“Can you come over here for a minute? I saw that guy do something kind of weird, and I wanted to tell someone about it.” He was trying to be secretive as he motioned over to the Hispanic man who was dressed as a Nazi. We had taken the swastika armband away from him, but he was still wearing a brown military uniform.
“Oh, yeah. He has been stirring the pot a bit. What’s up?” I had taken several complaints about him already.
“It’s kind of private. Can we step down the hall and talk for a minute?”
This patient had been looking better this morning than he had looked in the last few days. To be honest, he had been a mess up until now. The psychiatrist told us that he was an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania. As he put it, “Amish people become schizophrenic too.” He had apparently had a psychotic episode and left the farm to go on a bender. He stole a truck and made it all the way to Texas where he showed up to the Dallas Morning News building wearing nothing but a t-shirt that was draped over his head, making him look like a pharaoh. A completely naked pharaoh. He announced very loudly to the newspaper staff that he was King David and that he was going to win the lotto tonight. The cops had dropped him off at our doorstep, not sure what to do with him.
I had been working as an orderly at the Dallas Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit for only a few months at that point. The year was 1993 and I had not even thought about EMT school yet. However, it doesn’t take long to become paranoid working in such a place. “Take-downs” with patients were a common occurrence. Physical restraint happened almost daily, The old school nurses walked around with “10 and 2 cocktail” syringes filled with 10mg of haldol and 2 mg of ativan pre-filled and ready to go.
“Sure, why not? We can go down the hall and talk a bit,” I said as I motioned down an empty hallway on the side of the unit. King David as he was known after his incident was a towering figure. Corn-fed was the term most commonly used for mid-western farmers that looked like him. He had been on his meds for about three days now and was starting to come out of his fog. That was the normal progression of things. Psych patients would stop taking their meds for some reason, do something spectacular out in public, and then were brought to us to be placed back on their medication until they were stabilized. It usually took two or three days for the patient to come down and ask, “Hey, where am I?” King David had given us some trouble, and it was nice to see him start to act appropriately. The Mexican patient who thought he was a Nazi was getting on everyone’s nerves and I was wanting to hear the story that King David had about him.
“That guy…” he said trailing off as if he was trying to find the right words to express how disgusted he was, “…you are not going to believe what he said to that girl over there. I really don’t want to repeat it. It’s not something that I care to think about.”
“Well, thanks for telling me. You don’t have to go in to great detail. Just give me the gist of what happened and we will follow up. What it sexually inappropriate?” I asked.
“Yes. I can tell you what he said, but I am a bit embarrassed. Lean a bit closer and I will tell you.”
I leaned closer, and suddenly my head had snapped back and I was staring at a stained acoustic tile set into the ceiling. I remember being confused at why I had looked up so sharply. I could feel the warmth of the blood that had started flow down the back of my throat. The position of my head was such that it flowed unobstructed. Despite this, all I could think about for two or three seconds was how dirty the ceiling seemed to be. Was there a leak? Was there mold growing up there? My senses came back to me and I lowered my gaze. As my eyes began to focus I could see the outline of the giant King David running down the hallway towards the back of the unit.
I looked around indignant, but unable to speak. I thought to myself, “Boy are you going to get it! I better compose myself quick so that the army of nurses and aids who are no doubt going to be rushing down this corridor will have room to pass.” I whirled around and was shocked to find about a dozen people milling around in the dayroom chatting. It was shift change on the unit and everyone was greeting each other and giving report. No one had seen what happened. No one was even looking in my direction.
I tried to speak but couldn’t form any words. I was still confused about what had just happened and had not found my voice yet. It had left with my senses just a few seconds before, and neither had returned quite yet. I stumbled around to see King David had made it all the way to the end of the hall and was currently swiping a key card through a slot bolted directly next to the door that opened into the rear stairwell. I thought to myself, “Hey, he doesn’t have a key card.” I looked down and noticed that mine was missing from its clip on my belt loop. I saw a few drops of blood drip on the floor and splatter onto my tennis shoe. I started to put two and two together and decided to act.
My ability to run came back before anything else. Running in the opposite direction of the angry King David would have been the most logical thing to do. But I was still not thinking clearly. My ability to move and my sense of pride had come back to me first, beating anything logical by a long shot. I started to run towards King David who was now becoming frustrated because the key card was not working. “He must be excited and swiping it too fast, “ I thought to myself as I closed the gap between me and my attacker.
My courage started to swell as I neared the stairwell. “What if he gets out onto the street?” I thought, “I have to stop him! He’s violent!” By the time I reached him I had no plan at all. Nothing. He was at least six foot, two inches tall and I was lucky to be five foot, seven if I was in mid-jump. I went for my key card first but he merely brought is elbow back into my forehead and gave it another swipe. This didn’t faze me near as much as the shot to the nose, and I repositioned myself behind him. In what will probably go down as one of the dumbest moves in my adult life, I simply decided to jump on his back. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t heroic. It was just plain stupid tenacity. And I was about to pay for it.
I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do now that he was giving me a piggy back ride. But as I saw him swipe the card a few more times, it became apparent that I should try to keep him from entering the stairwell. The brief inkling of a plan invigorated me. I had a goal. I had a purpose. I was to keep him from entering the stairway at all costs. The fate of humanity itself depended on this one single task. Defend the stairwell!
From my position atop his back I placed my foot on the wall near the card reader and pushed us both off into the middle of the hall. This was the first successful move I had made against King David and it only strengthened his resolve. He recovered quickly and ran towards the stairwell door again. I had a second to glance down the hall and was dismayed to see that still no one had seen us. Everyone was milling around and talking like nothing was happening. As we reached the doorway I again placed my foot against the wall and kicked, propelling us backwards into the center of the hall. This last kick was more forceful and pushed him off balance a bit. He quickly threw out his left foot to steady himself. There he stayed for a few seconds, regaining his balance. As he was squatting in the middle of the hall, obviously pausing to think of a plan, I could do nothing but dangle. I didn’t want to drop to the floor because I was afraid he would turn around and give me his undivided attention. For some reason, something logical like yelling for help never crossed my mind. I just hung there like an idiot with my legs dangling off a corn-fed mountain.
That’s when he came up with the plan to run at a door jam at full speed and scrape me off his back. The pain was excruciating. The noise was loud enough to gain the attention from the shift change staff though, and I finally got some help. But not until my head was smashed twice into the door jam of the seclusion room.
After that, things are a bit hazy. Before long I found myself sitting in the hallway against the wall, talking to one of the nurses while she looked at my face. King David had been tackled by about a dozen staff members and placed in the seclusion room. A security guard walked up and handed my key card back to me.
“Well, at least I didn’t let him get into the stairwell,” I said hopefully, trying to get some sort of recognition for my efforts.
“You should have just let him go. I was watching the whole thing from the camera above us. If he had gotten in the stairwell I would have just locked the doors and he would have been trapped in there. You dumb-ass.”
King David did lash out a few more times at staff. But in the end, the meds started working. His family finally made it to Dallas to visit with him. I was the tech that supervised the visitation, and it was one of the most uncomfortable things I have ever done. His wife came dressed in the stereotypical Amish garb. She was wearing a bonnet and her dress had hooks and eyes. The boys came too, dressed in black pants and jackets with linen shirts. I am not sure what I expected, but I didn’t think it would look so much like a scene from “Witness.” I had finally made some headway in gaining the trust of King David, but I was disappointed in his interaction with his family. He seemed abrupt and impatient, even with his children. His wife did not like making eye contact with me, but she did ask me what had happened to my face. I shot King David a quick glance and just said, “This is a dangerous place to work sometimes ma’am.”
It wasn’t a lie. However, I was young and foolish and sometimes made it more dangerous than it had to be. Such as getting a piggy back ride from a corn-fed Amish schizophrenic. But in the end I learned from my mistake. The next time a psychotic Amish patient tries to tell me about the sexual inappropriateness of a Neo-Nazi, I will try to take the report out in the open and protect my key card.
You are thinking like a bureaucrat – never repeat exactly the same mistake. Any other mistake is allowable – even expected.
Now you have me wondering what a sexually appropriate comment from a Hispanic Neo-Nazi in a psychiatric facility would be.