I didn’t know what to think, other than it felt like a dream. I was lying in bed some time in the evening, around eight o’clock. The night nurse had just come on shift. When I woke she was in my room, this woman in her late twenties whom I’d never seen before. She was leaning against the wall near the bed, close enough that I could have reached out and touched her. The overhead lights were off. She hadn’t turned any of them on when she entered the room. When she said my name and called me awake, there was a note of familiarity in her voice, as if I had been staying here longer than just one night. I asked about my meds. The lorazepam, up to three milligrams as needed, the extra-strength Tylenol every eight hours. I don’t remember if I asked for some or if she offered, but she soon pushed off from the wall and made to go get a dose. When I started to move she said I didn’t have to get up, she’d bring it to me here in my room. She wasn’t supposed to do that. I couldn’t even be trusted to have a pen to write with without supervision, only a very dull pencil. I was supposed to come out into the hall, to the half-wall a couple doors down, and get them. “I’m good at breaking the rules,” she said when I mentioned some of this. I got out of bed and followed her into the bright hall anyway, and took some Tylenol while she watched.
Later that evening she came by my room again and asked if I wanted a snack, some popcorn. I was lying in bed again, somewhere between sleep and never-sleeping. A few of the other residents were over on the other side of the unit, B-side, where a movie was playing, something called Wedding Crashers. I said no to both the snack and the movie.
Later still I came out to the nurse’s station where she was sitting. The entire area was encased behind a partition that looked like glass, but was probably some shatterproof plastic. I asked about my chart. I said, “What does my chart say?” She looked up at me. She was in the middle of eating some barbecue from Buffalo Wild Wings. She rolled herself over to the sink and washed her hands, wiped her mouth clean, without leaving her chair, rolling over to a different computer afterward. It was quiet for a time as she clicked through several windows. “Not much yet,” she said, still clicking. “Oh here we go. Overdose and SI.” She studied the screen a few moments more, the bright square reflected across the lenses of her eyeglasses. “But I don’t see anything else.” Too early to tell, I said. “Yeah. No, there’s nothing else.”
