The Dark Side of Life

A cold wind stung my eyes as I stood in front of the gates to Peat Island Asylum. The guard looked at my ID and opened the gate to let me into hell.

Today was my first day working with mentally challenged men. As I walked up the hill towards the quadrangle of staff, safe houses, I heard screaming and moaning coming from where the large garage housed emergency fire vehicles.

I was gobsmacked to witness male nurses using fire hoses to wash down the naked men. It was freezing, the middle of winter.
"What are you doing?" I sputtered.
"Only way we can get them clean." He laughed.

I continued on to see the Nursing Supervisor. I originally signed on for a six months stint to finish my psychiatric block. Mr. Gally was waiting for me and ushered me into his office.
He gave me a run down of what to look out for and gave me a leather belt with keys.
"You must use the keys every time you open and close a door. We do have inmates wandering the outside of the buildings. Even though they are not as dangerous as the ones in lock-up. Trust no one."

I was then introduced to the head nurse. After talking with her, I thought she had got her credentials out of a Cornflakes box. No brain, no pain and happy without it.

The safe houses were for staff to have lunch or just make a cup of tea. All the windows were heavily barred.
Between the houses were concrete spaces, also heavily barred.
Bam! A small body hit the wire on our window. Like a monkey, he started shaking the wire madly.

"We've just bathed him. And now he's naked." Said Julie the head nurse.
"What does he want?" I stepped back from the window, just a response to danger I guess.

"If you give him cigarette butts, he will go away and sit on the concrete and eat them. We have a special tin of butts we keep when he rattles the window!"
This was my second bad introduction to how the patients were treated on Peat Island.
The Island itself was so beautiful, surrounded by the deep waters of the Hawkesbury River. Newly married and in the middle of building our house, the Peat Island psychiatric position that was offered seemed a good idea. It took me fifteen minutes to reach the Asylum via the busy bridge spanning the river. The shifts were broken, and I had four hours in the middle of the day to myself.

"Help! Help! A tearful nurse came running towards me from our outside toilet block."
"What's wrong?"
"He chased me and then the dirty fellow ejaculated all over my uniform!"
I walked back to the safe house with her. I never saw her again.

There was no learning for me, I was just biding my time until my six months were finished. I knew this placement was totally wrong for me.

One day I was upstairs checking all the inmates were out. A scream from a filthy man who had been hiding under the bed.

He had a knife.

I was scared witless. I fumbled with the key to the safety glass, enclosed, nurses station. My heart was thundering in my chest.
He was two beds away as the key turned in the lock. Feeling foolish, I rang downstairs for a wardsman to deal with him.

"He won't hurt you, love. Just likes to scare the girls."
"With a knife?"
"He laughed out loud and said, it's rubber!"

I went to see Mr. Gally and unloaded my thoughts on leaving. He then told me he was leaving himself in a couple of weeks. These jobs are what we call, burn-out jobs. Staff move on rapidly because of the environment and treatment of the inmates.

"Tell you what." He smiled and pointed to the Nursing Annexe away from the main buildings.

"Would you like to work with young people in the annexe?'
"It's got to be better surely?" I smiled back and thanked him.

And, so I started at the annexe for young people, no noise, no danger just a horrific situation for the teenagers.

I was in charge of drugs and injections. Mostly the tablets were crushed into chocolate milk. Not too many injections, thank heavens. These teenagers should not have been in an Asylum. All of them were mentally disabled. There was a lock on the fridge to stop one lad from continually eating. All they fed him were salads, yes, he was very obese.
Some older men were passing him Mars Bars through the window above his bed!
The worse case I nursed was a Downe's Syndrome boy from parents who locked him in a chicken coop and fed him chicken feed. The parents were intellectually disabled themselves and knew no better.

Michael was blind, deaf and his gut was ruined from the feed. There was nothing we could do to stop the constant diarrhea. As soon as we fed him, he was sat on a pot on the floor. My heart was breaking.
There was a bright light in this young man's life. When he came to Peat Island, he couldn't walk or stand up because of his confinement in the chicken coop.
The local Doctor ordered physio treatment and by the time I left, he was wearing sandals and being slowly walked by the physios. Obviously he wasn't going to live very long but the physios gave him some interaction with normality. He was even trying to make noises, I thought it sounded like pleasure. Someone finally cared!

The last Friday before I left, a guard on the gate was laughing heartily at me.
"Going home nurse? Just as well you don't work tomorrow."
"Why?" I was curious.
"Oh, it's sex day for the inmates. Once a month the girls are brought over from Hornsby nut house and they get together with our men." He winked at me.

In summation; behind closed doors, human beings were the living dead.
1969 opened my eyes to the other side of life. I went on to nurse palliative care children. But that's another story.