The hallway walls on the twenty-first floor were bare, showing nothing but faded paint and reinforced tinted glass. I hadn’t been to this part of the hospital in close to a year but the maintenance carts and construction tarps to the left of the elevators did not seem to have moved. It was the highest floor in the building but I had long thought that the brown and taupe evoked the image of a dungeon, rather than the penthouse.
I pressed the intercom button to announce myself to the nursing station and sat obediently in the small waiting room to be let in. My eyes lingered for a moment on the sign next to the door – “Caution Opening Door; Elopement Risk” – and I grunted. The phrase had always struck me as odd, as though the staff were concerned that the patients’ first destination if they left the unit would be a seedy Las Vegas chapel.
Her therapist entered and greeted me with a smile and a handshake. We exchanged pleasantries and she led me through a maze of hallways to the meeting room. Our patient was seated next to the table, her mother and grandmother on either side of her and her infant brother bouncing on her lap. I smiled at the family and the two other social workers in the room and made my way to a seat across the table. The baby tracked me as I sidled between the chairs, his expression of skepticism strong enough to rival any teenager’s.
Don’t worry, kid, I thought. I hate having to be here as much as you do.
I tried to take back the thought almost as soon as it passed through my head. I didn’t hate being there; face to face contact with my families has always been my favorite part of my job, even if it happened in a hospital. I wanted to be there for her and her family – Lord knows they needed someone to be – especially given the circumstances they had been facing recently. And, as helpful as the hospital treatment team had been, they couldn’t have the same insight as someone who had been working with the girl and her family for close to two years.
The family was quite comfortable with me; the girl had revealed more in our first few meetings than I expected about her trauma history, her mental health symptoms and her relationships with her family members. I had worked with a number of families who had told me that they considered me more of a beloved cousin than a clinician. It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear this girl’s grandmother describe her affection for me in similar terms.
But there was still no escaping the awkwardness of the situation. I sat quietly as the girl played with her baby brother, making mental notes of her mother’s and grandmother’s facial expressions and silent reactions as they watched her. I might have been almost a relative in their eyes but this moment – the girl seeing her mother and baby brother for the first time in weeks – was not meant for “almost relatives.” This reunion was a critical moment for the girl, a chance for her to care for a loved one who needed her and to be cared for by those who loved her. It was a private meeting, meant to be shared only by those in the innermost circle, the trusted few privileged enough to be a part of the family’s healing. I was an intruder; not only a voyeur into one of the girl’s most personal moments, but an implicit judge of the meanings behind her behaviors.
I needed to be in the room. I needed to be present to support the girl’s family, to help them understand their loved one’s mindset and to remind them of the struggles that were likely still to come. I needed to be there to give feedback to the hospital treatment team about their recommendations and to clarify those decisions for the girl’s family. I needed to serve as a sounding board for the girl so that she could vent and cry and curse and continue working to understand where she had been, where she was and where she was going.
I needed to be in the room.
But I didn’t belong there.
