There are no rules to mental illness and one patient is totally unlike another. My advice to young interns is always the same—toss out the DSM because there are as many variations as there are patients.
Take Nate Hanley for instance. Last night he refused to cooperate because the on-duty psychiatrist changed his prescription. Security was called and he’s now in restraints in an isolation room, while Maynard Reese, another patient, is standing outside his door taunting him.
“Get back to the patients’ lounge, Maynard,” I tell him. He blinks at me, but quickly complies. He knows the game—act out and your privileges are withdrawn.
I peek in at Nate, now subdued and injected with Thorazine. I chuckle. Maynard had nothing to fear—Nate’s experienced a form of chemical lobotomy and won’t be punching anybody today.
I glance around the new facility with its brightly painted walls and huge windows—the community finally got it right and spent some money on mental health for a change.
Karen Olmstead, the heavyweight night nurse, has just come on duty and is rounding up patients to get their meds. They call her Klink—probably a reference to the Colonel in Hogan’s Heroes who ran the Nazi concentration camp.
Pretty perceptive, I think.
Klink spots me. So much for my hopes of getting home early tonight.
“Doctor Wallace, can you look in on Amber Taylor? —She’s the new patient I told you about who thinks she’s a time traveler.”
I sigh. It’s been a long day and tomorrow will be even longer as I see my private practice patients, but I go.
I wander back to Room 324 and spot her name tag on the door. I knock softly and poke in my head. She’s sitting at the window watching the blue tree shadows in the snowy ravine outside.
“Amber?”
She looks up and smiles. “Pretty isn’t it? I like snow—always have.”
I pick up a chair, drag it to the window and sit down beside her. “Aren’t you cold?” I ask, noting the window slid open the few inches allowed for fresh air.
“No. I grew up here and got used to freezing weather. Sometimes those prairy clippers pick up the snow and you feel your face is being sand-blasted—or ice-blasted, as the case might be.”
I like her. She has bright eyes and a warm smile. If I hadn’t seen her chart, I’d think her totally normal. The notation reads bipolar I disorder—psychosis, delusional thinking, hallucinations and disordered thinking.
It’s not my diagnosis, but that’s why she’s in here.
“Do you know why you’re in here, Amber?”
Her huge eyes grow sad. “I was brought here on a form—the policemen said I wasn’t arrested, but apprehended. They put handcuffs on me.”
“And why did they do that?”
“Said they had no alternative—said I was non-compliant because I told them I wasn’t crazy or a danger to myself.”
“Why did they think you were crazy?”
“I guess because I walked into the Empire Room and kinda had a meltdown.”
“Why was that?”
She takes a huge breath and begins to unfold her tale.
“Because everything was changed. It used to have a big sculpted ceiling, and plush green drapes with gold tassels and about a hundred tables covered with white table cloths and it was all gone—all changed—overnight!”
“You work there?"
She nods, “As a waitress.”
She begins folding and unfolding the hem of her hospital gown.
“ I asked for Eddie my boss and they said he didn’t work there—never did. I guess I got pretty upset—okay, maybe hysterical. Anyway, that’s when they called the police and they finally brought me here.”
“Where is this Empire Room?”
“It’s in the Palmer House Hotel downtown—Oh, why doesn’t anybody believe me?”
“I guess because the Empire Room is no longer there, Amber. It was there in the 1940’s, but not now.”
“Okay, okay—I believe you. Just tell me how to get back.”
“Get back where?”
“Get back to my life—to the 1940’s. I don’t belong here."
This is going to be a long conversation.
“Well, how did you get here?”
“I don’t know. I went to bed, had a funny dream and woke up walking downtown. I spotted the Palmer House, went in and—well, here I am.”
I tried a different tack. “Where did you go to high school?”
“South Shore, here in Chicago.”
“When did you graduate?”
“1945.”
“And you’re convinced you went to sleep one night in 1945 and woke up here seventy years later?”
She shrugged. “I guess so—I don’t have any other explanation.”
It was close to five and I had a dinner date with Tara, my wife. I made a note to check the details of Amber’s story and see if she had any relatives living in the area. I wanted to interview her further, but the time was getting late and I had to go.
“I’ll be in to see you tomorrow, Amber and we’ll check the details of your story. Don’t worry—we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“I hope so,” she replied. She looked so lost and forlorn, I wanted to stay and comfort her, but as I said, I had made the date with Tara and didn’t want to disappoint her.
I wrote a scrip for a mild sedative for Amber and benzodiazepine for her bedtime.
Ironically, my dinner reservation with Tara was made for the Lockwood Restaurant & Bar located in the Palmer House Hotel. Usually, I avoid discussing patients with Tara, especially over an anniversary dinner, but the surroundings inspired me to share Amber’s story.
Tara was fascinated. “Surely, the details would be easy enough to check—what about missing persons reports? Maybe the poor girl’s an amnesiac.”
I sipped from my glass of Yellow Tail. “I was thinking the same thing. It should be a relatively straightforward matter of finding out who she is—treating her is going to be the tricky part.”
Just as we were leaving the restaurant, my cell went off. The hospital needed me. I dropped Tara off at home, promising to get back as soon as I could, and headed for the Mental Health Facility.
When I arrived on the floor, there was pandemonium. Karen Olmstead, aka Klink, was having a meltdown of her own.
It seems Karen did a bed check just before going off duty. Usually, she’d do a count first, and then check off each name on her list just to be sure. Her initial head count came out to twenty-nine—one patient short.
She did the more detailed checklist and discovered Amber Taylor was missing.
Security was alerted and the closed circuit video cameras checked—they indicated Amber did not exit the facility. A thorough search of every closet, bathroom and storeroom was conducted, but to no avail. The girl seemed to have vanished into thin air.
“Do you have cameras in the patients’ rooms?” I asked.
Karen was adamant. “Oh no, Doctor Wallace—the privacy act wouldn’t allow that—all the cameras are in the common areas and the doors are electronic and require pass cards.”
“I still want to see all the video footage,” I insisted.
I sat down with Mike Edwards, the head of our security and we scanned through the video recordings—they were time and date stamped and showed absolutely nothing.
Then, I got an idea. I went out into the common area and checked for camera angles and blind spots. There were a few dead zones located in corners or windowless areas—there was no way that Amber could have escaped that way, unless she blasted her way out.
I was baffled. I examined the window in her room, but it only opened a crack—hardly wide enough to get a hand through.
I stood in the doorway and scanned the room—nothing. I turned around and scanned the common area outside and looked up and saw the camera. Then it hit me.
I went back to the video playback. On the video, her door was slightly ajar. I asked Mike if he could enhance the image and zoom in.
He was able to do it and so we ran the tape in slow motion. We could make out the dim outline of Amber’s sleeping torso, her back toward the door. At precisely, eleven fifteen, her sleeping form seemed to fade into nothingness—her disappearance was unmistakably captured on camera.
I have no explanation for what happened to Amber Taylor. We found her picture in The Tide, the 1945 edition of the South Coast High School Yearbook. There could be no doubt—it was her all right.
The police located a cousin living in Pennsylvania that reported Amber died of cancer in 2009. Those were the bare facts of the case.
Today, I’m sitting in my office looking at a file and a police admit report on a woman who died in 2009, but was admitted to our facility in 2024, suffering from bipolar disorder. I also have my own personal handwritten notes.
It’s absolutely impossible for Amber Taylor to have been a patient in this facility. She was dead. Then, I smile to myself—I forgot my own observation—even reasonableness in a psych ward becomes transmuted into something else.
There is no reasonable explanation for the case of Amber Taylor—but then, there are no rules to mental illness and one patient is totally unlike another.
