I work in a very interesting hospital, and there is never a dull moment. Today I met a new patient, who I will call Jane Doe for HIPAA reasons. She just wanted to bring joy to the world before our first meeting, so we had “dance therapy by Jane.”

We turned on the radio and she commenced a series of interesting moves, including one that she called the “peach” which entailed spreading her legs and getting as low to the floor as possible. It was named that as we were listening to the song that goes, “I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree.” In which she replied, “they can shake my peach anyday, my peaches haven’t been shaken in years!” The staff and other patients couldn’t help but laugh, but she was being completely serious. It kind of made me sad, but I couldn’t help but laugh as well… it went on for 15 minutes. Jane had signs of a schizophrenic, couldn’t stay still, lost her train of thought easily and was easily triggered. For the majority of the morning she kept telling me how glad she was to hear Osama bin Laden had been killed, because he was her ex husband and he sodomized her over and over again.

When I came back from lunch with the other patients, she and I were standing by the nurses station when she started to talk about her new husband of 2 years. She told the nurse, “If anyone tried to take my husband away from me, I would kill them with my bare hands. If I had to shoot them with a shotgun or whatever, I don’t care, I’d do it.” She then looked at me and said, “ESPECIALLY YOU. I saw you looking at my husband…” I told her, “Jane, but I’ve never met your husband. I don’t even know who he is.” She held her hands up and pretended like she was choking someone, “I’ll kill you with my own hands.” She kept getting closer to me, so I started backing up. Finally the nurse said, “we’re not going to even think about hurting anyone Jane. Let’s talk about flowers.” Jane said, “flowers, I like flowers. I drew a picture of roses for my husband, just like the ones he planted in my backyard.” I walked away, I didn’t even know what to think.

Later on right as I was leaving my shift, a new young girl who was fairly pretty was taking over as the Tech. Jane said, “you have really nice boobs, are those plastic?” She laughed and said, “no they’re not plastic, haha.” “Well how come I can’t have boobs like yours, I don’t have any boobs. Do I need to get plastic surgery?” The tech said, “No you are beautiful the way you are Jane, if you want your boobs to look bigger then try a different bra.” Then they went on and on about what type of bra she should get, the color, the store, the price, if we could take her there and watch her try it on, etc. Then she said, “I don’t like girls like you, Miss America. I don’t like pretty girls, I want to kill all of them.”

Oh Jane Doe, you certainly are a character.