[Buttons.]

Aided by the violent and threatening nature of certain patients I began to feel ever increasing anxiety and fear. Due to low staffing numbers often the rule of me being accompanied to the bathroom was ignored, and I was able to cut and cut and cut until finally, finally, my anxiety flatlined and I could think straight again.

The staff could see that I was struggling but limited numbers, despite good hearts, meant that I rarely received one to one input to help me through the hardest times.

However one health care assistant somehow seemed to make the time, and it was she who found me when my anxiety was at it's peak. She had observed the hour by hour descent into craziness that such high levels of fear can create from thin air, and as such requested a doctor to come and see me.

While her back was turned however, I slipped away, trying my room door which was supposed to be locked, however due to untold pressure on staffing someone had forgotten to turn the key. I slipped into the room, shut the door firmly behind me, and began to unravel my bandaged arms, removing my blade from it's hiding place as I did so.

I had barely accomplished these tasks when the health care assistant (HCA) arrived with the softly spoken Lithuanian doctor who had admitted me. I cringed away from help, even as the HCA sat beside me on the bed, coaxing me not to unravel the bandages, not yet having seen the blade.

Half way through the interaction she spotted the blade. I made a desperate grab for it, determined to hurt myself as much as possible before I lost the silver edge of redemption. The moment the HCA spotted the blade she reacted with lightening speed, grabbing my arm and spinning me before I could even react face down on the bed, pulling her alarm as she did so.

I kept my fist gripped around the minute blade, fighting hard and furiously as more staff members poured into my room and pressed down hard to restrain me. The restrain was painful and I felt completely unable to breathe with so many bodies on top of me, weighing me down.

'Please let go!,' I begged, increasingly hysterical, struggling against what felt like the weight of the world.
A male voice said 'We can only let go when you've calmed down and given us the blade,'
My fear increased at the low male tones and I fought harder, tears streaming down my face, feeling so terribly, awfully trapped. Again my mind tripped and stumbled into memory lane, my abuser's hands rising out of the gloom of time gone by.

'Let go!' I screamed to which a remarkably calm voiced nurse responded
'We will if you give us the blade, Katy, where is it?'
Desperate for these hands to leave my body I choked out 'In my hand,'
'The left or the right?" asked the voice again, urgently.
'Right,' I ground out through clenched teeth and before I knew it, my fist was being prized open and the blade was removed.

I howled in terror, I fought but all in vain. I lay, struggling for breath under the weight of so many bodies, nausea rising on a wave of fear.
'I'm going to be sick,' I gasped out and one of the male staff attempting to reassure me told me
'We've had people do that before, don't worry.'
'Please let me go to the bathroom,' I begged, my stomach twisting and turning as though on a roller coaster.

There was a tense pause and then what appeared to be the senior female nurse agreed, with the proviso that the HCA who had first found me went with me to the bathroom. I was beyond caring at this stage, just hysterically grateful that the press of bodies against mine had ended, and stumbled willingly with support to the bathroom.

Once there I threw my glasses aside and vomited into the waiting toilet again and again and again, tears coursing down my cheeks. The HCA held back the hair that stood out like a mane around my head, tenderly mopping my face when I had finished.

The nurse in charge poked her head in the door to ensure I was finished, then left just as quickly. I was returned to the communal lounge, still shaky and tearful, with no mention of the traumatic events that had just occurred. The next day I went from bad to worse, rubbing my wrists, mottled blue and purple with bruises from the previous night's restraint, my wounded pride howling like a lone wolf.