Benny wasn’t quite sure why he’d come to the clinic…
Benny Benedict came to the clinic looking for me and Lou. He wasn’t quite certain whether or not he needed to tell us something but fortunately the cautious side of him won out and he slowly spilled the lot. We never got to the bottom of whether it was a voice that made him do it or some other psychotic driver or just part of the confusion that prevented him from knowing if what he’d done actually happened and if it was really dangerous or just a dream.
I’ll cut through all the fog and bewilderment in Benny’s story to tell you this; he’d gone into another patient’s room and wrapped a belt around their neck. The other patient, Dopey, was the ward vegetable, operating permanently at 33 1/3 rpm from a combination of schizophrenia and brain damage from heavy duty drug & solvent use.
Benny said Dopey just looked up at him and laughed in his dopey way. This reaction could not have helped his confused state but it was Dopey’s reaction to most things, “Do you want a few more chips?” “Go and get your medication” or “Your brother’s here to visit you.”
Benny unwrapped the belt and left the room only to return a bit later to try again. This time, Dopey’s reaction was a better one and it possibly saved his life. When Benny tried to wrap the belt around his neck for the second time, Dopey stopped him, saying, “No, you’re not doing that to me again.” He was still laughing his dopey laugh though. It might have been this second reaction that alerted Benny, made him think that something might be wrong and he’d better go to the staff to check it out. He told us, again confusedly, dreamily, that he thought he’d wanted to tighten the belt. Would Dopey’s struggling have snapped him back to reality or would he have reacted by pulling tighter? Impossible to say.
Lou and I looked at each other. We felt relieved that everyone had been granted a stroke of luck. Dopey from not being dead, Benny from not spending years in Rampton on a Section 37 and Lou and me from the comparatively trivial months of waiting to be quizzed in Coroner’s Court, sleepless nights worrying whether we’d missed something and the guilt of knowing that a patient we were supposed to be looking after had been killed on our watch.
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