In the morning, November 30, 2016, I was transferred to a crisis unit in another part of Boston. I've been there before.
I was not verbally mistreated, but I've been victimized by voyeurism in so many places in the Boston area, including psychiatric units, that I turned the light off when I had to use the toilet, to change my clothes and to take a shower. I also wore a hospital nightgown into the shower, since I couldn't block all light from getting into the bathroom and because the light had a motion detector and went on when I moved the shower curtain.
There are also no drains in the floors of the bathrooms. The showers are built with flat sides, so that patients don't fall over them getting into or out of them, but because there are no drains in the floors, an inch of water gets all over the floors when someone takes a shower. Patients or staff have to mop the floors in the bathrooms with towels or blankets to be able to walk in the bathrooms after someone has taken a shower.
At least the showers have hot water, which they didn't the first few times that I was at that unit, when I was homeless. This past week was the first time that I've been hospitalized or in a crisis unit in about a year. Whenever I was there before last week, the showers were "at regulation" temperature, according to what I heard a maintenance worker tell a staffperson. I guess it took a few years, hundreds of complaints by patients, and advocacy from the staff to get the water heated; it's so much less expensive not to heat shower water in the winter, and everyone knows that mental patients don't have anything to say that anyone needs to listen to.
Copyright L. Kochman, December 4, 2016 @ 7:37 p.m./additions to the title December 5, 2016 @ 2:30 a.m.
