CHAPTER 67

2025-07-16

When I realized that I was wrong, I felt a bit like the actor in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" who suddenly realized that his university classmate and his young niece, who had been with him for many years, had never grown up in the past years. These two characters were created out of thin air in his mind.

On the first night I was admitted to the psychiatric ward, my thoughts turned for the first time. In the past three months, I realized for the first time that my thoughts were wrong. I misunderstood my wife and younger son.

By the end of May, when I was ill, I had already determined that my wife and son abandoned me deliberately in the hospital and no longer cared about me. When I was admitted to the hospital, I argued with the burly male nurse who looked like a black boxing champion about my family's intention to send me to the hospital. When he was sure that I was unreasonable, he asked my son about my condition alone. I have been somewhat afraid of him since then.

A few hours later, when the hospital officially admitted me as a patient, I changed into a patient uniform in the waiting room and waited for various examinations and questions from different people. I had already prepared myself mentally that most medical staff would choose to believe my family's one-sided words. This expectation was confirmed one by one, and they soon agreed that there was something wrong with me.

It started with the intern female doctor. She looked Middle Eastern, about 30 years old, with long black hair, big eyes, unusually pointed cheeks, and very thin. The mentor she invited also agreed with her diagnosis, and I was sure that I would be detained in the hospital. From then on, I and other people who were labeled as mentally ill would only be separated, isolated, and finally secluded, abandoned and forgotten.

My wife and son stayed with me in the emergency room until about noon, and told me that they would leave first and come back to visit me in the evening. I thought they were perfunctory to me, but in fact they would never come back, and I would never see them again.

I recalled afterwards that they should have noticed that my expression and looks were strange, but at that moment they were exhausted and had to fight for rest time to recover their spirit and physical strength. The relatives of mental patients often bear great pressure and are misunderstood by the patients. They suffer by themselves and cannot explain their reasons.

After they left, I continued to have wild thoughts and made up some fragmentary and untrue stories in my mind. Soon a female nurse took me through an underground passage in the hospital and entered the acute psychiatric male patient ward (this experience will be described in detail later). Here I phoned a mentor about my admission.

I was uneasy, thinking that I would live with other patients in this closed environment without a sense of security until an unknown time. Then I was transported in a wheelchair and escorted by the mover and security guards to an old intensive care psychiatric ward building next to the hospital (now dismantled). I stayed here for three weeks, three days longer than when I had a liver transplant.

It was noon when I completed the procedures and entered the room. Soon the mentor came to visit. After her leave, several buddies who I had known for 40 years also visited around dinner time. They told me that my wife would come later because she needed to rest. I replied that she would not come again. All of them disagreed and comforted me that she would definitely come. One of them even assured me that my wife, Victoria would definitely come and she would stay with me until my wife arrived.

The idea that I firmly believed in at that time was broken at around 7:30 pm. Looking back now, this idea is exaggerated and untrue, and it will fall apart on its own. Yet such belief had a wide foundation by then. I lost confidence completely in everything and everyone. My despair engraved a "no" on everyone and everything.

When I, standing by the entrance of my room, saw my wife walking out of the elevator, I turned around and bowed 90 degrees to my friend who was still sitting in the chair beside the bed. I first thanked my friend for her love and confidence in the matter, and admitted that I was wrong. This awakening was crucial.

It felt a bit like the actor in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" who suddenly realized that his university classmate and his young niece had never grown up. These two characters were created out of thin air in his mind.

During the three weeks of hospital stay, I lived a rather different life and gradually settled down.