I like to think I’m somewhere near the bottom edge of normal. Some days I imagine other people with extraordinary lives. I pretty much plant myself in the same few spots of a fifty foot by 100′ acreage. Every car I see is imaginable as extraordinary. My life has been like being on a sightseeing tour except the brochure and map are for another location and the guide doubles as a guard.

I spent a few months hiding which is leaps and bounds beyond only moving around the house in the dark. I know every noise depending on how I shift my weight. Most days I’m suicidal but I keep my pills in weekly containers to make it all seem onerous.

I used to have more kick and fight but I’m still feeling beaten down by my latest healthcare apprehensions. In March I left the house on an ambulance gurney. I had four seizures which seems reasonable after a year of two to three hours of sleep and a drinking and fasting regime. I was screaming at my mattress because I didn’t want to go in an ambulance let alone a hospital. I was unwell, and the ambulance ride was a blackout, but I recall recalling some of my story as far as justice and innocence in the emergency department. It’s important to be heard even in a CT scan. It was a bunch of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, but I felt like I got hit by a truck. I slept for three days and only walked to the washroom.

A few weeks later I got dragged out of the house on another ambulance gurney, but things didn’t go as smoothly. I was funneled through the police before the paramedics would do whatever it is they do; the ambulance ride was another blackout. I sure as shit remember the cops and all the Plexiglas shields as I ranted from the corner of my living room protecting my therapy dog. Things would have turned out differently had I known one of the cops told my wife “we might have to shoot the dog.”

I was screaming about “21 feet” so they weren’t justified in shooting anything, but they were already 10 feet away. They finally got my dog away from me and I turned around and stripped naked without prompting. “On the floor.” And they pinned me to the floor with their Plexiglas shields and handcuffed me. The paramedics gave me a needle in the ass and I was placed on the gurney I had kicked over when they parked it at my front door.

I was only in the ER against my will for a few days. Because of my experiences in solitary confinement and the similarities with LHSC the first hours were in my world days. I lost all sense of time again and was very agitated with anyone who turned on the lights. I was strapped down at least twice but those events are basically blackouts as well. I don’t react normally to such conditions and confinement which is where some of my agitation and anxiety arise. I guess you’d have to spend a year or two with an indefinite sentence on your person to get it.

I left against doctors’ advice in part because the only other option was to remain in “solitary confinement” until they found a psychiatric bed. Maybe if they had a window in the room or something other than a jail toilet in the hallway of correctional officers and cops. I pissed in the drain in the corner most of the time I was there.

A few days later the police came to apologize, I thought, but five of them seemed to want to stuff me in the back of a police car. I had bruises for two weeks from where they squeezed the pressure points on the insides of my arms. The cops left me back in the ER with a “spit hood” on my head and some nurse trying to medicate me. I overheard someone say, “I’ll take anyone but that one.”

After about five weeks they let me wander so I can spend half my time wishing I was dead and the other half wondering if I have a choice.

I know of no other health condition that the police are likely to respond to. I understand that behavior is a symptom, but I don’t see nurses giving out speeding tickets.