Saturday, 10:00am

(Note: This was also typed from Jess' handwritten notes. Still no computer. Typo's and punctuation still my fault. -- Shane)

Today is my third day here. Thursday I was still high all day from the clonazepam, so I don’t remember much of what happened except for being very scared.

Yesterday as the day wore on I started to make friends with some of the people here. Every life has a very interesting story and every life is filled with sadness and joy and love and hate.

The night I was admitted a young boy named Jessie was also admitted. He was left in a locked surveillance room for the night and woke everyone up banging on the door screaming “I want a shower!” Over and over. They let him out to shower and then for some reason let him down stairs for a cigarette. He stole a wheelchair, rode it down the big hill to 7-11 and nobody has seen him since.

I am the only one on the ward not allowed outside. Escorted or not. This place is not a place to make you happy or feel better. I suppose it is what you might expect. Boring. We mostly stay in our rooms or sit around in a lounge-type area waiting for the television to be turned on at 3:30. We sit and talk sometimes about medications we are taking or joke about escape plans. We quietly discuss all the ways we have tried to kill ourselves, each scare a badge of honour. We sit and wonder what is going through Sarah’s head.

Sarah is our resident schizophrenic. She has been here since November 2005. She has good days and bad days. On good days she’s a lucid, intelligent lady who can tell you about the job she used to have as a biologist (etymology), how she volunteered in the community garden.

On other days like today she will start out fine and then all of a sudden come heavy footing down the hall with a hair band pulled over one eye pirate style with her glasses over top obsessing about something in the nurse’s station. She wanders around the glassed in, locked-tight office tapping lightly on every panel, starring up at a black plastic bag taped to one of the ceiling panels. She will wander the halls all day, doing this dance around the station with lots of “fucks” and “fucking crazy people” in between. Her crazy manic ranting getting louder until it reaches a roar at midnight when I suspect she finally passes out.

My two favorite people are Brendan and Jessica. He’s 19 and she’s 22. He came in after taking a massive overdose of some mood disorder medicine. He was in a coma for several weeks. He sleeps a lot and wakes up late. Then he sits in a chair in the lounge and talk to whoever happens by.

He’s now totally medication free. They don’t really know what is wrong with him, but his whole body is full of cuts and scars that he has self-inflicted. I haven’t seen anybody come and visit him. He hasn’t told me much about himself. He’s very interested in my iPod and I’m fairly sure he wants to steal it. I like him anyway. He’s got these gentle, sad eyes that speak to me. They speak to me of a sadness that nobody can make better and nobody can understand.