Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer Read Free Book Online

had been a gang member, drug user, and petty dealer who didn’t actively abuse her children so much as neglect them.
Feral
was the term ACS used in a report that had been shared with Tanisha by a social worker when she was a young teenager. Tanisha had no idea what feral was. She had thought it was an animal, a pet tiger.
    The Smiths were the first family Tanisha remembered. They were a black Jamaican couple with six youngsters under their care. Tanisha was four years old. They were benign with the children. There was food on the table, and the kids were bathed and kept clean, dry, and warm. They slept in one large dormitory room with the door open. The husband came home from driving a city bus and sat in front of the television and slipped a bottle of rum out from a brown paper bag. His personality went from quiet and calm to an animal growl with a few sips of the brownish liquid. Tanisha could still hear his voice penetrating the walls and the open door, “Get your fucking ass in here, bitch. Get your fucking ass right in here.” The yelling, cursing, screaming, door banging, and throwing would cease around midnight, when he could be heard snoring. The thunderous snores were punctuated by long apneic pauses when he ceased to breathe altogether. And then the rumble would begin again after some horse-like snorts. The kids would finally get to sleep between nightmares and bed-wetting. One day a dozen ACS workers showed up at the apartment with several official white vehicles idling in the street. The children were all packed up and taken away. Two workers accompanied each child. Mrs. Smith was nowhere in sight. Mr. Smith was driving his bus. They were all taken to a large shelter somewhere in Brooklyn.
    By the time Tanisha was seven, she had been in seven different residential homes and foster families, plus a few shelters and ACSdistribution facilities. She remembered her first hospitalization as she reached the bottom of the bridge and kept walking down Delancey Street. She stopped in a Dunkin’ Donuts on the north side of the street. This was an old hangout, and she was glad it was still here after so many years. There was already a line in front of the counter where some Indian women presided over the coffee and donuts. She settled in a window seat warming up for a few minutes. At age seven she had become unmanageable. The foster family had called 911 when she attacked another foster child who hit Tanisha and called her a bitch. Something had flipped and continued to flip without any warning signs.
    She would be fine—then suddenly hypervigilant. Something would snap, and later she had no recognition of what had happened. Except that some adults were holding her down, sitting on her, injecting her buttock with Haldol that put her to sleep or left her extremely dopey, in a dream-like state. She had once been taken to an emergency room at the local hospital. After hours of sitting on a stretcher with a bored woman in light brown scrubs looking at her, reading the paper, and talking to her boyfriend on her cell phone, she was admitted to the inpatient pediatric unit. The other kids had diabetes, pneumonia, influenza, epilepsy, asthma, and mental retardation. Tanisha remembered the doctor who talked to her two days after she was admitted. He took her into a quiet room, with a social worker taking notes at his side. There were toys in the room. Tanisha was asked if she wanted to play with the toys or draw. She refused to talk to the man, who looked bored and tired. She was hungry and asked for food. They said after she drew them a picture. She sat and waited them out. After a month on the unit, visited by social workers, psychologists and the occasional psychiatrist, and ACS workers, she was transferred to another foster family.
    A succession of families followed, interrupted by shelter stays when the families disintegrated in a shower of police calls, domestic violence, drug dealing, and ACS investigations. As Tanisha