North West Community Hospital Part 2

All of the patients in the adolescent ward were there for depression and for making attempts on their lives.  Charlie was the only one who was clinically out of his mind.  He was 17 years old, tall,thin, had glasses and sandy blond hair.  I believe he suffered from acute, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. . .among other things.  He was admitted for his continual quest for a missing chess piece.  It started when he was in junior high.  One day he wanted to play chess during an in-door recess and discovered that there was a missing piece to the chess board and decided that he was going to find it.  The next 5 years of his life were spent searching for the missing chess piece.  "It had to be somewhere, chess pieces don't just disappear, I knew that if I kept looking, it would turn up, eventually."  In spite of my inability to remember faces, I will never forget Charlie's.  He didn't look anybody in the eye and he smacked his lips together constantly, bobbing his neck back and forth as he sat.

Charlie's mother had him admitted when she felt he was a threat to his own life.  He had suddenly developed an immense regard for the sunlight and decided that, no matter what the circumstances might be, he needed to be beneath it at all times.  He developed a new behavior that involved getting out of the car when they were at a stop light just to sit in a patch of grass that was free of shade.  Around that time, Charlie also began exposing himself to people.  On a few occasions he would step out of the shower, significantly nude, and into the hallway of the ward, yelling "I can't open my shampoo!"  I did not like that.  He had really bad acne and he ate hot dogs provocatively, always bobbing the neck back and forth, in such a way that disturbed even the most innocent of young minds.  He ate them for lunch and dinner, every single day.  I grew up sitting next to my handicapped brother at the kitchen table, staring as his meal ran down his chin with a stream of drool and watching him shoot noodles out of his nose when he laughed, but those meals with my brother pale in comparison to watching Charlie eat those dam hot dogs.

Charlie spent a good portion of his time in the ward sitting in The Chair.  It was a punishment for, either, bad behavior or if a patient failed to get to another level at the the time they were expected to.  I spent 10 days in The Chair, not because of bad behavior, like Charlie, but because my doctor would not give me the signature I needed to move up to level 2.  He felt that my manipulative tactics were not yet subjugated and that as soon as I admitted that all my suicidal, depressive thoughts and behaviors were a direct result of my inability to be honest about my self-seeking motives, than my doctors would consider allowing me to move up to level 2.