I'm Not Crazy

~6~ Does this straight jacket make me look fat?

Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go
I wanna be sedated
Nothin' to do and no where to go-o-oh
I wanna be sedated

The Ramones - "I Wanna Be Sedated"

😈😈😈

Slipping back into the current again, I still have my eyes squeezed shut tight. Desperately trying to block out the screams of the crows. So I really can't say exactly for sure how I got from the school to the hospital. I have the fuguest feeling that I was picked up by rough hands and summarily carried away from wherever I was last. Then someone super strong is holding my magic hands, probably to prevent them from clawing my soul out of my skin again?

Soon enough I smell sickness, blood, bile and antiseptic air. So I can only assume that I was in some sort of hospital emergency room? A lot of voices squawking and talking nonsense codes all around me. Someone keeps trying to pry open my eyelids, then burn my brain with their bright white light of truth. Asking me stupid questions that I can't possibly know the answer to.

Like: "Do I know who I am?"

I mean seriously, does anyone really know who they are at fourteen?

So I keep my silent secrets to myself, because I think this might be a trick question to see if I am insane. At some point, I am being strapped into a hospital bed. Ostensibly to stop me from opening up a vein in my neck from my continual scratching. I finally feel a slight pinching prick in my arm, and then a welcome warmth starts seeping thru my cold blood.

Whatever I've been given to fix me is starting to unlock some of the secrets that I am keeping inside my soul. So for some stupid reason, I am fighting the medicine ...making everything feel very "warpy" and slightly surreal. The secrets are whispering at me to rest, but I really don't want to sleep. Because I know that once I float away into the warm orison embrace of sleep, the night terrors are coming for me ...as they always do. So I am fighting the drugs they poked into me the best I can. Leaving me feeling drifty and disconnected from what little is left of my reality.

At some point apparently, my mother has shown up at the hospital. Because I can hear her crying out my name in distant the hallway beyond me. She is talking to Sheriff Buddy, and someone else I can assume is a witch doctor? I don't think that they know I can hear them out in the hallway, with my new found febrile sensitivity to sound. Or maybe the shroud skein surrounding me is so thin, that I can hear them talking about me, just on the other side of the thin pale veil. But thanks to my drug-addled brain, I can only absorb bits and pieces of a longer larger conversation. But some of the words seem to stick better than others.

Wha-wha-wah...Thorazine. Wha-wha-wha...has this kind of thing ever happened before? Wha? Well in my experience girls at this age are prone to...wha-wha-wha. I would prefer that we hold her for a 72 hour observation ...wha-wha-wha. But your insurance will only let us keep her for a little while  ...wha-wha. So I suggest that you get her to someone who has experience in panic disorders and PSTD. As well as ...wha-wah-wha-wha-whaaaaa...

"PTSD? Panic attack? I don't understand? Samantha's never had any problems with anything like this. She's always been the calm one in the family?" I hear my mother protest the diagnosis and the obvious stupidity of this all.

Yeah, dead dad aside ...but hey, what's a little tragic childhood between best friends, right?

But I don't hear anymore after this, because the dark drug dreams take hold of me. Sucking me back down into my only too familiar hellishly reoccurring childhood nightmare once more.