It was like going through an earthquake all fucking day. I walked into the dungeon with locked doors every few feet and that hospital smell that seeps into your fingers and nests in your fingernails and no matter how much you try, you can’t shake the thought that you are going to have to get used to that smell. That greasy, sick, been-in-bed-way-too-long-with-no-soap stench that made my empty stomach find itself vomit to suppress the look of white fear on my shock-waved face.

I have to tell you I didn’t expect to be so close to crazy, and I mean crazy unlike any crazy I’ve ever slipped as a normal word that people use without any consideration to the real meaning until it’s walking down a hall with slice marks on its neck while you kneel down to speak to a patient that tried to kill her mother and needs to hear her options for her next move out of the hospital. It’s something like that.

I think my white face turned to shaking hands when I walked by a woman in a room in solitary confinement standing watching a wall, then moments later I heard a bang and a raucous explosion as she tore off her clothes and smeared her shit on the walls.

I started to pray to my grandfather’s spirit. He used to work in a hospital delivering babies and my mom said she never saw him because he worked so hard. I figured a hospital smell must have felt like home to him, so I called out to him for the ability to smell the tiles and walk by bodies with uniforms and an elevator that overruns itself then stops with a drop, so much that anyone on the brink of it may just barf right about now. And I felt the yearning to feel something calming enough to walk forward and swallow fresh without a cold palm or deep bowel eruption. Calling on a dead one that you never knew to love, but do regardless, does the job. He was something there for me to focus on and it made me breathe, which was the hardest out of all the hard things to do that first day. Breathing was Mount Sinai.

The day started out peacefully. I sat in a meeting with a table of doctors, interns, psychiatrists and social workers. We went through all fourteen clients and spoke about their current mental status. The attendant sat at the head of the squad when the alarm went off like a fire bell.

“Erica, did you lean on the alarm?” He smiled and I sat up real straight without realizing he was kidding. Turns out it wasn’t me. There was an episode in the hallway that required the alarm for assistance. It was called a Code Green. A Code Green was called if a patient had an outburst that required a team of people to come as fast as possible to assist in wrestling the patient to the ground, injecting him with tranquilizing meds, then tying him or her down in restraints on all four corners of the bed. Sometimes I would hear it in the lobby waiting for the elevator to take me to the 8th floor.

“Code Green, 9th Floor. Code Green, 9th Floor.” It was announced by a recording of a calm woman with an easygoing inflection in her voice. It was used for severe situations on the ward. It was my first day and the code was called. That bell must have been used two weeks ago when a nurse was pulled into a room by a 300-pound patient and thrown on the floor to be raped, and barely escaped thanks to that alarm. She’s now at home resting for a few weeks because she’s dealing with shock. That’s another type of earthquake.

Sometimes you’re hardcore, you’re outside of yourself, your brain, and your living known experience and then something happens. You are driving down the fast lane on the freeway and a belt of manic hyper voice releases from your lips and you grab the wheel and drive hard in your crazy moment that is, or was, “total control,” to oh whoa, I’m on the side of the peel that is biting and ugly and time runs wild and you’re somewhere else but still somewhere so it’s not a problem.

Is that mania?

Is that mania?

Is that what constitutes mania?