THEY HAVE TO keep patients medicated on a psychiatric unit. Staff are trying to get the patient’s illness back in control. If a person is in the hospital, it’s probably because his or her levels are off. Some meds are tried, a few work and others don’t but staff are always trying to find the exact right combination for each patient.
But the other reason they have to keep patients medicated, even sedated, is because life on the unit will scramble anyone’s brains.
What is there to do in a mental hospital? Watch television, sit in your room, wander the hallways, step out for a smoke break, attend group meetings. Every day, that’s all you get. It’s why visiting hours mean so much. Even patients who didn’t get along with their families on the outside are pleased to welcome them here.
Being stuck inside and doped up to the gills can make the place feel like a time machine, as Loochie knew, even by age nineteen. The distinction between the days, the weeks, the months, the years fade. It all seems like one long day. You just lose track. It’s shocking how quickly that can happen.
So if Pepper lost the next day or two because of the injection (plus the Haldol and lithium) well, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. It took him hours to swim back to the shores of consciousness. And who was waiting for him right there on the beach? A nurse carrying a small white cup. Casting him out to sea again.
It takes time for a body to adjust to the meds. Really not all that different from building up one’s tolerance to alcohol. Once, one beer had your head wobbling loose on your neck, but in time, it might take five or six. You learn to hold your liquor. In the ward, you learn to hold your pills.
But it takes time.
Pepper’s seventy-two-hour observation period came and went, and he hardly realized its passing. Not that he forgot, he was just so busy swimming. Who petitions for his legal rights while trying desperately not to drown?
When he came to New Hyde, it was the third week of February.
When he finally shook off his medical haze, it was the middle of March.