JEWELRY BOXES 2

kELLI V.

Sisi M.

Tamra Lucid

Michelle T.

JEWELRY BOXES

PLEASANT GEHMAN/PRINCESS FARHANA

MARGARET

JOY

VALERIE

KELLY

GINA ABELKOP

MISS G

ROBIN CRANE

Addendum to "My Outpatient Stay at a Mental Hospital"

I feel bad about my last post, and it seems sneaky and dishonest to just delete it, so I wanted to write about it instead.  I feel bad using that picture of poor Frances Farmer, who was such a victim of a society that couldn’t stand a wild woman and of the sexist side of psychiatry, where a women’s rights can be signed away when she’s deemed incompetent, and a lobotomy is used for treatment.  

 I also feel bad using Kimye Dawson’s lyrics from her beautiful song, "hold my hand," about a child in a bad situation who doesn’t receive any help because the welfare worker doesn’t give a shit.  In comparison to either of these situations, my writing about my experience in a fancy rehab and mental health facility probably sounded like a “white girl problem,” a term I generally object to (since it’s a derogatory term, and I know plenty of white girls with some pretty horrible problems), but in this case, I do think my recollections of this time of my life were poorly described and and probably sounded petty.  I’ve never known how to write about these 3 weeks of my life.   

I loved the fact that they fed me there at the hospital, since that was the main thing I was having a hard time with at home, eating.  But it was also a place of a lot of institutionalized indifference, and some things were so hard to consider legitimate practices, like all the electroshock treatment this one patient I knew received.  Also, when I was having my intake meeting with the psychiatrist assigned to my case, crying my eyes out, he got excited to find out I’d gone to The Evergreen State College, since that’s where his son went, and he wanted to chitchat about that like I was there for a social visit.  Similarly, when I shared my worries about my seemingly uncontrollable and risky sexual behavior, he told me not to worry about it, he had this other client who was a lawyer and slept with literally every man in her office, including 3 in one day, in the bathroom at the law firm, like the ugliest gossip session ever.  This type of behavior leaves me dumbfounded and disbelieving, but I don’t know how to start writing about it – nonetheless, it’s not on par with what happened to Frances Farmer, or the events in the narrative of Dawson’s beautiful song.

The thing is that I’ve had so many medically irresponsible things happen to me at the hands of playing-god doctors and fed up nurses, I couldn’t even begin to tell all the close-call stories that have happened to me, so I have this backlog of hatred for medical experiences that include sloppy work, and that is something I was trying to voice in describing the downsides of being outpatient hospitalized for my sort of nervous breakdown.  

Just to get some of that backlog of hatred out (let me reiterate right now how much I FUCKING HATE sloppy cocky doctors and unfair insurance practices): the most minor careless act that comes to mind is my doctor accidentally prescribing me 125 milligrams of my blood pressure medication when oops, it was supposed to be 25 milligrams, and my blood pressure was so low I felt myself shutting down.  This is literally the least fucked up medical oopsie I can think of off-hand.  I’m a girl whose had open heart surgery with the unfortunate post-op experience of my heart sac filling up with a quart of blood so that my heart could hardly beat, and a bunch of doctors like “geez, why doesn’t this girl stop bothering us,” when I was trying to tell these assholes on the daily that something wasn't right, and not getting help until I was in the ER and my dad almost fought the intake nurses and security guards to get me seen asap (my wonderful surgeon Dr. Sharo Raissi was the only doctor to help me, immensely, in this situation, even though I was calling him on his cell phone when he was on vacation).  I’m a girl who was shot full of morphine one time at the ER and then a few minutes later the nurse was like “okay, looks like you’re ready to go home,” and I drove myself home hallucinating all the way.  This is the girl whose (former) Beverly Hills dipshit gynecologist's waiting room was full of beautiful women, and who bitched at me because I had a hairy pussy.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, and all of these things plus the inexplicably bizarre experience of spending 3 weeks with fellow humans sharing my suicidal ideation has often put me in a rage with The Man and also made me feel sorry for myself and everyone I love, for living in a world that can be full of so many stupid, lazy people, incompetent enough to affect our living and dying just by their pure stupidity.   

I didn’t express this well in the previous post, and I hope nobody feels that I don’t appreciate having insurance, and doctors that I have the luxury to hate and complain to.  I could be someone without insurance, letting my suicidal ideation drive me to actual suicide in a lonely apartment somewhere.  I could be someone from a socioeconomic background didn’t instill me with the knowledge of personal rights, so that I didn’t know to advocate for myself and my loved ones when some doctor has his stupid dumb head up his ass.  Sorry about the pity party of the last post.

Instead of poor Frances Farmer, here is a pic of me dressed up as a punker for my birthday party, 7 months before I flipped my shit and needed the hospitalization.  Look into my wild eyes...