It is Finished!

The tiles were the same color as when I was walked through the doors a year ago Good Friday. The smell was the same as a year ago. Mike the nurse was beside me as I was walked through the doors the the same ER I was walked through a year ago. I felt the emotions, I saw the faces of the nurses, the scrubs, the glass doors and the curtains. "You would have been back there," he said kindly, "Do you want to walk around the corner to get a better look?" We walked around the corner and I spotted a nurse that had been my nurse when I was there. I waved...she looked annoyed. I laughed at myself....here we are in the ER, one of the craziest places on earth and I am waving like an idiot to a busy ER nurse who was a hardass on me. I looked down the way and saw the rooms I had been in...the Psyche rooms for the "crazy people" the mentally ill people, the terrified people. No panic swept over me, no worry or fear that I was back there. I was in my street clothes, not green scrubs. I was normal not crazy and yet I am mentally ill. I suffer from Bi Polar disorder and here I was feeling like I was getting away with something. I turned to Mike and said, "I just want to say thank you. Please pass that on. When we are sick and brought in here we are mean and say bad things because we are scared. We are not in our right mind and you guys do your best to care for us. I am so sorry but I want to say we don't mean it." He looked down at me with kind blue eyes and said, "We know that. We know you are not able to be who you really are. That is why we are hear to take care of you. We realize it is not you."
Moments before Dad and I had walked up to the 5th floor...the Behavioral Unit they call it...hahaha...not the loony bin, or the crazy house, or the psyche ward, the Behavioral unit. So PC. I looked in the clouded window and saw the shaped of people walking the halls like I did, the TV room and the front desk. I saw down the hall to my room and dad and I sat in the waiting room and just prayed. Thanked God for me being healed, for our family becoming hole because I was broken, for how strong we were now, and for the nurses and the patients, that they would be made whole like I was. It was amazing to stand on the outside of a lock down facility, where I was kept for 9 days as I was put back on medication and watched carefully. Where I was fed and brought back from terrible anorexia and paranoia. Where I was locked in, just wanting to get out, talking to other patients, learning how to play the sane game and get out sooner. All of it flashed back, but mostly in the ER with the smells. When I was down in the ER bathroom the smell of the Ward just washed over me and I was paralyzed in the bathroom. I just closed my eyes and memories flooded back, my next door roommate, the woman in the "quiet room", the food and the classes, the constant supervision and sleeping with the night light on even as a nurse checked on me every 45 min.
What a Good Friday. I can now say, it is finished! Amen!