Paranoia and other pleasant things

Got to get back, Samurai Jack

Since Monday, the work has me again. It isn’t too bad though - there are few patients since the Handicapped Persons’ Comission is on vacation until the beginning of September. I’ve had two encounters that remained in my mind this week - one with a crying girl, the other with an unlucky byciclist.

The teary patient was in her early thenties, and she started sobbing almost immediately after she entered my room. The fact that both her mom and her grandma reprimanded her for crying, while telling me repeatedly that neither the other two psychologists nor the comission could make her cooperate didn’t help much. However, the good old sixth sense started soon whispering in my ear that the girl could be autistic, even if no previous diagnoses said anything about it. Confiding in it, I started approaching her by the way you should do with frightened patients that have the big A - not forcing eye contact, not making her do things for me directly, speaking with a low, calm voice, chatting about her animals, what she does each day, her sister’s baby … in about 4 minutes I made the sobbing stop, and she was cooperating. After a while, she even left her hand down from her face and looked at me. Careful not to scare her, I directed a quick examination of her cognitive state, wrote the results down, chatted with the now smiling girl some more, and gave some advices to the mom, who’s jaw dropped when she saw me performing apparent magic on the girl. When they left, I was smiling too.

The biker was an entirely different story. A typical Transylvanian peasant, now in his 50s, with a face full of deep sun wrinkles and hands that have seen more physical effort than three stadiums full of bodybuilders, he came with a diagnose of post-traumatic personality disorder and epilepsy-like crises. His story made me cringe. Seems that he was riding his bike one day when a speeding car got out of control, hit and dragged him for almost 30 meters before dropping his body on the concrete. He has been in a coma for two weeks and woke up not being sure if he’ll be able to move again. By the time he got out of the hospital, he found out that the accident was deemed his fault, thanks to certain large envelopes full of money that exchanged owners.

He cried when he described what it feels like to be transformed from a hard worker to a jobless infirm and how stuck he felt, not having money to start a lawsuit and maybe see justice. “I go to bed thinking of what a burden I’ve become to my wife and my boys .. if I wouldn’t have prayer I would have probably started drinking by now..”

No smiles when he left.

Posted under: hospital