DAY 34 - 10th September, Tuesday
Keri has spent all day still being checked every 10 minutes. Her numbness wore off by the time she woke up this morning so she stayed huddled in a cocoon until about 11am. She then decided that that was that and she wasn't going to bother cooperating any more. She refused her morning medication, refused to communicate with staff and ignored the physiotherapist when she came knocking at the door. This continued until early afternoon.
At about 1.30pm a nurse came out and told Keri she had her medication. Keri was at the reception desk waiting to ask to go out.
"Keri, I've got your medication here," she said.
"I don't want the fucking pills! I just want to go out!" Keri replied.
"We can't do that, Keri," the nurse said. "Let's go and have a chat."
Keri and two other staff went into one of the interview rooms to have their chat. Keri was still refusing to take the medication and was insistent that there was no point in doing anything the staff asked her anymore, she just kept asking to go out.
"Keri, if you were in our position, would you let one of us out?" asked one of the nurses.
"But I've got escorted leave, I just want to get out," Keri said.
"You have to tell us where you want to go and for how long," the same nurse asked.
"Tesco," Keri said, the supermarket was only across the road from the hospital.
"Well we're taking away your leave for now," they said. "The risk of you running away from the staff is too high. I'd be devastated and very worried about you if I was in that position. The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour and you've put yourself in high risk situations before, sometimes ending up getting quite badly hurt. We're not letting you off the ward at the moment, even with the staff."
There was a lot of conversation about how Keri was feeling. She's absolutely gutted (we all are besides Sally, and jimmy wants his mum and dad back!) about the housing situation and feels there's nothing left to lose. They know how terrible she's feeling through her body language and tone of voice, there's no hiding it. After about an hour they had managed to persuade her to take her medication, which also had additional Lorazepam. Their solution to try and control the situation is to check Keri every 10 minutes and to dose her up on medication. Today she maxed out the amount of PRN Lorazepam she's been prescribed! That's a clear indicator that her medication needs to be reviewed which one of the nurses is going to try and arrange tomorrow as it didn't get discussed during her ward round.
Her ward round didn't take long. It was mainly Keri's care coordinator talking about rehabilitation clinics and getting onto the emergency funding list. Again, there was no discussion of a discharge plan, which means Keri won't be discharged in the near future. She's still got strong intent to drill a hole in her head to get the bug out, except now she's taking it a step further and thinking she may as well jump off the suspension bridge. What's she got left to lose? She doesn't understand that her foster carers love her to pieces even though she doesn't live with them anymore.
Just to end his post, a little depressing but a key point I think. Keri's been going through the Twilight saga. When she got to the point where Bella and Edward were getting married and Charlie was walking Bella down the aisle, Keri sat there and cried, thinking she'll never get that chance and whether her foster dad would be the one to give her away! So somewhere deep down, she knows her foster parents care about her. The feeling is completely mutual. Keri cares about them as if they were her own flesh and blood. She's also conflicted about her own mother. She's been thinking about moving in with her instead of people playing about with ideas of where she could be put. Where this idea came from I have no idea and I have no idea how that would work, especially with Keri's mixed up feelings about her mum. I think she'd be better in a rehabilitation ward initially. She's not in a position to have the capability to make important choices at the moment. She's still viewed as not having the mental capacity to think and make decisions for herself, hence the fact she's on a section 3!
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