Keira, Interrupted (Part One)

A long dark Lenten season. There is light at the end of the tunnel, however - don't go into the light! That isn't the mystical light of heaven, that brightness is only the fluorescent lights of an actual hospital, and it will damage your retinas if you don't blink. (An important thing that I learned over the last month.)
Also: lock up the polydent in a mental hospital because some patients may ingest it, possibly mistaking it for candy.
Also: everyone is a little mentally ill. But whether you tuck your head under, stuffing it deep down, or whether you are handcuffed and forcibly deposited at Eden Mental Health Centre, people can and will surprise you with love and support. And it's not the end of the line, though it may feel that way.
Total mental shutdown. Those were the words branded on my brain as I cowered in the cold and echoing observation room. I imagined that soon I would be drooling all over myself, sitting in a wheelchair parked in front of a television, filled with useless rage and yet somehow blank, blank, blank.
Then, miraculously, bit by bit, sanity gained ground. Food. I remember eating a banana, then a muffin. Suddenly I was allowed to creep from my room and walk as far as the blue line on the floor beside the nurses' station. There were people here and there and every where.
Another fearful night. Someone pounding on the door, someone is trying to kill me! Later I meet John, who has made hooch in prison with carrot sticks and raisins. In reality he was pounding on the door of his own observation room, oblivious to my presence in the other. He was not trying to kill me, all he really appears to want in life is the freedom to cook up some decent home brew. Neither of us are in observation rooms anymore, we have our own proper rooms now, with a door and a bathroom. Now the Queen of Canada rages in one of the observation rooms, demanding the right to know what sort of needles they're sticking into her.
Once emerging from the fog of my delusions, I realized how utterly sane I've been for most of my life. I think of all wisdom-tooth-extraction tales, mine must at last take the cake. I've never heard anyone else claim that the removal of their wisdom teeth led to a mental breakdown. I win!