It was that bewitching hour. 0300. Behavioral health unit/behavioral health intensive care unit.
She was a small young woman. Her eyes appeared black as coal, as if her soul had been sucked out repeatedly. There were bruises around her eyes, black and blue punch marks up and down her arms. Several superficial cuts on her forearm—self-destruction. She was quiet, almost invisible. She wanted to sit in the corner of her bed, curled up in a fetal position.
He was so charming. He swallowed her up with compliments and made her laugh. She hadn’t laughed in a long time. He showered her with breadcrumbs of love, which she desperately grabbed.
But things changed. The trickle of verbal abuse, constantly. And then came the physical abuse. He was now the irrational and violent boyfriend. Physical abuse equally goes with verbal abuse—a constant trickling of abuse until she realized she was a “nothing.”
Her last beating, because she didn’t have dinner on the table when her man came home from work, left her barely able to see out of her swollen eyes. She was punched repeatedly.
Her last call for safety before she felt she would surely die was her lifeline: 911. As the sirens blared, he ran out the back door. She lay there on the kitchen floor, bruised and battered, bleeding from her nose. Her throat was punched in as she slowly gasped for oxygen. She was an emergent admit to our behavioral health intensive care unit.
We found her in the corner of her room, repeatedly banging her head against the wall. The abuse from her partner became her own self-abuse. It was imperative to make her a one-to-one assignment for her safety.
We could feel her pain. We held her tight to prevent her from banging her head against that cement wall.
I ran for an injection to quiet her. Her arms were up in the air, waving frantically, as if she were fighting him off. The injection was given, and then she fell fast asleep, peacefully. Demons driven away … for now.
Debbie Moore-Black is a nurse who blogs at Do Not Resuscitate.
