Grandma's first electroshock

I've been reading a lot of books lately, but I'll spare you my pitiful attempts at reviewing them. Try as I might, I'm just bad at it, unless I mull it over for a few months first.

But still, books tend to remind me of other things, or at least make me think a lot, so I guess I can tell you about that. So I finished The Cure for Death by Lightning today. It was set in a place I'm not familiar with, but judging by the description, it was about 150 km north of where I live.

In it they mentioned a place called Essondale. I thought that perhaps it would have been helpful had they put some sort of note in the book as to what exactly it was. I knew, but I don't suppose many would.

Essondale, now Riverview Hospital, is where my grandma Eileen studied nursing. Today much of it sits empty, and its grounds are home to an impressive collection of rare trees, but from what I understand it wasn't a particularly nice place when grandma worked there.

Inside there is a display of all the old instruments and equipment that used to be used for the treatment of mental illness. They used to stick people in special therapeutic bathtubs with fitted covers to keep them confined, shaped such that the patients could recline, but far too short for them to slip in and drown. Left alone in the room, patients used to drum their feet rythmically against the ends of the tubs. The rest was silent.

The space in the middle of the stairwells at Riverview are all caged in. They weren't always that way. While grandma worked there, one of the patients threw one of grandma's coworkers down that space between the flights and she died. This same patient used to stay in a special room naked, all by herself because she was so violent.

Once a day all the nurses would block all the exits between her room and the shower room. They would throw open her door, and she would walk down to be washed, occasionally throwing a few punches at the staff on her way. Then, while she was out, they would hose down her room.

Years later, grandma came across this woman eating ice cream in front of a corner store. By that time, medicine had made enormous leaps past what it had been while she had been a psych nurse, but she still hid from her.

The nurses used to wear shoes with very thick rubber soles. At her first electroshock, grandma's job was to hold down a patient while he convulsed. Later, they would go through one after another after another on electroshock days, but her first time the man was struggling, because he was scared. They applied the electrodes, placed something in his mouth for him to bite and flipped the switch.

Grandma woke up in the room where they wheeled everyone after being electroshocked. Already, people were regaining consciousness, silently getting up from their gurneys and wandering around the room, bumping into walls.