Personal Narrative: Healing Experience With Mental Illness

At today’s visit the patient is awake, alert. The patient reports that he was recently placed in the ALF after moving from Orlando. He states that he misses his home and would like to return home. I met at length with the patient’s son, daughter in law and the facility owner. The son reports that the patient was place in the facility due to his functional decline, needing more assistance with ADLS, his advanced dementia and his behavioral disturbances. The son reports that

“Oh I got my heart right here. Oh I got my scars right here…” With the slow beat of The Weeknd, I took a right onto the highway. Where was I going? I didn’t know. I was just going to drive my thoughts away. Peering down into my windows, the moon shone on my interior, lighting up everything. It was just me, the moon, and my freedom. I turned the radio louder to blast out my thoughts and just think about the song. I do this therapeutically. Driving makes me feel better, especially when I have no certain destination or deadline. My only goal is to chase the moon in an eternal game of tag, but for some reason I’m always “it”.

As I was locking the apartment and leaving for school, my phone rang, "Can you come to the front door? I am not feeling okay", said my dad. I rushed to the front, helped him get out of the car, and carried his stuff. "What happened? How did your dialysis go? Why are you not feeling okay?" He was lacking so much energy that he couldn 't answer any of my questions and kept walking slowly while holding on to me. "Let me take a break," said my dad as he leaned towards the wall. As he closed his eyes he fainted and collapsed. I didn 't let him fall but slide down by the wall and reached for my phone and dialed 911. I sprinkled water on his face from his water bottle I was carrying as I stayed on the phone with the operator. Within few minutes they reached, got my dad up on the stretcher and took his vitals. I explained them as to what happened while getting on the ambulance with my dad. He was rushed to the nearest emergency. I stayed with him the entire time and informed my family as soon as possible. The medical team got him stabilized soon and explained that there was extra fluid taken out during dialysis than normal which caused him to lose all the energy and faint. Bringing my father to the hospital and calling for help on time shows my compassion towards my father 's sufferings and an ability to stay emotionally stable at such a stressful time. My father 's decline in health has motivated me to get into healthcare because I have always felt very limited in terms of helping

Dr. Williams stresses the importance of talking to your patients and nurses. He tells me that when you talk to someone you learn a lot more than when you don’t. He tells me that people who document well, do not converse well. He admits he does not document well but he has great communication with his patients and that helps. He also tells me that it is important to document because otherwise insurance companies will not pay as much. I see more of the jaded side of him in the sense that he’ll have excellent bedside manner but as soon as we walk out of the room he’ll crack a joke about the patient or something they said. One of the patients there has a daughter who is extremely obese and after walking out Dr. Williams says, “There’s a four-hundred-pounder. She’s got enough yeast to be making donuts under all those rolls.” He then tells me the importance of not overeating and how he wishes people didn’t because it makes medical practice much more difficult. He tells me how to get around the difficulties of trying to get an IV in an overweight person or when they weigh too much to have a CAT scan. We visit many elderly patients tonight. We run EKG’s on some to find that one is normal but the other two have CHF. We also conduct an EKG in the trauma room in which Dr. Williams notices a rare heart rhythm that he’s only seen four other times in twenty-five years. He teaches me about the p and q waves on the EKGs.

No one considered that Schizophrenia was the ailment that tormented my brother. We assumed it was just stress and anxiety that stole his nights, his sanity, and his joy. We all believed that it was just a phase my happy, go-lucky, comic brother would get over. After all, doesn't everybody go through these rough patches of their life, and like a phoenix tried through a fire, rise triumphantly? That was my hope for my brother. But as the days progressed, fatigue mixed with delusions consumed my brother’s thoughts and disrupted his ability to function. As a sister, I felt helpless watching my big brother, my hero, and my confidant going through the greatest battle of his life - mental illness. Episodes and psychiatric breakdowns were constant,

It’s a struggle to get out of bed sometimes, I often just sit there struggling to comprehend the sequence of events which have taken place over the past year. I mean, I’m used to this now, its normal to me, but the fact that this has happened and that I am now ‘disabled’ as people would put it is hard to get my head around. And every time I look down I’m reminded of the pain and the struggle I faced, it’s a physical scar which links me to my grueling past, a physical and emotional journey.

Around six to three months before this tragedy occurred, my grandpa’s health had taken a turn for the worst. We would be awake at midnight, hearing him violently vomit crimson colored fluid. He couldn't get up or walk without my mother or grandma’s assistance. A brutal cough would take both his breath and voice away. Yet, he was so understanding and caring of both my brother and I. He would do everything he could to play with me or tell me a story, since he knew that I didn’t know any better. A couple months before his passing, I came home from school to find no one home except my anxious looking aunt and my then three-year old cousin. I remember running to my grandparents’ room to greet my grandparents, but when I opened the door, no one was there. I ran to my aunt and asked her where everyone was. I could see in her face that she was worried, but she tried to be as calm as possible so she wouldn’t scare me.

I remember the moment my uncle came to pick me up in class. My family wanted me to visit my father. I knew he was in the hospital for an allergic reaction. Many days had passed since I saw him last. Seeing him in the intensive care unit was terrifying. Large blisters covered his body from head to toe. Several had broken down to purple-black sores that looked like his body had burned. Skin swelled up and was oozing all over. Doctors had connected him with machines with tubes all over on his body. I felt he wasn’t coming back home. However, as the days elapsed, he improved, doctors removed the tubes and in fifteen days he returned to baseline. The fact he survived from such a severe reaction astonished me. This incident had a

To this date, it was the worst phone call of my life. I was informed my father and stepmother were in a motorcycle accident in Florida where they retired for the winter. My stepmother was expected to have a painful, long recovery, as she suffered from multiple fractures to her face, a dislocated jaw, and pelvis that was broken in 3 places, plus many small cuts and bruises. My father, however, had not awakened after the accident and we should get to the hospital in Florida as soon as possible. My brother, his wife, and I booked flights and we were on our way they next day. It was not how I expected to spend Easter. The next four days were a blur. We met with doctors and nurses and didn’t feel like we had any answers to the real condition of our father. We knew of his injuries but not what they meant to his future. He had bruising between the hemispheres of his brain, on the outside of the brain, bruising on his brainstem, and multiple open fractures on the left side of his body. I couldn’t get any of his doctors to tell me their opinion on his prognosis. They would only say, “we need another 48 hours”. The only thing I could think was, “if you knew my dad, he would hate this. You life flighted him, now he’s hook to machinery to breath, and all he would have wanted was to have the ambulance run him over and put him out of his misery”. We knew my father’s wishes and they didn’t look anything like

One night in January, I couldn't sleep and it was 4am and then out of the blue I got a call from my sister.. At first all I had was questions, “What do you mean his organs are shutting down?” And then she said it-- grandpa’s dying. She called telling me that our grandpa, who was battling cancer on and off for eight years,

Collapsed. 3rd January 2015, I was awoken by the hysteric screams of my mother coming from her bedroom. I rushed in just to see the sight in front which overwhelmed me with waves of anguish. My father collapsed on the floor. foaming. My tearing mother by his side screaming out "995!". The following crucial hours felt like days as I followed my dad who was rushed to the A&E department - my world just took a 360 Degrees change. The A&E department diagnosed that my father was struck down by an Acute Ischemic Stroke, killing off his entire Cerebellum, severely reducing his cognitive abilities. My father was bed-ridden, unable to speak and control his movements properly. Reality struck me, my beloved father will never to be like normal as he was

We finally got to Lake Regional Hospital and there was not a lot of people there, considering it was autumn and most people come in the summer. Since my grandpa didn’t know all of my dad’s personal information, I had to fill it in. It seemed like the people at the hospital wanted me to write a five-page essay because it took me almost an hour to figure it all out. In the meantime, they took my dad into emergency surgery and put either one or two stents into his arteries. Nobody would tell me what was going on so I had to just sit in the waiting room and wait. Uncle Terri finally came out and explained that one of his arteries was completely blocked but they opened it up and put a stent into it.

They explained that cancer is a rapid growing disease that may eventually cause him to pass away. I was confused and had never experienced death before. I did not, at the moment, understand the magnitude of what was occurring around me. Everyday life continued without a blip. My grandparents and I would go to the movies, the beach, and to local diners. The first few weeks were filled with laughs and love until one day my grandfather collapsed while out at the store with my grandmother and me. The ambulance came to take him to the local hospital where he was admitted and later seen by his oncologist who told him that he did not have much time left. I started to understand what was happening and had a nurse hold my hand while I cried in the hallway. I was scared for the unknown for him and my family. “What would the world be like without my grandfather in it?”, “Who would be there to take care of my grandmother?” a million questions darted through my head but I felt the uncontrollable need to always be strong in his presence.

In December of 1996, several months after having surgery, I went to give my dad his Christmas gifts. He had not been answering his phone for some time. Although I had become accustomed to this for some years before my surgery, this time was odd. Previously, my father was involved with someone who had a visible addiction. There were years where I rarely spoke with him for long periods. But this time I wondered why he suddenly became silent again. So I went in person and noticed he answered the door but did not invite me in. He barely cracked the door which was quite unusual. I never experienced this before because I had a key and could have gone inside but decided instead to ring the doorbell. I noticed he was coughing and appeared quite ill and frail.

One day my father came from farming and he looked exhausted. He just went to his bedroom. The next morning, he felt sick. We took him to the closest hospital after the doctors did the required examination, they found out he had high blood pressure and could be a victim of a heart attack if he did not take the necessary medication. We came back home with the prescription and medicine. My dad took those pills only for three days, after two weeks he was sick again, but this time he couldn't breathe normally and wouldn’t move his bodies, we rushed him to the hospital and in the emergency room he stopped