So this morning a whole bunch of us clinical staff are meeting with an inmate/patient to discuess his progress. He’s all antsy, moving around constantly, almost falling out of his chair a couple of times… He is saying that he has a huge tumor in his head, and then laughing maniacally. I suppose it’s possible that he has a tumor, but more likely he’s just delusional.

Anyways, his treatment team meeting is going sorta down hill, as he’s getting more and more agitated. The doctor says “that’s it.. go ahead and rehouse him.” The inmate jumps out of his chair, and starts mumbling curses as he’s walking quickly to the door. Well the staff are trying to catch up to him and he rams his head straight on into a glass pane on the door. Now this is that glass with the wire cross hatched throughout, but lemme tell you.. that stuff still shatters. Then he gets out in the hall and is calm for a little bit but then tries to headbutt one of the guards.. so they blow their whistle and sound the alarm, and like 25 guards from all over the prison show up within 2 minutes.

There’s me.. classic shock response.. jaw dropped, hand covering my open mouth.. for like a minute. So this was 10 in the morning, and the day didn’t get too much better. Apparently when one person goes mental, it rubs off on other people.

So well that was my day. And let me just say that it’s fortunate I moved all the way across country for this job. Cause if I was comfortably living in Jersey with my parents, it would be REAL easy to walk away from this job after a day like today…