So there I was in the Queens Psychiatric hospital. (I don't really remember the name of it.) These stays in the psychiatric hospitals had been in closed units. Meaning there was no way to run off. Every door had locks on it.
I was starting to come out of the Transcendentalistic fog that I had been in for what was now 2 months. I was still sensitive to certain things. I had been at this pysicatric hospital for three weeks watching things change. I would notice things like a fire extinguisher sign pop up one day and then a wall mounted fire extinguisher under it.. An emergency exit sign appearing over one side of the unit and another at the other side.. Signs that showed the different department rooms.
It just seemed odd that things you would normally find in a hospital were slowly appearing. As if the hospital was changing from one kind of hospital to another kind.
I always complained that we would all suffocate because no air could get in the unit, and the staff would keep saying there were a/c and heating vents. Not to worry.
My mom on one of her hospital visits to me asked me if there was anything she could bring with her next time she visited, I hadn't listened to any music in some time. I really wasn't a music listener at the time, to begin with, but I thought it was important to know what was going on. I figured I'd listen to the news. (I listen now a days. to iTunes songs that I download but at the time I wasn't really a music person.)
My mom on her next visit brought me a Sony Walkman. I recongnized it as the one I had had at college. I thanked her. It was a special Analogue Walkman that I had picked out the summer before I got sick. My mom and I talked for quite awhile. It was nice and comforting. It was a lot better than my first meeting with her at the hospital. I had accused her of being the Angel of Death because she had come dressed to the hospital in black. (Like I said: I wasn't in the right mind at the time and everything seemed to have spiritual meaning.)
Anyway she left and I turned on the radio. I was lying in my patient bed and I started to realize that all the music was hate music and it was all focused on me. "Your a jerk. We hate you. You don't deserve to be in college, You should be killed. On and on it went. All reworked lyrics to songs I had heard in my childhood. All focusing hate on me. I got angry, Here I am. Sick in the hospital. My college carrier in jeopardy because of how long I had been stuck in here. I had had many blood tests which were just agony because no one there knew how to take blood properly. And now the music of my home city was basically telling me to go frack myself.
So I started concentrating on one station, and its music and trying to re-write or just stop the bad lyrics. Over a matter of time I was able to slowly push one station off the air and then another. Soon all the stations were gone except one.
For some reason z100 refused to shut up. Every other station had been pushed off my radio but z100. It was then as I calmed down that I realized that z100 was actually my real home city station and not these other ones that just wanted me dead. z100 wasn't play I hate you songs like the others, but just normal songs. I started to realize. Maybe this was a life line for me to follow and listen to until I came back to my correct city.
I mentinoned this to my mom the next visiting time and she said, "I was probably making nothing out of nothing." This was my mom's personality. "If you didn't shit on it. Why would it shit on you?"
Over a few more weeks the rest of the radio stations returned on the air on my Walkman and they were singing normal songs. A week later. My sanity clear. My prescriptions written out by a Dr..I went home.
It wasn't simple being home. Although I was still a lot better than I had been at the begining of this journey there was still parts of me thinking something special had happened to me. My mom calls it part of the illness. That people think with my illness they were in a special place and feel depressed not being back there. I gotta tell you. I like life better when I am out of the hospital than in. But she was right, a part of me kept saying something had happened, But I couldn't quite put my finger on what had happened. It just seems all so strange.
I went to an after care facility for a few weeks after coming home to Staten Island. I was learning the basics of food preparation, different group activities. Nothing spectacular to report here, although I did find it amazing that oil and water were similar. Even though they could not be mixed together oil bubbled and was used to cook, And water bubbled and was used cook too. It was something that I never quite had thought about.
Months went by.. I transferred from Oneonta State College to (C.S.I.) the College of Staten Island. I have nothing but praise for that school: C.S.I. It really is a miracle school. It takes just regular students and turns them into smart thinking graduates. Say what you will about the difference between NYS and NYC colleges but where one was an alcoholic's rampage. CSI was like a Philosophical Arena.
I went back to writing for the school paper. I did odds and ends reporting. I mostly did Film reviews. But it was nice. I was taking my meds quite regularly and was in a very sane piece of mind. Most people who talked to me did not even know anything was different about me.
Then 1998 came and my Psychiatrist wanted to stop medication to see if I still needed it, There had been rare cases where mentally ill patients did not need the meds anymore and could live without them, So we both agreed it was worth a shot.
I stopped taking my meds and a week later I was watching TV. I had just shut it off to get ready to move to another room when I noticed shadows moving along the screen of the TV. I thought they were shadows from the outside. I looked out the patio door behind me and noticed some bushes waving in the breeze but nothing more, I turned back around and continued watching the shadows move around. My mom came into the room saw how I looked and made a phone call. It was back to the hospital.
To be continued....
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Friday, June 16, 2017
My Schizophrenia Experience or A Divine Encounter Part III
Okay, So now I am in this ambulance. I am lying on a stretcher. I have a clear view of what we are passing by from looking out the back windows but I have no idea of what we are racing towards which freaked me out a little bit. But the EMT was quite nice.
He asked if I wanted a sedative, "Hell no!"
He smiled. "Rough night?"
I looked at him, "Aren't you supposed to tell me?"
We both sort of laughed and I decided to watch the progress our ambulance was making by watching the traffic out ther back door. Finally I started to wonder and asked the EMT, "Why was it taking so long to get back to the hospital I had escaped from?"
He said, "I was going to a special hospital."
About 45 minutes later or at least it seemed like 45 minutes. I found myself at Binghampton Psychiatric Hospital. I was rolled into one of their wards, into a room. And sat there playing games with the analog clock., You have to understand. I was really out of it. I was kind of in a transcendental state. I was watching everything and everybody closely. For some reason thru all of this I kept thinking everything had a mystical meaning. The clock seemed to be running backwards and then forwards. Just what I needed a Schizophrenic clock! Which meant there was no way to tell time.
I could have been there days or weeks. I just don't know. What I did notice was the blanket they gave me to keep warm. It had strange hieroglyphics on it. My mom would later say they were just the name of the hospital but they were reversed for some reason. They wheeled in an older gentlemen and gave him a blanket and we both stayed their silently. A Rabbi made a brief appearance talking to the gentlemen and me. "Asking how everything was and if I needed any prayers."
But for some reason I kept thinking this was a whole god swapping exercise. Here was an older god showing up to relieve his duties to the younger new guy. (I know this sounds weird, But this is what I really thought.)
It wasn't until my parents showed up and talked me out of this crazy thinking that things for me got saner. My mom said the clock was not running backwards it just needed a new battery,. The old man was here not to transfer godly powers but for the same reason I was here. He needed psychiatric help.
I asked about the blanket. It seemed like a Jewish Religious Tallit and I was somehow being transferred powers. My mom looked at the blanket and said, "This is just a blanket with the hospital name on it."
So I calmed down. To many crazy things had happened to me to worry about the possibility of being a god. What seemed more appropriate was to just worry about my health and getting back to college.
So for a few days they gave me different medications but nothing was working. They decided to transfer me closer to NYC so My mom and Dad could have easier access to me. They transferred me down to Westchester Psychiatric where I played spiritual games. See the goal is to understand the crazy spirituality that happens in a psychiatric break. The ward was broken into two groups. Red and Blue./ Red from Hell, Blue for Heaven. The Hell part of the ward was heated very high while the heaven part of the ward was heated normally. The point of this exercise, I guess ,was to figure out where each person belonged in a spiritual sense. What I found interesting was that in the Hell corridor there was a room for a Heaven person and in the Heaven corridor there was a room for a Hell person. I found this interesting because it meant that even in Heaven there was a person good enough to be in Heaven but still classified as being a misfit from Hell and a person bad enough to be in Hell but considered nice enough to be in Heaven.
On the walls leading between the Heaven and Hell corridors were pictures. They ranged from a House, a picture of a baby, a public school, marriage, old age, and a funeral. But to liven things up the very last picture was a picture of a house. Either to portray life as cyclical, you come back to the same universe or species after this life or there is a new life somewhere else. It kind of gave me a little comfort after dying three times!! lol.
My dad showed up pissed at me for signing into this hospital. I said to him, "Let me explain to you how signing into a psychiatric hospital works. You arrive by ambulance. You sit in front of the hospitals director's desk he says you can be admitted voluntarily or involuntarily. No matter what you do you are going to be admitted." Being admitted voluntarily means you have a few more rights than involuntarily so as I am explaining to my dad I had no choice. My mom shows up. They both talk off to the side and then it was two weeks of psychiatric games."
While all this is going on they are still trying to find a medication that will work on my psychiatric disorder. I basically remember the quiet room. A place to go to scream if you need to do so as not to bother the other patients. I remember the exodus. They wanted to see in my transcendental state what I would do if I wasn't allowed to go with the rest of the patients, for a trip outside, if I thought they were leaving this reality, for good. Basically leaving me behind! Oh yeah. Fun stuff!! I ended up in the quiet room that did not stay so.
After two weeks I was moved to another psychiatric hospital in Queens. From there they finally got some meds working on me and I started coming out of my transcendental state. But things still did not seem right. For example. I was asked to draw NYC. What I remembered of it. I thought I'd be cute and draw trees on buildings. Trees on tops and sides of buildings. You could say it was my fantasy city, While in reality I really could not remember if there had been or not.
I was still not well and they were asking me to describe where my home was. I am surprised I didn't draw a picture of NYC as a floating island. Although that may not have been so bad now with global warming and all.
I started to realize what was going on. I had eloped. I was a person in a different reality. And these so called psychiatric hospitals were trying to get me back to my reality. Everyday it was something else. What do your parents do. Do your parents love you. Do you have friends, etc.
But the best was the TV. The TV was set up to show different reality's programs. Differentiated by different TV logos. A clear Channel 2 eye logo or a colored in one. A colored in peacock logo for channel 4 or a clear one. On and on it went for weeks until each person in the facility agreed that was what their main Broadcast logos looked like and off they went, home. It was kind of like the Hospital was moving thru realities matching up to each persons who had eloped in the hospital. Everyday there would be a different TV tuning make up, CBS would be on channel 4 and NBC would be on channel 2 or ABC would be on chamnel 5 and Fox would be on channel 7. It was all to find where an eloped person belonged. That was why my mom's name was spelled weirdly in the hospital phone book. I was in a different reality. Or at least that was what I thought. All of this is circumstantial because I was in the middle of a psychotic break.
To be continued....
He asked if I wanted a sedative, "Hell no!"
He smiled. "Rough night?"
I looked at him, "Aren't you supposed to tell me?"
We both sort of laughed and I decided to watch the progress our ambulance was making by watching the traffic out ther back door. Finally I started to wonder and asked the EMT, "Why was it taking so long to get back to the hospital I had escaped from?"
He said, "I was going to a special hospital."
About 45 minutes later or at least it seemed like 45 minutes. I found myself at Binghampton Psychiatric Hospital. I was rolled into one of their wards, into a room. And sat there playing games with the analog clock., You have to understand. I was really out of it. I was kind of in a transcendental state. I was watching everything and everybody closely. For some reason thru all of this I kept thinking everything had a mystical meaning. The clock seemed to be running backwards and then forwards. Just what I needed a Schizophrenic clock! Which meant there was no way to tell time.
I could have been there days or weeks. I just don't know. What I did notice was the blanket they gave me to keep warm. It had strange hieroglyphics on it. My mom would later say they were just the name of the hospital but they were reversed for some reason. They wheeled in an older gentlemen and gave him a blanket and we both stayed their silently. A Rabbi made a brief appearance talking to the gentlemen and me. "Asking how everything was and if I needed any prayers."
But for some reason I kept thinking this was a whole god swapping exercise. Here was an older god showing up to relieve his duties to the younger new guy. (I know this sounds weird, But this is what I really thought.)
It wasn't until my parents showed up and talked me out of this crazy thinking that things for me got saner. My mom said the clock was not running backwards it just needed a new battery,. The old man was here not to transfer godly powers but for the same reason I was here. He needed psychiatric help.
I asked about the blanket. It seemed like a Jewish Religious Tallit and I was somehow being transferred powers. My mom looked at the blanket and said, "This is just a blanket with the hospital name on it."
So I calmed down. To many crazy things had happened to me to worry about the possibility of being a god. What seemed more appropriate was to just worry about my health and getting back to college.
So for a few days they gave me different medications but nothing was working. They decided to transfer me closer to NYC so My mom and Dad could have easier access to me. They transferred me down to Westchester Psychiatric where I played spiritual games. See the goal is to understand the crazy spirituality that happens in a psychiatric break. The ward was broken into two groups. Red and Blue./ Red from Hell, Blue for Heaven. The Hell part of the ward was heated very high while the heaven part of the ward was heated normally. The point of this exercise, I guess ,was to figure out where each person belonged in a spiritual sense. What I found interesting was that in the Hell corridor there was a room for a Heaven person and in the Heaven corridor there was a room for a Hell person. I found this interesting because it meant that even in Heaven there was a person good enough to be in Heaven but still classified as being a misfit from Hell and a person bad enough to be in Hell but considered nice enough to be in Heaven.
On the walls leading between the Heaven and Hell corridors were pictures. They ranged from a House, a picture of a baby, a public school, marriage, old age, and a funeral. But to liven things up the very last picture was a picture of a house. Either to portray life as cyclical, you come back to the same universe or species after this life or there is a new life somewhere else. It kind of gave me a little comfort after dying three times!! lol.
My dad showed up pissed at me for signing into this hospital. I said to him, "Let me explain to you how signing into a psychiatric hospital works. You arrive by ambulance. You sit in front of the hospitals director's desk he says you can be admitted voluntarily or involuntarily. No matter what you do you are going to be admitted." Being admitted voluntarily means you have a few more rights than involuntarily so as I am explaining to my dad I had no choice. My mom shows up. They both talk off to the side and then it was two weeks of psychiatric games."
While all this is going on they are still trying to find a medication that will work on my psychiatric disorder. I basically remember the quiet room. A place to go to scream if you need to do so as not to bother the other patients. I remember the exodus. They wanted to see in my transcendental state what I would do if I wasn't allowed to go with the rest of the patients, for a trip outside, if I thought they were leaving this reality, for good. Basically leaving me behind! Oh yeah. Fun stuff!! I ended up in the quiet room that did not stay so.
After two weeks I was moved to another psychiatric hospital in Queens. From there they finally got some meds working on me and I started coming out of my transcendental state. But things still did not seem right. For example. I was asked to draw NYC. What I remembered of it. I thought I'd be cute and draw trees on buildings. Trees on tops and sides of buildings. You could say it was my fantasy city, While in reality I really could not remember if there had been or not.
I was still not well and they were asking me to describe where my home was. I am surprised I didn't draw a picture of NYC as a floating island. Although that may not have been so bad now with global warming and all.
I started to realize what was going on. I had eloped. I was a person in a different reality. And these so called psychiatric hospitals were trying to get me back to my reality. Everyday it was something else. What do your parents do. Do your parents love you. Do you have friends, etc.
But the best was the TV. The TV was set up to show different reality's programs. Differentiated by different TV logos. A clear Channel 2 eye logo or a colored in one. A colored in peacock logo for channel 4 or a clear one. On and on it went for weeks until each person in the facility agreed that was what their main Broadcast logos looked like and off they went, home. It was kind of like the Hospital was moving thru realities matching up to each persons who had eloped in the hospital. Everyday there would be a different TV tuning make up, CBS would be on channel 4 and NBC would be on channel 2 or ABC would be on chamnel 5 and Fox would be on channel 7. It was all to find where an eloped person belonged. That was why my mom's name was spelled weirdly in the hospital phone book. I was in a different reality. Or at least that was what I thought. All of this is circumstantial because I was in the middle of a psychotic break.
To be continued....
My Schizophrenia Experience or A Divine Encounter Part II
Okay, so to recap.. I have just woken up from being in a park.
It's September.
The setting in Oneonta, NY.
It's cold.
It's 1 am, and I am knocking on people's doors warning them about some kind of threat that I have no idea is. I then see a police officer in his car and I tell him I don't feel right.
He says, "Do you need to go to the hospital?"
I say, "I think so."
He says, "Okay, get in my police car and I'll drive you over."
Now, you have to understand. I was in a really strange state. Not quite sure what was going on with me but knowing I needed to do something about it. Another thing is when I ride with my mom in her car. I tend to sit in the front seat.... Yes, that is right. When the police officer said get in his car. I got into the front passenger seat. This not withstanding made him jumpy. "I meant get in the back." He said.
I said, "Sorry do you want me to get out?"
He said, "No, just don't touch anything,"
He proceeds to drive me about five city blocks to the main hospital. I walk in with him and I enter a room that has two doors. One is the one We came in thru and the other leads to another room.
The head nurse and an orderly asks first the cop and then me, "what is the problem?"
The cop says, "He says he needed to go to the hospital."
They look at me,
I say, "I just feel strange."
They ask, "Do you have family in the area?"
I say, "On Staten Island."
They get out a phone book, why they would have a NYC telephone book in of all places, Oneonta, don't ask me, and ask me to pick out my mother's name. I look and look and can't find it. Finally, I see her name but the last name is spelled differently. "Strange," I thought.
They call up my mom. They put me on the phone with her and she asks, "Is everything alright?"
I say, "I just feel weird." She gets on the phone with the head nurse and starts talking.
He decides to admit and gives me a sedative. Now, you have to understand. Here I am in a strange room in a strange hospital and they want to give me a shot of something. Now any normal person would have freaked out.
Which I of course did fighting with both the orderly and the head nurse. Unfortunately, I was over powered and given the sedative. I thought I was dying, The second time that night it seemed. Everything got blurry, and. I black out.
While I am blacked out,
Thinking back on this whole incident there was one other thing I forgot to mention. Remember, how I was trying to warn everybody about some kind of danger? (Back at the beginning of this chapter) And it was this danger that had made me run out of the park in the first place? It was years later when I remembered what exactly had happened in those moments. I remember being in a dark place with monsters and I had literally run past all of these creatures before waking up running to knock on people doors warning them of this danger. Why the blank spot in my memory? I don't know. All I know is if you see a bunch of monsters grinning at you, You'd run your ass off too!
Okay, so I wake up. I am on a medical bed and my shirt is gone. I have on a hospital gown. Luckily I still have my pants on. And All I hear are people moaning on the other side of a curtain. Turns out I was in the ER of the hospital. I had an IV filled with fluids and I was trying to get my barring. I start getting angry because from my point of view. They didn't need to knock me out (Making me think I was being killed) and take my shirt! Well, I wasn't going to have any of this. I pulled the IV out and then sat wondering which way led out? I decided to sit there and see if the nurse would return and what direction she would come from, to put the IV back in. Sure enough, she returned, reset my IV and left to the left of my bed. I muttered, "What is to the left of me?"
Luckily for me, a patient on the other side of the curtain gladly told me what was, "There is a doorway to your right it leads to the ER waiting room. Just don't turn left you'll end up at a wall."
That was enough fort me. I yanked out the IV again and walked very calmly out of the ER out to the ER Waiting room and out to the front of the hospital.
A nurse, panicking, "Yelled at me to stop."
I of course bolted. I was close to a set of houses and I figured if I stayed on the main street the orderlies would get me. So I hopped a few backyard fences and hid behind a house. I heard a siren go off for a while. And then nothing. It was then that I realized how cold it was.
The Hospital garb was like wearing nothing. At first I tried to figure out what to do. "I am cold? I need a place to stay warm."
I noticed an open door to the back of a house, Now, remember I was exactly in the right frame of mind. I rang the doorbell. No one came to the door. I stood in the inner vestibule of the door and tried to shield myself from the wind. It was then that I noticed a friend from college a house over. I told him, "I lost my shirt. Can I have one of yours to borrow. He said sure. He saw I was acting strange and said you need to get home. I think you have had one too many beers. (This is why they give you an admitting sedative.) I said, "Sure thanks."
He walked me over to the local bus and he made sure I got on it. The local city bus is basically there to help college students get from the college to the bars downtown. Its a symbiotic relationship. The school provides the students, the students, then pay and drink the beer from these bars. The need for a bus is because the college sits on a hill and no student wants to walk up that hill sober or drunk. Anyway. I am on the bus. I am determined to get back to the college. Only one thing stood in the way. That damn holy water construction line that was dug to keep me out.
The bus route happens to go right over this line and I having been killed twice already today and I am in no mood for a third. As the bus gets close, my fear factor goes up. Finally I give in and I get off one stop before.
So my progress has been from College, to park, to black out, to creatures, to hospital, to escaping hospital, on bus to college and now back to the park. God knows how long I was in the hospital because now it is day break. And I decide I need some food.
So I go to a local pizza and ask for some change. Don't ask me why or how I came up with this, but for some reason I felt that stores would be more inclined to give you change from their registers then keep it for themselves. (Look, I had had a rough night!) So I go in and ask for some change and the owner throws me out. Now I am hungry, thirsty, tired, and unsure as to what my next move should be. I see some old men playing basketball. I sit on a bench and watch them play. I suddenly have thoughts of, "This must be what the Greek gods used to do. They are up their in Heaven and they are playing basketball, deciding important issues by who wins. They see me watching them and they see I don't look right so..
Yes, you guessed it, they call an ambulance and it was off to another hospital.
To be Continued...
It's September.
The setting in Oneonta, NY.
It's cold.
It's 1 am, and I am knocking on people's doors warning them about some kind of threat that I have no idea is. I then see a police officer in his car and I tell him I don't feel right.
He says, "Do you need to go to the hospital?"
I say, "I think so."
He says, "Okay, get in my police car and I'll drive you over."
Now, you have to understand. I was in a really strange state. Not quite sure what was going on with me but knowing I needed to do something about it. Another thing is when I ride with my mom in her car. I tend to sit in the front seat.... Yes, that is right. When the police officer said get in his car. I got into the front passenger seat. This not withstanding made him jumpy. "I meant get in the back." He said.
I said, "Sorry do you want me to get out?"
He said, "No, just don't touch anything,"
He proceeds to drive me about five city blocks to the main hospital. I walk in with him and I enter a room that has two doors. One is the one We came in thru and the other leads to another room.
The head nurse and an orderly asks first the cop and then me, "what is the problem?"
The cop says, "He says he needed to go to the hospital."
They look at me,
I say, "I just feel strange."
They ask, "Do you have family in the area?"
I say, "On Staten Island."
They get out a phone book, why they would have a NYC telephone book in of all places, Oneonta, don't ask me, and ask me to pick out my mother's name. I look and look and can't find it. Finally, I see her name but the last name is spelled differently. "Strange," I thought.
They call up my mom. They put me on the phone with her and she asks, "Is everything alright?"
I say, "I just feel weird." She gets on the phone with the head nurse and starts talking.
He decides to admit and gives me a sedative. Now, you have to understand. Here I am in a strange room in a strange hospital and they want to give me a shot of something. Now any normal person would have freaked out.
Which I of course did fighting with both the orderly and the head nurse. Unfortunately, I was over powered and given the sedative. I thought I was dying, The second time that night it seemed. Everything got blurry, and. I black out.
While I am blacked out,
Thinking back on this whole incident there was one other thing I forgot to mention. Remember, how I was trying to warn everybody about some kind of danger? (Back at the beginning of this chapter) And it was this danger that had made me run out of the park in the first place? It was years later when I remembered what exactly had happened in those moments. I remember being in a dark place with monsters and I had literally run past all of these creatures before waking up running to knock on people doors warning them of this danger. Why the blank spot in my memory? I don't know. All I know is if you see a bunch of monsters grinning at you, You'd run your ass off too!
Okay, so I wake up. I am on a medical bed and my shirt is gone. I have on a hospital gown. Luckily I still have my pants on. And All I hear are people moaning on the other side of a curtain. Turns out I was in the ER of the hospital. I had an IV filled with fluids and I was trying to get my barring. I start getting angry because from my point of view. They didn't need to knock me out (Making me think I was being killed) and take my shirt! Well, I wasn't going to have any of this. I pulled the IV out and then sat wondering which way led out? I decided to sit there and see if the nurse would return and what direction she would come from, to put the IV back in. Sure enough, she returned, reset my IV and left to the left of my bed. I muttered, "What is to the left of me?"
Luckily for me, a patient on the other side of the curtain gladly told me what was, "There is a doorway to your right it leads to the ER waiting room. Just don't turn left you'll end up at a wall."
That was enough fort me. I yanked out the IV again and walked very calmly out of the ER out to the ER Waiting room and out to the front of the hospital.
A nurse, panicking, "Yelled at me to stop."
I of course bolted. I was close to a set of houses and I figured if I stayed on the main street the orderlies would get me. So I hopped a few backyard fences and hid behind a house. I heard a siren go off for a while. And then nothing. It was then that I realized how cold it was.
The Hospital garb was like wearing nothing. At first I tried to figure out what to do. "I am cold? I need a place to stay warm."
I noticed an open door to the back of a house, Now, remember I was exactly in the right frame of mind. I rang the doorbell. No one came to the door. I stood in the inner vestibule of the door and tried to shield myself from the wind. It was then that I noticed a friend from college a house over. I told him, "I lost my shirt. Can I have one of yours to borrow. He said sure. He saw I was acting strange and said you need to get home. I think you have had one too many beers. (This is why they give you an admitting sedative.) I said, "Sure thanks."
He walked me over to the local bus and he made sure I got on it. The local city bus is basically there to help college students get from the college to the bars downtown. Its a symbiotic relationship. The school provides the students, the students, then pay and drink the beer from these bars. The need for a bus is because the college sits on a hill and no student wants to walk up that hill sober or drunk. Anyway. I am on the bus. I am determined to get back to the college. Only one thing stood in the way. That damn holy water construction line that was dug to keep me out.
The bus route happens to go right over this line and I having been killed twice already today and I am in no mood for a third. As the bus gets close, my fear factor goes up. Finally I give in and I get off one stop before.
So my progress has been from College, to park, to black out, to creatures, to hospital, to escaping hospital, on bus to college and now back to the park. God knows how long I was in the hospital because now it is day break. And I decide I need some food.
So I go to a local pizza and ask for some change. Don't ask me why or how I came up with this, but for some reason I felt that stores would be more inclined to give you change from their registers then keep it for themselves. (Look, I had had a rough night!) So I go in and ask for some change and the owner throws me out. Now I am hungry, thirsty, tired, and unsure as to what my next move should be. I see some old men playing basketball. I sit on a bench and watch them play. I suddenly have thoughts of, "This must be what the Greek gods used to do. They are up their in Heaven and they are playing basketball, deciding important issues by who wins. They see me watching them and they see I don't look right so..
Yes, you guessed it, they call an ambulance and it was off to another hospital.
To be Continued...
My Schizophrenia Experience or A Divine Encounter
I have always wondered about my condition. I have a mental illness. Its something that I have been able to deal with thanks to medicine and a decent supportive family. But I have always wondered was my condition something more? I come from a Jewish family. I myself just celebrate the high holidays. I am not kosher and I sometimes think I don't believe in God. This view depends on the time of day and circumstances. My day is going badly? I hate God. My day is going good? Is there a God? Etc. We are all allowed to believe or not believe in God. I am sure if there is a God he understands that all religions, even ones that don't believe in him, are still religions in a way, and he is all accepting. In other-wards it doesn't matter if you believe in Judaism or Catholicism or Muslim-ism, etc. All faiths or non faiths are fine. There are plenty of ways of reaching for God.
So, that's my view on God.
On Schizophrenia: I said before that my family is Jewish. My mom's parents lost there whole family in the holocaust. And my Dad's parents there was never a person who had Schizophrenia. So It is hard to make a judgement as to if Schizophrenia runs in my family line. So, when I tell you my story I want you to understand that there are many ways of looking at my experience. There will be those that say I hallucinated the whole thing or that something happened but I still suffer from Schizophrenia so how much weight can you give to his (my) story?
On Drugs: I have never taken any illegal drugs. The only thing I take is meds prescribed by a Dr. However, since my story starts in college, a week or two after my 19th Birthday, and my side of the dorm was heavy into smoking pot, you can't rule out that I may have been influenced by drug leakage thru he bottom of my dorm door from the hallway where marijuana could be smelled quite strongly.
Okay so let me start with: I am a 19 year old student. I am a crack reporter. I report on anything I feel deserves the college administration's attention. From crumbling sidewalks. To food sources being closed at the wrong times at night, Really, when you read my other blogs, or my Facebook page: that was what I was doing at The State College of Oneonta.
At the time I was a junior. I was excited about being one year away from graduating and I was happy to be writing my articles.
One day I was in one of the computer labs. I was researching the USDA food pyramid. I wanted to write a story on how it is necessary to eat a well balanced meal. I had on numerous occasions seen students eating the most unhealthy of foods and wondering why they had a hard time getting up and going to class. So, my thinking was I'll write a story about eating well and it will help the students.
Well, I had been digging through the USDA's website and getting frustrated because I could not find the food pyramid. I don't know what button I pushed or where I was in the website but I came to a screen that was throwing out names and cities. For ex. Elaine Smith, Boston, Dan Gratter, San Diego etc. I was stunned by this page. Why would a USDA page be throwing out names and places. And that is when I saw my name and city. I got scared. I started punching buttons left and right. Somehow I got out of the screen and returned to the USDA website. I thought about what had just happened. Was I on some kind of government list? What did the names and places mean? I pushed a bunch of buttons again and again the screen came up with names and cities. Any student today would have broken out their cell phone and recorded all of this. But you have to remember this was 1996. The Smart Phone craze hadn't even started yet. So I never was able to find this page again or show it to someone else to collaborate my story.
A few days later I was under intense pressure. My field of study was English and I was reading many long stories by famous English Writers like Shakespeare for one class and U.S. founding fathers for another. It was a lot of stress and at this particular time you could find me down in the study lounge reading and taking meticulous notes. Well, I don't know who I was reading. I think may have been a transcendentalist but I came up with a theory. MY brain was actually two brains. One was the mathematical brain. The part of the brain that computes problems. and the other part of the brain was the creative brain. The part of the brain that reads or writes. Somewhere I got the idea that I could come up with a mathematical equation that my creative side of the brain would feed me the answer to in my dreams. But somewhere along the way I created a mathematical equation that could not be solved and I ended up with Schizophrenia. This is one idea: I thought on what happened to me. That some how I had unintentionally screwed up my brain.
Over the next few days I was getting less and less sleep relying on my new friend,, COFFEE!!!!
I have to admit I never drank coffee until I was in college. Man was I an idiot. All those early morning high school classes that I almost fell asleep in, well, coffee would have been the answer. So I was getting real chummy with coffee. I would go to sleep late at night and be up five or six hours later and my friend coffee helped. Anyway, between my next door dorm mates being pricks and smoking marijuana in the hallway, and my sleeping less, reading and studying more I had the next weirdness.
As in most Oneonta dorms there are two kitchens. Complete with a microwave and sink. There is a table you can sit at and eat your hot morning breakfast and there is even another connecting room where you can watch TV. I sometime would go down and join my fellow dorm mates watching a movie or tv show. Well I came down and a bunch of my dorm mates asked if I wanted to watch Mousetrap. Its a movie about a pesky mouse trying to get rid of new owners of a house and all the crazy life threatening shenanigans that happen to the new owners.
I am watching it and I have to admit it was quite violent on stunts. I mean Home Alone looked tame to this movie. Anyway one of the girl dorm mates came in and started screaming at us. "Don't you know these actors are really getting hurt? Don't you guys feel the least bit sorry?" And she ran off in a huff.
I have to admit. I and my dorm mates were stunned. It was just a movie. Nothing was real in it. But apparently this girl had thought so or had freaked out. Freaked out is a term we gave dorm mates who had lost it to the stress of college life and had to be sent home or to a mental institution. It happened when class work became so intense there was no way to finish it and basically you were two months away from failing out of college. Anyway. We just shruigged and went back to watching the movie.
Later that night I was up late reading. It was quiet for the first time in weeks on my side of the dorm and I got a lot of reading done. I decided to reward myself by turning on the TV and watching a show. I had just tuned into a show but it went to commercial. I was busy blocking out the TV ads when a commercial came on for the Golden Child, The Eddie Murphy movie. There stood Eddie Murphy confronting a flaming demon, which I took to believe was the devil. Eddie was cracking jokes at the devil's expense and the devil was getting pissed. I stopped zoning out and realized this was a scene that had never been in the movie. I watched it more intently now and saw the demon whip out a sword and cut Eddie in half. Eddie stopped laughing and you could see his body slowly separate and slide off onto the floor. I got scared and shut off the TV. I was wondering had I really seen what I had seen? I looked at the coffee pot, looked at the doorway with maybe marijuana might be leaking in and decided I must have just imagined it. I turned the TV back on and not one commercial break later the same commercial came on. Now I was just freaking out. What the hell was going on here? My mom has explained to me that what I saw must have been a hallucination. But it wasn't.
The next day I was passing by the RA's desk. These are people who help solve problems in the dorm and they had on the TV and were watching it. I sometimes went down to the desk, more appropriately called the cage because one RA's had to stay there managing it and they all felt it was like it was a cage. I stopped by to say hello. As I got close I saw the same Eddie Murphy ad on again and the RA's were watching it like it was just a regular commercial. I said to them. "That ad does not frighten you?" The RA just shrugged and said, "Its just a TV ad." I said, "Yeah, well Its not from any scene in the movie. The RA just shrugged and went back to watching the TV. So my second thinking was that it was a real TV ad but not from the movie. But what about that girl who had walked into the kitchen area and screamed at us watching an obvious fake movie? Could there have been more than what I thought was going on. Were the RA's in on it or did they just not know. Had I pissed off the wrong college administration person?
So all this leads up to my running away from college and almost dying.
The next day I was busy studying again and I was tired. Day after Day reading and putting together book reports on what I had read and its significance was starting to have an affect. Also the late nights and early mornings were also starting to have an affect. Then as I finished readings from one English class and opened up the book to the next English class. I snapped. I said, "this is too much work and I need some time away from all of this."
I put on my winter coat. Oneonta has a strange climate .Even in the summer it never reaches farther than the 70's. This being September, the cold had started to seep into the surrounding college hills, and If you were smart, when you went out, you took a coat. Anyway, I made my way down the hill into Oneonta town. The sun was just setting and the wind had kicked up a little bit.
I passed familiar buildings, like the hockey league gym building, and residential houses and found myself watching a construction crew pull up and start digging a trench across from one side of a street to another. I had sat down at a near by bench at a park and was watching the construction wondering what was going on. I heard them mutter ,"This will keep him out of the college. We just sprinkle some holy water on it and he will die if he steps over this trench. They smiled at me and a half hour later left. Now I sat there trying to come to my senses. Did they actually mean it? If I crossed this construction line would I die? I didn't want to find out. I went for a walk around the park. It was getting late. The sun had set around 7:30 pm, and it was getting really dark and cold. I couldn't bring myself to cross this line they had dug. Between the Eddie Murphy commercial and the construction crew laughing at me, I was stuck with few options. I decided to lay down in the park and look at the sky. I figured A few minutes laying down would center myself and bring me a solution. I heard from the tree line of the park. "Aw.. Look at how much he cares. We have to do something for him." I couldn't' see these people talking but their voices seemed quite close. I decided to ignore them and look at the stars. The stars looked normal. I am not a big constellation person so I did not know what I was looking at, only that they were stars in no particular order.
Suddenly, the stars started to spin. It hurt my eyes to watch. I closed them after a few seconds of trying to watch what was going on. The next thing I know they settle into the position of a cross. And I blacked out.
I awoke to a Dr. and nurses holding me down and trying to stick me with a needle. I kept crying, "Let me go back! Let me go back!" A nurse asked, "what is he talking about?" The Dr., said, "He must be delusional. He wants to go back? Here." He gave me a shot of something and I went back to sleep.
I awoke in the park again the star cross was still in the sky and I felt this urge to run and get out of the park. I ran from house to house feeling the need to warn people of an impending attack. I don't know why I thought there was an attack coming. I just felt the urge to get a hold of someone. It must have been 1 am because no one was answering their doors. Finally I got lucky and a guy came to the door. He asked me, "What do you want?" I said, "Someone is coming. You have to leave." He said, "Are you kidding? Are you sick? Its 1 am! Go back to the college!"
I started walking towards the main street thinking, "maybe I am sick?" I saw a police officer in his car. I told him I wasn't feeling right and he drove me to the local hospital.
To be Continued...
So, that's my view on God.
On Schizophrenia: I said before that my family is Jewish. My mom's parents lost there whole family in the holocaust. And my Dad's parents there was never a person who had Schizophrenia. So It is hard to make a judgement as to if Schizophrenia runs in my family line. So, when I tell you my story I want you to understand that there are many ways of looking at my experience. There will be those that say I hallucinated the whole thing or that something happened but I still suffer from Schizophrenia so how much weight can you give to his (my) story?
On Drugs: I have never taken any illegal drugs. The only thing I take is meds prescribed by a Dr. However, since my story starts in college, a week or two after my 19th Birthday, and my side of the dorm was heavy into smoking pot, you can't rule out that I may have been influenced by drug leakage thru he bottom of my dorm door from the hallway where marijuana could be smelled quite strongly.
Okay so let me start with: I am a 19 year old student. I am a crack reporter. I report on anything I feel deserves the college administration's attention. From crumbling sidewalks. To food sources being closed at the wrong times at night, Really, when you read my other blogs, or my Facebook page: that was what I was doing at The State College of Oneonta.
At the time I was a junior. I was excited about being one year away from graduating and I was happy to be writing my articles.
One day I was in one of the computer labs. I was researching the USDA food pyramid. I wanted to write a story on how it is necessary to eat a well balanced meal. I had on numerous occasions seen students eating the most unhealthy of foods and wondering why they had a hard time getting up and going to class. So, my thinking was I'll write a story about eating well and it will help the students.
Well, I had been digging through the USDA's website and getting frustrated because I could not find the food pyramid. I don't know what button I pushed or where I was in the website but I came to a screen that was throwing out names and cities. For ex. Elaine Smith, Boston, Dan Gratter, San Diego etc. I was stunned by this page. Why would a USDA page be throwing out names and places. And that is when I saw my name and city. I got scared. I started punching buttons left and right. Somehow I got out of the screen and returned to the USDA website. I thought about what had just happened. Was I on some kind of government list? What did the names and places mean? I pushed a bunch of buttons again and again the screen came up with names and cities. Any student today would have broken out their cell phone and recorded all of this. But you have to remember this was 1996. The Smart Phone craze hadn't even started yet. So I never was able to find this page again or show it to someone else to collaborate my story.
A few days later I was under intense pressure. My field of study was English and I was reading many long stories by famous English Writers like Shakespeare for one class and U.S. founding fathers for another. It was a lot of stress and at this particular time you could find me down in the study lounge reading and taking meticulous notes. Well, I don't know who I was reading. I think may have been a transcendentalist but I came up with a theory. MY brain was actually two brains. One was the mathematical brain. The part of the brain that computes problems. and the other part of the brain was the creative brain. The part of the brain that reads or writes. Somewhere I got the idea that I could come up with a mathematical equation that my creative side of the brain would feed me the answer to in my dreams. But somewhere along the way I created a mathematical equation that could not be solved and I ended up with Schizophrenia. This is one idea: I thought on what happened to me. That some how I had unintentionally screwed up my brain.
Over the next few days I was getting less and less sleep relying on my new friend,, COFFEE!!!!
I have to admit I never drank coffee until I was in college. Man was I an idiot. All those early morning high school classes that I almost fell asleep in, well, coffee would have been the answer. So I was getting real chummy with coffee. I would go to sleep late at night and be up five or six hours later and my friend coffee helped. Anyway, between my next door dorm mates being pricks and smoking marijuana in the hallway, and my sleeping less, reading and studying more I had the next weirdness.
As in most Oneonta dorms there are two kitchens. Complete with a microwave and sink. There is a table you can sit at and eat your hot morning breakfast and there is even another connecting room where you can watch TV. I sometime would go down and join my fellow dorm mates watching a movie or tv show. Well I came down and a bunch of my dorm mates asked if I wanted to watch Mousetrap. Its a movie about a pesky mouse trying to get rid of new owners of a house and all the crazy life threatening shenanigans that happen to the new owners.
I am watching it and I have to admit it was quite violent on stunts. I mean Home Alone looked tame to this movie. Anyway one of the girl dorm mates came in and started screaming at us. "Don't you know these actors are really getting hurt? Don't you guys feel the least bit sorry?" And she ran off in a huff.
I have to admit. I and my dorm mates were stunned. It was just a movie. Nothing was real in it. But apparently this girl had thought so or had freaked out. Freaked out is a term we gave dorm mates who had lost it to the stress of college life and had to be sent home or to a mental institution. It happened when class work became so intense there was no way to finish it and basically you were two months away from failing out of college. Anyway. We just shruigged and went back to watching the movie.
Later that night I was up late reading. It was quiet for the first time in weeks on my side of the dorm and I got a lot of reading done. I decided to reward myself by turning on the TV and watching a show. I had just tuned into a show but it went to commercial. I was busy blocking out the TV ads when a commercial came on for the Golden Child, The Eddie Murphy movie. There stood Eddie Murphy confronting a flaming demon, which I took to believe was the devil. Eddie was cracking jokes at the devil's expense and the devil was getting pissed. I stopped zoning out and realized this was a scene that had never been in the movie. I watched it more intently now and saw the demon whip out a sword and cut Eddie in half. Eddie stopped laughing and you could see his body slowly separate and slide off onto the floor. I got scared and shut off the TV. I was wondering had I really seen what I had seen? I looked at the coffee pot, looked at the doorway with maybe marijuana might be leaking in and decided I must have just imagined it. I turned the TV back on and not one commercial break later the same commercial came on. Now I was just freaking out. What the hell was going on here? My mom has explained to me that what I saw must have been a hallucination. But it wasn't.
The next day I was passing by the RA's desk. These are people who help solve problems in the dorm and they had on the TV and were watching it. I sometimes went down to the desk, more appropriately called the cage because one RA's had to stay there managing it and they all felt it was like it was a cage. I stopped by to say hello. As I got close I saw the same Eddie Murphy ad on again and the RA's were watching it like it was just a regular commercial. I said to them. "That ad does not frighten you?" The RA just shrugged and said, "Its just a TV ad." I said, "Yeah, well Its not from any scene in the movie. The RA just shrugged and went back to watching the TV. So my second thinking was that it was a real TV ad but not from the movie. But what about that girl who had walked into the kitchen area and screamed at us watching an obvious fake movie? Could there have been more than what I thought was going on. Were the RA's in on it or did they just not know. Had I pissed off the wrong college administration person?
So all this leads up to my running away from college and almost dying.
The next day I was busy studying again and I was tired. Day after Day reading and putting together book reports on what I had read and its significance was starting to have an affect. Also the late nights and early mornings were also starting to have an affect. Then as I finished readings from one English class and opened up the book to the next English class. I snapped. I said, "this is too much work and I need some time away from all of this."
I put on my winter coat. Oneonta has a strange climate .Even in the summer it never reaches farther than the 70's. This being September, the cold had started to seep into the surrounding college hills, and If you were smart, when you went out, you took a coat. Anyway, I made my way down the hill into Oneonta town. The sun was just setting and the wind had kicked up a little bit.
I passed familiar buildings, like the hockey league gym building, and residential houses and found myself watching a construction crew pull up and start digging a trench across from one side of a street to another. I had sat down at a near by bench at a park and was watching the construction wondering what was going on. I heard them mutter ,"This will keep him out of the college. We just sprinkle some holy water on it and he will die if he steps over this trench. They smiled at me and a half hour later left. Now I sat there trying to come to my senses. Did they actually mean it? If I crossed this construction line would I die? I didn't want to find out. I went for a walk around the park. It was getting late. The sun had set around 7:30 pm, and it was getting really dark and cold. I couldn't bring myself to cross this line they had dug. Between the Eddie Murphy commercial and the construction crew laughing at me, I was stuck with few options. I decided to lay down in the park and look at the sky. I figured A few minutes laying down would center myself and bring me a solution. I heard from the tree line of the park. "Aw.. Look at how much he cares. We have to do something for him." I couldn't' see these people talking but their voices seemed quite close. I decided to ignore them and look at the stars. The stars looked normal. I am not a big constellation person so I did not know what I was looking at, only that they were stars in no particular order.
Suddenly, the stars started to spin. It hurt my eyes to watch. I closed them after a few seconds of trying to watch what was going on. The next thing I know they settle into the position of a cross. And I blacked out.
I awoke to a Dr. and nurses holding me down and trying to stick me with a needle. I kept crying, "Let me go back! Let me go back!" A nurse asked, "what is he talking about?" The Dr., said, "He must be delusional. He wants to go back? Here." He gave me a shot of something and I went back to sleep.
I awoke in the park again the star cross was still in the sky and I felt this urge to run and get out of the park. I ran from house to house feeling the need to warn people of an impending attack. I don't know why I thought there was an attack coming. I just felt the urge to get a hold of someone. It must have been 1 am because no one was answering their doors. Finally I got lucky and a guy came to the door. He asked me, "What do you want?" I said, "Someone is coming. You have to leave." He said, "Are you kidding? Are you sick? Its 1 am! Go back to the college!"
I started walking towards the main street thinking, "maybe I am sick?" I saw a police officer in his car. I told him I wasn't feeling right and he drove me to the local hospital.
To be Continued...
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