“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He laughed and flipped onto his back.
“You aren’t me,” I responded and pulled his blanket off. “I’ll pull this blanket off and you won’t be comfortable and then maybe you’ll get up and go to your groups. Now let’s…” I stopped dead in my tracks as the comforter left his bed.
“Told you so.” He laughed as his raging hard-on pressed his boxer shorts up into the air.
“Oh, come on! Let’s go; I don’t care what you’ve got going on under there. You’ve been here more than a week. You know the rules. You’re a big boy. Get up.”
I expected him to make some sort of comment about his penis in relation to the big boy comment I had just said. So, I was surprised when he simply grabbed the comforter, pulled it back up over him, and rolled toward the wall again.
“I’m sleeping,” he said.
“So, you are seriously fine with spending thousands of dollars a day for a treatment facility just so you can sleep? Wow, you must have a pretty privileged life to waste that much money on sleeping.”
“I don’t have a privileged life,” he said.
“You know, when I went to treatment, it was in a disgusting state facility with rapists, meth addicts, and prostitutes. I didn’t have my own private room with a shower, and I certainly didn’t have nice nurses and techs who worried about me like you have.”
I felt myself getting angry, and as much as I knew it wasn’t professional, Erik was really starting to piss me off. Did he understand how good he had it? I would have died to have the opportunity to do treatment in a swanky place like Paradise Peak. Everyone was nice, even the people who weren’t as nice as I was were one hundred times nicer than what I had put up with at the state hospital.
“Go away,” Erik said without giving me the satisfaction of feeding into my angry spew.
“Fine, but I was going to lead group today. So, you’re going to miss out. But hey, just wallow in your own self-pity. I’m sure you will magically start to feel better sooner or later.”
I stormed out of the room and back to the nurses’ station. It killed me that he didn’t listen to me. It bugged me that he hadn’t participated in my little word fight with him. Something was different with Erik than when he had arrived. There had been a small glimpse of his boyish charm when I had pulled the covers off of him, but it quickly disappeared as he rolled back over.
“I told you he wouldn’t move,” Kaitlin said. “I think he needs to be kicked out of this place. There’s dozens of people waiting for a bed, and he’s just wasting it.”
To hear her speak poorly of Erik had my defenses on alert. I didn’t think he was a bad guy. I didn’t know what was going on with him, though, and it was obvious he wasn’t getting much out of his stay with us. But I would never condone kicking someone out unless they were putting others in danger. And even then, I would recommend sending them to the state hospital where they had quiet rooms and better security for dangerous patients. I just wasn’t the type of person who gave up on people.
“He’s going to group,” I said, not even believing my own words as they came out of my mouth.
I took a couple deep breaths and walked back to Erik’s door. I had to take a different approach. There had to be a way to earn his trust and get him out of his room and working on his recovery. Part of what I had said was true, there was no way he would ever get better if he just stayed lying in his bed the whole time he was with us.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” I said as I stood in the doorway. “Is there anything I can do for you? Is there something you need so you can feel better? What do you need to be successful?”
There was no answer.
I waited another moment before I started to talk again.
“Come to group this morning. I’m going to help Jarrod with some activities. It’s not going to be fun, at all. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. You’ll probably hate it here even more than you do now. But come anyways.”
“That’s the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard,” Erik said as I heard him moving in his bed.
“So, is that a yes?”
“Hell, no. I’m not coming, but thanks for the effort.”
“Fine. Just fine. You want to rot away in this room all alone, then go ahead and do it. I don’t care!” I yelled as I left and went back to the nurses’ station again.
But I couldn’t stand to look at Kaitlin and the smug look on her face, so I went into the back room and hid for a moment. Why did this man drive me so crazy? Plenty of other patients had refused to go to group before and I had never raised my voice to a single one of them.
Brad constantly argued with me about his food and what was in it, yet I didn’t yell at him. Kimber could hardly walk half the time because she was so drugged up on psych meds and refused to let the doctor lower them, but I didn’t yell at her, either. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had yelled at anyone in our facility. But there I was, yelling and berating Erik like it was going to help motivate him.
I knew better! I wasn’t a counselor and I wasn’t a nurse, but I had been a patient before and I knew that yelling at someone wasn’t going to motivate them. I knew that trying to make them feel bad about their decision was the worst thing I could have done. It put a divide between us and assured that Erik would stick his heels in deeper, just to avoid looking like I had forced him into doing something he didn’t want to do.
I knew all of those things, yet I had still yelled at a patient to try and get them to a group session. I felt like the worst mental health technician in the world. How was I ever going to be a nurse if I couldn’t even handle my own frustrations when all I had to do was get people to groups and feed them?
My stomach was in knots as I sat in the back room and tried to pull myself back together. It wasn’t like me to act like I had been and I r