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....
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