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In any case I was not diagnosed with - or even suspected of - having any mental illness in sixty-five years or the two years since then. Thus there was no reason for those drugs being used on me.

Why did they do it? I've asked myself that, I've asked my family members who were there every day, and actually discussed my condition. Did I mention that to this day I have never seen him? More on that later. They indicated that he seemed uninterested in me and rarely came out of his office to talk with them, sitting at his desk and talking to them as they stood at the door.

I do know that he was short on experience, having finished medical school about five years earlier. I know that his first job after his residency was at the best hospital in the area, and lasted about two years. After that he took a job in a hospice conveniently located in the same building as the hospital to which I had been consigned. Then, a few months before I arrived he became the Chief Medical Officer at Hospital C. Impressive, on paper. Well, Hospital C is small (44-bed) hospital located in an old facility dating to the 1960s which closed around 1999. Hospital C had occupied it for about four years when I arrived.

Having been hospitalized briefly some years earlier, my experience that the doctor in charge of my care visited me every day. Perhaps the doctor, let's call him Doctor C, did at some point come to my room and examine me, but if he did I was now aware of it. Until the last three weeks I was completely incognizant of his presence, or that of anyone else. My family and other visitors tell me that I was apparently conscious and conversing, but except for the one incident I mentioned earlier I have no memory of it. The records do not indicate the dosages of the drugs Doctor C had administered to me, but to have been dissociated to that degree they must have been considerable. My natural resistance to drugs probably prompted him to use them excessively. After all the idea was to keep me under control. So if the good doctor did happen by my room at some point I would not have been aware of it.

Whatever the reason the effect on my body (via my nervous system) were devastating. As with other effects of psychotropic drugs (all drugs actually) the harmful 'side effects' are rather casually mentioned in Medical Industry talk and never is any admission made of the seriousness in terms of injury. I suppose that since most people subjected to a regimen of such drugs - particularly involuntarily - don't live to tell the tale (or are never again allowed to resume a state of lucidity) only those close to the victims actually know. For those who do survive and escape the clutches of the Beast the physical effects are severe and in my case apparently permanent. I was there and survived because my family intervened and got me out of there before I was either dead or beyond any chance of recovery.

I have recovered much of my former physical health, but the neurological damage remains. My brain is as healthy as it ever was, proving the error of the diagnosis at Hospital B, but the nervous system is damaged and the brain's ability to control my body is seriously compromised. I am fortunate that the physical damage was not worse, having been tied to a bed for more than a month while drugged senseless.

The only way to describe that first month is a perpetual dream, punctuated by a couple of events when the drugs apparently wore off enough for me to experience reality briefly. The dream was a continual series of hallucinations, more bizarre and otherworldly than any dream I had or have since experienced. Some involved monstrous people, impossibly large or deformed, attacking and abusing me while I was unable to resist or escape. Some were likely times that the staff described as my 'being violent and uncontrollable'. Given that the nurse accused of murdering her children before attempting suicide was taking the same mix of drugs that were being administered to me, I suspect that when she killed the children she did not see children but something else, something threatening, and that when she jumped out the window she was not trying to commit suicide but to escape from an attacker.

Later, when the drugs were reduced sufficiently to allow me to remain awake and aware of my surroundings, reality and dreams were often merged, as though elements of the dream were present in the room. I remember once dreaming that a dead man was in my bed, and for a while after I awoke and could see the room around me I could still see the body lying there beside me while I was talking with a nurse who had entered the room.



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