One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in the 1975 film. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But anywho, I have another page from the notebook journal I kept while I was at Window Licker Hall. This I wrote sometime in mid March.

Nurses

The nurses here are of every sort. On weekdays we have a surly head nurse with a facial expression resembling Louise Fletcher’s. Nurse Ratchet is always polite to me, but to others not so much. One morning after playing bingo for 75 cents (the price of a soda in the drink machines here), an elderly man fell backwards in his chair, hitting the sharp edges of another chair. I ran and got Nurse Ratched and her solution was to yell at him to get up. This made my blood boil.

There are the kind, caring nurses who help folks like me not feel so alone. My favorite nurse gave me a dollar for a drink, and another time let me use her cell phone to call Soul Bro to beg him to take me back…no dice. I am a leper now, or maybe I bear an invisible scarlet letter: ‘S’ for suicidal.

There’s a couple of nurses who look and act like “trash.” They obviously became nurses  for the cash, and if they could get away with it, they’d ignore us altogether.

And then there’s Princess. Princess is generally a nice person until someone crosses her. That’s what one resident did over a pill she didn’t want to take because it was broke in two. Yelling ensued. “Either take it or don’t, or I’ll throw it away!”

“You can’t throw my pill away! If you do, I’ll make sure you pay for it.” Then yell, yell, yell.

“How unprofessional,” I said to my roomie’s semi-boyfriend as we watched.

Then my best-friend at Window Licker Hall, Nowheresville, USA, wanted a tylenol with her other pain meds, and when she couldn’t have it, she and Princess also got into it. Like sands through the hour-glass, so are the Days of Our Lives.

Once my best-friend got done having it out with Princess, she yelled to me, “She’s a bitch!”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“She’s a black bitch!”

“We don’t have to bring race into it.”

Meanwhile, Princess is still royally pissed and screams, “You all belong in Grape, every one of you!” Until then, I wasn’t angry, but when she said that, I felt my rage building. If you live in this state, you likely know that Grape is a long term psychiatric hospital. Since I pride myself in considering me an overall sane soul, to be lumped into one category  with the nuts and ‘special’ people is just enough digging  into my insecurities.

My best-friend, the Tylenol bereft one, says Princess only meant the white people should go to Grape, because she doesn’t like us. Well, break me a cracker. My friend has been here 7 years (7 years! I’d prefer self-emulsion), ao she’s been an observer of Princess’ ways. I feel, however, a touch of racial bias on the part of my friend in her belief. Like I said before, Princess is always nice to me, but I do anything to keep anyone from being mad at me. I just can’t take anger now. Anyway, how I get the feeling it wasn’t Princess’ dislike of the pigment challenged of us, is because the first woman Princess got into a fight with was a hateful African-American woman with legs so swollen she looks like a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. I must humbly surmise, then, that Princess meant the lot of us should get on the short bus to ride from our rest home in Nowheresville to the loony bin in Crazyboro, USA regardless of race or ethnicity. It’s the American way.

My roommate, however, wasn’t miffed, because she’s already been there, done that with Grape.

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In retrospect, Nurse Ratchet wasn’t a bad person at all. By the time I left Window Licker Hall I loved her because she offered to take my cats when they were thrown in the pound, even though she had a Rottweiller and it wouldn’t have been the best idea (it was appreciated all the same).

I heard bad things about my favorite nurse, though I believe she is an overall good person.

Lastly, I still think Princess wasn’t a racist. She hated us equally that night.

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Bonus

Recently I transferred all the unique posts from ocdbloggergirl.com. Each post, I’ll point you to a post I wrote months ago on my other blog in case you missed it and want to see.

https://ocdbloggergirl.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/1459/

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