the collected schizophrenias esmé weijun wang

The home fries were warm and slicked my tongue with grease. I almost choked on the first bite before abandoning the rest. I used my spork first to sample the eggs, which were nearly tasteless, and lacked the near-sulfurous attributes that make them disgusting to those who hate eggs - but their tastelessness was its own challenge. I took a risk and sat at an empty table, where I attended to the food before me. Where to sit? I had a sense of which patients to avoid and which would let me be, but I also saw a few sitting with the nurses, who attracted me with their normalcy. My stomach lurched at the sight, but I was hungry, having barely eaten in weeks.

I asked for eggs and home fries, and could tell straightaway that the scoop of yellow dropped on my plate was reconstituted. Instead, we told the servers what we wanted. The other patients muttered and jostled, jittery in this foreign space. The room was a smaller version of the school cafeterias I’ve known all my life, with a line for hot food and a few circular tables. A handful of nurses followed, laughing among themselves and teasing: “You say that to me again, I dare you.” “Yeah, I’ll say that to you again.” One nurse used her key card to scan us out of the ward - the double doors swung slowly open - and we went down in pairs in the elevator, which required another key card, to the cafeteria. I sat by the television for a while with some of the other patients, all of whom were groggy from psychotropic side effects and uncommunicative.Įventually Level One patients began to hang around the ward exit, as though it were a gate at an airport terminal, and we were all eager to nab overhead bin space. The nurse who checked my vitals on the second morning informed me that I’d been elevated to Level One status, which I took as a good sign. There were patients who had been there longer, were well behaved, and yet also ate breakfast on the ward signs hung on the doors of their rooms indicated that they received electro-convulsive therapy, and thus could not eat before their morning treatments. I drank apple juice, which came in a plastic container with a foil top and a straw. I ate the cereal under supervision with a plastic spoon. I chose raisin bran from a selection of preschool-sized boxes. Because I spent my first half day hidden in my room’s wardrobe, sobbing, no one knew that I was not a danger to myself or others, and so I ate the first breakfast without any designation, stowed away near the nurses’ station at a round plastic table. With Level One privileges at the psychiatric hospital where I was involuntarily committed in 2002, the patient was allowed off the ward for breakfast.

The collected schizophrenias esmé weijun wang