Psych Ward Male Night Nurses

The Psych Ward was in reality a maximum security prison. Nobody left of their own accord.  Every 20 minutes, the nursing staff made their rounds to track down every patient. Whether we were in the shower, asleep or whatever, they always knew where we were.  As we slept, the night nurse came into our dark bedroom with a flashlight and shined it on our face and chest to make sure we were still breathing. If we were in the bathroom, they stood outside the bathroom door calling our name.  If we didn’t open the door to tell them we were there, they assumed that we were either trying to hide,  trying to kill ourselves, or already dead.  So they opened the door and hunted us down. There was no such thing as patient privacy.

A 10 foot barbed wire fence (with razor wire at the very top) surrounded the entire building, including the tiny courtyard attached to the building.  We weren’t allowed outside except for supervised group smoke breaks inside that tiny little courtyard. There was no such thing as structured exercise- or even unstructured exercise. If it happened at all, it happened at 8 pm, provided we could talk a staff member into walking us down the hall and out the steel double doors to a gym. Most days, the nursing staff was too short-staffed for that, but occasionally we got the chance to actually stretch our limbs out and break a sweat.

The hospital was always short-staffed, and the hardest shifts to fill were the night shifts. Nobody wanted to be a nurse on a psych ward at night. Most nights the only people they could get to handle the night shift were male nurses.  So usually there were two male nurses on the night shift overseeing about 25 patients. Sometimes only one male nurse was on the night shift.  Night nurses had unlimited and unsupervised access to all of those drugged up people (everyone was given sleeping meds) lying in their dark bedrooms .  Were there cameras?  In a few rooms.  But not all.

Night nurses were  required to walk into those dark bedrooms and shine a flashlight on the patient’s  face and chest every 20 minutes to make sure we were still alive, so they had every right to be in a patient’s dark bedroom alone. Under those circumstances, it would be child’s play for an unscrupulous  person to take advantage of a patient lying alone in her dark bedroom- a patient who was so full of sedatives  that she  wouldn’t wake up under almost any circumstance.  Even a patient sharing the bedroom with another patient could be a target, since both were heavily medicated. Added to that was the fact that the general reputation of a psychotic patient was that they were unreliable and their memories untrustworthy, and the psych ward was a virtual hunting ground for an unethical night nurse.

The morning following a night with one male night nurse on staff, I  thought I might have been violated by a male nurse. But I couldn’t make my mind up.   Was it my imagination?   I just didn’t know. I admitted to myself that I had been heavily sedated. Even then, I was in a fog. Was it real? Or wasn’t it?

Realizing that I had to let the people in charge know about my suspicions, I complained to the head nurse on duty.   I explained to her what I thought happened and that I couldn’t be sure, since I was sedated during the night. But certain things pointed in that direction.

Although she brushed off my complaint,  I watched as she returned to the nursing station.  A look of shock flash across her face as she read my chart. She immediately sought out the male night nurse on duty, and I overheard her berating him. The head nurse was obviously shaken up by what happened, but nothing further was communicated with me.  I was, after all, just a psychotic mental patient, obviously delusional and unreliable.