Mental

True Story #49

When I first started working in the hospital, I was sitting with this . I had sat with her, talking about her family and such for six hours. Towards the end of my shift (9 pm) they decided she didn't need to have a heart monitor, so they transferred her to a different unit.

Once we got to the new room, she started acting differently - just generally angry, I would say. Then all of a sudden, she tried to jump out of the bed (a big no-no at hospitals), so I immediately got up to stop her. She started screaming bloody murder about how her house was on fire, and her family was inside and she needed to get them out. I tried to calm her down, but to no avail.

She started yelling at me about how I'm going to rot in the flames of Hell because God told her so, and how I was responsible for her family's death. Staring deep into my eyes, she told me all about how I will burn in eternal flames, and that I am filled with evil. I thought, "Okay, at least she isn't worried about her family or trying to get out of bed."

But then she started screaming at the top of her lungs in what I can only describe as Latin or maybe even gibberish. She then ripped out her dentures, threw them at me, and pulled all of the skin on her face back into this long, stretched-out, creepy smile. She let out a blood-curdling scream while her eyes rolled back into her head like some sort of possession scene in a movie. Just as she let up my relief came into the room. I wished her luck and booked it out of there.

The second I got off the unit, I called my mom and cried for a good 15 minutes. I still think of her stretched-out face sometimes.