A/N: Heyy guys! New chapter, thanks to the people who reviewed because you make me want to update more! Sitting here watching a hot shirtless guy out my bedroom mirror… I really need something better to do…
xoxo
He Who Descends
My jaw hit the floor.
This was nothing and I mean NOTHING like the Pennhurst I was told about.
There were red faced nurses rushing around, dripping with puke and blood, shouting at each other and at the children over the sound of their wailing; most of the little ones were tied to the railings in the hallway, naked and shrieking, wrists swollen around the tatty ropes that bound them. Lumps of brown slush covered the floor around their knees, liquid was smeared across the walls and stinking up the hallway something so awful that I was nauseas quicker than any amusement ride I'd ever been on.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, fighting the tears that wanted to fall from my eyes.
What had happened? This was supposed to be one of the leading correctional facilities in the country, possibly the Pacific. Not a Goddamn prison. Or… or a stable or something!
"You there, in the doorway! Stop standing around looking like you've seen a bloody ghost and give me a hand over here!" My eyes flickered to the plump nurse standing in the third doorway down. Even though she must have been standing about twenty five yards away from me, her shout sounded as though she were right in front of me.
I hurried over and followed her into the second ward, stepping quickly and carefully around puddles of muck and children that swiped at my ankles, shrieking and bawling wildly.
"Right, you grab 'er legs and I'll grab 'er arms," the woman ordered, regarding a nine or ten year old girl who was tantruming by the filthy window.
"What? Why? What are we going to do with her?" I asked, a little afraid of what the woman may answer.
"We're gunna' strap 'er to that there wheelchair," the nurse explained, nodding her head in the direction of a dilapidated looking wheel chair.
I panicked on the inside. That chair didn't even look like it would hold her weight. She could get seriously injured! Hadn't anyone thought of the risks?
"Do you think that's really the best idea?" I cried, my morals becoming seriously conflicted.
"It's all we can do. What if she 'urt 'erself or someone else?" the fat woman bellowed over the din.
"Why don't you ask her why she's upset? Maybe she just wants something to eat or she's in pain?" I suggested.
"Because ain't nobody stupid enough to get in arms lenth a' her," the woman spat, ready to carry out her plan.
"I will," I nodded, deciding the poor flailing little girl deserved at least one person to listen to her.
"A'ight, it's yer' funeral," the nurse stepped back and let me get closer to the little girl.
"It's ok, sweetheart, calm down," I begged the screaming child. I edged ever closer to her, steeling myself to be smacked at least once. I was almost upon her when she cried out something along the lines of 'Get away from me' in her slurred speech. I disregarded it and kept about with my job.
"It's alright, I won't hurt you," I comforted as I tentatively took her by the shoulder and tried to sit her upright. She gave one almighty wail and then bit my wrist.
I inhaled sharply and yanked my hand back. "Shit!"
I studied the wrist in question and was actually surprised to find it was bleeding a little.
"See, tyin' 'er up's all we can do," the nurse rasped out. "Now 'elp me get 'er."
I stood, admitting defeat and helped the chubby woman wrestle the small girl into the wheelchair, which gave a whine of discomfort but didn't give way beneath the child.
"There," the woman breathed, wiping the sweat off her forehead. "Ya 'an go back to yer rounds now."
I nodded and left the room, close to vomiting as I stepped back into the excrement steeped hallway. I paused for a moment, wondering what I should do. But my attention was quickly taken when I heard one of the children further up the hall begin vomiting violently.
I hurried up toward the girl tied to the railing as she heaved whatever slop she'd been fed all over the tiled floor. I had to walk reasonably slowly to avoid slipping over due to all the fluids and whatever else was on the floor so by the time I reached her, she was finished vomiting.
"Are you alright?" I asked as I knelt beside her.
She just made a garbled noise and looked me up and down. I took my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the sick from her chin. Then I looked her up and down and had to wonder what the point of my actions had been. She was sat in a pile of her own poop and urine and now vomit also, so it was going to go all over her anyway.
I quickly reprimanded myself. Every tiny bit helped.
When I was done cleaning the girl's face, I stood up and again had to pause. Where to next?
"Somebody give me some assistance up heerre!" a female voice screamed. I assumed it came from the second floor so I hurried to the stairs at the far end of the building and traversed them with enough speed to send me sliding down the second floor hallway and, thankfully, into a nurse.
"Whoa there," she caught me and helped me regain my balance. "That was an almost-accident if I ever did see one."
"I'm so sorry, I was just hurrying too much and I-" I began but another voice cut me off.
"Hurry up and heeelllp mmeeeee!"
The nurse and I hurried into the very last ward and saw another nurse being crushed under a collapsed crib.
"Oh shit, not another one!" the red haired nurse I'd crashed into grumbled.
"Oh shit says you!" the trapped nurse yelled. "Get this thing offa' me!"
"Um," I walked over, trying to negotiate exactly how to get the collapsed wreck of metal off the poor nurse. I lifted what looked like the thing that held the mattress up. When the woman didn't react I gave it all I had and half lifted half dragged the rusted mess off her.
"Oh thank the Lord," she gasped. "I thought I was going to have to sit here for hours."
I helped her up and brushed as much faecal matter from her white dress as possible.
"Are you alright?" I asked, watching her straighten out her clothing.
"Fine, thanks to you, big man," she giggled. "Never seen you around before. Are you new?"
"Yes, today is my first day," I explained as the other nurse lifted the child who'd been dumped in the crib accident.
"Welcome to hell," the redhead said.
"Stop scaring them away Rosa, we need all the help we can get," the blonde I'd helped up said.
"I can see that," I murmured. "Just what is going on here? Why are there kids tied up every which way and where?"
"Because," the blonde said, "We just don't have the beds."
"Or the staff," the redhead murmured. "Not to mention food, medicine, money. We don't have enough of anything, really."
"That's terrible, couldn't Dr Madden ask the government for funds?" I asked, helping the redhead find a new crib for the crying, waste covered baby in her arms.
"Oh, I see you've never met the Mad Doctor himself," the blonde said.
"Dr Madden? Ask for funds?" redhead cackled. "Think again, honey cake."
"So, the guy who runs the place is a dick, basically," I clarified.
"Cupcake, he the king dick," blondie explained, loading a syringe at the counter by the back of the room. She walked over and jabbed the baby in the arm.
I rushed to the counter and picked up the glass bottle she had loaded the syringe from.
"This is thioridazine," I gasped in disbelief, "That's a tranquilizer. You're giving a tranquilizer to a baby."
"Doctor's order, sugar," the blonde shrugged as she disposed of the syringe. "My name's Rosalie, by the way."
"And I'm Rosa," the redhead spoke up. "What should we call you?"
I pointed to the name tag, "Jasper," I answered.
"Like I said before, welcome to hell," Rosa said, jabbing another thioridazine needle into what must have only been a six year old boy in a crib.
"Would you do me a favour, Jasper?" Rosalie asked, fluttering her eyelashes as she fished around in the cupboard above the counter.
"Oh God, what?" I asked, dreading what she would ask me to do.
"Take this," she handed me a small, silver package. It was strange to look at, at first, with one tapered end and one blunt end but I quickly recognised it as a rectal suppository. Yay. "And administer it to the teeniest blonde male who doesn't look like a male tied up in the hall for me please."
"Why?" I asked, hoping she wouldn't make me do it.
"Because I'm busy," she said.
"But I've never administered a rectal suppository, especially not to a child, what if I hurt him?" I chewed my thumb nail, extremely nervous about the prospect of having to do this.
"You'll be fine," she rolled her eyes. "I mean, all you have to do is shove it up there right? If you mess that up, you must be just as bad as the mush-brains children here."
"I really, really don't want to do this," I reiterated, feeling weird about touching a kid there. I mean, I know I'm a nurse but still…
"Come on, I'll help you," Rosa intoned, grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me out of the room. She pulled me into the hallway and walked past every kid tied up. "Not this one, not that one, it's not him either. Which one again Rosalie?"
"The itty-bitty one!" she answered. "He's really quiet and he likes to look out the window lots!"
"You should make sure it's the right one, you don't want to give the wrong kid medication," I murmured.
"I think it's that one."
She pointed to the tiny, feeble creature tied to the railing at the very end of the hall by the window.
"Are you sure?" I stalled.
"Well, it won't hurt him if it's not, right?" she muttered, yanking me down the hall toward him.
It felt like years before we were standing in front of him. Rosa knelt down and took his right wrist, studying the plastic ID bracelet that hung off it. I looked over her shoulder and was horrified to see it was completely text free but I could see where there had once been writing which had faded.
"Well," she said, "No name."
"That's terrible, shouldn't someone have noticed this before now and written up a new one?"
"Sweet cakes, we don't even issue these any more. We stopped like, a year ago," she murmured, setting about removing the now useless piece of plastic.
"What?! You don't even issue them? Then how the hell do you know who is who?" I cried, utterly disgusted and horrified.
"Well, we just don't. Most of us pick some special patient and commit their medications and dosages to memory, and the rest just rot in their cribs," Rosa admitted, seeming a little ashamed. "But, I mean, it's not our faults. We're the ones on the wards every minute of day and night looking after these kids as best we can so we're really doing all that's possible for us."
"That's still absolutely abhorrent," I spat, wishing I could do something to help the situation here. But she was right, all I could do was what the nurses did. Devote every minute of every day to these kids and hope I gave one of them a nice last five minutes or something.
"Ok," Rosa said, "Let's get this over with." Rosa untied the tiny boy's wrists from the railing and inspected him.
I watched her, too horrified and upset to move for a little. The boy was blonde, like me, but his blonde was lighter and whiter. He had the most alarming pallor that made him look like he could have been dead. And his eyes were the most fascinating slate grey. And there he was, naked and dangerously underweight, tied to a rail.
Rosa looked disapprovingly down at the ground where he'd been sitting. It was piled with half dried half liquid half solid diarrhoea and it was caked all over his butt. And the stench was almost enough to make me heave.
"Oh God, this is disgusting," I shouted, losing my temper. "How can you expect him to get better when he's tied to a rail sitting in a pile of his own shit!?"
"Jasper! Calm down, I think you just made him shit on me," Rosa growled. "Let's just shove it in his ass and get it done!"
"You can't administer anything to him rectally when he's shitting this much, he'll just shit it out!" I raged.
"Then go to Rosalie and get the intravenous version," Rosa growled, "And get me a tissue while you're at it."
"I think you'll need more than a tissue," I hissed, standing and storming back to the ward Rosalie had been in. But when I arrived, she wasn't there.
I cussed to myself and stomped over to the cupboard at the back of the room. I looked at the suppository in my hand and read the drug name.
Compazine Suppository
To be administered rectally or vaginally
Compazine? Why in the hell did a kid who probably couldn't even walk need a Compazine shot? The only thing Compazine was going to do was kill him early and give him seizures. Which would make the impatient and overwhelmed staff here give him either more Compazine or some other tranquilizer to do the job, not realizing it was the Compazine that had caused the seizure in the first place.
I replaced the suppository back into the box in the cupboard and instead took a bottle of Loxitane. If they wanted to calm him down, Compazine was not the right drug for the job. It was only going to hurt him and cause a potential overdose if others who didn't know he'd already had a dose got involved. Loxitane on the other hand was designed to control moods and anxiety and it would have the sedative effect they were looking for without the seizures and other serious side effects.
I loaded a clean syringe with ten mils of the drug and placed the cap back over the needle so I didn't trip and stab myself or someone else on the way there.
I made my way back down the hallway and had to stop for a minute while a seriously disfigured child dragged their legless body across the hall. I shook the image out of my head and continued back to where Rosa was waiting.
"Did you decide he needed his meds for Christmas?" she asked, glaring at me.
"Rosalie was giving him the wrong meds," I barked, taking the cap off the needle. I leaned over to grab the boy's arm but he snatched it away.
The glare he gave me said he knew how this game worked and he wasn't going to make it easy.
"It's ok," I promised, reaching for his arm once again but he whacked my hand away.
"Look don't be difficult," Rosa said, seizing his arm roughly and outstretching it towards me. He grunted and squirmed around in her lap.
"I promise it won't hurt that much and I'll be quick," I assured him, pushing the needle into his arm, depositing the fluid drug and then pulling it out. I pressed the entrance wound with the thumb of my clean hand to stop any bleeding. I looked up at his face and saw tears rolling down his cheeks. It broke my heart a little more and I stroked his cheek with the partially free needle hand.
"You were very brave," I encouraged. He whimpered somewhere in the back of his throat and began sobbing.
"Wanna switch?"Rosa asked, looking longingly at the somewhat clean syringe in my hand and back to the filthy child in her arms.
"Ok," I agreed, taking the helpless child from her and surrendering the syringe.
This was the first time I'd held a child from Pennhurst and it made me feel better about being here. It made me feel like it wasn't so hopeless. Maybe, just maybe, a cuddle could make this kid better. Maybe as soon as I wrapped my arms around him, he'd stop crying.
And for what must have been the five hundredth time that day. I was wrong.
As soon as I wrapped my arms around the kid he started making some weird kind of high pitched inhaling noise that I interpreted as squealing and cried more.
"I only want to help you," I murmured, instinctively kissing his neck. I leaned him back to look at his face and was greeted with what I first interpreted as a slap across the face. I was a little shocked, the kid was like, eight, that was pretty violent for an eight year old. But it took a couple more moments to realise the extent of the attack as he wiped his hand across the front of my scrubs, looking pretty pleased with himself.
I looked down at the hand he'd used and my lip began to tremble when I saw that it was covered in none other than that icky diarrhoea. I sat for a moment, feeling it drip off my cheek and onto my leg. I bit my lip while he smiled up at me sweetly.
I tilted my head down to look at him. "Why would you do that?" I cried, feeling quite discouraged.
He looked up at me, looking quite upset with me, opened his mouth and… I winced waiting for it.
Coughed.
We didn't look away from one another's eyes for quite a few moments before he did something I was not expecting.
He leaned back into me, wrapping his arms around my neck and fidgeting until he was comfortable.
I couldn't help but feel as though I'd just passed a test. The little boy's test.