Days 111- 120 Triage

People With AIDS called Patti to advise that they had a cheque waiting for Lee to pick up and since he would probably pick it up when he went for his appointment with De Wet on Jan. 2,I called the Advocates office at PWA and arranged for him to also pick up the forms for both his Living Will and Designation of Medical Alternate. Since he was no longer "Certified" I was going to make certain that should he crash again the documentation was in place to ensure we had rights to information and a degree of control over his treatment.

Lee's Journal Entry: Jan. 2, 1996

i finally got to sleep last night about 1-130 am.

i got up and went for breakfast, came back here to wait for the nurse to show up. now i wait for “meals on wheels” i hope the meal is better than the one yesterday, gross, tough roast beef.

i guess if i don’t get an eviction notice i won’t be committing suicide. my nerves have been bad and i’ve been smoking a lot because of it.

i just feel like committing suicide and getting this nightmare life over with. i just wish i could get a room in the grandville hotel then i could gas myself- that doesn’t frighten me. perhaps i’ll start phoning the hotel every morning to see if they have a vacancy. maybe i’ll luck out and get something right away. i won’t hold my breath. i’ve an appointment with dewet this afternoon and i don’t know if i want to go. rather, i don’t know if i should go.

i’d be content drinking a bottle of rum in one of my favorite cafes

***

the store I buy a carton of cigs was closed today.

pwa phoned mom and told her there was a cheque there waiting for me to be picked up.

i’m wondering “what cheque?”

so i go there to see what it is and find out it’s a chf cheque from last aug!! i think it was for $83. money i got and wasn’t counting on.

so it’s a total bonus.

i’m now in one of my favorite cafes drinking rum & coffee and rum & water.

***

i just came from seeing dewet. he asked me when the last time i drank.

i lied and told him this past weekend which was a total lie

as i had a few cocktails before seeing him. i don’t trust him anymore. i’ll never speak my suicidal thoughts again; nothing personal. i’m even thinking about trying out a different doctor.

he betrayed me. it was partly his doing i ended up on 2E ward. he justified it by saying “ it was because you were so full of suicidal thoughts!!”

i shared my thoughts, my inner thoughts with him. i shared my goals and aspirations with him... only for him to back-stab me by shipping me off to 2E.

i think it’s time i find a new doctor. i’ve always had weird vibes about dewet. he plays that he is really sincere but he isn’t. he strikes me as this “happy go lucky fag.”

***

after lunch today sadness swept over me as it does now. i cry as i cried earlier. it’s as if everything in my life is sad.

***

i’ve forgotten where the apartment is exactly. i hope i’m able to find it.

***

i’ve been moved to a different hotel. it’s not close to downtown, which is a drag. i feel massively depressed. i just want to get drunk. i shit my pants earlier and now i’m sitting in it as the place i’m in has no public washroom!! i wonder what my new room will be like. i hope it’s better than my old one.

i wish i’d die.

i wish i could gas myself.

i wish i could clean up my ass.

i wish i died months ago when i was on my deathbed. i was so close to death. why couldn’t i have died.

and here i am now wanting to die more than anything else.

tomorrow i’ll go downtown and buy 1 bottle and 1 micky of dark rum and tomorrow afternoon i’ll sit in my new room and drink it all.

On Friday, Jan. 5, Lee called and left a message on the machine asking to come out and visit the next day. He called back at 7pm and we were surprised to find out that he wasn’t living at Dunsmuir anymore. He had moved to someplace else, he wasn’t exactly sure where, but they had three meals a day and they were pretty good. His room was nice, but he didn’t know the phone number, the name of the place or the address. He’d bring it with him. Patti and I could only look at each other and think, "What the hell is going on now?".

He arrived about noon on Saturday, with several ugly abrasions on his face which he attributed to “ a crash in the gravel a couple of days ago.” He had pissed his pants during the ride out to Surrey on the Skytrain so Patti gave him a pair of mine to wear while she washed his. I was working Saturdays at that time and since he arrived with 12 beer and seemed prepared to just sit and drink all day, there wasn’t much for Patti to do but to join him and try to find out what was happening.

Lee had gone to pick up his cheque on Tues at PWA but had decided to call and cancel his appointment with Dr. De Wet. He remembered going to PWA but he didn’t remember picking up any papers. He’d have a look when he got back. He didn’t remember our visit with Dr. De Wet the previous week. He didn’t know whether he had kept his appointment with De Wet on Tuesday. At some point in the week he returned to Dunsmuir House to find all of his belongings piled into plastic bags and was told he was moving someplace else, was put into a cab and shipped off to this new place. From the fact that he was pissed off that they only had cereal for breakfast today, previously he had had eggs and french toast, we concluded he had been there a couple of days. He knew the address was 707 Powell Street. Patti called Dunsmuir and found out the name of the place was Triage.

We returned Lee to Triage after we took him out for supper. I had a talk with a young attendant there named Theresa who was most helpful giving me what information and names she could. At this point it seemed that some big “mystery” person was pulling all the strings and neither Lee nor us has any control in matters. Lee had been at Triage since Tuesday, his meds were delivered by the Burrard Pharmacy to Triage, so we had to assume that Dr. De Wet either arranged for Lee to be sent there or had been advised of his move. Why didn’t he let us know what was happening?

The next morning I went down to Triage and found out that Lee had been booted out of Dunsmuir for his continual violations of the booze rules. Doug Peat at Dunsmuir made good on his word and managed to pull some strings and get Lee place at Triage ahead of a waiting list. The Day Supervisor told me that Lee had finally been accepted as a client by the ACT Team. This was the same team that was to have been in place when Lee was discharged from St. Paul's..

I talked to Lee and found out that he had picked up the Legal forms I had requested from PWA. These were his Living Will and Medical Alternative designations, and I had him sign them then and there with the Triage staff as witnesses. I promptly delivered a copy to Triage and to Dr. De Wet’s office.

On Tuesday, the next day, I received a phone call from Miss Doreen Littlejohn of the ACT, who informed me that the Assertive Community Team is part of Greater Vancouver Mental Health. They were set up to handle repeat high users of hospital services, to locate these people, support and follow them out in the community and attempt to keep them out of hospital. She also told me that they had received Lee’s application from Peter Weir late Thursday, Dec. 21. They requested data from other hospitals but it was after Christmas before they got responses. Based on the fact that Lee apparently had only one long stay at St. Paul’s he was not a "repeat" user, he was turned down. They had since reevaluated and Lee does meet their criteria. Lee was now their responsibility. They would find him the best housing available that could tolerate his drinking and behavior, keep in contact with him, monitor his meds, make certain that he’s eating and in general try to keep him from landing up in the hospital again.

On Wednesday they planned for Lee to see the Portland Hotel. It’s a skid row dump, but, each room has it’s own fridge, there is a common kitchen he can use, and there are 2 workers there to administer his meds and monitor his behavior. It sounded pretty grim over the phone but it will probably be ideal for Lee. As long as he can have his bottle of booze, he will probably just hole up and be OK for a while.

Thursday evening after supper, we had a call from Dave at Triage to tell us that Lee was once again drunk and disorderly with a bottle of rum, inviting other residents to his room for “cocktails.“ They are very sorry but they can’t handle him. As soon as he can be bundled up, an ambulance has been arranged to run him to Vancouver General Hospital since his Homecare Worker is from the St. James Society which is affiliated with VGH. We thought about it for a long time, and in the end decided to do nothing. ACT had advised Lee was now their client, so we decided to see if the system actually worked.

This time it did. We got a call from Doreen Littlejohn on Friday morning saying they had recovered Lee from VGH, and she and Lee were out taking care of some business. She called back at 5:30 and told us that Lee was now a resident in the Walton Hotel on East Hastings. She had spent the day with Lee, taken him shopping, and she thinks at one point he might actually have smiled. Lee is placed as well as he can for the time being and now we just have to wait and see how he handles the situation.