Tales from a Hospital

A few months ago, I was catatonic... I hadn't slept, eaten or talk for three days. I remember the entire ordeal, but from a confused state. A state of total chaos.

What could bring me, a 24 year old biomedical engineer, soon to be neural engineer, to do that? To act in such chaos?

It all lies in the mind and mental illness. 

To those who don't know, I struggle with schizoaffective (schizophrenia and bipolar), PTSD and Aspergers.

The mind and the brain are currently being rigorously studied and there is a current debate about how they work. At the same time that my brain was going haywire, I was studying the brain in the lab. It's almost as if I studied so hard that the wires in my brain went chaotic. Overdrive, I think.

The voices are something very interesting. When I heard voices in the hospital, they were voices of people I had talked to throughout different points in my life but their voices were clear as day, even if I hadn't talked to them in many years. The voices were the strongest when I was catatonic. They were tormenting me, calling me a liar and telling me nobody cared about me.

I thought for awhile that I was hearing the voices on an invisible earplug in my ear... I thought they were talking to me but were in another room. I kept looking in other rooms to see if they were there. I got in trouble a few times for going in other peoples' rooms.

When the medications started working, the voices slowly slipped away...

One of the most interesting aspects I can remember is that the reason I didn't eat for three days was that I thought the food was poisoned. All of the food they gave me looked like it was rotten. It actually looked that way; there were dark spots on everything and it looked disgusting.

Not only was I blessed with auditory hallucinations, but I also have visual hallucinations.

Plus paranoia.

A few months ago, I went to the police because I thought someone booby-trapped my apartment.

Paranoia and psychosis make you do interesting things.

What intrigues me as someone who has studied the brain and deals with such severe mental illness is how all of the different parts of the brain work together to cause such "organized chaos." The voices went along with the visual hallucinations and everything made sense to me. To an outsider, it makes no sense though.

The brain is very interesting...