April 15, 2015
I did not sleep at all last night. Yesterday, I was forced out of my room at the crisis unit and into another room in a much more trafficked part of the unit. There's another patient in the room. The patient in the room next door to my new room is a male patient who is a persistent and vicious harasser who tries to get other male patients to gang up on me with him.
There was no reason for me to lose my room; everything that was told to me about why it was happening was a lie.
As soon as the patient who has been harassing me for weeks saw that I had lost my room, he ran outside to the smoking area to talk with another male patient. When they got back into the unit, they stood in the hallway and coughed.
I went to the nurses' station to ask for help making the harassment stop; it kept happening. The third time that I went to that office, the mental health worker (not the nurse) said that she had just talked to the patient who has been harassing me for weeks. I said "He did it again as soon as you had talked to him."
The staffperson started screaming at me "There's nothing I can f---ing do about it! What do you want me to do, tell everyone to never f---ing cough? You have to drop this s---! Get the f--- out of my office! This is crazy! Get out of the office!" She slammed the door of the office in my face.
This happened in front of the nurse and another female patient who were both in the office. The nurse did nothing to stop the mental health worker from verbally abusing me.
The male patient who had just harassed me stood several feet away and watched me get screamed at, with satisfaction.
I left the unit and went to the lobby of the health center for a while. The security guard coughed until I went back to the unit.
When I was losing my room today, the person who is supposed to be my case manager rubbed her nose at me. The assistant director of the unit screamed at me and then coughed at me.
The nurse who helped save my room last week was working on another floor tonight. I talked to her for a few minutes about what was happening. She had gone above the nurse manager last week to another supervisor, who kept me in my room. I knew there would be retaliation for that; I didn't even take most of my things out of the garbage bags I put them in last week when I thought I'd lose my room.
I don't know why I asked for her help last night at all. By the time I saw her a few days after she saved my room last week, she was already running away from the issue. Last night, she made it clear that she has no sympathy left for my situation; she is not the only one who sees that helping me is hazardous to her job.
One of the male patients whom the persistent harasser had gotten to harass me was removed by police from the unit today for punching holes in walls. He never had harassed me before the persistent harasser got to the unit. The last time I talked to him was a few days ago, when he was standing outside my room saying that "something in my head" was making me think he has ever coughed at me deliberately.
The unit is in hysteria around the harassment issue, and it is all centered on me, "the bad patient."
Yesterday afternoon I was doing housing applications when I was told that I had to move out of my room. That was also what happened a week ago; I was working on housing when I was told that I had to leave my room.
I have been picked on every day at that unit since I got there. The harassment has slowed the process of my being able to do anything except trying to deal with being abused and trying not to lose my mind.
I left the unit before 6:00 this morning. Several men coughed at me from Quincy to Cambridge.
Copyright L. Kochman, April 16, 2015 @ 8:56 a.m.
