Back in 2009, a close friend was in a terrible motorcycle accident, which meant he hadn’t turned up for a dinner meeting with me and our mutual friend that night. The two of us who were enjoying the sushi dinner in Laguna Beach figured he’d fallen asleep, or must have just blown us off, but we tried not to worry. It wasn’t totally out of character for our motorcycle friend to flake.

The next morning as I was boarding my flight home, I got a text from motorcycle boy in response to my (multiple) unanswered texts the night before.

“I’m in the ICU at UCI”

My friend’s text to me, roughly 16 hours after a brutal motorcycle accident

I was confused by the acronyms, and panicked, because the “put your cell phone in airplane mode” message was being broadcast. I was buckled in my seat and ready for takeoff, but I would have fought my way off the plane if I thought it would do any good. Instead, I quickly called our sushi eating mutual friend from the night before, (he was local) so he could go see what was happening for real. He convinced me to stay on the flight, and confirmed that yes, the text likely meant: Intensive Care Unit at University of California, Irvine…it made terrible sense and he would check it out immediately.

By the time I landed, 90 minutes later at SFO, I had the news: a bunch of busted ribs, a collarbone that was shattered, surgeries necessary to repair his punctured lung. He’d be there for a while, but he was lucid and able to accept visitors. He was lucky to be alive.

Of course I booked another trip down south to spend some time with him while he was in the hospital, where he spent weeks. They wouldn’t let him leave until he could pass gas, and we laughed about that a lot. Overall, while I am no hospital inspector, I’d say he got great care. UCI is a teaching hospital, and maybe some students got to practice their bedside manner on him, as he made lots of nurse friends.

Did you fart yet?

My daily question during my time visiting the hospital

Later, in 2016, I was hospitalized for a psychiatric emergency, and I was self-presenting to a teaching hospital. I didn’t know it at the time, and, I didn’t really think I was ill. But I had many reasons for wanting to see a doctor, I just didn’t know that the kind of doctor I needed to see wouldn’t be present at this kind of hospital.

Once I signed that paper, though, to self-admit, I was seen by many, many different doctors, and interviewed, and drugged, I was ultimately advised that I should stay. For some time. An unspecified amount of time. Thankfully I had the help of my most trusted friend, and a parent to help convince me that this would be beneficial. And so I did follow their advice.

But ever since then, I’ve sometimes felt that I was duped. Part of me knows I wasn’t ill, and part of me knows I was, but for self-inflicted reasons. (Check the U-tox, doc!) Much of me feels like the emotional truth of that psychiatric emergency was more about the teaching hospital keeping me there longer than necessary, just to expose their students to a real. live. crazy person.

I know I did have deluded thinking about a lot of what was happening to me in the tech world; there is overlap here that needs to be better explored. (But that’s for another post.) My point with this post is when am I going to get over it? It happened, I did it to myself, and I’ve moved on (mostly.) It does serve as a time in my life of a “before” and a very distinctive “after.”

Doctors have to learn somewhere, right? I came out of there with a misdiagnosis of Bipolar, but my shrink agrees that it should have been psychosis NOS; and I suppose I agree, but in layman’s terms: I was tripping. (I just never mentioned that to any of the doctors.) I doubt they learned much from me, but, me? I learned a lot. Stuff I didn’t even know that I wanted to learn.

I guess my point with the comparison of the psychiatric teaching hospital and the general hospital in Irvine has to do with the physical signs. The waiting for a fart. In psychological work, it’s not as clearly evident. You have to sniff it out, and it smells different to everyone.

Many thanks for the photo by Natanael Melchor on Unsplash