Yesterday was a very boring day. I pretty much slept the entire day, which is what I always think I want to do, but which never turns out to be the best thing for me. I ended up not sleeping much last night, and it didn’t help that my cat Max chose last night to be a total lovebug. By which I mean he sat right on my chest and purred as loudly as possible for the entirety of the night, swatting at my face if I dared stop petting him. And don’t think you can do something as simple as just put Max away in another room — he literally throws himself at the door over and over again until you let him back in. He will do it non-stop for hours.
So whatever, I was hoping to have a not-so-boring day today, since I woke up feeling depressed and lethargic and anxious about having done nothing yesterday. I called one of my girlfriends to see what she was up to, and she was basically mid-crisis. We’ll call her “B” for the sake of her privacy. B is — like me — on psychiatric medication, because — like me — she descends rapidly into fucking insanity without it. But while I have the privilege of fancy health insurance and a father who works in medicine and can always make a phone call when I’m in pinch, B is completely dependent on the state for her health care. She goes through doctors at the county hospital. She’s been trying to get her psych meds refilled for WEEKS now. The psychiatrist told her she first had to see a primary care physician, who had a waiting list of six months, so she got on the waiting list, called the psychiatrist back, and has been basically begging them to give her a refill for awhile now. They have not returned her calls. So last night she was completely out of her meds. She called me this morning — she hadn’t slept all night, she sounded absolutely wrecked, she was just a total mess. And I know from experience how quickly I can lose all contact with reality when I go off these meds cold turkey. But I’ve always made that ill-advised choice myself, not because I didn’t have the meds available. I was furious at her doctor for putting her in this position — it’s absurdly irresponsible.
B doesn’t have a car, so I picked her up and we headed over to Harborview, the county hospital, where I informed her that we were going to make giant pains in the ass of ourselves until she got her meds. This is an approach I find to be effective in these types of situations. We arrived at the county ER around 4pm, and they were relatively quick in admitting her, and then she met with a financial counselor who agreed to waive all fees for her for the next six months, so that was awesome. By around 4:30, they let us into the ward to meet with a doctor. Note that by “ward” I am referring to the psychiatric ward of a county hospital. This is not a pleasant place to be. To their credit, the nurses and doctors were all fantastic and very pleasant, but there was a patient in the room down the hall who INCESSANTLY screamed to herself and at the hospital staff. Mostly it was variations of “I WILL FUCK THAT BITCH UP” and “I’M GONNA FUCK YOU UP!” but occasionally it got interesting, like, she screamed the word “basketball” for awhile, and then played Marco Polo with herself. I recorded parts of it on my iPhone, and it was funny at the time, but on a re-listen, it’s just too desperate and genuinely painful to put on here. There was just such depth to her sadness, and you hear it in her screams. So much pain. B and I both felt toxic being on that ward. Oh, and did I mention they wanted to take away B’s shoelaces? When she was just there to get a med refill? But luckily the head nurse was like, “No, I don’t think we have to worry about her hanging herself in here.” (This conversation was going on while B and I were laughing and playing logic puzzles on my iPhone — that’s how close to suicide we appeared: “IF I CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET THIS GOLF BALL OUT OF THIS PIPE USING ONLY A WATER BOTTLE AND A TENNIS RACKET I SWEAR TO GOD I’M GONNA FUCKING HANG MYSELF!”)
About a half-hour later, the doctor came in. She was very nice. B was only asking for one or two pills, just until she could get a hold of her psychiatrist, but the doctor was like, “That’s silly, I’m going to write you a prescription for a month. It’s much easier to do that right now than to worry about having you come back here for a month-long stay.” Which is SO FUCKING TRUE. Like, the hospital knows B’s history — she’s been on that ward before as a patient. But she’s been on these meds for two years now and has been a totally healthy, happy, normal person. WHY ON EARTH WOULD HER PSYCHIATRIST NOT GIVE HER A REFILL??? It’s mind-blowing to me, the impossible hoops she was supposed to jump through for these pills. Our hospital doctor was very understanding and wrote her a prescription.
But here’s the next part: B needs to get her meds from the hospital. If she takes the scrip somewhere else, she has to pay for it all out-of-pocket. So we wait — ON THE PSYCH WARD — for the pharmacy to send the meds up, because on Sunday the normal pharmacy is closed and now there is only one pharmacist on duty. After an hour of waiting — amidst this woman’s screams of “Sir? SIR? SIIIIIIIIIIRRRRR???? I will FUCK YOU UP!” (I have it all on tape, I swear) — we still didn’t have our meds, so they let us be discharged so we could wait for them in the normal ER waiting area. By 7:30 we were tired of waiting, so we went to meet up with another friend and then came back at 8:45, when they finally had the meds that had been called in at 5:45. Oh, and did I mention that, by that time of night, we had to clear a metal detector to go into the waiting room?
I’m glad my friend can access health care even without health insurance. I’m glad we were able to work within the system to get her those pills she needed. I’m grateful that the hospital waived all fees for her — which she was really nervous about having to pay. These are all aspects of the system that work. I wish it could have happened faster — and we got expedited service because we were psych ER patients. B tells me she waited in that room for 7 hours just a day after having back surgery to try to get pain meds, crying and in excruciating pain, and she was never seen. She finally went home and cried herself to sleep, she tells me.
I don’t understand exactly where the hiccups are in the system, but that waiting room just reeked of desperation. Sad, desperate lives without options. Everyone who worked there was very kind and willing to help, it’s just SO SLOW to get patients seen. Where is the problem? Are there not enough doctors? Are there not enough beds? Where is the bottleneck here and how do we fix it?
And why couldn’t B’s psychiatrist have just given her enough of her meds until she could get in to see this primary care doctor? Why on earth would you risk doing that to a patient, when you know full well what happens to her when she doesn’t take those meds? B’s a smart and competent girl, and she has a strong support system, and so she understood how to go to the ER and get what she needed. But think of the countless patients out there that would be so discouraged by the situation that they just never would have gone back to their doctors and never would have gotten back on their meds, and then a couple weeks later they’re the one being rolled in on a gurney screaming and crying about Marco Polo. Very, very frustrating.
In the end, though, B got her pills, and I had most DEFINITELY not spent the day being bored. If nothing else, this was a very good reminder of where I could be 10 years down the road if I don’t stay on top of my mental health shit — going to my therapist, taking my meds as prescribed, etc. It was a wake-up call that I needed, as I’d been planning in my head already how I was going to taper myself of the Seroquel, because I HATE how tired it makes me. How I don’t even start my day until noon usually, and then I’m tired again by 4. And because I think it’s giving me diabetes. But after seeing all this, what I think I’m going to do instead is talk it over with my doctor and hear what he has to say. Because that is what a normal person would do.
