Category Archives: Life stories

A budgie in the hand, and two more on ice….

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Ffolkes,

     Part III of Repercussions….

On a day in mid-August of 1984, I was working once again at Napa State Hospital (NSH) as a Psychiatric Technician. Since the adolescent program where I previously worked had closed, I was assigned to a unit designated T8. The T-building is a two-story edifice which encompasses enough space for 10 units housing up to 45 adult individuals each, an industrial kitchen with two separate dining rooms, serving meals in both rooms in rotation, for eight of the units, and several program offices for the Program managers and support staff.

The population was all male, in a program whose purpose was to treat a variety of different diagnoses. The residents of the program, who were diagnosed with Schizophrenia, Bi-Polar Disorders, Personality Disorders, along with a wide variety of other psychiatric conditions, were housed together on eight units with dormitories where they slept at night. On this particular late summer’s day, the men on T8 were relatively quiet, as everyone tried to cope with the stifling heat common to the area at this time of the year. The buildings at NSH were built in the 1950’s, all of concrete, and could be very uncomfortable.

A couple of hours into the shift, we escorted our charges out the door, downstairs to the hallway leading to the dining room for dinner. It is always the most dangerous part of the shift; the residents are hungry, and the walk to the dining room necessarily leaves the staff spread apart in order to keep an eye on everyone. The team I worked with was a good one, and with all of us staying alert, we got to the dining room and supervised the clients, who were conversant with the routine, until all were seated and eating, except a couple of stragglers still in line.

The phone on the wall rang, and one of the kitchen employees picked up to answer. She listened a moment, then turned to quickly address us nursing staff, saying in a strained voice, “T6 needs help, stat!” “Stat” is the medical code word for an emergency situation, requiring staff to respond as fast as possible to lend assistance. Two of us immediately broke into a run, out of the door to the left down the hallway to the stairway door leading up to T6. We hit the open hall door at a full run and bounded up the stairs, slowing as we came to the doorway to scan the situation before entering into the main day hall of the unit.

To the left was the medication room door, bottom half closed, top open to the room. A female staff member in the open upper half pointed across the day hall at a resident there, saying only, “that’s him” In the middle of the room, near the chairs grouped in front of the TV, lay another of the residents, curled into a ball and shivering violently. A female staff member could be seen in the nursing office, still calling for help. No one was in the TV area; most of the clients were on the way to the dining room, as were most of the staff, so my teammate, named Lee, and I were the first responders at the scene. I looked straight ahead from the door as I moved into the room, and saw a sight I will see in dreams for the rest of my days, burned indelibly on my memory in an instant that lasted forever.

I saw the body of a male staff member, obviously unconscious; he lay on his back straight in front of me about 10 feet away. I recognized him as the T-6 shift lead, a friend named Al, who had oriented me to the program when I first came on board. I observed that he was breathing, but his complexion had a very bad looking, chalky grey cast to it. Another 15 feet beyond where he lay paced the apparent perpetrator, who immediately began yelling at me in a threatening voice, shouting, ” Yeah I did that, come and get me!.” He was about 6’1″, approximately 190 lbs., appeared to be in good shape, and very obviously was in an agitated psychotic state, just coming down after an explosion of rage, and still pumped up to fight.

As I approached him, I had to step over the body of my friend, and very carefully moved toward the agitated individual, on full alert and fully adrenalized. Time had slowed to a crawl, and I could hear the harsh breathing from the aggressor as he paced in a tight circle, mumbling to himself between yells in my direction. Lee, the other staff who had come in with me, is an experienced PT, and like me, a veteran of such situations.

     He silently crossed behind me to the left, quickly circling around to the opposite side, so we could approach from both directions. As I stepped up to the aggressor, I casually took his left arm, just as Lee did the same on the other side. Both of us had been trained to use a special hold which allows control of the arm without stressing it by putting it in unnatural positions, allowing you to use your weight to control the arm, quickly tiring the subject. He began to try rip his arms from our grasp, yelling obscenities at us, and flailing about.

Lee was experienced, but only weighed about 110 lbs. dripping wet, and I could tell he wasn’t going to be able to hold the right arm much longer, and I would then be the unhappy recipient of an attempted blow to the head. I had to think fast, so I dropped my weight while holding his arm, then lifted him upward until his weight went onto his toes, just enough that I was able to control the direction of our movement.

     I quickly directed all three of us right into the chairs a few feet away, knowing that I could direct him hard enough to cause his legs to run into the arm of the heavy chair, causing him to imbalance and fall over to the floor, with me still on top grimly keeping a death-grip on his arm. This unfortunately left Lee underneath him, but as I knew he would, he wriggled free, still holding the right arm, and we were then able to use our combined weight to hold him securely on the floor until more help arrived.

Very soon after we got control of the still wildly struggling individual, more people arrived, helped us to restrain him, then per procedure, move him to a secure room, where he could be restrained with leather straps on a bed until he regained control, as the psychotic rage passed. Once he was secure, Lee and I returned to the day hall where Al still lay, being examined by the on-duty physician, surrounded by silent and worried looking staff. A paramedic team arrived with a gurney stretcher, Al was lifted onto it gently, and rushed to the emergency room at the nearest hospital a few miles away. The doctor was only able to stand there shaking his head sadly, with a grave expression, saying over and over, “it’s bad, it’s bad”. After writing up the incident reports, Lee and I finished our shift on our unit, quietly raging inside but still outwardly under control.

After our shift ended, we went to the hospital to see if Al had been stabilized and/or had regained consciousness; before we left work, we had heard only periodic updates that told us he was still in surgery. When we arrived, we were told he was in a coma, in critical condition, and being monitored for fluid pressure on the brain. His prognosis was serious and guarded, meaning the doctors didn’t know whether he would recover or not, only time would tell.

Four days later, Al died without ever waking up. The doctors explained that he had apparently been struck full in the face, a massive blow to the nose. The doctors related he had received in essence two blows, one to the face and nose, and one to the back of the head when he fell to the floor. In reality, he never stood much chance of a full recovery; even if he had lived, the likelihood of a severe loss of brain function would almost certainly have made him a full-time bed patient, requiring full nursing care to survive. He would never have been able to speak, or walk, or hold his family again.

   Al was survived by his wife and four children. At the funeral a day after his death all of us who had worked with Al stood by his casket at the memorial service as we and his family bid him a tearful farewell. We could but stare in shock, and wonder at the terrible waste of a good man’s life, silent as the sadness filled us.

And I, I was filled with a such a sense of rage and sorrow, such waves of pain and anguish that I could barely speak for the clenching of my jaw. For the first time in my life and career, I had been unable to protect someone I had cared for, and I was filled with an immensely deep sense of regret for having arrived on the scene too late to save my friend…..

     My equilibrium was completely shattered, and I could not find my center, nor even momentary peace, despite recognizing that we had done as much as we could, and held no personal responsibility for his death. That knowledge gave me no comfort, and I entered the realm of the “walking dead”, gripped by madness and and soul-deep pain….

To be continued…..

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Dozer

Kowabunga!

Remarkably obscene patterns in the sand….

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Ffolkes,
Here is the second of four parts…

In 1973, at the age of 23, I attended school to study to take the state examination for a license as a Psychiatric Technician (PT). The classes were subsidized by, and took place at, Atascadero State Hospital (ASH) in Central California. College credits were given through the local J.C., Cuesta College in nearby San Luis Obispo. In conjunction with the classes, students were allowed, and encouraged, to work 20 hours per week in the hospital, as a supplement to the clinical hours required to complete the courses. So began my journey in the mental health industry, and unknown to me at the time, down the path to darkness…..

The hospital at Atascadero is a maximum security facility that houses up to 1200 individuals, who are committed to the bleak, prison-like hospital by the state courts, having been judged as being either unable to stand trial due to being unable to understand the charges, or because they were unable to cooperate in their own defense, due to mental illness. Some of these men (it is an all-male facility; women in the same legal categories were housed in another facility) were also committed by the courts as being Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, or were those who had manifested symptoms of mental illness after being convicted of crimes and sent to prison. A very few of them were not insane, but were master manipulators, career criminals with very good lawyers who had convinced the court to send them to the hospital rather than prison. These individuals caused a great many problems, as they would manipulate their less functional peers into giving up their property, or doing their will, or  incite them to violence, just to watch the results from a safe distance, for amusement.

Working in a maximum security facility as a therapist is possibly one of the most difficult jobs man has ever created. A prison-like environment makes it difficult to create the ambiance necessary to allow the men being treated to feel safe and comfortable enough to deal with their individual problems. The danger of housing so many people with mental illness is an ever-present and overriding concern, as one of the primary characteristics of those with these types of diagnoses is a lack, or even absence, of impulse control. As a result, managing assaultive behavior becomes a necessary adjunct to treatment.

The Department of Mental Health, working with employees from all the state hospitals, developed a policy for dealing with the issue; subsequently, training in Management of Assaultive Behavior (MAB) was given to every employee who came into contact with the committed individuals. Since the facility was classed as maximum security, the training was especially important for the Hospital Police, who were responsible for maintaining the security of the physical plant, and for the therapists (psychiatrists and psychologists, nurses, psychiatric technicians, and ancillary staff such as occupational and rehabilitation therapists) who were the primary care-givers for the individuals. These teams were taught specific techniques for recognizing the warning signs of impending violent behavior, how to re-direct when possible, and methods for physically controlling individuals who were acting out in a violent manner, without causing or sustaining injury.

Most of these principles and techniques, if not all, were very similar to the Judo and Kung Fu that I had been taught, so my prior training and experience became valuable tools for me, helping me to be skillful in keeping safe both the aggressors and victims involved in the violent episodes so frequently found in settings such as ASH. I became one of the people who specialized in MAB, which necessarily meant that whenever a violent incident broke out, I was one of the first to respond, as I was adept at controlling the situation without any of the participants sustaining injury, the primary goal in such instances.

Working in such a high stress environment as a maximum security hospital was both physically and emotionally draining, and after three years at ASH I had had enough. I moved north to work at Napa State Hospital, in order to get back to being a therapist rather than a glorified cop. I obtained a position as a PT in a treatment program for adolescents at NSH in 1976. To me, it was  a wonderful change; the kids in the program, lived ina co-educational environment, and were smaller as a rule than the full-grown men I was used to; in addition, there were far fewer individuals who had already learned to resort to violence, compared to those who were housed at ASH. It was also different for being co-ed, as I had previously not worked with any women, or girls, in a therapeutic setting. Because of my experience in MAB, violence on the unit where I worked became a non-viable behavior for the adolescents, and after a few months the number of incidents that took place on the unit were greatly reduced.

After a few years at NSH, I decided to take an extended sabbatical from working as a PT, and traveled around California for a few months, until not working became a bore; I was raised to be productive, and needed to get back to work. I applied to and was hired to work in another state hospital in Camarillo, a relatively small town near Ventura in Southern California. At CSH I once again worked with adolescents, as they had a similar program, patterned after the one at NSH. My martial arts training, which I had continued all this time, once again proved to be a valuable tool, and I again became the first responder at any outbreaks of violence among the individuals under treatment.

I met my wife at Camarillo; she was another PT in the adolescent program. We worked together, began dating, fell in love, married and started our family. It was a challenging period for me; between work, parenting, maintaining my marriage, home maintenance, and the myriad of little things that are the activities of daily life in this country, I was a very busy, very stressed individual. But I loved it that way, and was happy and content for some years.

     The economy at that time changed for the worse; we were unable to keep up with our mortgage payments, and lost our house to foreclosure. We decided to move north, to the Sonoma Valley, to raise our children in a country setting, with very well-respected schools, and a much lower crime rate than the southern California area in which we had lived.

I eventually hired on back at NSH, but the adolescent program was no longer open, so I began working with adults, on an all-male unit, with a group of individuals with a wide variety of diagnoses. As the level of security at Napa was not maximum, and the degree of MAB training was not up to the higher standards at ASH, the units in the program where I worked were very dangerous, a situation which ultimately led to my downfall.

     It was about this time when I calculated that, in my career as a PT, I had worked in the most stressful environments in the entire world, outside of battlefields, constantly in danger, and my martial arts background had become not just useful, but absolutely critical. I estimated the number of violent incidents in which I had been involved, and found that over the years I had an average of one major incident (translation: a knock-down, drag-out fight, in real-time, with real opponents, who are actively engaged in trying to hurt or maim me, or someone else) per week since I had started as a PT at ASH. My calculations came to a minimum of 728 incidents. I was appalled, but also somewhat proud of this figure; in all those incidents only one of the individuals had sustained a minor injury, and I had sustained one minor injury myself. Not a bad record, all in all…2 partial failures and 726 successful outcomes.

However, the damage to my psyche that had accumulated through the years had by this time reached an unprecedented and dangerous level, and I was finding it extremely difficult to maintain the now uncertain equilibrium I had achieved. My experiences had left me burdened with an indelible, hidden wound in my soul, in my very center. The experiences to which I’d been exposed eventually culminated in one specific incident that brought all of my pent-up stress to the surface, and affected me so deeply that I still feel the effects today……I became, quite literally, one of the “walking wounded”, a condition with which my generation, due to the Vietnam War, had become all too familiar. It was a single incident, that happened one night in 1984, and to this day I have never fully recovered…..

To be continued…..

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Dozer

Kowabunga!

Belaboring toast points for profit….

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Ffolkes,
Today, and for the next three days, I’ll be posting some material I wrote last year, while writing on a site called GoodBlogs. Technically, they have the online rights to it, but it is still mine, and is completely appropriate for this venue. Therefore, I am publishing all four pieces here on WordPress, just because I want to, and to give my brain a few days to dive for pearls, and to renew and redirect my creative urges. Together the four pieces tell a true story, of my time in Hell…..it’s titled, “Repercussions”……

Part the first…..

When I was four, my father was stationed in Japan with the US Army, at a base near Okinawa. He was there for about 18 months, and the rest of the family, my mother and, at the time, four kids joined him there for the last seven months of his tour of duty. During that time, I was made aware, simply by traveling to and living there, that the world was much larger than I thought, and there were a lot of different kinds of people living in it. He was an officer at the time, so the six of us lived in a large house on base, with two Japanese housekeepers. Learning about Mariko and her sister, whose name escapes me, taught us many things about Japanese culture, and my mind grew in leaps and bounds.

One of the things we learned were some basic Judo (the gentle way) techniques, by one of Mariko’s friends who was member of a dojo (school). This exposure to the martial arts stayed with me, but after returning to the USA, there was little opportunity to pursue the arts further. Especially when my parents had another child, and money became a permanent issue in the household. But I never forgot Mariko, (who made the best cinnamon roles ever) or any of my experiences in Japan.

Much later in my life when I went to college, at the University of California at Berkeley, Judo was offered as a physical education course, and I at last had the opportunity to study in earnest what so long ago had made such an impression on my young mind. I took the course for 3 quarters (UCB had switched to a four-quarter-per-calendar year schedule some years before my admission), much as a duck takes to water, and after less than 9 months I had earned my brown belt, second degree.

I loved the arts with a passion I had not felt since I first discovered science-fiction at age ten. It was, perhaps, a lesser passion than when I discovered that girls weren’t so yucky after all, but studying the arts became a significant part of my life, and I have studied one art or another ever since, a matter of about 40 years. After Judo, I took some lessons in Karate (the empty-hand), Tae Kwon Do and Shotokan styles, a little bit of Tai Chi, and some Aikido..

    Then in my late twenties, I joined my first class in the Chinese art of Kung Fu. All my other exposure, Tai Chi aside (which though useful in that respect, was an art not primarily designed for use in fighting), had been to arts developed in Japan and Korea. I learned that all of those arts had been patterned after the precepts of Kung Fu many centuries before.

The origins of Kung Fu are shrouded in some mystery, but the consensus is that the monks of the Taoist temple of the order of the Shaolin were the first to learn the basic art, and developed it as a means of protecting their temple from the degradations of the numerous marauding warlords fighting over the various geographic regions in China. It is said that the art was brought to them by none other than Bhodi Dharma, an ancient warrior of India who traveled all over the Far East during his life, using his unspeakably powerful skills, developed by him during many years of studying Yoga, to protect the weak and oppressed, much like a wandering knight in Europe during the age of chivalry.

The Shaolin monks developed the skills they learned to such a high degree that the temple was eventually destroyed by warlords who had developed cannons, because they feared the monks so much. The monks scattered over the rest of China taking their skills with them, teaching them to the people, and to monks at other temples. It was said that a Shaolin monk could disappear from sight, could walk through walls, and fly through the air, and their reputation protected them probably as much as their fighting skills.

In the 1970’s there was a show on TV called Kung Fu, loosely based on a figure in Shaolin history, their greatest warrior, whose name on the show was Kwai Chang Caine. Though it was subject, unfortunately, to the occasionally bizarre demands of Hollywood culture, it was nonetheless a relatively accurate representation of how such a monk might have approached the new culture in the United States, and gave a good idea of how effective the skills learned by the monks could be, even against superior numbers and weaponry.

When I was first introduced to Kung Fu, it seemed as though all the other arts I had studied became irrelevant. I had graduated from the high-school level of Karate and Aikido to a more advanced university, that started with basics, then led the student into deeper and deeper knowledge, not just of the techniques of fighting and training, but knowledge of both the body and the mind, which are never considered to be separate entities in Chinese culture.

    The techniques learned became only a part of what one learns; much of the rest of what is taught was concerned with learning to control one’s mind and spirit. The first lesson was the most important one, and it consists of one concept…..restraint. Simply put, we do not learn these skills to fight, but to grow; to learn how to accept the danger that exists in human society without being paralyzed by fear, allowing one’s higher principles to guide action for the betterment of all creatures.

Learning Kung Fu, as well as the other martial arts I studied, was a seminal part of my own developing philosophy of life, and has been, in my mind, an invaluable tool in my own growth. But learning the arts, as I was later to learn, would have repercussions so powerful, and so all-encompassing, that they would send shock waves of pain and anguish down every step of my path in the world; repercussions that would stay with me for the rest of my life…..

To be continued…….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Dozer

Kowabunga!