Word: ward
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...after a while I looked around and saw a guy in his thirties with short hair sleeping on the sofa, and a guy in his fifties with bristly gray whiskers rocking back and forth in a chair like mine, sort of chanting to himself. Every one else on the ward was in bed. I wondered how long it would take for the luxury of time to turn into the horror of waiting, endlessly. By the third day I had strong hints that it didn't take very long...
...going loud and strong. It always went loud and strong. Television is an immensely important fact for mental hospitals. It provides an automatic something-to-do. If I'm just wandering around the ward or coming back from supper or from the bathroom, I'll have to pass the TV and since it provides constant change and because it's something that is acceptable to sit in front of while doing nothing it is tremendously attractive. You can almost fool yourself into thinking that you're watching TV. But really watching implies participation which means activity. And activity, as opposed...
AFTER LUNCH I went outside. With the use of tranquilizers many wards have been unlocked and the patients are free to leave during the day. Hardly any do. I walked over the grounds and brooded over my patienthood. Already the enormous dull routine of back ward life was getting to me. Already I was beginning to feel dead. And lonely, terribly lonely...
Since I'd been on the ward only one person had spoken to me besides Catherine Glenn. A guy in his thirties came up to me and said, "Hi, are you going to be living here?" With great effort I pulled a voice out of myself: "Yes, yes I guess so." He sort of smiled and shook my hand. "My name is Marc." I said "I'm Ken," and walked away, feeling very bad about...
...patients rarely communicate, the nurses never talk to you either. They seemed nice but never had time for the patients except to occasionally hand out a cigarette or say "mop the floor." And the doctors were so distant they might have been another species. They strode through the ward on long rubbery legs at ninety miles an hour and the only thing they seemed to have to do with the ward was to use it as a path from where they had been to where they were going. Once a doctor slowed down to thirty as he passed the chair...