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....
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