Scout is Out

 Scout is out…in more ways than one.  

  Having first outed myself to my family whilst in Hawaii I then  proceeded to go bonkers , well, er, um, further bonkers, and landed in the nut house.  I didn’t see any squirrels around but did get a good first hand peak at facilities today for the mentally ill (such a stupid term in itself). 

 

North Vancouver’s Lions Gate Hospital is rather draconian and while their blurb is a good one, it sure doesn’t hold true.  About the only good thing was the uniforms…hospital issue now has nice colours in various shakes of gold, brown, tan and yellow.  Yes, I was one of the revered ‘Golden Girls’ of Ward A2.   We were such hags , nice hags but still hags , that none of the slightly dangerous patients would go near us (and what the fuck are slightly dangerous ones doing in a ward with non-dangerous ones, hmm, hmmm?.  

 

Wholly inadequate.  From having dropped the transitional ward to meet again with the pressures of the outisde world, those rooms have now been converted to nice office space to attract pychiatrists….oh goody, they get to have nice office space while we get tossed back out onto the street.  My doctor is the director of A2 and released me knowing i’d be homeless and living in my van a few days after.  As far as he is concerned that is not the hospital’s business.  So, who’s nuts here, the sheeple who go along with the underfunded system and mind-altering politics, or moi, a bipolar who reacts strongly to the ills of the world?  

 

At least i smuggled out a uni and got something out of the deal besides a med switch which seems to be affective.

 

Meals? We won’t even go there but I wished I’d had my camera.  Mind you, they probably would have taken it away from me anyways…just like they kept trying to take away my cigarettes (Scout wouldn’t surrender them and repeatedly told them they had no right to….more on this in further posts as I strip apart the Mental Illness Act, B.C. Coastal Health Authority, etc..  Then again I may just say ‘fuck it, fuck it all’.  

 

Most of the nurses, as usual, were angels…..about 90% women, the majority were the only ones who really knew what they were doing and had to scramble their arses off due to a nursing shortage and financial cutbacks.  My doc was a typical old style doc, he was knowledgable but mysoginistic.  Somehow I took great dellight in watching his facade crumble as I questioned his authority and competance.  Maybe I have a cruel streak but it’s not such a bad one as I could have stripped the guy down to bare bones and watched him shrivel into a little ball.  I decided not to go that far.

 

Fashion, food and farce…..the three ‘F’s that make up the psyche ward.  Not much has changed in the Cukoo’s Nest.