Needing Medical Attention, Not The Psych Unit

After playing food police with my parents and doctors for two years, and then, two months earlier, passing out in an elevator. My dad rushed me to the hospital.  The whole time that I was in the ER, my dad insisted that there was nothing wrong with me. and that I passed out from malnutrition.  He continued to stick to this theory, even after the ER doctor tried explaining to him that my inflammation labs were sky high, I had no bowel sounds, I was in acute kidney failure, and was extremely anemic. All these signs suggested I belonged on the medical floor, not the psych unit.

Hearing the doctor confirm that it wasn’t all in my head brought me so much relief.  But the relief didn’t last.  After getting admitted to the pediatric medical/surgical floor I went through a battery of testing. Nothing else showed up as a problem and because my parents and home care team continued to insist that I was just a psych case, the hospital finally decided that maybe there really was nothing physically wrong with me.

Going to The Psych Unit and The Eating Disorder Unit Simultaneously

The final decision was that I was anorexic and would need to be transferred to the psych unit for children in a different hospital, where I would be on a unit for 5 to 11-year-olds but have meals and some groups with the eating disorder unit.

At that point I had a special feeding tube in my nose called an NG tube. It went from my nose down my throat, past my esophagus, and ended in my stomach.  The part of the tube that came out of my nose was hooked up to tubing that was connected to a bag of a liquid called tube feed that contained all the nutrition I would need in a day.  It ran on a pump that set the rate of how fast the tube feed ran in.  Until I could start eating enough calories a day to maintain my weight, I would need to have that NG tube.

The doctors didn’t want to transfer me until I was up to goal rate on tube feeds, but they couldn’t get me above 30 ml an hour no matter what type of tube feed they used because it would cause explosive diarrhea, intractable nausea, profuse vomiting, and repetitive dry heaving.

Finally, they gave up and transferred me anyway.

Trying To Adjust to the Foreign World of The Psych Unit

The psych unit was a totally different world than the medical unit.  We had to wear clothes, not comfy pajamas.  We had to get out of bed every morning and were rarely allowed to rest, no matter how exhausted we were.  There was no more IV for magic nausea medicine.  My mom couldn’t stay with me.  Plus, there were some really wild and crazy kids on the unit.

Someone had painted little swimming fish along the walls of the psych unit so that it looked like a fun place to be. The nurse showed me to the Dayroom where there were a lot of shelves with toys in them and a TV. The double-locked doors separating me from the rest of the world were the only tell-tale sign that I was on a psych unit at first. That, and a thick feeling of despair in the air.

The Other Kids on The Psych Unit

Usually, if you listened carefully, you could always hear at least one kid having a major temper tantrum complete with screaming, kicking, curse words no seven-year-old should know, head-smashing, and pure anguish.

My bigger-than-me six-year-old roommate warned me on my first day there,

“If you hit another kid, you get shots in your butt…, Do you want to play Barbie with me?  There’s a lot in the day room.”

I felt so shell-shocked that I couldn’t respond. After two months in the medical hospital, the psych unit was a whole different ball game.

Getting the Wrong Kind of Attention

My mom and dad visited every day during visiting hours. Visiting hours were only three hours in the evening.  

When they had to go home at 7 PM, I grabbed onto their shirts and didn’t want to let go.  Inside I felt panic pooling in my chest.  They were leaving me in these locked-up hallways and rooms with all these screaming kids I didn’t know that hit each other and yelled bad words at the grown-ups in charge of us. 

The grown-ups in charge of us didn’t even pay that much attention to us.  When they did, it was the kind of attention we didn’t want. They woke me up every morning at 6 AM to take my blood pressure and pulse with me lying down, sitting, and standing. Then they would hand me a pee cup to give a urine sample, and a blue spaceman hospital Johnny and bright blue hospital pants to change into.  I always pretended that they weren’t size 3T, a size made for toddlers. While I was peeing in the pee cup I had to leave the door to the bathroom slightly open.  A nurse or aide had to stand there with their foot in the door. The nurse or aide wasn’t even always female.

I’m Not Playing Games, I Really Can’t Pee

It was near impossible to pee with an audience, and usually, they would try to hurry me up as I sat there attempting to will my body to pee.  Usually, it would take me about ten minutes before I could finally get a trickle going. 

“Come on, stop playing games with us,” the staff on the psych unit would tell me.

“We don’t have time for this today,” or “This little fun you are having with us is getting old” or, “You are going to get dropped a level if you don’t stop trying to toy with us.”

My Suprapubic Catheter

Years later I was diagnosed with a neurogenic bladder and had to learn to insert a catheter into my urethra, drain my bladder into the toilet and then remove the catheter.  As I got more handicapped this turned into a catheter that stayed in my urethra 24/7 and drained my bladder into a bag. When I couldn’t tolerate the pain of that catheter, I ended up with the type of catheter I have now.  A suprapubic catheter that goes through a surgically inserted hole in my lower abdominal wall and through into my bladder to continuously drain my bladder into a catheter bag.

Back then, the psych unit staff just thought I was a pain in the butt.

More Eating Disorder Protocol on the Psych Unit

Once I finally had enough pee in the cup, I would hand it to the staff who were so rude to me with their accusations, and violations of my privacy making things worse.

They would walk me down the hall to the nurses’ station and have me step on a cold metal scale with my back to the scale so that I couldn’t see the numbers.

“No peeking,” they would tell me like I actually cared how much I weighed.  Then they would walk me back down the dark empty halls and let me change back into pajamas and go back to bed.

The next time they woke me up it was for breakfast.  But I wasn’t allowed to sit with the other kids on the unit for breakfast.  Instead, they had me put my sneakers on and get buzzed through the locked doors of the psych unit for children, walked down the halls to a unit called, “The Inpatient Adolescent Eating Disorder Treatment Program” and sit in a special dining room with a whole bunch of super skinny teenage girls. Some of those girls had feeding tubes just like mine.

Meals on the Inpatient Eating Disorder Unit

Before we were allowed to go in the dining room, we had to take off any sweatshirts or sweaters we might be wearing and change out of pants or shirts with pockets.  Then they handed out trays of gross-looking food.  If we didn’t finish 100% of the food on our tray within one hour we had to drink an Ensure Plus. 

We had 45 minutes to drink the Ensure Plus.  If we didn’t drink all of it, we were consequenced.  The teenage girls lost privileges like going to off-unit activities in the game room on the regular medical adolescent floor, going on slow easy walks around the hospital, and going out on passes with family. 

I would get reported to Dr. Hizami, my psychiatrist on the psych unit for children. He would bar me from using the toys in the playroom or not allow me to go to the fun groups with the other kids.  Sometimes he would even make me sit on time out in the Quiet Room for half an hour.

Vomiting in the Dining Room

I was never able to eat more than a few bites off of my tray before I started projectile vomiting.  Even though I would try to run out of the dining room so that I wouldn’t puke in front of all the other girls, the staff would always stop me.

“No leaving the dining room until mealtime is over,” they would tell me.

“But I’m about to…” I would never be able to finish my sentence.  Instead, I would throw up all over the floor.

“You can’t just purge in the dining room like that, do you know how triggering that is to the other girls?” the eating disorder unit staff would say to me.

At first, I didn’t even know what purging was. But, after I got walked back to the Children’s Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment Unit at the end of breakfast, iI would stay on my unit a little longer and then get walked back over to the eating disorder unit again for some of their therapy groups that I didn’t really understand. What I did get out of them, was that purging was when you make yourself throw up on purpose after eating in order to lose weight.  This confused me because I was barely eating a few bites and obviously was doing nothing to make myself throw up.

The Start of the Klonopin and the Wire of Agitation

The eating disorder unit meals that I could never eat or hold down anyways made me so anxious that Dr. Hizami decided I had an anxiety disorder.  He started me on an anti-anxiety medication meant for adults called Klonopin.  That was the beginning of the most severe trauma at St. Michael’s Children’s Hospital.

Shortly after I started the Klonopin, an intense feeling of super-agitation began bubbling up inside me.  Even though I had a lot to be agitated about, I couldn’t pin it on just one cause.  I would pace the halls of the psych unit with my pole of tube feeding in tow.

Soon, even that wasn’t enough. 

My body needed to move, and it needed to move constantly.  I started running up and down the halls of the psych unit instead and then jumping up on the IV pole and letting it give me a little ride down the halls.

The energy still wasn’t burning off enough. 

The Quiet Room on the Psych Unit

A bunch of staff on the psych unit would pick me up and roll my IV pole down the hall and put me down in a room they called The Quiet Room.  It was a small white room with no furniture or bed or anything in it. It was absolutely empty.  Every time they put me in there, I tried to run out, because this uncontrollable energy needed me to move. So they would lock the door to the Quiet Room so that I couldn’t get out.  They would just stare at me through a scratched-up plexiglass window in the door.  This began happening multiple times a day.

Every time I had to be locked in the Quiet Room it was considered “seclusion” and my parents had to be notified.  They were getting really concerned.  This wasn’t the same Becca that they had dropped off at the hospital after passing out in an elevator.  They immediately knew something else was wrong with me.

Sedation and Restraints on the Psych Unit

Soon, even in the Quiet Room on the psych unit, this electric wire of energy ran through me.  I would throw myself against the walls full force to try to beat it out of me.  When that didn’t work, I smacked my whole head against the wall as hard as I could. Then I bit myself until I drew blood and left large blossoming bruises on my arms and pulled out fistfuls of my own hair that left bald spots.

If I beat myself up too much in The Quiet Room a whole bunch of the psych unit staff would come running in and jump on me to hold me down.  Then one of the nurses would inject a burning shot of Ativan into my bony little butt.  When all that did was ramp up my live wire of agitation inside me, they would carry me down to my room, hold me down on my bed and cover me with a big mesh blanket that had straps to fasten down my wrists, ankles, and belly.

A Total Loss of Control

The mesh blanket was impossible to escape from.  I would fight it with all my intense energy until my body could take no more and I passed out and fell asleep.

They no longer felt safe allowing me to have meals and groups with the eating disordered unit, which was the whole reason, I’d been sent there.  But people were losing track of that, so I just continued to refuse my trays on the psych unit without any staff making a big fuss about it.

Dr. Hizami made up a behavior plan for me to try to get my self-harming behavior under control.  Every time I had to be forcibly carried to the Quiet Room and locked inside they would take one stuffed animal, other toy, game, favorite T-shirt or some other treasured belonging away. 

It didn’t matter how much of my belongings they slowly took away because of the behavior plan the doctor had manufactured.  It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t let me leave the unit for activities in the game room like the other kids. It didn’t matter how many times they tied me down to the bed.  My behavior was completely out of my conscious control.