Well friends its been quite awhile since I wrote the last entry in
Cassie's Path and my spiritual adviser has been telling me for a long time now to get back to writing. I just never had anything I felt was interesting enough to write about.....until now....because I did a lot of thinking locked up in the psych ward Saturday night! Got your attention? Read on....
A couple of years ago I lost my job at J&J, just one month before my 55th birthday. It was very traumatic for me as I had built my carrer in startup and finally landed my dream job in big Pharma. I had been working there for 8 years, gotten lots of recognition awards, kept up with the increasing demands of the job ( I started off handling 40 complaint a month and went to over 400) worked 10 or 12 hr days on salary with out complaining much. But working for my newest boss had also been traumatic for me, not a people person at all was he. But anyway this story today is not about that, I probably will back fill things later on but today I want to tell you about how I ended up in the psych ward because I promised the nurses I would tel the tale as this is happening everyday now and besides being a total waste of public resources its just wrong...
After J&J I was out of work for 4 months then I got a temp job (paying 30% more money I might add) but that job only lasted for 7 months and when the guy who hired me threw up his hands and moved on they didn't keep me around either. Well that was 18 months ago. This long term of unemployment was predicted though by the local psychic here in town, as was the fact that I would be financially supported during this time. And I have been....first my father passed and left me a little bit and then a relative sent me a bit....and I learned to stretch every penny.....and I ate at the soup kitchen many a day as I volunteered there too. And every single stinking day I sent out at least 4- 6 resumes searching dozens of sites. I fielded calls from thousands of recruiters, most of whom were from shady off-shore companies who called me incessantly a couple dozen calls per day. But I hadn't finished my degree and worked my way up with out one and suddenly every job out there required one, and if anyone tells you ageism is not alive and well then need a reality check. It was an employers market after what Obama-nation had done to our economy..but I digress...
I really was at the end of my stress rope though and really had thought I would have a job again by now, even my little voice had said I would have one by Candelmas (or was that after?) So I was having dinner with a friend on Monday and after decided to pop into the psychic to see what the heck was going on with the job situation. I try to not go to them too often as I do believe God prefers we come to him directly, but hey I am a worrier sometimes and that still small voice that occasionally comes just don't cut it for me sometimes. Hey we are all a work in progress right? But anyway she assured me that a job was coming soon, that I would have one by the 15th or 20th of February and what I really needed was to relax, that my fear had caused many jobs to go away. She said I need to take a few days off and relax, maybe go away somewhere. So I posted this on my Facebook page that evening asking friends for ideas on where to go very cheap, kinda hoping maybe someone would invite me for a visit or something, you know to get a little support? Well one of my friends nagged me and insisted that it was the very wrong thing to do to take a break that I need to keep looking and after she posted that a few others chimed in agreeing with her. Well that really ticked me off and I went off on a rant trying to make her feel bad for being so insensitive. I said I had been sending out 4-6 resumes daily for a year and a half, I had been harassed by crazy recruiters from other countries, I had spent 4 hrs a day job searching (she thinks I should spent 8) I had gone to workshops I had networked and the stress of it all was getting to me so bad that I had come up with 3 different ways to kill myself. That last part was not true but I put it in for effect, my goal was to make her feel bad and lay off me. My true goal should have been to not let the opinions of others bother me, but hey we all slide a little backward with our spiritual evolution sometimes right? Prolonged stress can do that to us and we are still human after all.
At any rate the rest of my week progressed fine, I kept my nose to the job hunt grindstone and decided I could not afford to go away so I may as well keep at the hunt. I did find some nice singing bowl and gong bath videos to listen to on You Tube and they really did help me relax some. On Friday, which was Candelmas, one of my friends suggested I call the place I had phone interviewed at and while I am not a phone person at all I got brave and did. The HR guy had lost my resume! He said he would work on getting me scheduled next week for the face to face interview. So I went into the weekend feeling really good about the whole thing.......you can imagine my shock when two police officers showed up at my door Saturday night looking for me....and well bad girl or not the answer to what ya gonna do when they come for you is always: whatever they want!
I was playing on Facebook which I do a lot these days. Heck, I am 57, its the cold dead of winter, I am single, my son takes over the TV and well no make up, yoga pants and ordering pizza and chatting with family and old college chums online is my idea of a nice Saturday night as opposed to a crowded noisy bar shaking my arthritic booty trying to act like its 1999 or 1989 or 79 or well you get the idea. When the officers showed up and wanted to come in of course I let them, one of then I knew because I am a member of the local Neighborhood Watch Group. She told me they were there because someone had called in and was worried about me, they went through the whole are there weapons here etc, asked to see my ID etc etc. She told me it was over a something seen on social media, it took me awhile to think of what they could possibly mean and then I recalled that post. I would not even had recalled it but a friend had just sad faced it less than an hour before. So I told her about it why I had posted it and assured her I certainly didn't mean it. I explained everything and they left, I thought it was over and done and I was really angry to think a "friend" would have done that to me instead of call me themselves if they were worried about me, I posted as such on facebook......and then the guy cop knocked on my door again. He told me that he was very sorry but had to take me to the ER for an evaluation, he had no choice it was the law, I was not allowed to drive myself and since my son has no licence currently he could not follow me in my car. And my nightmare began....
He took me in the back of his police car to the ER at the local hospital. Once there two nurses came to check me in. I kept saying how embarrassed I was over this and that I was fine. They said don't be embarrassed it happens EVERY day now. A security guard took my coat and purse and a nurse took me into a rest room, gave me a paper scrubs outfit and told me to take EVERYTHING off. To add to the insult she stayed with me! I then had to pee in a cup. Once that was over they took me out to a bed in the hallway and drew FOUR vials of my blood and checked my vitals. My blood pressure was 247/175! I could have stroked out over this, I do have a history of high blood pressure it runs in my family even my boys have it and stress escalates it. Two different doctors came to talk to me and then a nurse sat next to me and we talked, I foolishly thought she was being nice but later though oh god she was babysitting me! After that they took me down the hall and I joked now what I am going in a padded room? No joke! There were no pads but it was a surveillance room, and there were two other rooms too. One had a guy in there who got brought in for domestic violence and the other horror of horrors was one of the homeless guys from town whom I had helped many a time at the soup kitchen! I had gotten him food and clothes many a time and talked to him trying to get him to go to a shelter. I spent my 3 hours there waiting going between anger and humiliation to incredibility to what was going on and where I was. I was interviewed by one of the psychiatric staff and when I got to the part where I had made that post on MONDAY and it was now SATURDAY and if someone was worried why did they wait that long to call it in I could see a real change come over her face. She said she had to call the psychiatrist on call and would find out if would be admitted or released.
I did end up getting released at 1 am and I refused to call and wake any of my friends to come get me so they called the police and he came back and got me and drove me home. During discharge I asked the nurse what she thought should I post about this and educate the public on this law that allows any innocent person to be hauled off and put through this humiliation on just the word of someone else. She said people need to know so they are VERY careful what they say but it may be too embarrassing for you to tell the story. She didn't know me, I have never been one to keep my pride if there is a chance my story can help another so I vowed to tell the tale. And tell it I did on Facebook that night and into the next day to all of my friends, hoping to get the one who did this to me to fess up. I would have forgiven them but no one confessed so I started deleting all the people whom I had not spent much time with, I was an event organizer for years and many on my list were there not because I considered them a friend but because they needed one.... I asked my son whom he thought did this to me and he said maybe no one, maybe Facebook did it to me......
With that thought in my mind I started doing some research and I did discover a very disturbing article
read it here that said:
Facebook has been working on suicide prevention tools for years, and the blog post notes the company has "released suicide prevention support on Facebook Live and introduced artificial intelligence to detect suicidal posts even before they are reported.
Personally I find this to be very disturbing, seems like Zuckerberg is playing god or something. Artificial intelligence is not emotionally intelligent, its not going to pick up the subtitles of persons who are just joking around on Facebook. and as the day drew on and I heard from other people I learned that I am not the only one who has had officials show up at their doors! Others had been drug off for saying things about wanting to hurt themselves in anger or jokingly, one woman had posted about wanting to beat her child for being such a brat and DYFS showed up at her door.
I still have no idea who called this in, a casual and lazy ass friend who didn't care enough to talk to ME or a Facebook algorithm but the lesson is still the same WATCH EVERY WORD you ever say to anyone or type on Facebook, better yet stay the heck off of it and make more time to go out and talk in real time. Not one of the professionals that night thought I belonged in the psych ward the cop the nurses the doctors the orderly that had to escort me to go pee...all of them could not apologize to me enough for having to do to me what they were doing. It's a real crazy world out there these days so keep your circle tight, your words guarded and don't load up that friends list unless you really know the person. Like I alway told my boys (and should have heeded more myself) you don't need a lot of "friends" you just need a few good ones......
With Love and in the Light, Cassie
