Good Lord

The day started out normal. Anxiety in the morning, gross breakfast, rock climbing expedition that I went to but did not participate in (somehow I managed to come to Florida without a single pair of pants?). In art therapy I started learning how to paint with oils. There was a very good group about independence. I got some exercise playing badminton, which I am not horrible at. I found out that a relatively sane-seeming woman believes she has been abducted by aliens on several occasions. I listened to my favorite schizophrenic ("The main conspiracy of Barney is whether he is a purple dinosaur or a blue dinosaur." Also, when I asked him what was shakin', he said "Quaker Oats" without further explanation) And the psychiatrist agreed to let me start administering my own medication, which is an absolute triumph.
However, all throughout the day, tension was building. A third person had been brought into the constant fighting between the original two. When I say fighting, I mean all out SCREAMING the most horrible things imaginable to each other. So, now three people are involved and things are quickly escalating. The staff has been trying to keep it under control by trying to keep them all separated, but that's pretty hard when they all live in the same building. There was screaming right after breakfast, and again at lunch. But when I went back to my house to get a book is when the shit REALLY hit the fan. I can't decide if I'm glad I wasn't there or bummed that I missed the action. I'm pretty cloudy on the details, but two of the three were at it again, and then one of them, a pretty low-functioning asperger's case, threw a metal chair (a heavy one, not a folding chair). My therapist was in between them, trying to keep them apart, and she was the one who ended up getting hit with the thing. She already has a bruise. So, after a huge amount of panicked staff meetings and scurrying around, the police were called. When they came, the asperger's guy was pounding on the other guy's door, screaming "I'm going to kill you, faggot!" (ugh, I don't even like writing that word, let alone hearing it). I don't know how many people they arrested, but certainly one. It's such a shitty thing to happen, but I'm glad that, hopefully, all this will end now. It got to the point where pretty much everyone in the program was feeling both emotionally and physically threatened. I would have to take a pill after each fight, they got that scary. So, hopefully this is the last chapter of all THAT.
Then, just as soon as the cops left, another patient got such a severe pain in his side that he walked to the nurses station bent over in half, literally BAWLING with pain. This is not a wimpy guy, he was a skater, and now he has MS, so he knows shit about pain. He just hobbled over a screamed for an ambulance to be called, then he collapsed. It was totally bonkers.
So, yeah, the natives were restless today. I'm just glad I didn't get very involved with all this shit and was able to get what I needed to do done. I do, however, have a gossiping problem, and I feel bad for trying to weasel information out of patients and staff. I have to keep an eye on that problem and learn to not talk about people who are not in the room.
Be so glad to be where to are, dear readers.