The Story of Channon Rose: Lessons between the Lines (6 page)

Chapter 4

T
he psychiatrist had told my mother that I was bi-polar and that I would not be able to live a normal life without medication. I was prescribed 500mg of Lithium three times a day and Seroquel once in the morning and once at night before bed. The decision to put me on that medicine ended up being a serious mistake and the beginning of a serious downhill path for me. The meds prescribed to me were to control my bi-polar disorder. I was so frustrated with everything going on and I had lost a big part of my soul in that hospital. Because of all of that, I became very rebellious—and I was on heavy psychiatric medication as well, not a great combination.

During those 30 minutes of meeting me, the psychiatrist “diagnosed” me with this serious disorder, no test needed. Oh yes, and my behavior as observed in the hospital contributed to the doctor’s conclusion of my mental state. Well, I can tell you that nobody acts like their normal self when thrown into a mental asylum. One man’s opinion would send me on a journey that nearly ended my life so many times. I was still coming to the reality that my parents put me in a psych ward, and now I had to take this brain altering medication. It was a lot for me to handle. My parents made sure I took every single pill the doctors said I needed. The doctor had scared us into thinking that if I did not take it, something terrible would happen. We were told I would hurt my family or myself! Being young, I believed what the doctor said and what my parents told me to do. I believed all of it. I didn’t know any better at the time.

I was placed in an outpatient therapy program by the state called the Family and Child Guidance Center and saw a therapist twice a week to talk about my feelings. I hated it. I didn’t want to talk about all the horrible things happening in my life, I wanted to forget them. Naturally, therapists want you to open up and talk about your problems. I did the opposite and would just be quiet and not talk at all. This really annoyed my therapist when I went in for our meetings and didn’t say a word. I was extremely defiant and no longer respected or trusted my elders. I did this for awhile until one day she took out art supplies during our session and said if I didn’t want to talk I could paint or draw my feelings. The idea of art and painting caught my attention and it was finally something I was up for. So I ended up painting in therapy and it actually did make me feel better. Ever since that day I have always used art as my outlet for when I can’t explain what I am feeling or to make myself feel better. As I got older, I would write songs, do art, and now—write books. It’s a creative outlet I have always needed and used to express myself in ways I wouldn’t otherwise know how. During the time I was in outpatient therapy, my parents were given a book on bi-polar disorder to help them better understand my supposed mental illness, but neither of them read it. If they weren’t going to try and understand my illness, then why should I try and learn more about it? Maybe if we would have read it and educated ourselves more on it, maybe they could help me and wouldn’t keep sending me to everyone else to fix me. After all, I was doing all these things for their attention.

One day I was extremely agitated in a therapy session. I really did not want to be there. All my friends were hanging out and seeing a movie and I couldn’t go because I had to go to stupid therapy. I was not getting better and therapy was not helping. I was pissed that I had to be there that day and was throwing some major attitude to my therapist. She was not having it and ended up yelling at me in the session. I freaked out and threatened to kill her if she tried yelling at me again like that. She immediately walked out of the room and left me in there by myself. I didn’t know if she was scared of me, or going to talk to my mother. Next thing I know I have my therapist walking back in with a security officer. He stood there in the room and I looked at her and said, “Really? You brought in a rent a cop?” She said, “Channon you can’t threaten to kill people, that will land you back in the hospital.” As soon as she said that, it set off a major trigger for me and I went ape sh*t crazy in her office. I picked up my chair and threw it at her. I started screaming telling her to not threaten me, just crazy stuff really. I think whatever meds they had me on really put me on edge and made me way crazier than I already was at the time. I tried to stab the security officer with a pen that was sitting on my therapist’s desk. He ended up restraining me with handcuffs but not after a serious struggle. I put up a good fight. I had turned into a mental patient that everyone was trying to help get better but I was only getting worse, much worse. I went back to the mental hospital again that day, and had been admitted to the psych ward seven different times that same year.

Fast forward a few months and I was admitted to the psych ward again, but this time Misty would be coming with me. Misty did everything for my dad, she waited on him hand and foot. That disturbed woman worshipped him like a god, and her obsession over him was not healthy. I never did believe that she loved him. Why would she intentionally hurt him and his kids if she loved him? Misty was a sick psychopath.

One evening during dinner Misty poked me with a fork at the dinner table because my elbows were on the table—it was rude to do that you see. I didn’t get a warning, or a verbal request, just a poke with a fork into my elbow. My father saw it, and asked her not to do that again. But being 13 years old and on meds, I forgot shortly afterwards, and my elbows popped back onto the table. Misty stabbed me with the fork again in the same place on my elbow, but this time breaking my skin and causing me to bleed. My father witnessed it again, and this time he was angry. I would have punched that crazy b*tch in the face if my dad wasn’t already reprimanding her. He yelled at Misty, which caused her to freak out. She started cussing and saying that I had no manners and that someone needed to teach me because nobody else was going to because he was never around. My father told her that is not how you punish children, and especially not his. My dad stuck up for me that night, and then proceeded to talk about how her kids had worse manners and it ended up a heated argument that lasted about an hour. I was just so happy that my dad had seen what happened and stood up for me. It made me feel like he actually did love me, and that he cared about me.

My dad didn’t talk to Misty for the rest of the night and I could visibly see that she was upset and really distraught by it. I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess Misty was so upset that she took some pills and started drinking that night. Later that night after everyone had gone to sleep, Misty quietly came into my room. My room had its own bathroom and was on the other side of the house. She came in, turned my light on which woke me up, and locked my door. I wasn’t sure why she was waking me up but I thought maybe she had come to apologize for what had happened earlier that night at the dinner table. I thought if she was actually here to apologize, she’s only here to try and make things better with my dad and not me. Either way, I was annoyed, and I had school the next day so I wasn’t happy that I was woken up. I was barely awake and my Seroquel meds were completely kicked in so I was kind of out of it. She told me she wanted to talk to me. I slowly sat up on my bed and then she asked me to go into the bathroom with her. I thought it was weird but I did it anyways because I was half asleep. As we entered my bathroom, she locked the door behind us.

Once the lock clicked, I realized she had me exactly where she wanted me. Misty was out of it too and was acting very strange. I could see her eyes were glazed over. I’d seen a look similar to this with her before, but this time her eyes took on the feeling of methodical planned intent of harm. I sensed something bad was going to happen, and immediately grew nervous and I had reason to be. Within seconds, she tackled me down and sat on top of me. Just as before, pinning me down. I was helpless yet again and under the weight of this crazy psycho. She began kissing and licking me all over my face. I was so disgusted I wanted to throw up. She said if my father wasn’t going to kiss her goodnight, then I would have to. I asked her nicely to get off me. It was a good thing I was heavily medicated because at this point of my life I would have tried to kill her. My arms started tingling. Then they started to go numb. I was trapped and restrained, underneath her. I kept asking her over and over to leave me alone but she just ignored me. She had something else in mind. Instead, she reached for something in the pocket of the robe she was wearing. As her hand went into her pocket, she told me that it was all my fault that my dad was mad at her and not talking to her. She said that I was going to pay for making it all happen. I could barely make out her words, she was slurring and started mumbling other things I couldn’t make out. She was basically talking crazy. By this time I was terrified, and as I looked over towards her pocket, I watched her pull out a razor blade. She took the razor blade and began to cut the inside of my wrists. I think I went into shock or took myself into another place mentally because I don’t remember screaming or shouting—I just let it happen. As the blade sliced my wrists, she mumbled a bunch of stuff I still could not understand. It was like everything went quiet. “What are you doing? Will you please get off of me, you’re scaring me!” I knew I was talking but I couldn’t hear myself, I had gone deaf. I started to struggle but I was trapped under her weight and could not move. I started panicking. I slowly started to hear sound again and then she said, “This time you are going away for a long time. Hopefully you will never come back. I can’t have bitchy red troublemakers like you coming between me and love. I can’t believe the nerve you have to cause a fight between us. You do it on purpose don’t you?” She kept saying red, red, red over and over again. All I could think in my head was, ‘you crazy psychopath when I get up I am going to kill you’. She started cutting me with passion, as if she loved the feeling it gave her. She drove the razor blade deeper and faster into my wrists as tears fell down my face. She started laughing as she cut me. She watched in awe as my blood dripped off of my arms. Suddenly my wrists hurt badly and blood was everywhere. I think at this stage reality set in for me and I started to come out of the initial shock of what was happening.

It was then I realized I didn’t think she was trying to kill me; she just wanted to hurt me and see me suffer as she did earlier that night. She was getting pure enjoyment from torturing me. She liked watching me in pain. She cut both my arms over and over. Both of my arms were cut from my elbows to my wrists. In the moment I thought well at least there is no way she will be able to get away with this, there is physical proof of what she’s done to me! It all happened so fast and as soon as she was done, she quickly climbed off me and threw the razor blade in my sink. Misty ran off into the kitchen where I heard her wash her hands, pour herself another drink, and I also heard the sounds of a pill bottle.

I had no clue what she was doing, but I wasn’t about to wait around any longer to find out. I ran across the other side of the house into my dad’s room and woke him up. I showed him my bloody wrists and told him Misty had cut me and I started to explain the story. My dad jumped out of bed to confront Misty but when he came out, she was lying on the floor of the kitchen passed out. She must have overdosed on pills or passed out from too much alcohol. I thought she was just faking it. But then I heard police sirens growing closer to our house. At some point, Misty had already called the hospital or police or something before passing out, because the police and ambulance arrived before we even had the chance to call them ourselves. When the ambulance arrived my father did not know what to say, as my wrist cuts looked like suicide cuts. I would never have cut myself, nor at the time did I even know how to. I told the emergency staff I did not do it, that Misty had, but she was out cold. Again—neither my dad nor the ambulance staff believed me. Nobody believed me, even with the incident that my father witnessed at the table I was still on my own, and once again I was off to an asylum for something I never did. I could not trust a single soul. I had no one to confide in, nobody to listen to me. The last place I wanted to go was to the hospital again. I had already been there so many times already, I knew how awful those places were. I kept crying and saying, “No, no, please no, please I don’t want to go back there.” This time they were sending me to UCLA Psychiatric Hospital. However, Misty would be joining me the next day. She had taken so many pills and drank so much alcohol she needed to have her stomach pumped. I’m still not sure if she had taken the pills and alcohol in an attempt for my dad’s attention, or to try and cover her tracks by passing out in an attempt to prove she wasn’t available to harm me at the time, or if she was going to try and say I hurt her and then tried to kill myself, who knows. As smart as her attempts were, it only worked half way. Sure she got me sent away, but at the same time, she screwed herself in the process.

Thankfully, the adult ward and the adolescent ward are separate. It was a good thing too, because I really did want to kill her. I was in pain from the cuts, my arms were sore, and once again she had landed me in another scary place. Another asylum. How was she able to get away with all of this? She knew that since I had already been in mental hospitals and diagnosed as bi-polar, getting me back in another ward would be easy. Once people find out you have a mental disorder or that you’ve been to a mental hospital, it’s easy to judge and dismiss you. People tend to automatically think you are crazy. It sucks, so if you get misdiagnosed, or sent to a psychiatric hospital by accident or mistake, it’s hard to break away from that stigma. Your notes and records are all kept on file. Good luck breaking free from all of that. I was upset, mad, pissed off, angry, hurt, sad, every negative emotion you could think of. Could I do anything about it though? No.

Being in another psych ward sucked, but this place was bigger and nicer than Pinegrove or Northridge Hospital. It didn’t have such a negative feel, but then again this wasn’t my first time around. Maybe I sort of knew what to expect. UCLA had art therapy twice a week, which was nice. I could paint and make candles! Even though I hated being there, I was safe from Misty. I knew she couldn’t hurt me when I was locked away in these places. I met a few other girls who had it rough at home, so I didn’t feel so alone. UCLA is a teaching hospital and the doctors moved around in packs. So there were 8 doctors who would come and see me. These doctors thought I should change from Lithium to Depakote in higher doses to see how I would react on them. I felt like a science experiment. I hated the drugs they were giving me but I usually took them anyway. Sometimes if I could hide them and not take them I would, and other days I just didn’t care and would take them as they requested.