Quiet Confessions, Episode 42: Psychiatric Hospitalization Part 5

This week we're continuing my journey through inpatient care, picking up right where we left off—the three or four days immediately following Thanksgiving at UNC Chapel Hill. 

In this episode, I’m sharing the raw, unedited reality of what "the haze" actually felt like.

If you’ve ever felt like you were "gone" inside yourself, I hope my story helps you realize that the path back is slow, but it is there. I see you, and I’m doing this right alongside you.

Key Takeaways

• The Monotony of the Ward: Understanding the repetitive, clinical nature of inpatient life and how it impacts the "sense of self."
• Navigating Medication Side Effects: A look at the physical toll of anti-psychotics, including night sweats and facial twitches.
• The Privacy "Towel Shimmy": The small ways patients reclaim agency in an environment of 24/7 surveillance.
• Deconstructing Parental Guilt: Moving past the feeling of "failing" your children when you are in a medical crisis. 

This episode discusses topics that may be triggering for some individuals. Please check the show notes for more information and be mindful of your own mental health and comfort levels.

Visit our Patreon to help support our mission to normalize the conversation and end the stigma surrounding PMADs!

Transcript

Chelsea Myers (00:01)
Hey, welcome back to another Quiet Confessions. Little mini episodes every Thursday where you and I get to spend some time together. And for the past couple of weeks, we've been doing a series specifically on my experiences with inpatient psychiatric hospitalization following the birth of my second child, my youngest child. ⁓

and what that looks like for me and what it can look like for others. And I say this every episode, my experience was my own. And even though I attended three different facilities and over the course of several months, every experience was different. Things shifted during my time in each facility. And ⁓ while I hope that

Anyone that needs the feeling of solidarity and validation can find that in these episodes. also just want to be so clear that these are my experiences and it doesn't mean that this is what everyone experiences in an inpatient setting. ⁓ with that little disclaimer that I felt was important. I.

I can't talk. I'm straight out the gate gonna admit that I'm feeling kind of aimless today. I went over my journal entries for the three or four following days after Thanksgiving, because that's where I left you last. And...

I think I kept going because I was looking for something deeper and this really is where my journal entries start to become even more clinical and less... just... they're very... there's an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and it very much reads like a captain's log.

I've mentioned that before, but like this is what I ate. These are the doctors that I saw. This is how I slept. So I'm gonna kind of wing it today and we'll sort of be following the timeline, but I'm gonna just kind of go with my gut and see what comes out. So again, I left you.

⁓ on Thanksgiving in a psych ward in a state that was very very far from my home state. I was in North Carolina and my whole family was here in Vermont and I was trying my hardest to make it as

I don't know, as normal as possible because I was still experiencing this deep, deep sensation of detachment from myself, from my family, from my life. So yeah, that was Thanksgiving. And beyond that, the next few days really, according to my journal, were pretty repetitive and the journal entries were very short.

I reported not sleeping well, which was kind of becoming the norm. I'm trying to decide. I'm going down rabbit holes.

One of the reasons that I wasn't sleeping well was, I mean, the anxiety itself would wake me up. But one of the medications that I was on, which was an anti-psychotic, had a lot of side effects. And one of those was night sweats. And that would wake me up. I would wake up soaked in sweat, ⁓ like every night. That was also the same medication that would cause facial twitches, which can be common in anti-psychotic.

I didn't know any of these things. So I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. And sleeping in a psych ward in general. mean, unless sleep comes very, very easily to you...

I'm making an assumption based on my experience, it's not a very restful place. say that knowing that the program that I was at, UNC Chapel Hill perinatal psychiatric inpatient, again, they were under construction. So we were not in the unit that we were supposed to be in. When you look it up now, and even when I looked it up then,

to a very different environment. There's supposed to be protected sleep hours, especially for brand new moms, very quiet environment, much more homey, much more nurturing.

and that wasn't really the experience that I had. And that's not to say that it was chaos because it absolutely was not chaos. See my first hospitalization if you want to talk chaos. It wasn't chaos, but it was not homey. was not... I didn't...

It could have been the state of my mental health. It could have been several factors, but it didn't feel like a place where I could put my head down at the end of the day and let go of things and fall asleep. And in terms of the protected sleep hours, like I don't know what it looks like today. And I don't know what it looked like prior to them being under construction. But like I said, like we...

Let me know if you've ever been hospitalized in a situation like this. Let me know if you have a similar experience because I learned this from other patients who had.

had previous stays, but we would take our washcloths, like for washing your face, and we would kind of roll them up and shove them under the door so that it would close most of the way, but not all the way, so that we didn't hear when the nurses, or we tried not to hear when the nurses would come do their 15 minute checks.

because they do all day, 24 hours a day. You have someone looking at you every 15 minutes for safety checks. So.

I didn't know this trick before and so I never fully shut my door because I knew that it was gonna get opened over and over again, but I shut it enough and sometimes it would shut on its own, but you could still hear the click and you could still... Yeah, it just was jarring every time. one of the other patients told me, roll up your washcloth and just shimmy it under the door and then it'll stay open just enough that they can peek in on you and they don't have to open the door.

I was like, sweet. at this point I had learned that and yeah, but it's still, it's still, it's still a lot.

The light from the halls dims at a certain time, but never goes out all the way. Your bedroom lights go out. Obviously you have control over those. At least I did in each of these settings. so where we slept, we could turn the lights off, but the hall lights were always on to a certain degree. So sleep just wasn't a thing that was really happening for me. ⁓

I noted on these three or four days varying degrees of being able to eat. Most of the days I was sticking to the Insure. ⁓ Another one of the perinatal patients who I had really bonded with was like, you should put it over ice. It tastes more like a milkshake. ⁓

Again, just learning these little things. So I tried that. And I don't know, I like it both ways. I can't drink it now. ⁓

at all. It's very triggering. I tried, I was sick with like a really bad respiratory virus. I feel like like all the time, which time? I don't know how, but recently and I really didn't have an appetite and my throat hurt and I took one of my kids ⁓ protein drinks.

because it's like packed with vitamins and stuff and it's plant-based and I was like I'll just drink this I couldn't even open it so that that was a no-go but anyway learned the towel shimmying trick and putting inshore over ice I did on one of those nights

actually eat dinner and that's the only like little form of glimmer you can see in me in the journal because there's an exclamation point in the sentence that says I actually have an appetite I'm excited for dinner I think I ordered a hot dog so I was still eating meat then but I and I do remember the hot dogs at this hospital were massive so whether I was able to

finish the whole thing or not, have no idea. But I ate dinner that night and I was excited about it. But honestly, the recurring theme in every journal entry from those four days following Thanksgiving was I have no hope. I repeated several times. I don't see myself getting better. I didn't want to burden my family. I thought that I would forever just be

this shell of myself who was sick and unable to care for myself or my kids. So I wasn't, I was more of a detriment to my family than I was anything else. And that's kind of where the suicidal ideation stemmed from. And I had had that prior to being hospitalized. That's why we took the steps for me to be hospitalized, but it shifted from, I can't live like this. I'm so sick to, well, if this is the rest of my

life it's not worth living. I again still did not have a plan. We had to do a thing that was so I don't I won't say that it was

common in all three of my hospitalizations because I don't believe I did it in my third one, but in my first two. So in Southern Vermont and then again at UNC, we would have to do these rating scales every day and set goals. And in Vermont, they were written out. We all had to write them out and then we would revisit them at the end of the day. And at UNC, it was verbal. would do it when we went to take our morning meds. We would check in with our nurse and she would say she would

ask us a series of questions and it's so nonchalant when you're in these environments it's like do you have any thoughts of harming yourself today? Do you have any thoughts of harming others today? ⁓

I don't even remember if it was like, you had to rate your level of anxiety, things like that. And then what's your goal for today? I totally blew off the goal thing. Every single day was the same thing. I said my goal is to take a shower and FaceTime with my family. And that was because I knew...

I didn't have any other goals because I couldn't see a future. So the furthest ahead I could see was my morning shower and my afternoon FaceTime. So those are my goals literally every day. ⁓ But in talking to the nurse, do you have any thoughts of harming yourself? No. Do you have any thoughts of harming others? No. I didn't have a plan to hurt myself and that didn't come.

until after I was discharged for the very last time for my last hospitalization. So we will get there and there will be content warnings. But at this point, it was much more a feeling of I just want to not exist anymore. I want to go to sleep and not wake up. And that I don't even know if I fully grasped.

the weight of that. I wasn't really thinking about the impact that those thoughts would have on a grander scale. I know that the only thing that kept me

focused on doing absolutely everything I could to feel better was that I did not want to be a statistic and I did not want my kids to be a statistic. I didn't want to fail my kids. My

Girls, I had a very complicated relationship with becoming a mother the first time especially. I did not embrace that role. I did not bond easily. Postpartum anxiety and depression took a lot from me after having my first.

I kind of was able to come back from that, but I never really felt like a mom. And I said for years, because there's a big age gap between my kids, there's a seven year age gap, I always said, I don't like being a mom, but I love being my kid's mom. And I think that's still true today.

But the title and the responsibility of mom became my anchor to staying alive.

I did note in the journal that over the course of one of these four days that I am condensing for you that I spent the majority of the day in my room looking at pictures of my kids crying and apologizing to them. And I was apologizing for not...

being physically present, was apologizing for the feelings and the thoughts that I was having. I was apologizing for essentially what I considered a failure. That I was a failure and that I was sorry that I was failing them, but I was doing everything that I could so that I could come back to them. And I was just talking to these pictures. And that...

that really does encompass a lot of.

what I felt during that time. There wasn't a lot of hope for me, but I felt so much shame about what I was doing to my kids or what I thought I was doing to my kids when in all reality, they were okay. They were cared for very well. Like they were very well cared for. My husband was very burnt out, but we have a village and we had a village and...

My infant was obviously unaware of the fact that I was missing. ⁓ And my seven year old just was, I mean, she was okay. We talk about it a little bit now and she said she missed me, but she knew that every time I was in the hospital that it was because I needed to get better and that they were going to help me. That's what we hoped. So I carried a lot of

guilt. A lot of things that came up in therapies and in like occupational therapy and in psychotherapy and even with a psychiatrist because I couldn't keep it together then either was just this repetitive notion of failing as a mother and that I can't be a mom in the state that I'm in.

as well as constant reassurance seeking of, this going to go away? Am I going to get better? Like literally those words over and over and over again.

During this time the Zilresso infusion was brought up to me which was something that my OCD brain already knew about because of course I had been on Dr. Google for weeks prior to this, prior to being hospitalized the first time, looking for anything that would help me. So I thought I knew all about it and when they brought it up they said they weren't sure if I would be a good candidate because it's more for

postpartum

depression and anxiety and at that point like if you remember they had a lot of things on the table in terms of diagnoses for me so like psychosis was was a question but it was more OCD PTSD anxiety all the letters

So they weren't sure, but they were willing to give it a try. But we didn't have a date set or anything. And my insu- they were kind of going back and forth with my insurance. And that was the point that they let me know that I would likely be there for another two to three weeks. I can't tell you how I felt about that when I received the news because I don't remember. And it's not in my journal. I just wrote it down as it was told to me.

looking back on it now, I assume I don't know. Because UNC was the safest I felt being hospitalized, I don't think I was worried.

I don't think I was like, no, no, no, no. Like I was at my first hospitalization. Like I have to get out of here. It was more like, okay, that's longer than I anticipated, but okay. I'm going to do whatever I have to do. And that'll come back later too. Before being hospitalized the third time, I begged, I begged the doctors and my family to send me back to North Carolina. And

they didn't and things unfolded the way that they did and I don't know that it would have been helpful anyway. think there was just this sense of like, these are the perinatal people and they are the ones to help me. ⁓ But regardless, those days were filled with just monotonous repetition.

I did note that I taught one of the patients, or a couple of the patients, to play Yahtzee. I love Yahtzee. I've been playing Yahtzee since I was a kid. But again, I just wrote it down like, I taught so and so and so and so how to play Yahtzee. And then I moved on to the next sentence. So I know who I was talking about, but I don't remember their names. And even if I did, I would not share them. But I don't remember their

I remember their faces. I remember how attached I felt to them. But in that moment, it was just a footnote, which makes me really sad. Because I was sharing something with them that had been like, I don't know, part of my childhood. I used to play Yahtzee with my mom and my sister. I loved it. And they'd never played it before, which blew my mind.

Is that like a regional thing? Like do people in other states not play Yahtzee or is that just random? I don't know. You let me know. But yeah, again, I told you I feel kind of aimless right now. Last week.

By the end of the recording, it was really difficult for me to regain my footing. And so I'm being really mindful with these episodes of going as deep as I am able to without crashing my system. I have talked to Ben and he is going to go through his own timeline and give you his perspective. Coordinating that is a little difficult. It's hard enough for me to be able to find time to record by myself.

but it will happen. And I'm actually really eager for you guys to hear that because I think there are still pieces of it that I don't even really know. We've talked about it in depth, but I don't know that I'll ever fully understand his perspective and what it was like for him because I was so lost in myself during that time. So yeah, that was.

me condensing four days into one and next time I chat with you I mean it's probably going to be a little bit of the same and maybe I'll get into some more finer details of just the clinical side of living in a psych ward. I try to infuse a little bit of that in between but yeah my journal entries start to get

short and bleak and they don't offer me as much as I had hoped that they would when I originally found the journal. I really hoped that it would give me more insight. But I guess it's given me insight into the fact that I actually I did say this I'm gone. I said I'm gone.

in every way. just how gone I was, I guess, because I can't find myself in there. But that said, I am going to continue the series. I'm here for it. I really hope that this will continue to be something that

I can't say it's cathartic for me and I can't say that it's healing because it isn't really.

My hope for this series is that sharing my experience will help someone else either feel seen and validated or help demystify the process of being hospitalized for mental health conditions. Because I know that it's scary and I know that as a parent, especially the unknowns are terrifying and it is based on your situation and it is

based on privilege, what your experience will look like. It is. But at the end of the day, will still always recommend first, reaching out to 9-8-8 or the maternal mental health hotline. And second, if hospitalization is recommended, as much as my situations are something that I don't ever want to relive, they were needed at the time to keep me safe.

I think a lot of things could have gone a lot differently, but I don't think that should stop anyone else from getting help getting safe, especially if you suspect postpartum psychosis that is a medical emergency and it does require hospitalization and Recovery with any of these perinatal and postpartum conditions Recovery is possible. It's more than possible. You can do it I'm doing it just because it's an ongoing process doesn't mean another

it's

not possible. So, okay, that said, I need to eat some lunch and take care of me. You need to refill your water bottle and do something kind for you. And who knows who you'll hear from next week? It could be me. It could be my husband, Ben. I don't know. We'll see. But thanks for sticking around and I will catch you on the next one.