long sleeved shirt. I sat on the bed, trying to wring the lingering moisture out of my hair with the second towel. A large post in the middle of the room partially obscured my view out of the window, but I could see now in the light that there was a ramshackle apartment building across the street. Past the building was a hilly landscape of interlocking gray rooftops, off-kilter telephone poles stabbing up into the blue-gray sky. The street was far away, but not too far to make out clearly the autumn leaves stomped into the wet sidewalk. A few cars were parked on the side of the road, and every so often a car sped past on the slick black asphalt. A couple tall maple trees drooped with rain on the other side of the street. I turned as I heard the door creak open. An unfamiliar dark haired woman appeared in the doorway.

“Hi, I’m Rosa. I’m a nurse here. It’s going to be time for breakfast in a few minutes, so put away your bathroom bin and come out as soon as you’re ready.”

“Okay cool.”

I took a last glance out the window and gathered my towels and toiletries from the bed. I dropped the cold towels in the hamper in the hallway and slid the bathroom bin into place beside the others on the table in front of the nursing station. I grabbed a sweater, my pink journal, a book, and a sketchbook from my room before walking nervously through the open metal doors into the dining room. I walked along the hardwood floor past the tables and the kitchen. I turned into the carpeted group area where numerous artificial leather chairs with wooden armrests were pushed haphazardly against the walls. I placed my pile of belongings on one of the double wide chairs and sat down beside it. A few girls and boys started to filter in, some of them pulling open the curtains and taking their seats on the other side of the room. I noticed Lex from the night before talking to a young boy with short brown hair and blue-white skin. I listened to the cheerful banter between a few of them as I looked out at the patio. It had been too dark to see it the night before. It was encircled in a tall white wall topped with spools of barbed wire and bird spikes. A couple white plastic chairs tilted over on the uneven linoleum, pools of dirty water collecting in the recesses. A few square concrete planters were filled with crushed plants. A leaning basketball hoop towered over the patio. Rosa called out from the dining area.

“EDO’s! Come to breakfast!” I didn’t know what the hell an EDO was, but I assumed that was me. I walked over to the table with Lex and a few other girls. The yellow wood table was laden with plastic containers of various sizes, paper bowls, and pink plastic cloches. Beside each assortment of foods was a foot long paper menu with our names written in blue marker. I spotted mine in front of a white paper bowl of cheerios, a plastic container of peeled, sliced oranges, and a small plastic container of sliced almonds. I sat down and studied the menu.

“EDO Pre-set Menu, Breakfast. Day 1” it read across the top. It had a list of the foods that I would be eating and the quantities of each. I chewed the cereal, enjoying the starchy earthiness.

After breakfast we pushed the chairs in the group room area into a circle. I curled up on one on the chairs, listening to the clacking of the puck on the air hockey table. Two women walked into the room, taking seats at the circle. I looked up at them. One was a short woman with curly brassy-gray hair and a loose patterned blouse. She seemed to be in her sixties. The second woman was tall and thin with flowing strawberry hair and a somber facial expression. Forty-something years old, perhaps.

“Hi guys!” called out the older woman. She had a brash, spontaneous voice. “Good morning!” Her eyes alighted on me, and I shifted in the chair. “Hi, I don’t recognize you. What’s your name?”

“I’m Vivian,” I replied timidly. She made a note on her clipboard.

“Well nice to meet you. I’m Claire. I’m an occupational therapist here.”

“Cool,” I said. “Nice to meet you too.”

“I’m Susanna,” the woman beside her piped up. Her voice was softer. It reminded me of a yoga teacher. “I’m an occupational therapist here as well.”

“Hi, nice to meet you.”

“So we’re going to start out with check in,” said Susanna. “Let’s put away our activities and give each other our full attention.” There was a rustle of activity and a rolling of eyes as the others put their books and journals under the chairs. “So, Vivian we do something here called creative check in where we compare our feelings to something else that is not a feeling, like types of trees or pieces of clothing.”

“Okay.”

“Anybody have any ideas for what we should all compare our feelings to?” Susanna prompted. Nobody seemed too eager to volunteer an idea. “Well, how about we do trees,” she relented. “So everyone, let’s check in with our names, our feelings, and what type of tree we feel like.” I said I felt like a willow tree. I couldn’t think of very many types of trees. After creative check in, Susanna explained that we would each come up with a treatment focus for the day, which was an issue we wanted to work on, a treatment goal, and a word for the day that was something we wanted more of in our lives. Lex stood at the whiteboard and wrote out the treatment focus, goal, and word for each person.

After check in, we had a few minutes until snack. I hung back and watched the others mill about. Rosa called out to us at ten thirty.

“EDO’s! Snacktime!” I walked over to the table where each seat had a different snack set in front of it. A small sticker curled up on the top of each snack with our name and the contents of the snack printed on it. I found my sticker partially adhered to a banana.

After snack we returned to the circle of chairs. I looked at the schedule written in dry erase marker on the board. DBT was next. I knew from CFD that DBT meant dialectical behavioral therapy. It was extremely boring. A woman sidled into the circle, her face puffy and round and her plump body wrapped in a black cardigan. She perched in one of the empty chairs, lips pursed tightly and small eyes staring quietly out at us. I could already tell this was going to be a nightmare.

“Okay guys,” she said, her voice high pitched and timid. “I’m Caitlin for those of you who don’t know me, and I’m a mental health specialist here. So I’m like a therapist and you can check in with me if you need to. That’s what I’m here for. We’re going to start DBT now, so please pass down these worksheets.” Ugh, I thought. First rule of working with teenagers: give us a worksheet and you’ve lost us already. I sat through DBT, watching the clock. Lunch was a wet sandwich bulging with hummus and cheese. After lunch was something called occupational therapy. I learned from Susanna and Claire that this was a type of therapy where we were provided with a fun or creative activity to do together. That sounded much more entertaining than DBT. We went out on the patio, bouncing a slightly deflated basketball, and blasting music on the radio balanced on one of the plastic chairs. The pigeons circled above us and alighted defiantly on the bird spikes. The mildewed building rose up on one side, obscuring a whole half of the world, but through the windows inset in the patio walls we could see all the way out to the hills above the tangle of power lines. Blue-windowed buildings glimmered in the afternoon light. We stayed out on the patio until the shadows began to stretch and the impossibly high hospital building cast shade over us. Snack was celery and more loose hummus. In the group area we sprawled out over the couches and played card games on the dirty carpet. Rosa came up to me and informed me that we would be going to room time in half an hour. Room time was an hour we were allowed to spend in our rooms alone. The nurses would check on us every fifteen minutes, of course, but we were tasked with entertaining ourselves while they did shift change. I sat on the window ledge, cold air blowing up from the vent beneath me, and talked to Milo. She had piercing eyes, thin white arms, and brown hair dyed a deep purplish-red. Her wrists were encircled by a gauntlet of abrasions, each one pointed vertically down her arm. They didn’t appear to have been very deep, and I could tell from their light brown coloration that they were beginning to heal.

“Why are you here?” I asked tentatively. I wasn’t quite sure yet about whether or not that was an appropriate question, but a couple of people had asked me so I assumed it was.

“Self harm,” she responded matter of factly, as if I ought to have guessed.

“Oh, okay.” That explained the morbid bracelet.

“I’ve been here before, though. For suicide and stuff. I have bipolar disorder. And borderline personality disorder. Or, at least they think so. They can’t figure me out.”

“Oh, that sounds hard.” I said nervously, although she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would appreciate pity. “How long have you been here?”

“A week this time.”

“Cool. Do you know when you’re leaving?”

“Yeah. In about a week.”

“Cool. Do you know where you’re going?”

“Yeah. They’re trying to send me back to this stupid DBT program. It’s a residential. It’s so horrible. I’ve been there twice before and it never helped. It’s so boring.”

“Yeah, that does suck. DBT is awful.”

“I know right. But I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been so many places.”

“I’m sorry.” I sat silently for a moment. She busied herself with folding her clothes. “Do you know Donna, by the way?” I asked. “I need to say hi to her from someone.”

“Yeah of course I know Donna. She’s a nurse. I think she’s working today. She walked in on me when I was trying to kill myself in the bathroom last time. We used to have a shared bathroom out by the dining area and she walked in on me eating soap.” I didn’t know soap could kill you. Guess there was a loophole in this place after all.

“Yikes. Well I’m glad you’re okay.” Milo returned to her folding, her dark ringlets falling in front of her pallid face. I scrawled the events of the past few days into my journal, propping it up on my knees. About half an hour later, a tall, robust nurse with streaky blond hair stepped into the room. She peered over at me and waved.

“Hi, I’m Donna. I’m the charge nurse,” she said in a gruff voice tugged by a southern drawl. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Oh, hi! I’m Vivian. Nia wanted me to say hi to you from her.” Donna broke out into a smile.

“Aww, how is she? She’s one of my favorite patients ever.”

“She’s really good. We were at residential together.”

“That’s good to hear. Well, room time will be up in another twenty or thirty minutes and we’ll come and get you for group.”

“Okay. Cool.” Shortly after the door sunk into the frame behind Donna, it swung open again. A man’s partially bald head peered into the room.

“Hey, you’re Vivian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Dan. Can you come out so I can get your vitals?”

“Yeah, sure.” I was back at the windowsill a few minutes later, scribbling in my notebook.

Nicole, the woman with the extraordinary eyelashes who I’d met last night, strode into the room, scrub pants tight around her thighs.

“Hey girl,” she teased, cocking her hip. “Remember me? I’m your nurse today. How’s it going? You getting used to things?”

“Yep!” I responded brightly.

“Good,” she smiled a white-toothed smile. “Can I ask you some questions?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, how’s your suicidal thoughts?”

“None.”

“Self harm thoughts?

“Nope.”

“Eating disorder urges?”

“I’m doing okay.”

“Great!” Well it’s almost time for group, so how about you start getting ready.”

“Okay, sounds good.” Dan poked his head in a few minutes later.

“Time for group,” he called out. Milo groaned and swung her legs off of the bed. I followed her out of the room, toting my stack of books. I, too, groaned inwardly at the sight of Caitlin in one of the chairs.

“Time for community meeting! Come sit down!” She called out to us, her voice already exasperated. We sat in the circle and passed around a couple laminated posters: the community meeting paper, the unit rules list, the visiting rules list, and the chores list. Caitlin read out the community meeting paper in her high-pitched monotone. At certain points she stopped to have someone read out one of the laminated papers. After about half an hour, she announced that community meeting was over and we could watch a movie until dinner. We sprang up gleefully from our seats and pushed them into rows in front of a gray metal cabinet. Caitlin unlocked the cabinet with a key hanging from her lanyard, revealing a small flat screen television. A few kids scurried over to the kitchen where a cabinet had been opened to show a selection of DVD’s. Lex grabbed a DVD and waved it over her head. She scampered over the rows of couches, slipping it into the DVD player.

“Somebody turn off the lights!” she called out. The lights flickered off, as if on command. We slouched on the chairs and watched the Paramount stars swirl across the screen. This place was pretty great so far.

At dinner I used my plastic fork to slice up sweet chunks of soggy fried tofu and limp pieces of broccoli soaked in teriyaki sauce. I pushed a layer of brown rice around in the thin brown liquid.

Visiting hours started at 6:30. My parents arrived promptly and we sat at the table playing cards. Although I was glad to see them, I was impatient for them to leave. I wanted to finish the movie with my friends. I already felt more comfortable here than I did after two weeks at CFD. Snack was a yellow package of fig newtons that were soft and sweet in my mouth. I fell into bed that night, almost joyous. My first day at Herrick. For the first time in months, I felt at home.