Onset psychosis (iii) John.

so I decided to go to bed and prepare for my mission tomorrow. I had no idea what this mission was, but it was definitely important and I was quite looking forward to it…

A few weeks back I did a couple of posts about my first dalliance with psychosis. I finished the second part of the story on a cliff hanger (see above) and so will finish it off now. I’ve recently just performed my Delusions show all about this so may slip into comedy mode at points.

I didn’t get a great night’s sleep that night, in fact I didn’t sleep at all. I was becoming fully delusional and even experiencing slight hallucinations. At one point my dad got up to the toilet and the light beams coming under my door coincided with a zzzhhhoooom  noise that made me fear the house was perhaps being invaded by aliens. That event and a constant racing thought process is all I can really remember of the night. Ironically, at the time, I was working at the Royal Edinburgh psychiatric hospital as a nursing assistant. So I bounded out of the house at 6.00a.m. for an early shift with no intention of going to work. I didn’t need a job now anyhow, something amazing was going on and I was off to find out what. Had I only turned up for work that day I would have been in exactly the place I needed to be and cut out all the middle men…and women!

So I set off walking. I did a ton of walking that day. Knowing the geography of the area I can calculate I probably covered around ten miles over the next few hours. Checking found magazines (A copy of the Watchtower!), road signs, shop fronts and possibly crisp bags for that vital bit of information that would enlighten me as to what was going down. At one point I found myself in a large graveyard. In the furthest corner of the graveyard, a good distance from where I was, I picked out a gravestone and decided whatever was written on it would be “The Sign!” You won’t believe what was written on it. Beside the owners name and date of life to end there were two words, “Keep Smiling”. How good is that? That’s not a bad sign at all.

After this I headed to my best friend Dave’s house. This is where the memory starts to go. The one thing I do remember is exhibiting a behaviour that can come with early psychosis. I could exactly rhyme every word Dave was saying with different words. And I was able to do this over quite complex sentence structures. In fact me and Dave spent a wee while testing my new ability to quite extreme lengths. I could randomly rhyme long paragraphs from books. As well as doing this Dave was often running out the room to “make a cup of tea”. What he was really doing was consulting his sister, a qualified nurse, for advice. she correctly diagnosed me as having a psychotic episode.

I was with Dave for a while but most of the memory is gone apart from going for a walk with his dog. When I got home my concerned parents obviously called a doctor. By this point I’d developed a notion that ginger people were coming to cause me harm or take me away (This to do with an ex partner who had red hair). So you can imagine everybodies delight when a G.P. arrived around 1 a.m. with the brightest red hair ever recorded in Scotland. And off to hospital I went. Reluctantly.

I’ll probably come back to these stories at another time, I’m sure you get the picture by now.