Get Me Out of Here Read Online Free PDF Page A

I'd anticipated. Indeed, he'd been relieved. Perhaps tonight he'd sleep well. He needed it; he looked like hell. A number of other patients were socializing in the smoking lounge. Most wore blue jeans and sweatshirts. A group of them sat on the sofas, bantering, laughing, and acting as if this were some sort of party. No one wore the dowdy, overlaundered hospital robes or paper slippers I'd expected. I stayed in a corner, alone. These people were mental patients. I wondered how these laughing women, who appeared more like carefree coeds, had ended up in this place.
    Of course, I was also a mental patient, although I'd had no idea that a trip to the emergency room would lead to this. I wasn't sure I belonged here. I mean, I'd been upset and all, but this— this was extreme. As bursts of laughter echoed through the lounge, I couldn't help but feel they were laughing at me, speculating on what had brought me here.
    Panic hit me. I didn't want to be here. I didn't ask to be here. I didn't need to be here. I would leave first thing in the morning.
    At ten o'clock I heard the squeaking wheels of a cart as it was pulled into the lounge. A nurse, the “Good Humor man,” was dispensing a kaleidoscope of medications. The laughing “coeds” gravitated to the cart, almost greedy for their pills. It was straight out of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest . Mind control. It frightened me.
    At first I refused the tiny, white anti-anxiety pill and the black, round sleeping pill he tried to give me. I needed my wits about me in this place where I didn't belong. Ultimately, I relented. It wasn't like I was a novice at drugs. How could a few pills hurt? I'd be leaving in the morning anyway.
    At midnight a new shift came on duty, and a heavyset nurse with a jet-black pageboy haircut, excessive makeup, and an attitude of authority came into the lounge, grabbed the TV remote, shut it off, and announced that it was bedtime. Bedtime? What gave her the right to tell me when I can or can't watch TV or go to bed?
    I made a few snippy remarks that she obviously didn't appreciate—a fact that placated me. But the pills I had taken dulled my ability to stand up for myself. I reminded myself that I was going to bed because I wanted to, not because some drill sergeant in white had ordered me to do so.

    My stark room had two single beds, institutional carpet, a built-in desk with a Formica top, and nearly empty walls. The place lacked the antiseptic tile floors of a typical hospital wing, but it wasn't quite like a dorm room. And it wasn't like a hospital either.
    What was this place? Why was I here? Panic filled me, despite the numbing effects of the pills. They were beginning to wear off anyway. I was wide awake. Alone. It was two o'clock in the morning. I was convinced that I couldn't stay in this place, with the drug cart and the nurses who ordered patients around as if they were children. No, I couldn't stay another minute.
    Tim, in his haste and worry, had forgotten to bring me clothes. So I had been forced to wear one of the hospital-issue gowns I so hated. The drill sergeant got some sort of strange satisfaction out of that. She wanted me to look like a mental patient. She wanted me to go crazy. Forget it. Cheap gown or not, I was getting out of this place. Right now.
    As I crept down the hallway, I saw her sitting there at the nurse's station, reading Vogue and sipping coffee. Sitting on her fat ass. No wonder she was so insistent that I go to bed: she was lazy.
    It was laughably simple to get past her, her eyes riveted to the magazine. Quietly I tiptoed toward the double entry doors to the ward and slowly, silently opened them. The fresh, cooler air of the hallway and the cold tile floor were proof that I had successfully escaped. When I left the building and inhaled the brisk outdoor air, reality set in.
    Where the hell did I intend to go?
    I didn't have a car. I hadn't brought my purse. Tim had gone home and was probably getting the good