"Ultimately Coombehaven is a place of safety"

Despite the excellent food, this is not a place that anyone in their right mind would choose to go to.  How did I go from the safety of my own home to this scary place?  Well, I was arrested and whilst I was de-arrested after a brief admission to a general hospital, I was immediately sectioned and literally carried kicking and screaming in the middle of the night into an ambulance to take me to Coombehaven.

The regime here is harsh but ultimately fair even if it does not seem that way at the time.  Why was I taken to seclusion for 3 days for hanging onto the telephone when speaking to my wife?  Why was I offered a binary choice of tablets or a forced injection in the backside, which I regard as a metaphoric rape.  I don't need answers to these rhetorical questions as I know my mind was disturbed.  Ultimately the staff here are doing one of the toughest jobs in the world and I have realised that they have  the patent's best interests at heart, even if it does not seem that way at the time. They are quite literally guardian angels.

I spent 3 weeks at Coombehaven.  They were the toughest 3 weeks of my life.  The first week, spent largely in solitary confinement, lost to my mind.  Apparently I met my sister but I have literally no recollection of seeing her and couldn't recognise some of my notes from this period although I could see they were written in my own handwriting, albeit in the third person. The last 2 weeks were made much worse because I caught covid and hence had to spend a lot of time in my tiny room on my own.  

Ultimately I feel lucky because I have a loving family who support me and have been able to bring me home to continue my recovery.  I recognise that most of the long term residents of the ward will not have this option.  This is a desperate place where I found it very difficult to sleep even 2-3 hours a night. My sleep pattern remains disturbed and institutionalised to the point where I still wake at 0550 hours to get a shower and have breakfast because that was the way I escaped from my room in hospital.

Ultimately Coombehavn is a place of safety for those for whom the alternative is somewhere extremely dark.  It turned me around and so there is hope even amongst the chaos.  Thank you to both shifts at Coombehaven for the under valued but simply extraordinary job you do.