Welcome to the Third installment of the blog challenge I began several weeks ago. I was supposed to write about 500 words in 24 hours about my stay in a mental hospital. I didn’t even come close to getting it done in time, but it is a topic that deserves to be tackled. And there is far more than 500 words worth of story. If you haven’t read the first two posts you will be lost. Click here to go to the beginning. And with that, here we go….

The first time I’ve ever woken up in a mental health facility was to the sound of a nurse telling me it was time for breakfast. Not a bad way to start, not bad at all. But I can’t for the life of me recall a single thing I ate there. I do remember I liked everything though. But that may be because of the three days of cold, stale, hospital food I had to force down. After eating that crap, I would have been happy with lukewarm canned dog food wrapped in binder paper with dicks drawn all over the outside. It wasn’t good, that’s what I’m getting at. Not good at all.

Anyway…They like to keep you busy when you’re on a 72 hour hold, though most of my time had already been used up in the ER. There was time devoted to arts and crafts, exercise in the gym, and group discussion. In between all that was free time. We could spend it in our rooms or in the common room where they had a tv, board games.

Group discussion was my favorite time that first day, and not only because it is the only thing I remember clearly. Each person got to pick a song, any song, and the facilitator would play it. Most people picked fairly benign pop songs. One guy picked a Slayer song. We became friends :), of course, picked a Tool song. Parabola. Give it a listen. It’s perfect for when you feel like the pain will never end. Go ahead, give it a listen and imagine you are at the ragged end of despair. Imagine one of your darkest fears, that your constant battle with depression nearly won. That for a moment, you thought you would never get better, never be happy again. Everything you’ve ever don’t wrong, every pain you’ve caused or transgression you’ve committed, cycles through your mind in an endless and relentless loop. Now imagine Maynard James Keenan (your poetic hero) telling you “This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality. Embrace this moment. Remember. We are eternal. All this pain is an illusion.” That, accompanied by Justin Chancellor’s amazing bass, Adam Jones’s wicked guitar, and Danny Carey’s sublime drums. It’s enough to bring tears to my eyes even today.

And it nearly broke me down during group. Just as I was about to lose it, I heard the therapist guy ask someone about Dark Energy, if they knew what it is and how we know it’s there. I, of course, rose my hand and said that I did. The guy looked at me with a little surprise and gave me the “go ahead” nod.

“Well, Brian Schmidt won the Nobel Prize in 2012 for discovering Dark Energy, which is an unknown energy source that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. He did this by measuring the red shift of light from a supernova from several thousand mega-parsecs away.”

Silence. Everyone was looking at me trying to figure out if I actually knew, or if I was making it up. I WAS in a mental hospital after all. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if I was right or not. I purposefully didn’t look anything up just now. Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait…..

Anyway, visiting hours were from 6pm-8:30pm…I think. My wife was there, of course. She brought me Beowulf translated by JRR Tolkien. It’s a beautiful hardcover she got me for Father’s Day a few years ago. Love that book. One of my best friends was there to see me too, I later found out. She couldn’t come in to see me though. Turned out that it was a good thing she couldn’t, because it wasn’t a very good visit for my wife. I was still pretty out of it. I don’t remember what we talked about. I only remember that at some point I got upset again and stormed back to my room. She left in tears. Not my finest moment.

I got to see a psychiatrist too while I was there, which was a good thing. I’d been trying to find a psychiatrist for weeks. Well, when I say “I” I mean my wife. SHE tried to find me a psychiatrist for weeks, to no avail. This doc prescribed me some new meds, along with those I was already taking, and asked if I wouldn’t mind staying in the hospital for a few more days since my hold was about to expire. I said yes. I knew I needed all the help I could get. I signed a paper saying that I couldn’t have a firearm for 5 years, and another to keep me lock up for another couple days.

Good call on both accounts.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I’ll tell you about my epic ping-pong battle the following day in my next installment of “Oz Locked in the Loony Bin”