Saving Lives by dovemarie |
On January 22, 1982, I found myself with a roommate who told me she had taken all her pills in an overdose. It flashed through me not to help her, as she and I had not gotten along for the previous two or three months. But my sense of humanity won out. I called the mental institution staff, who told me to try and get her into a cab! She was a big woman, and of course she wouldn't go. So I called staff at a halfway house that we were connected with, and that person and the Emergency Team of the institution called an ambulance to get her at our apartment. She was taken to ICU, and I was told that I had helped to save her life.
In February or March 1991, I was an inpatient at the institution, and I went into the bathroom a minute after a female patient who was on constant observation had gone in. A male staff, who was really not qualified to be watching her as he was only a kitchen worker, kept saying to himself in a low tone, "Come on, miss," (meaning for that patient to hurry up in the bathroom.) When I went in, I was on the other side of the stall, I didn't see most of her body, but I could see the top of the stall, and part of her head above it, so I rushed out into the hallway and said to the young man who had been watching her: "She's hanging herself!" He dashed in and got her out, and we alerted other staff as well. On both of these occasions, I was thankful to be in the right place at the right time.
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