I had a pretty interesting day today at work. I would assume that most of you know that I work on an all male Adolescent Unit at a mental health hospital. The lads are all between 16 and 24 years old and have learning disabilities, and mental health problems, and most of them are on a court order (which means they are in hospital, rather than in prison). Unfortunately I cannot share too many details due to confidentiality of patients..so I will try to keep this informative, but in no way could you find out who it was.
Today, myself and two other members of staff had to stand in a doorway for about an hour, while we tried to calm a patient down. He had attempted to punch a member of staff 3 times already, but was now laying on a couch and calming down, but still threatening the member of staff.
As he was getting bored, he thought it would be fun to try to find all kinds of things that would get a reaction from us. The two things he did do was expose himself, and then take a big long wee on the floor. Eventually we pursuaded him to clean it up and he came out, slighly calmer than he was before. Needless to say, the whole time all we did was continue to talk to him, and show absoutely no reaction what so ever. In fact, one of the nurses that was actually doing most of the talking told the patient…’do you really think you are the first person to do something like that?’
I was nearly wetting myself with laughter (pun intended), but I did a good job at keeping a straight face and the patient will never know that I thought it was funny…I guess playing poker all those years with my family and being taught a good ‘poker face’ by my dad finally paid off!
