After Hours (InterMix)(7)
“We’ll wait and see if he calms first,” she said, discarding the sharps, “but knowing this one, he won’t.”
Beyond the booth’s glass, the angry patient was on his feet, as was Kelly. Kelly listened patiently to the vitriol suddenly streaming from the older man, nodding with his thick arms locked benignly across his chest. While my body vibrated with adrenaline, his looked positively serene.
“Red cards!” the man was shouting. “Six reds cards in a row! Six six six! Red like the Devil! He’s leading me into sin!” He pointed at the other patient who’d been playing. The accused was so stuporous, he looked close to dropping off to sleep, which seemed to enrage his fellow resident more. He made to lunge, but Kelly had his arms behind his back in a blink, holding him in place as two more orderlies ran over. The man kicked, the table jumping and a stack of cards fanning across the wood. In seconds they had him belly-down on the ground, a man securing each arm and one his legs. I hurried out of the booth behind Jenny, heart thumping.
Often a physical restraint was enough to calm this type of episode, but Jenny had called it—this guy was not soothed. Quite the opposite. Normally the shot would go in the patient’s shoulder, but with a table and two orderlies in the way, we had to go to Plan B.
“Pants,” Jenny ordered me, and in a robotic, unthinking daze, I knelt to pull the elastic waistbands of the patient’s pants and underwear down. Jenny scouted the injection site in a fraction of the time I’d have needed, and gave him the dose.
And just like that, I’d taken part in my first restraint and sedation.
It happened so fast, I hadn’t had time to register my fear as much more than a chemical rush. In its wake I felt high, but knowing maybe I did possess some modicum of instinct was a relief beyond measure. I got to my feet, shaky but proud, feeling like a part of a team.
“Well done,” Jenny said, once the patient was calm and settled once more and his doctor had been paged.
“Thanks.”
Back in the booth, she jotted a note on a clipboard. “Dennis said this is your first psych gig.”
“Kind of. I was my grandma’s live-in caregiver for six years. She had dementia. My psych hours for school were at an outpatient substance abuse facility. So no hands-on experience with . . . you know. Nothing this intense.” Nothing this dangerous.
“Ambitious,” she said, scribbling.
Ambitious wasn’t quite the word. This position was the only one I’d found within an hour’s drive of Amber. I’d have far preferred to get work in a nursing home, but I didn’t think it’d curry me much favor to tell Jenny I was only here as a matter of complete desperation.
“I saw on the roster you’ll be doing restraint training the next three days,” she said.
“Yeah.” And I couldn’t for the life of me decide if I was pleased about it. This was restraint as in wrestling a patient into submission in order to calm him or administer a sedative, not restraints like you’d use to strap him to a bed. Mastering the drill in the event of an outburst was essential, of course, but I worried that after I’d completed the training, the danger would feel all the more acute. The training would also take a bite out of my days off, Wednesday and Thursday, which I could have used to process all these changes, get my things unpacked, and explore my new town.
“It usually takes place in the gym in the Warbler building,” Jenny said. “You’re the only new hire from our ward who’ll be taking part, but Kelly helps teach, so there’ll be one familiar face, at least.”
As if I could call anyone’s face familiar yet. And as if I’d be able to relax, counting down the hours to when six-feet-several-inches of Kelly Robak would likely be pretending to assault me. The thought of his massive arm locked around my neck made my southerly lady region flutter to sudden life.
Oh dear. That wasn’t right.
Kelly Robak was not my type. He was too big, too covered in bruises, and far too married—just too much. Most worrisome of all, he looked an awful lot like Amber’s type, which meant I’d already spent years fostering a grudge against him.
Still, he drew my eyes from across the rec room, some obscene muscle or other flexing in his forearm as he reached up to change the channel on the television. Knowing my luck, I’d seize up and faint in his demonstrative choke hold, outing myself as the neophyte I was. Though perhaps I’d ought to be more worried that some sexual monkey wrench would jam my good sense during a drill and my body would refuse to fight him off. In any case, all the logical, northerly regions of my being decided restraint training was something to dread.