Psycho Ward

As a child I hated being around anyone who was crippled, old, or sickly. Taking out the garbage at home for Mom was enough to make me sick. I couldn't stand to be around anything that didn't smell good. So, it is curious that at age twenty, I became a hospital orderly working at night on the psychiatric ward of Orange County General Hospital. Mom told me about her work as we ate dinner together at home. She complained about an overweight German orderly in psycho who mistreated alcoholics. "He showed them pictures of liquor from magazines and teased them by withholding paraldehyde or sleeping pills." Mom was also angry at him for planting a large rubber life-like snake in the linen closet. "It scared me half to death." Mother did not approve of the orderly.

I worked with him in psycho from eleven at night to seven in the morning. The man was a former German Hitler Youth who spoke with a foreign accent.

He told me this story, "I wheeled a dead man on a gurney to the morgue taking a sweet young student nurse with me to help. We pushed the dead man to the morgue outside in the dark at midnight. (The morgue is a small concrete building. It smells like formaldehyde. Autopsies are done on a concrete table.) I used a big key to open the heavy door with creaky hinges. It was very spooky and dark. I opened the huge oak refrigerator door and pulled out the three tiered body slab holder. Then I left the student nurse to watch the body while I went to get a flashlight. She couldn't see to find a light switch. Having previously left a window open, I spoke through the window into the hollow sounding room in a slow scary voice. ‘Let me out of here.’ She thought the corpse was alive, and she wet her pants."

My mother worked the swing shift, and I worked nights from eleven to seven in the morning. Tillie was a patient who helped the nurses with the work in the psychiatric ward. Something would set Tillie off, and she would act upset like a schizophrenic. One thing that would get her started was the mention of an animal like cat, dog, or horse. We tried not to say anything about animals in her hearing. At the beginning of an attack she became quiet, secretive, and suspicious of those around her. She would start talking slowly at first and then speed the words up until she was talking rapidly and getting louder all the time. Then she would go in the little kitchen and start throwing pots and pans and making a lot of noise.

The charge nurse would say, "Come on, Tillie, lets go. You need to cool down." She would lock Tillie in a cell and leave her there for a few days until Tillie calmed down to normal.

Tillie acted sane most of the time and was so useful at the Orange County General Hospital psycho ward, the supervisor of nurses would not let her transfer to Metropolitan State Hospital for treatment. Tillie kept the psycho kitchen neat and clean, helped serve food to the other patients, and she crocheted for the nurse supervisor. Tillie owned property in Anaheim, and she had money, but she spent eight years in the psycho ward. After being released, she visited my mother, and Mom went to visit Tillie in her home. She told Mom a dog had frightened her so badly, afterwards, the mention of animals made her act nutty. She said Mom had given her the encouragement and friendship that helped her to finally get well.

One of the psycho patients was a very plump middle aged lady who told me she was the Lord Jesus Christ. When I pointed out to her she had female organs and no sign of male genitalia she answered without blinking an eye. "The doctors got a hold of me and gave me a sex change operation. And they did it against my will, the dirty bastards!"

Mom had started as a polio practical nurse. Nurses came to Orange County Hospital to teach the Sister Kenny method of treating polio. Mom learned to use hot packs and other Sister Kenny treatments. Mom invented a way to give drinking water to people confined to breathing tanks. She connected IV tubing from a water pitcher to a place where all the patient had to do was turn his head to the free end of the tubing and suck up fresh water whenever they got thirsty. After the epidemic, Mom floated to wards. This meant she worked any floor where they were short of help. She was intelligent and adjusted to changes quickly. At least one finicky doctor preferred Mom over the other nurses to assist him on pediatric and contagious disease rounds. Mom treated the patients with love and understanding.

The Orange County General Hospital psychiatric ward was separated from the medical ward by a second story solarium. The women were kept upstairs and the men downstairs in a half basement with windows close to the ground outside. With high, barred windows from the inside, it seemed like we were in a cold, damp basement. New patients were evaluated for seventy two hours to decide if they needed long term treatment at the state mental institution at Norwalk. A psychiatrist saw each patient before they were taken to be judged by an older judge in Santa Ana. Sometimes due to human error, sane people were sent to Norwalk State Mental Institution. Once there, it took an act of Congress to get them out. Psychiatrists and nurses were accustomed to hearing patients say they were normal. People claiming to be sane were labeled paranoid.

I met an interesting patient my first night of duty at the psycho ward. Mr. Duvall lived in a room like a jail cell with bars on the window of the large wooden door. The room was down the concrete stairs in the basement below the psycho ward nurses station. He was over ninety, and half his face was covered by a mass of purple tissue all bumpy and wrinkled. It made him look grotesque. The growth looked like a blue vegetable grew on his face half covering one eye. The eye seemed small and looked like it was crying. He used a dirty looking handkerchief to wipe the tears. Usually he was in bed chewing stinky tobacco and spilling it on his bedding. The nurses hated the smell of the tobacco, and they referred to Mr. Duvall as a dirty old man. At night I often heard him get up and push a straight backed chair on the concrete to and from the toilet all the male patients shared. I could hear the click, click, clicks as he pushed the chair over the cracks in the cement and he made choo choo train sounds with his voice. I would go down and talk to him, and at first, it made me feel sick to see his face. But he had a wonderful mind and a good sense of humor. He wasn't crazy like the hospital workers said. They said he couldn't get along with anybody on the geriatric ward. I think he was just too ugly, and too sarcastic, and they were simply hiding him in the psychiatric ward. He told me he wanted to die, and he frequently asked my mother to give him a black pill. She said, "I don't know what a black pill is." He said, "Yes, you do."

Pretty soon I liked him and looked at him without feeling pity any more. I went to check on him when I heard him talking to himself out loud. When I asked who he was talking to he said, "When I feel like talking to someone with good sense, I talk to myself. Nobody else has good sense here." When he died I was glad he got his wish to die. He had suffered enough.