This post comes from the room that has computers for the patients ... adjacent to a sort of community center, and also connected to the big residence for the in-patient population with its private rooms and dining area and nurses' station.
I am IN. All the way IN. I got run off my feet today! So many appointments and consultations. So much paperwork and forms to sign. Told the same histories about four or five times to four or five different professionals.
Upon arrival, one is escorted to a private room that will only be home/sleeping for a few days, they call these admission rooms. So one starts there. I got a corner room! It's a little cell of a room, but being on the corner it has got TWO, count 'em, TWO windows! The shared bathroom is in the hall just outside.
Two delicious meals (ate breakfast before showing up at the clinic). I didn't see the entire physical plant/campus but I saw too much as it was! And there are patient handbooks, and regulations, and ever so much to read... a complete physical exam tomorrow. And I met too many fellow patients, how will I ever remember names?
Before the weekend, if I heard right, I will be assigned a room in a different wing of the big residence, and that will be my room throughout the prolonged evaluation period. What I didn't get much of today, it is yet to come, is a sense of the patient community, as this is an extremely community-oriented treatment clinic. That is a little daunting. To be a newbie, fitting in ... maybe a lot of acquaintances, maybe a friendship, and then all these group meetings ( not on the first-day patient agenda), they happen every week. I'm as nervous as I would be about an audition in my misspent youth. Staff are terrific, the consults are hard work and reassuring at the same time. Can hardly believe I'm here.