And The Jumper

Ok, as well as the addict, the other fascinating character was the one in bed opposite.  She must have been mid to late 20's, was married and had her mother who came in to see her often.  Basically, when I was brought in and coming around from the general anaesthetic and the morphine highs, I kept smiling at her.  All she did was scowl back.

Anyway, it turns out that she'd tried to end it all by jumping out of the window at her mums flat.  She survived with a broken leg and the left side of her face was drooping a bit but on the whole she was alive and relatively unscathed.

Anyway, for the first few days she had lots of docs and psych people visiting her and drawing curtains around her.  I have very good hearing and an uncanny knack of turning in and out of conversations so I managed to piece together her story from those conversations.  In the main she just wanted to be discharged back into her mums care but her mum did not want that to happen. She called her mum a witch and blamed her for everything - in many ways it was like viewing crazy teenage tantrums which were far worse as they had had such a dramatic and almost devastating ending.  

Her hubby didn't seem like the brightest kid on the block but he seemed to try and do all he could to make her happy.  Her mum by no means seemed perfect but she did care so that was something.
During the night the jumper was bloody annoying as she was like a whining child moaning and asking for painkillers.  In our part of the ward, her general moaning was stopping everyone from sleeping.  There was one night when the others turned on her and told her to shut the hell up.  It was about time really as she in many ways was there due her own devices and the rest of us were there for ops etc.  You could tell she wasn't used to being told off in that manner as she soon shut up.

In the end, an ambulance came by one day and she was carted off to a mental hospital nearby.