who is this damned nurse ratched i thought? a figment of Ken Kesey's imagination?

I see her coming towards me.. is she real or is this the morphine?
An authoritative voice spoke in my head. It said that the screenwriter Bo Goldman who created her for 1 Flew Over Cuckoo's Hernia said his first encounter with nursing was with a labor and delivery nurse who attended his newborn brother. "She was terrifying. She was huge and scary. ... She was obsessive about sanitation. The baby was always clean. The blanket was always clean and everything had to be clean." Some images are hard to shake.

Nurse Ratched in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," said the voice, has become almost synonymous with the disciplinarian medical professional—a nurse whose unyielding worldview and sadism, when unchecked, could provoke a homicidal meltdown in her emotionally regressed patients.

To bring the character from Ken Kesey's novel to the screen, Goldman based Nurse Ratched in part on his imperious mother-in-law. "I always thought of [Nurse Ratched] as a nurse second and a control freak first," Goldman said. "She was a terrifying woman, an emasculating and castrating creature."

"I think that every lawyer is a criminal and in any doctor there is a sadist," he said. "In every nurse—never mind Florence Nightingale or Mother Teresa—is a sadist's accomplice."

...this bed is uncomfortable - my limbs are aching.... where is my teddy bear?

dreary and teary....