Blue Monday

‘So,’ Dr Hann commenced the meeting with attitude in her tone. ‘What’s been going on?’

I wanted to get out of special care and be moved to the main ward where I would get my phone and computer back, so I tried to act cool, calm and collected. I started by saying, ‘Steven has put Eduardo on the boat to Columbia and is going to get Spencer to go home and look after his babies today!’

‘This is Steven your CBT therapist?’ she asked, her brow raised.

‘Yes.’

‘Who are Eduardo and Spencer?’ she asked with her head tilted to the side.

I went into detail, with the thought that being honest with the psychiatrist and telling her exactly what was going on would move me on quicker. ‘Eduardo is the capuchin monkey Columbian drug lord and he’s come back to collect the €50,000 worth of heroin I owe him from the last time he was here, and Spencer is the seagull who lives on my roof at home.’ I elaborated by telling her, ‘he’s at the hospital visiting his brother and cousins who live here and they keep telling me that they want to kill me!’

Dr Hann sat forward in her chair and asked, ‘do you do heroin?’

‘No,’ I answered shaking my head. ‘The last time Eduardo was here he was driving his remote-control car in my room and was really getting on my nerves, so I grabbed him and trapped him in the windowsill with the aid of the heavy floor to ceiling curtains and placed his car under the table outside my room. When we woke up, the car was gone. That was when he disclosed that there was €50,000 worth of heroin under the seat and he was pissed and has returned to collect the money I owe him.’

I watched as Dr Hann pinched her nose. ‘You do realise that they aren’t real?’

‘Well Steven just got rid of Eduardo. He put him on the boat back to Columbia!’ I smiled. ‘He’s working on getting Spencer to stay at home and has emailed pest control about his brother and cousins!’ I added keeping my voice in a calm and collected tone, praying my answers were politically correct.

‘What?’ she asked in a slightly worried tone and leaned forward.

‘It’s ok,’ I said again, ‘he’s not here anymore, he’s on the boat back to Columbia!’

‘When did they appear?’

‘Eduardo came back a couple of weeks ago and Spencer came to visit his brother and cousins around then as well.’ As the gulls on the roof started to squawk, I whispered, ‘they’re trying to kill me!’

‘But I was here two weeks ago! Why didn’t you tell me then?’

‘With all due respect,’ I managed, my legs beginning to sway from side to side, ‘I wanted to tell you, but you never asked, and then you were off sick.’

‘But I was here two weeks ago! Were they here then?’

‘Yea!’ I answer bluntly and began to rub my temple with my right index finger nervously. I wanted to get back to the main ward so badly but lies are something which go against my personal form of ethics.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Dr Hann said sounding panicked.

I didn’t want to admit to her face that I didn’t trust her, so instead I told her what happened two weeks before. ‘I asked to see you every day that week and every day you blanked me out like I didn’t exist!’

‘You never asked to see me!’

‘It’s in the notes!’ I answered, getting riled up. ‘I asked to see you every single day, and the night staff even wrote to you in an email asking for you to see me!’

‘I never got that email!’ she answered.

At that stage I didn’t know who to believe or what to think.

‘You do realise that there is no boat to Columbia, or an Eduardo or Spencer!’ Dr Hann pushed.

Now, I knew I could believe Steven as I’d been seeing him for twelve years, so if he said Eduardo was gone then he was gone. I also knew that Spencer had given my brother and the dog up the road stitches before, and had been in the house on multiple occasions. He also constantly pecks at the back door looking for food. When I told Dr Hann that, she began to challenge me.

‘Seagulls don’t attack people and they definitely don’t come into houses! Eduardo is not on a boat to Columbia, and that is not what Steven is supposed to be working with you on!’

No one, or nothing will ever say a bad word to me about Steven! He had gotten me out of so many mental sticky situations that warranted respect. He even managed to get me to stop cutting myself! I respected the bones off that man, and I wasn’t going to let her verbally bash him!

‘But he got rid of Eduardo!’ I said a little stronger than I meant.

‘Who are we talking about now? The monkey or the seagull?’ she asked, her eyes beginning to illustrate anger.

‘The monkey!’ I said exasperatedly.

‘No, he is not on any boat! I can guarantee you that!’

I sat back in my chair quickly, my eyes darting from one corner of the room to the next panicking. ‘You mean he’s still here?’

‘There is no Eduardo and no Spencer!’ she said in a tone that was final and a little bit too forceful for a psychiatrist who was responsible for all of the twelve patients, six males and six females, on the special care ward.

Cold sweat began to form on my brow and I sat with my hands on my head, my bottom lip trembling, swaying backwards and forwards.

‘Do you have any questions?’ Dr Hann asked oblivious as to how paranoid she had just made me feel.

I shook my head no and cautiously rose from the grey tub chair and exited the room. I went straight to my bed where I lay on my side, my oversized squishmallow, Jesse, pressed against my exposed cheek and cried in the foetal position until I was called for lunch two hours later. I simply refused, my appetite gone from fear! I wasn’t sure whether Eduardo was lurking in the corner, ready to attack, and figured the best way for me to not experience that was to keep my face covered.

The policy in the special care ward was that you got checked on every fifteen minutes. Because I was such a risk to myself, I had to have supervised showers and tell a nurse when I was going to use the bathroom so that one of them could stand outside, sporadically looking in to make sure I wasn’t harming myself. How I was left for those two hours with my face and neck covered by the great, big fluffy teddy was beyond me!

My tablets were brought by a nurse to my bedside. That was the first face I had seen in all that time. For all they knew, I could have had a ligature around my neck and were going to find me there, dead! When I looked up, I quickly took my medication and returned to my frightened state.

‘You know you have Steven at two, right?’ the nurse asked.

Being special care, you weren’t allowed watches or clocks or anything that would tell you the time. As I was given my medication four times a day, I knew when it was 8am, 1pm, 5pm and 9pm. I also knew when those times were approaching as I was getting fidgety, needing my meds to calm me down. If I got too anxious too early, the nurses would feed me extra, but not that day! No, that day they let me sit with my feelings all morning, so I was glad when the lunch time medication came around. I was also delighted that I would have Steven to talk to just as they kicked in.

Once 1:45 came around, the nurses put me in a room with a window, so they could still look in, with a tablet so I could have my meeting with Steven in confidence. From the second I saw him on the screen, he reinforced that Eduardo was indeed gone and that Spencer was truly real. He used guided imagery to find out what I needed in order for Spencer to get away from the hospital, so we put a ‘tag’ on his leg which ‘gave him a little shock’ if he flew outside my hometown. That was enough for Spencer to vanish from the hospital. Additionally, we put ‘tags’ on his brother and cousins, to ‘give them a shock’ if they came near the hospital, obliterating their existence. By the end of the meeting, both Spencer and Eduardo were gone and I was no longer a target for the gulls.

When the meeting was coming to a close, Steven asked me to ring my brother to confirm Spencer was indeed still in my hometown and it was the best phone call I had ever made! Not only did my brother confirm Spencer’s existence, he also told me he had video evidence of him in the kitchen as my mother was shooing him out with a broom, video of him attacking him, and of him knocking on the back door begging for food. It was as if I had taken an extra Valium that was just kicking in as he confirmed I wasn’t spinning yarns! He told me to show Dr Hann when I got my phone back so she could eat her words, but that was the last interaction I had with the witch of a woman. Technically, I was still under her care for the following two weeks, she just never saw me again, even though I asked to see her multiple times.

I was released from special care that Friday and was put back under the team I knew, loved, and trusted. It was like I could breathe again. They didn’t know the goings on of that Monday, I just informed them that Dr Hann undid three weeks’ worth of work with Steven in the space of five minutes. All my doctor said was ‘well Steven knows best!’ I was happy with that!