“No, it’s a win-win situation. In both options, I win.”
Kaitlin laughed loudly and everyone in the dining area turned to look at her. It didn’t faze her, though, as she continued to laugh.
“How about you give me a hundred dollars if I get him out of his room and to group?” I asked.
“Well, then you have to give me a hundred dollars if he doesn’t go to group.”
“Deal,” I said with a victorious smile. “You better get your money ready.”
Kaitlin didn’t seem very scared at all as I walked toward Erik’s room. I had been there once already that morning when I had tried to get him up for breakfast. But when he said he wasn’t hungry, I didn’t argue and instead just returned to the nurses’ station.
Anytime I had been away from work for a few days, I had to get reoriented to the patients and what was going on. I didn’t want to push Erik if he was still having panic attacks like he had had the last time I was there. But if he wasn’t having panic attacks and he was just hiding out in his room hoping that treatment would magically fix him, then he had another thing coming to him.
I might not have looked like I was all that tough, but I could be if I wanted to. I had been through treatment; these patients couldn’t pull anything over on me. I knew what it was like to be depressed. I knew what it was like to not want to get out of bed or even what it was like to feel like treatment was useless. The thing about it was, I also knew that if you just stuck it out, treatment really did work.
Treatment took a lot of hard work. I knew that firsthand and it really annoyed me when people thought they could just sleep through a couple months at a treatment facilities and they would be all better when it was done. Sure, they would be over their physical withdrawals, but addiction was about so much more than physical addiction to a substance. The mental process of addiction was where the true treatment came in.
“Let’s go; it’s time to get up,” I said as I marched into Erik’s room.
“I’m sleeping.”
He turned toward the wall in an effort to ignore me. But I wasn’t going to lose a bet because he wanted to be lazy. Sometimes, I had to act more like a drill sergeant than their friend and that was just fine by me. Whatever I needed to do to make Erik get moving, I was going to do it.
“Let’s go,” I said as I reached for his comforter.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He laughed and flipped onto his back.
“You aren’t me,” I responded and pulled his blanket off. “I’ll pull this blanket off and you won’t be comfortable and then maybe you’ll get up and go to your groups. Now let’s…” I stopped dead in my tracks as the comforter left his bed.
“Told you so.” He laughed as his raging hard-on pressed his boxer shorts up into the air.
“Oh, come on! Let’s go; I don’t care what you’ve got going on under there. You’ve been here more than a week. You know the rules. You’re a big boy. Get up.”
I expected him to make some sort of comment about his penis in relation to the big boy comment I had just said. So, I was surprised when he simply grabbed the comforter, pulled it back up over him, and rolled toward the wall again.
“I’m sleeping,” he said.
“So, you are seriously fine with spending thousands of dollars a day for a treatment facility just so you can sleep? Wow, you must have a pretty privileged life to waste that much money on sleeping.”
“I don’t have a privileged life,” he said.
“You know, when I went to treatment, it was in a disgusting state facility with rapists, meth addicts, and prostitutes. I didn’t have my own private room with a shower, and I certainly didn’t have nice nurses and techs who worried about me like you have.”
I felt myself getting angry, and as much as I knew it wasn’t professional, Erik was really starting to piss me off. Did he understand how good he had it? I would have died to have the opportunity to do treatment in a swanky place like Paradise Peak. Everyone was nice, even the people who weren’t as nice as I was were one hundred times nicer than what I had put up with at the state hospital.
“Go away,” Erik said without giving me the satisfaction of feeding into my angry spew.
“Fine, but I was going to lead group today. So, you’re going to miss out. But hey, just wallow in your own self-pity. I’m sure you will magically start to feel better sooner or later.”
I stormed out of the room and back to the nurses’ station. It killed me that he didn’t listen to me. It bugged me that he hadn’t participated in my little word fight with him. Something was different with Erik than when he had arrived. There had been a small glimpse of his boyish charm when I had pulled the covers off of him, but it quickly disappeared as he rolled back over.
“I told you he wouldn’t move,” Kaitlin said. “I think he needs to be kicked out of this place. There’s dozens of people waiting for a bed, and he’s just wasting it.”
To hear her speak poorly of Erik had my defenses on alert. I didn’t think he was a bad guy. I didn’t know what was going on with him, though, and it was obvious he wasn’t getting much out of his stay with us. But I would never condone kicking someone out unless they were putting others in danger. And even then, I would recommend sending them to the state hospital where they had quiet rooms and better security for dangerous patients. I just wasn’t the type of person who gave up on people.
“He’s going to group,” I said, not even believing my own words as they came out of my mouth.