THE MISSION
Orientation unsettled me more than I expected. I sat in a small meeting room near the personnel office, surrounded by other summer workers, trying to absorb the stream of rules, warnings, and actual accounts of crises the staff delivered with practiced seriousness. Their words blurred together – do’s and don’ts, what-ifs and never-evers – but one thought pulsed steadily beneath all of it: Please don’t assign me to a men’s ward.
I was nineteen, inexperienced, and certain I wasn’t ready for that level of responsibility. I wanted a woman’s ward: a place that felt at least somewhat familiar.
So, of course, they sent me to a men’s ward. C-11.
My heart hammered as I walked down the long, echoing hallway toward the unit – a corridor that seemed to stretch farther the more I wished it wouldn’t. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, and each step felt like a quiet surrender to whatever waited behind that locked door. When I finally knocked, my pulse thudded in my ears as I waited for someone to let me in. It beat even harder when the Nurse Aide – a brisk, no-nonsense woman older than my mother and twice as serious – opened the door and then locked it behind me.
“There are forty men here,” she told me. “I’m the only staff on the unit.” She said it without pride or complaint, just the weary matter-of-fact tone of someone who had long since stopped expecting help. She returned to the office, where she dispensed medications, kept records, and conferred with psychiatrists and staff from other departments. I was instructed to sit in the straight chair beside her desk.
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