DETOX, SUICIDE WATCH, AND “WELCOME TO CAT 5”

Unfortunately, this is the portion of my journey I am the most unfamiliar with for a variety of reasons, so my recollections will be recounted to you as they exist in my head; in brief snatches experienced in varying degrees of lucidity. Thank you in advance for your forgiveness and understanding.

I arrived at the emergency room really fucking drunk; able to walk in the door under my own power, but cognizant enough of my situation to feel ashamed, remorseful, and very sad. Jennie, god bless her, came in with me.

“Name?”

“Chris Moriarty”

“Last 4?”

“5232”

“Reason for visit?”

“Uh…alcoholic crisis”

Blood pressure taken (very high), temperature taken, pulse checked.

“Ok, grab your things and come back here”

Although there was no way of knowing it at that moment, this was where I would say goodbye to the last member of my family I would see for nearly two months. If things went well.

“See you later”, was all I could manage.

“Bye”, she said through tears. No hug. No kiss. Just damage. All done by me.

A nurse handed me two hospital gowns and a plastic bag containing some sort of footwear.

“Go in the bathroom, take off all your clothes, and put this on. You’re going to put one gown on facing forward, and one facing backward, so you’re completely covered. And just let me know if the socks don’t fit. I can get you a bigger pair”.

They fit fine. They were the type of socks you’d buy your grandmother for Christmas to keep her from falling on her ass on the linoleum; the soles all covered in rubber appliqués like a 70s bathtub. I came out of the bathroom.

“Put all your clothes in this bag”.

The nurse extended a clear plastic trash bag to put my belongings in. I had nothing but the clothes I was wearing. No phone, no wallet. Nothing. She soon came back with an inventory sheet for me to sign. I scrawled my signature on it, she jammed it into the bag, and scurried down the hallway.

A different nurse approached me in the chair I was sitting in.

“So, you’re here for alcohol?”

“Yes”

“Ok. How often have you been drinking?”

“Every day”

“Ok. And what have you been drinking?”

“Vodka”

“How much per day? Approximately?”

“A fifth a day for about the last week. Less prior to that”

“Have you had any seizures?”

“No”

“Blackouts?”

“Yes”

“Thoughts of hurting yourself?”

Ah, fuck it. Why pull punches? I was in the hospital, for chrissakes.

“Yes”

“Thoughts of suicide?”

“Yes”

“Any suicide attempts?”

“No, just suicidal ideations, I guess you’d call them. I told my wife about them”

“Any thoughts of hurting anyone else?”

“No!”

“Ok. Well, we’re going to get you squared away with a room upstairs, but until then, why don’t you go ahead and lie down in that room right there and we’ll come get you when they’re ready for you upstairs”.

“Ok. Thank you”.

I was ushered into a brilliantly lit room with four fluorescent tube light bulbs blazing above a twin-sized bed with a hollow plastic frame filled with sand to prevent patients from picking it up and throwing it through the glass doors of the hospital in order to affect an escape. I lay down on the mattress and was immediately joined by a nurse’s assistant who sat at the open door and just looked at me. I made small talk with her as best I could, given the awkwardness of the situation. In my drunken condition, I had not yet put two and two together.

After about an hour, I was informed that a bed had opened for me on the fourth floor, where I would begin the detoxification process. Strangely, I have no memory of how I got to my room. Was I wheeled up there on a stretcher? Did I walk? Was I already hooked up to an IV? Had I already been given my first dose of benzodiazepines before I ever got to my room? I cannot for the life of me remember the answers to any of these questions. Where the story picks up in my liquor-addled brain is: I am in my hospital room. There is an IV hookup in my left arm. Nurses come and go. They take blood. They give me medications. They change IV bags when they finish draining into my arm. There is also a nurse’s assistant sitting silently in a chair across the room from me. Upon arrival it was determined that I was very drunk, my blood pressure was very high, and I was extremely dehydrated. The alcohol was slowly seeping out of my system, but the contents of the IV bags which were rehydrating me were causing my blood pressure to stay dangerously high. I was given a large dose of Ativan in my IV tube which quickly put me to sleep. When I awakened several hours later, the same nurse’s assistant was still sitting in the same chair, looking at me. Not reading a book. Not scrolling through her phone. Just looking at me. Finally, it occurred to me: I was on suicide watch.

“Hi”

“Hello”

“Feel better?”

“I guess. How long was I asleep?”

“About four hours”

“Did I snore? I usually snore really bad. I use a CPAP machine at home”

“Not too bad. But I can ask the nurse about getting you a machine while you’re here”

“Ok. Thanks”

“Do you need anything?”

“Actually, I need to go to the bathroom. Do I need to roll this whole machine in there with me?”, I asked nodding backwards toward a wheeled tower which connected the tube in my arm to my IV bag and a medical machine with a digital panel covered with lights and meters of varying degrees of urgency.

“Yeah, unfortunately. I’ll help you”

I slowly sat up, pivoted, and placed my feet on the floor while the nurse prepared my rig for the short journey across the room to the bathroom. I slowly shuffled across the tile floor and into the bathroom and prepared to sit on the toilet when I noticed the nurse standing in the open doorway, still looking at me. If I was not yet aware I was on suicide watch, this new development certainly hammered the point home. I farted embarrassingly and impotently into the toilet, emptied my bladder, flushed, and arranged my tube and gowns for the journey back to my bed. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and pivoted back into the sleeping position.

“The remote to your TV is right behind you there. You can also use it to call the nurse if you need anything”

“Thanks”, I replied miserably.

I found a college football game, wondered if it was part of Hippo’s write-up that morning, and fell back to sleep.

I was awakened by a tech from the sleep services department of the hospital. My nurse had gotten word that I was a CPAP user, contacted the tech, and she brought me a loaner machine I could use for the duration of my stay. It was even the same model and mask style as the one I use at home! I couldn’t believe my luck. She fitted the nose pillows over my nostrils, filled the humidity reservoir with distilled water and left. I was asleep again in minutes. I woke up with a dinner tray being pushed into my chest. I had slept through lunch, and the staff felt it was important for me to eat something before sleeping through the night. I choked down about half the low-sodium meal which had been delivered, pushed the tray away, and looked to my left. I discovered that my wife had come back to the hospital, dropped off my CPAP machine while I was asleep, and the nurse had been able to switch the two without waking me up. The thought of her making a second hour-long car journey to make sure I’d be able to get decent sleep after the way I’d treated her and behaved in front of the kids left me profoundly depressed and ashamed of myself. I asked if I could call to thank her and was told that no telephone usage was permitted while I was on suicide watch; or as they referred to it, “one-on-one” status.

The next three days consisted of the common drudgery of hospital routine. Vitals every four hours, pills every six hours, three horrible meals a day, putrid American television, an endless series of faceless nurses and assistants whose names I have forgotten, and who I am sure have long since forgotten me. And desperately trying (and failing) to shit in front of a woman who wasn’t my wife.

I had a roommate named Roy, who I could hear, but not see, as we were separated by what amounted to a giant shower curtain which divided our shared room in two. He was a loud man. An ex-Marine. He was a trucker by trade, but now ran a repair shop for 18-wheelers. He was also very sick. Unfortunately, he and his family spent a good deal of his enlisted time at Camp LeJeune, and the place poisoned each and every one of them. He signed off as a plaintiff on one of the well-advertised class-action lawsuits being brought against the military for poisoning its members with befouled drinking water. I wish him the best in that endeavor. I imagine the United States military is a ruthless adversary in court. Roy and I spent six days in that room together. We only left to use the shower, which was located in the room directly next door. Other than that, we were not permitted to leave. So, we bullshitted, told bad jokes, and complained about the food through that shower curtain. My complaints about Roy do not amount to a hill of shit. You want to know what was wrong with him? He talked too loud on the phone while he was doggedly trying to track down wayward truck-part deliveries or find out why some lazy bastard or other had failed to show up for work at his garage, and he watched too much COPS on his television. Which is to say he was the best roomie I could have hoped for under the circumstances, and I hope he got those wings at Applebee’s the minute he got sprung from that joint. And I hope he gets whatever he has coming to him in court, even though it will never make up for the loss of his wife to cancer. And most of all, I hope one day he can get past the accident he got into on that rainy night which took the life of that tow-truck driver. Or at the very least, I hope he can learn to forgive himself the way the tow-truck driver’s husband has forgiven him.

After the third day, it became apparent the staff were satisfied with my hydration level and I was past the danger zone for detox-related seizures and hallucinations. It was time to make plans for the next step in my recovery. I had been attending a Thursday afternoon Zoom-session alcohol support group through the VA, sort of a less doctrinaire version of Alcoholics Anonymous. During the last meeting I attended BEFORE I went on my fateful final bender, I had apparently shown enough of my ass to the moderator of the group that he had already put a consult in for me for the 45-day inpatient recovery program I am attending today, so I was one step ahead of the game. I was visited by a representative of the program who gave me a quick suicide risk assessment and declared me low-risk enough to take me off one-on-one status. And since I was deemed sufficiently hydrated and would be receiving no further Ativan injections, I had the IV tube removed from my arm. I was now able to move freely about the room, meet my roommate face-to-face, and take a shower. But most importantly, to close the door behind me and be alone in the bathroom. Did I shit? Oh, men. Men! As Bukowski wrote, “Out it came. Hot, glorious, and stinking”. Bears don’t shit with such gusto. Not even Ditka.

The next order of business was to figure out when my transfer into the rehab program would be. My doctor wanted to keep me until the level of benzodiazepines in my blood subsided to a level she was comfortable with. This was no problem, as a counselor of the program had been by to inform me that while I had been accepted into the program, they were still waiting on a bed to come open for me. To be perfectly honest, my mind was elsewhere. Now that I was no longer on suicide watch, I knew I would be permitted to speak to my family on the telephone. I was hoping to find out the program policy on visitation before I placed my first call, since I missed the hell out of my wife and was absolutely miserable from not having seen or spoken with my kids for three days. I couldn’t wait to be able to see them, no matter how short the visit.

After two more agonizing days of waiting, the same counselor who had visited me previously came back to inform me that a bed had come open in the domiciliary, and to give me my instructions for moving in. She reiterated that it was a 45-day inpatient program and provided me with a packing list and a list of prohibited items. I immediately asked what the visitation policy would be.

“Unfortunately,” she began, “due to COVID-19, there will be no visitation permitted for the duration of your stay”.

Drowning.

Real pain.

Waving goodbye.

Alone.

I was given a phone with which to call home. It resembled the handset from a Vietnam War-era radio. I used it to call in artillery on my own position:

“Hello?”

“Hi”

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah”

“What’s happening?”

“I’m going downstairs to the inpatient program today”

“That’s good, I guess”

“Yeah”

“It’s 45 days, right?”

“Yeah”

“What do you need?”

“They gave me a list”

I read the list to her. She copied it down.

“When can we visit?”

“Um…”, choking hard, ”…You can’t. There’s no visitation because of COVID”

“At all?”

“No”

“Are you ok?”

“No”

“Well…I’ll talk to the kids. I’ll try to bring that stuff to you after I get off work. My Dad is staying at the house”

“Oh. That’s good. What are you going to tell them?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to tell them.”

“I’m so sorry”

“….”

“Can I say, ‘I love you?’”

“….”

“I’ll let you go”

“Ok”

“Thank you for bringing the stuff. And thanks for bringing my sleep machine.”

“You’re welcome”

“Bye”

“Bye”

I hung up, laid on my back in silence, and felt the incoming rounds crater my chest.

A short time later, I was walked across the hospital to a place called the Domicilliary, or “The Dom” for short. Patients of the Dom are in three programs I am aware of: the PTSD program, CAT 5 and the GOALS program. The PTSD program is self-explanatory, CAT 5 is for substance abusers like me, and the GOALS program is to provide homeless veterans with halfway housing in one of two VA-run houses; North Point & Victory House. Both buy the homeless vet around a year off the streets to try to get his situation straightened out. I entered the CAT 5 program October 13^th and began my medical intake that day. The procedure was pretty basic and very much reminded me of intake at basic training. They get a medical baseline on you, and then get you set up with your room and show you the procedure for food. The waiting is endless, and you are made to feel very much as though you have slipped through the cracks many times before it is all over. After what seemed like an eternity, I was led to my room at the end of a hallway in the CAT 5 section of the Dom called B Pod. I was shown my bed which consisted of a wooden frame with two slide out drawers at its base and a mattress with a bedbug cover standing on its side on the frame. A pile of fresh linen sat folded on the windowsill. An identical set-up existed on the other side of the room, indicating that there was room for me to have a roommate, but I did not have one yet. A bored attendant (known as a Health Tech) said, “Go ahead and make up your bed. Dinner is at 5:00. Do you know where the dining hall is?”

“Yeah, I think so. Is there a pillow?”

“There isn’t one there?”

“No. Just a pillowcase”

“Oh. I’ll see if I can find one for you”

“Thanks”

She left. She would not return.

I made the bed, plugged in the CPAP machine, and set it up on the dresser beside my bed. Since the shower in the detox wing of the hospital produced only cold water, I had decided to wait until I’d arrived in the Dom to shower again. But now I had no idea if or when Jennie would be bringing me more clothes and toiletries. I had nothing except the dirty clothes I had worn into the hospital a week ago and the case to my CPAP machine. I placed it in one of the drawers beneath the bed and wondered how close it was to 5:00. I had no phone and there was no clock in the room. I went wandering into the hallway and asked the first person I saw. It was 3:15. Shit.

I had been to this hospital many times over the years, so I was aware of a small retail store off the main hallway and decided to go down and at least have a browse. As I set off, I felt a strange transformation begin to happen inside me as I walked down the hallway. I was feeling a rotten combination of alone, anxious, ashamed, nervous, helpless, unfamiliar, and scared. This was a combination of feelings I hadn’t felt since I was a young child of an alcoholic father. And as I walked, the more I became overwhelmed. So, by the time I arrived at the entrance to the retail store, I was no longer a 50-year-old man, but a young child too broken to raise his hand to tell his teacher he had a migraine headache and needed to go to the nurse’s office please. There were plenty of customers in the tiny store, so it was easy to go unnoticed as I stood silently in front of the toiletries shelf. I was squinting through the tears which were now falling freely down my face to locate the lowest priced choices of the items I needed: body wash/shampoo combo, toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, and dental floss. I gathered these items in my arms and tried to compose myself. Deep breaths. Turning my head to wipe my cheeks on the shoulders of my sweatshirt. Hoping my eyeglasses would mask my reddened eyes somewhat. More deep breaths. Now hanging back until the registers were clear to make my request. Just a loan. I would sign for everything, of course. My wallet would surely be here any day now, you see. If you could just see your way clear to help me out just this once. I have no ID right now, but I’m in CAT 5. B Pod. They know me. One of them is even looking for a pillow for me right this very minute! I’m sure of it!

“Can I help you?”

I took one final deep breath and stepped forward to make my request.

I got as far as, “Do you give credit…?” before I completely fell to pieces. I could not speak. I could not make eye contact. My shoulders were touching under my chin. I sobbed the sobs of a child who is lost and afraid to ask for help. And I cried the tears of a man who knows he is creating that same reality for two of his own children, has profoundly hurt his wife, and might not be forgiven for doing so.

Not one, but two, cash register attendants came around the counter to comfort me. One was older, and very motherly, and her name badge read “Brenda”. She produced a box of tissues, kept an arm around my shoulder, and assured me that everything was going to be just fine. The younger of the two ladies, whose badge read “Lori”, hustled out of the store and around the corner. She reappeared a few minutes later as I was finally beginning to get a hold of myself. She motioned to Brenda that we should follow her. We left the store and went around the corner to an office marked “Community Services”. Brenda went back to mind the registers and I went in with Lori and the Community Services attendant whose name I did not catch. Inside were baskets upon baskets of every kind of toiletry one could possibly need as well as t-shirts, socks, and underwear. All free; donated from stores throughout the community to be distributed to veterans in need, a description I shamefully but accurately fit at that moment. Lori made me promise to stop back by the Retail Store after I’d collected everything I needed. I did. We talked for a few minutes during which time I explained what led me to end up in CAT 5 and how I’d gotten into the situation I was in. They made me promise that if I needed ANYTHING, I’d come to them for it. They are my guardian angels here, and I visit them every day they are working whether I need to buy anything or not. And I truly look forward to the day I can walk into the store to see them with Jennie, Finn, and Emmett in tow so they can see me as happy as I was miserable on that horrible day.

COMING SOON – PART 3: A FULLBACK, A FUCKUP, AND THE REASONS WHY

CLICK HERE IF YOU MISSED PART 1.