The South Carolina State Hospital by William Buchheit

Author:William Buchheit
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

ACTS OF COMPASSION

Any semblance of comic relief was welcome at Bull Street, as it was often a depressing and emotionally exhausting place to work. Even a seasoned nurse like Skipper, who’d watched hundreds of patients die inside the emergency room at Baptist, was shaken by a young AIDS patient who spent his final hours in her care. By the time the twenty-four-year-old arrived at Byrnes, he was bald, emaciated and suffering a fever of 105 degrees. For Skipper, the saddest part of this experience was how the young man didn’t have any loved ones with him during his last moments. “My mother taught me that no one should die alone,” she said. “So, when it was obvious that he was dying, I took off my gloves, held his hand and talked with him until he passed.” After death mercifully came to the man, Skipper cried for her first and only time while working at Bull Street. She then dried her eyes, took a few deep breaths, put her gloves back on and returned to work on the ward.

In addition to the inherent emotional strains of the job at Bull Street, there were also a number of physical risks that the hospital’s employees faced. Skipper’s mother, Geneva, was forced into early retirement in 1981, when a patient attacked her in the Williams building. While Geneva and several other staffers were trying to push the man into a seclusion room, he managed to grab her and slam her headfirst into a wall. The assault permanently damaged Geneva’s spine. Two decades later, Skipper would suffer her own attack while on the clock at the hospital. It was surprising, she said, because the patient was usually quite fond of her. “I turned my back on him, and what he saw was evidently not me but something else,” she recalled. “He started beating me in the head, and the moment I turned around and faced him, he broke down and started crying.” Except for a headache, Skipper was uninjured in the attack. And when other staff members urged her to lock the delusional patient in a seclusion room, she refused, choosing instead to go sit with him in his room until he calmed down. It was a signature act of compassion from the woman who’d first come to Bull Street as a teenager many years ago.

I see mental illness the same way I see physical illness. It is something that happens to us, and we cannot help [it]. We just need to accept it, try to care for them and love them. We always want to label everybody, but I think if people actually worked around these patients and saw them as the humans they really are, they would feel differently.

In 2002, Skipper left Bull Street to become a hospice nurse. Three years later, her mother, Geneva, died. Over the last decade, Skipper has retired from nursing and made a life for herself in the country, living on a large piece of farmland between Belton and Anderson.

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