***The following post mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. You can also call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
The Beginning of Fury: College Freshman Year – Section E
Nighttime was especially bright out as the dorm mother and me walked to the campus infirmary. Although I had ventured from the campus at night, I had never actually walked around the campus at night. The experience of walking around the main part of the campus felt just as safe as the day, but there was nobody around except the dorm mother and me.
I had heard about the outskirts – the peripheral part of campus – and those were the parts that brought female students the most fear. Even still, for my sake and the sake of the dorm mother, I was glad that the infirmary was not a far walk.
As we walked, the dorm mother talked about a lot of this and a lot of that, but it was all light airy conversation. I said nothing as we walked, and I was not sure what to expect. I counted the bricks underneath my feet and played a silent game of attempting not to step on the cracks in between. {My mind spoke of my attempts, “Futile. Game over before it could really start.”}
I had anticipated that my time in the infirmary would be quick and to the point. I had another thing coming. Once the dorm mother and I were inside the infirmary, there were other students I saw too. I was not expecting to see so many people. I looked around in wild amazement. I saw either a student on a gurney with an arm propped over their face, a student heaving over a bucket (perhaps a drunken or sick night), or a student waiting to be seen.
It was an interesting night in the infirmary, and it seemed busy for the wee hours of the A.M. There may have been at most 20 students, but that was more than the amount I actually wanted to see considering my situation. I was hoping for privacy, but I was not sure that was going to be the case.
Once at the main desk, the dorm mother spoke to two nurses and had a lengthy ordinary conversation with one. It was small chit chat, but I could already tell that these nurses knew the reason I had come. One of the nurses whom I will refer to as Nurse Meany seemed aggravated by my presence. I could tell based on her reaction towards me that my time in the infirmary was not going to be pleasant.
Nurse Meany had “judge-y” eyes. She was not empathetic or compassionate at all. I wondered if years of nursing had burned her out. It was obvious that a foul mood was just her normal disposition. I was so glad that another nurse would be attending to me and asking me questions. I could not imagine the amount of pressure it would take to even want to talk to Nurse Meany.
Since there had been a string of campus sexual assaults in the past (which had been more rumored but now revealed to be true), the nicer nurse wanted to make sure that a recent sexual assault was not the cause of my contemplation and suicide attempt. I assured her that I had not been sexually assaulted recently. My mind failed to mentioned past trauma.
The nice nurse asked me a lot that all basically pertained to the state of my mental health. When the nice nurse asked me, “Why do you want to kill yourself?” I paused. I realized it was too complicated to explain. When I did try to explain it, all I could tell her was that I was in great emotional pain … that my entire body ached with a grief I did not understand, and I wanted it to end. It was a nonstop pain that would not go away. It was with me all the time. Then I said, “I don’t want to really die. I just want the pain to stop. But killing myself seemed like the only thing I could think to do.”
The nice nurse simply looked at me as if she did not know what to say. When I thought about my former roommate and how she said I never talked about anything, I immediately thought about all the reasons why no one wanted to talk to me about my life. No one was truly interested, and when thought-provoking questions were asked, they were not asked for the sake of getting a real answer.
No one wanted “real” answers to questions. They were only rhetorical. I could not help but wonder if the nice nurse really wanted to know why I had wanted “to kill myself” or if it was a question she just had to ask because it was part of the required questionnaire.
Then the nurse turned to me and said that maybe my heavy and lengthy periods were messing with my head since she had asked me about any physical stress. Sure, my heavy periods were stressful, but I had managed my best to maneuver my life around freely bleeding since I was 10. It was really the least of my worries, but the nurse seemed to be grabbing at straws. So she settled on the fact that I had not quite adjusted to life as a freshman, and I settled on her answer because it felt pointless for me to even talk about my ‘real’ problems. After that ‘interview’, I felt defeated.
When it was time for me to check out, I encountered Nurse Meany again, and the things she said to me stuck with me for years. I have come across some very irritable and unhappy behaving nurses in my lifetime, but Nurse Meany takes the cake. She has been the meanest and most hateful pf all nurses I have ever encountered in my life. She lacked even the most common characteristics needed to be a nurse – empathy, compassion, care, and tact.
Nurse Meany’s bedside manner was absolutely horrible, and if my life depended on her, I would have rather died that night. I am not exaggerating when I say this. Her words haunted me for days afterwards, and I never went back to the campus infirmary again. I even wrote a critical review of my experience (along with other students that later gained the infirmary and investigation by the school).
While checking out of the infirmary, Nurse Meany was cold as ice to me. She took the liberty to give me pieces of her mind. She was blunt and to the point, and her words were very hurtful to me. If she was attempting to scare the thought of me ever attempting another suicide, she had successfully failed. For a long time after her words to me, I never quite viewed nurses the same again.
Nurse Meany said to me, “You’ve given us all quite the night. You’re a sick individual. You need help. It would probably be even a good idea for people like you to go home and stay there. Who calls a suicide hotline and has a poor crisis counselor calling campuses to look for you? Who do you think you are? You’re nobody special. The fact that you wasted that counselor’s time, everyone else’s time, and you’re hear wasting our time because no one can figure out what is wrong with you is just sick. You young people just really get on my nerves with all of your trivial problems. Your parents should know how much money they are wasting on you here and how much trouble you’ve made for everyone here. Fake suicide attempt. You should have completed it to save us all this extra trouble especially this time of the morning.”
I was mortified but then suddenly angry. I felt such an intense rage unleash within me. It was the beginning of fury. I could not even think straight. I watched as more venom wrangled itself in a twist of words from Nurse Meany’s mouth. At that point, I no longer remembered her words. Her voice had become faint as I felt myself dissociating from the scene. It was as if I was in a tunnel, and all I could do was look at her mouth and her micro-expressions that detailed the amount of hatred that appeared to consume her.
By all accounts, Nurse Meany was a vicious and hateful person. I was not the only one stunned by her response. The dorm mother quickly came to my rescue and shushed the nurse. I could tell that the dorm mother was extremely frazzled by the nurse’s response. She turned to me with a shocking look of concern on her face and then told me in a stern voice to “Go up to the front area and wait for me, please. I’ll be there in a moment.”
I do not know what happened after I walked away, but I had the feeling that the dorm mother gave Nurse Meany a piece of her mind. It would serve that cruel nurse right. Unfortunately, there were a few other witnesses who had observed and heard what had happened with Nurse Meany too. So that meant that my private situation had now become very public. My suicide attempt was no longer a secret.
One campus-mate immediately came over to me while I waited in the front area and told me how sorry she was and that she understood my pain. She was extremely bothered by Nurse Meany’s behavior and said that someone needed to put a stop to her. Although I agreed with the sentiments, I said nothing. I felt like I was in a haze. I had detached enough from my surroundings to ward off feeling emotional pain. However, I remember having a panicky feeling inside of me, and I wished that maybe I had just taken all the pills.
When the dorm mother finally entered the front area, she said, “Well, that’s been handled, and you have nothing to worry about.” Yet, based on her nervous and fraught reaction, I was not so sure. The student who had attempted to console me walked with me and the dorm mother as far as our dorm. Then she separated from us in the direction of her dorm. She bid me farewell and hoped to see me around on campus. The student’s exchange was friendly, and later I would find her to become a friendly acquaintance for the remainder of my college years.
There is nothing quite like a mean nurse to bring a group of college students together, and there is also nothing quite like the same mean nurse to attempt to destroy my spirit by tearing me down and making me regret that a self-deletion was a mission unaccomplished. By now, Nurse Meany is most likely dead, but I do not know for sure. It is a shame that someone working with others with mental health issues could be so cruel. Thankfully, I have lived to tell my story, and I remain resilient after that night of anguish, but there was more to come.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 