The Great Escape

Sinead woke up in a strange place, a place she did not recognise at first. She woke on a bed, if you could call it that. It consisted of a green mattress, no sheet, no duvet, no pillow. She was frightened. She looked down and realised she only had two pieces of clothing on, a black t-shirt with a bleach stain down the side, and homer Simpson pyjama bottoms.

She started to scream from fright. Three nurses came running into the three bed room to try and calm her down, but she was having none of it. It was night time and so she woke her two roommates along with half the rest of the ward.

There were four night staff nurses on who looked after twelve patients. Sinead was in the high dependency unit, or special care as it was most commonly known, in a psychiatric hospital. It was a locked ward within a locked ward. You weren’t allowed any technology of any kind on that particular ward; he reason behind that was that the health care professionals wanted you to rest without any distractions.

It just happened that the doctor on call was in the office at the time Sinead freaked out, and she came out to see if she was okay.

They, the doctor and three of the nurses, couldn’t calm her down for love nor money so the doctor gave the go ahead for a sedative injection.

Sinead was off her medication. She had reasons of her own for not taking it, she said it made her more ‘foggy’.

As the medication, and nurses, calmed her down, the doctor took her into a side room. This room was adjacent to the outer locked ward and there was a locked door to it that Sinead couldn’t take her eyes off. The doctor was talking to her but she wasn’t listening, she just wanted her freedom back.

The doctor was writing notes when she realised she had ran out of paper. She went to get some more leaving the subdued Sinead in the room on her own. Sinead, who with the sedative was able to think more clearly, knew the layout of the hospital well because she was a ‘frequent flyer’ as you might put it. She looked at the table the doctor was writing on and to her delight saw keys.

Sinead picked up the keys blood racing through her body. She had two options; open the door and try to escape or stay and be unwillingly pumped full of drugs. She chose the former. She knew that when she left that little side room she could either turn right and exit through the main door of the outer ward, or turn left and exit through the fire door.

Even with the drugs firmly in her system she shakily walked to the door of the side room. She knew what the master key would open it, and she knew what it looked like from previous admissions and was almost certain that it would open the fire door.

‘Here goes nothing!’ she said to herself as she opened the office door and turned left. She staggered to the fire door and, fumbling with the keys, opened it. The fresh air hit her face and she sobered up. She looked behind her and saw a little head pop out from the outer wards nurses’ desk. Sinead smiled and ran.

It was raining and, in her bare feet, she ran like the wind. A second after she exited the building she could hear the alarms coming from behind her. She didn’t dare look around because it would have slowed her down. She ran free of the building and into the car park. The gravel made her feet bleed but that didn’t matter to Sinead. In her eyes this was the most freedom she had gotten in god knows how long.

She smiled; to her delight the gates to the hospital were still open. She dropped the doctor’s keys, not needing them anymore. The alarms edged closer. Pure adrenaline was all she was going on. She could hear people behind her urging her to stop but she paid no attention.

Her wish was to run far enough to be run over by a tram. She just wasn’t able to live with the cards with which she was dealt.

She felt a tug on her t-shirt. The turned around, it someone she recognised to be a nurse. She kept running, all twenty stone of her. The alarms like crickets were all around her. She finally got to the gates where she felt someone different pull on her arm.

She heard the ding ding of a tram. Was she going to get her wish? Suddenly she was on the ground. She had been rugby tackled. The tram passed. ‘Shit!’ she said aloud. She tried to wriggle free of culprit holding her.

‘Help me’ the nurse shouted in alarm, ‘she’s trying to wriggle free!’

Sinead felt three more bodies hold her hostage. She could wriggle no more.

‘No’ she cried, ‘I just want to be free!’

In the end it took seven nurses to carry her back to the ward. They tried to walk her back but she broke free with every opportunity and had started to get violent.

Once she was back on her bed, screaming hysterically, she got another injection in her upper left arm. Three nurses were around her bed making sure she was going to stay put. As the drugs entered her system, she began to be calmer in the nurse’s eyes. In Sinead’s it was getting foggy again.

One of the nurses sitting with Sinead said ‘once you calm down a bit more, I’ll look after the cuts on your hands and feet, ok.’ Sinead didn’t even know she had sustained these cuts but nodded anyway.

As she fell deeper and deeper into a state of relaxation the three nurses around her turned into two. She looked at one of them and said, ‘I just wanted to be free.’ Her speech was slurred.

‘I know my darling,’ the nurse said wiping sweat off her brow. ‘But by god, for a big girl you can run!’ they laughed.