Escape from Alcatraz. (not really)
It's not fun having paranoid schizophrenia. Hearing voices, sounds, and confusing reality with hallucinations. The CIA chasing after you. Radio messages from satellites. I don't base this on personal experience but I've observed this in my clinical work. Most patients can work and live a nice life if they keep up with the medications. Skip the meds and the world gets warped. Events no longer makes sense. People can't be trusted.
Being the blessed nurse that I am, I get assigned to one of these patients. The person, now refered to as he/him/his to make things easy to write, decided that the hospital is not a nice place to be, so off he went. This happened because the guard watching him turned his back and tried to talk to one of the nurses. I was with my other patient, changing a feeding bottle. The security guard, well, he's kinda obese and can't really run. He said " We can't really hold him." I didn't say a thing, I just kept running.
Thank God he is obese and on barefoot. It's also good that he is on street clothes, don't need to worry about nudity. Hey, I have my orthotics and have been working out lately so I was able to chase the guy. Being on 5150, medical psychiatric hold, gives me the right to hold him against his will. He can do harm to himself and to others. After a block of trying to restrain him, he finally ran out of steam.
Three security guards finally caught up with us. To make a long waiting game story short, he ended up in out psych unit. To make things interesting, my nursing director and our chief nursing officer were among the people involved with getting the person back in the hospital. Kinda embarrasing that this happened to me but my director said she owned me a huge banana split sundae. Yummy! Who said that nursing is boring? Not me.
It's not fun having paranoid schizophrenia. Hearing voices, sounds, and confusing reality with hallucinations. The CIA chasing after you. Radio messages from satellites. I don't base this on personal experience but I've observed this in my clinical work. Most patients can work and live a nice life if they keep up with the medications. Skip the meds and the world gets warped. Events no longer makes sense. People can't be trusted.
Being the blessed nurse that I am, I get assigned to one of these patients. The person, now refered to as he/him/his to make things easy to write, decided that the hospital is not a nice place to be, so off he went. This happened because the guard watching him turned his back and tried to talk to one of the nurses. I was with my other patient, changing a feeding bottle. The security guard, well, he's kinda obese and can't really run. He said " We can't really hold him." I didn't say a thing, I just kept running.
Thank God he is obese and on barefoot. It's also good that he is on street clothes, don't need to worry about nudity. Hey, I have my orthotics and have been working out lately so I was able to chase the guy. Being on 5150, medical psychiatric hold, gives me the right to hold him against his will. He can do harm to himself and to others. After a block of trying to restrain him, he finally ran out of steam.
Three security guards finally caught up with us. To make a long waiting game story short, he ended up in out psych unit. To make things interesting, my nursing director and our chief nursing officer were among the people involved with getting the person back in the hospital. Kinda embarrasing that this happened to me but my director said she owned me a huge banana split sundae. Yummy! Who said that nursing is boring? Not me.
