Hospitalized at 14 after Hearing Voices

Mason             I was 14 years old and in the ninth grade.  I thought I was in love.  Mason was so handsome and we talked on the phone for several minutes, sometimes an hour.  He was a Black guy; his skin was a honey color and his brown eyes complemented his fuzzy short brown hair.  I could feel my heart beat faster every time he was in my presence.  The so called relationship went on for a few weeks and we never kissed.  We would hold hands or he would put his arm around me but that was about it.  One day, he told me that he was in love with a gal named Martha.  She was so beautiful.  Her hazel eyes glistened in the sun along with her wavy long brown hair.  She was a tiny little thing with large breasts.  One day, out of the blue, Mason told me he liked her instead and that she was a "hot product."  He broke my heart. I went home in tears.                My mother comforted me.  She gave me one long hug and said there would be many more guys that would be after me, much more handsome than that turkey Mason.  I tried to let go of him, I really did.  One day, we were in homeroom, and I was sitting at my desk, and Mason grabbed my breast quickly and smiled at me.  I don't remember what I said but he thought I would be pleased by this.  I stormed out of the room.  I couldn't stop thinking about the incident and went home very stressed.  This incident triggered the terrible memory of an incident that happened in my childhood and that was when I stopped eating and sleeping, and started to see things and hear voices. Voices             I didn't eat.  I used to love the school nachos but seeing any type of food made me want to throw up.  I couldn't focus on school and them, I started to lose sleep.  I started going through the motions of every day school life but couldn't quite find my "normal" self.  I was an empty shell.  The hallucinations started.  In math, I was reading word problems that wouldn't make any sense.  In one word problem, I read that Susan had eleven assholes instead of apples.  I am not kidding you.  It didn't trouble me at the time until I started to hear the voices.              I didn't know what the voices were saying.  They sounded robotic and loud and they wouldn't stop.  It scared the hell out of me.  My father drove me home from school and they would pound in my head for minutes at a time.  I pretended to not hear them but really, I was so scared.  My mother and father started to worry, especially when I told my mother to kill me.  "Mom, please kill me.  I am a bad person.  Please just kill me!"  She cried and was confused.  She told me I did nothing wrong and she begged for me to eat.  "Eat baby.  What is wrong?  Why won't you eat?"  She bought me all my favorite fast food like Taco Bell or Kentucky Fried Chicken but I took one look at the food and I had no desire to eat anything.  I felt like a frozen body; cold and with no emotions.              At home, I started acting like a stereotypical black person and told my dad, "I can't sing no mo!  I can't sing no mo!"  He didn't understand why I was saying this but I think it was my way of saying that things weren't as they should be.  I really couldn't sing though.  I tried but my voice just wouldn't come out.  For God's sake, I was hearing voices and seeing words in books that weren't there.  I wanted to feel normal again.  I wanted the voices to go away and I wanted to eat again. I had a burst of energy that we didn't quite act on and then, a sudden depression.  I kept hearing the voices and still wouldn't eat.                                                                  The First Hospital            My mother took me to a child psychiatrist that prescribed medications for my anxiety and psychosis.  One of these medications made my bladder shut down and I had to wear a damn catheter.  That thing was so painful.  Imagine being pierced by a needle down there.  I hated it.  I had to walk around with a bag attached to my leg.  My parents had to deal with this and I was like this big baby who couldn't do anything.  The medications made the psychoses worse and my mother and father decided I should be admitted into a psychiatric hospital.              I remember that they took my shoelaces.  I had to wear rubber bands around my shoes to keep them on.  I felt like a fool.  Immediately, I wanted to go home.  I was assigned a roommate and she seemed pretty nice.  She was an overweight Latina girl, always smiling.  I never knew why she was there exactly.  She seemed perfectly fine to me.  I even gave her my special gold bracelet for being my special friend.  To this day, my mother won't let me live this down.  She asked the girl to give her back the bracelet but she wouldn't.  Then there was Seth.  He was a skinny red-headed boy with braces and I immediately liked him.  He was definitely depressed but I could tell that he was trying hard to get better.  Every morning, he would knock on my door. "Leslie, it's time for our exercises." I would go sometimes but most days, I wanted to just lie in bed, like a blob of nothingness.  I felt no reason to do anything.            I didn't want to go to the group meetings and activities.  I was always forced into participating and I remember one of the mental health workers yelled at me in the dining room to eat.  "You are not leaving until you eat something!"  I started to stand up and she pushed me down.  "Eat."  That happened on most days.  The food tasted like shit.  When I was "normal," I loved all food.  I would eat almost anything but this food tasted like death.  The juice was too cold for my mouth and sometimes when I drank, I could feel juice dribble out of my mouth as though I had just been to the dentist.  Potatoes tasted like nothing and the texture bothered my mouth.             One day, I decided I wanted to die.  I had enough of everything.  I was tired of seeing roommates come and go.  I was tired of this hospital and tired of the world.  I took the sample sized shampoo from my room and swallowed the whole bottle.  I thought to myself, surely I would die if I swallowed the whole bottle.  I started to gag and went into the hallway.  I think this was a cry for help and attention.  Why was I dumb enough to think this would even kill me?  I was a dumb suicidal alright.  I thought to myself how nice it would be to die.  Then I wouldn't remember all that stuff, all that stuff that caused me so much pain.  The hospital workers pinned me down and had me drink tons of water and then when they knew I was fine, they sent me to the quiet room.            The quiet room was exactly what it was. .  It was a room with a bed that had white sheets and that was it.  I seemed to ask to go there a lot because I felt freer.  I even tried to escape the stupid hospital and threw my body into emergency exits.  The hospital workers pinned me down and I ended up in the quiet room again.  Just what I wanted.             One day in the quiet room, I had the worst panic attack ever.  Thank God my mother was there with me.  "Breathe Leslie.  Take a deep breath.  Don't forget to breathe."  I would run out of breath and my chest felt like it was falling deep into a pit.  I felt like I was going to die and nobody around made it any better.  Not the doctors, the hospital workers, the priest, not a damn person.  Eventually, the panic stopped but I don't remember how.  I am so glad I didn't die even though it felt so much like I was going to.            I cried in the quiet room a lot but it wasn't a full on cry.  I felt like I had lost my voice.  I couldn't sing even though I was in my right mind.  I loved to sing.  One of the hospital workers comforted me and sang to me and I cried even more and tried to sing along with her.  When she left, I tried so hard to sing.  Only a few words came out.  "Lean on me.  Lean on me."  I couldn't sing even though I tried so hard to.  I wanted to yell but I just couldn't do it.  I felt like I was trapped in my own body, which used to be able to do human things.            One day, I was able to go on an outing with my father and my aunt, and her husband.  They took me to KFC because they knew I loved it.  I acted pretty normal and had a great time.  They had hoped that I would be going home soon.  That night, I went to my hospital room and kept the leftover fries on my dresser.  Damn it, the French fries had smiley faces on them and they started to shake.  I would start to eat them and they shook as I ate them.  I was so damn frustrated.  I wanted to go home.  One day, in the quiet room, I had been napping but woke up from my nap to hallucinate an odd picture.  I stared at the wooden door and within the door's wavy wooden lines, I saw Jesus Christ with DJ headphones spinning records on a turntable.  I loved this hallucination.  It was like he was telling me to wake up and that everything would be OK.  So, I think this was when I started trying to get better.  I woke up.  I started to think of all the people I loved and that loved me back.  I started to think of volleyball and choir.  My friend Martha even came to visit me and brought me a nice plant to put in my room.  I resented her just a little since Mason was in love with her but appreciated her presence.                I started to take my medications.  Before, I would pretend to swallow them but managed to hide the medication under my tongue.  I spit it out and gave them to my friend Lee.  He wanted them for whatever reason.  But later, I complied with the nurses and started to take the medication.  I started listening to my Walkman.  By this time, my first one was stolen and soon enough, my second Walkman was stolen and my mother refused to buy a third one.  But still, I heard my favorite songs in my head by choice.  I started writing in my journal.  I wrote rhymes, positive ones to take with me after the hospital stay.  I wish I could have kept them.  I started to eat.  Finally, the food tasted good.  I could actually smell the mashed potatoes and instead of feeling like cold useless mush, they sort of burnt my tongue and actually tasted like potatoes.  The juice tasted like juice and it wasn't too cold this time.  After all of this, I started to get better and I was able to go home.