Hello! Hope you guys are doing excellent. Here's a true story told by a nurse on reddit. Enjoy!
Ben was a man in his forties. The only time I saw him, looked prim and dignified, although definitely groggy. Had he worn a suit instead of hospital clothes, it would have been extremely easy to imagine him as a businessman.
His hair was short and well-kept, nails were manicured. No previous hospital stays, either, judging from the state records.
Briefly, everything about him seemed to clash with his admission story.
Apparently, a neighbor had called emergency services on him. Said neighbor was line-drying some laundry, happened to peek into Ben's room one floor below and saw him intently looking into a mirror while trying to cut some slits into his back with a small axe.
Upon arrival, as per routine, a psychiatrist evaluated him and got the following: Ben had had a dream a week prior. A handsome man that "looked superhuman" had told him that "his mortal days were almost over", and that he could finally take his "final form" and "set himself free".
"It took me a few days to figure out why, but the morning after the dream my whole back was itching. Like, really badly. There was no rash, or sores, but if I looked close enough in the mirror, sometimes I could see these small, little bumps symmetrically aligned with my shoulder blades."
When the doctor asked what he thought those "bumps" were, ben had no hesitation whatsoever.
"My wings, of course!"
The itch had turned into pain pretty quickly, according to Ben, so he figured out that if he could just free his wings from underneath his skin, the discomfort would stop. Hence why the axe.
He has appeared disappointed as the doctors stitched his skin back together. He lamented the fact that, had he been flexible enough to use a knife on himself, he could have done a better job and wouldn't have ended at the hospital.
For a stroke of bad luck, there were no beds available in the psychiatric unit, so some higher up decided to "park" Ben in another ward for a few hours, until a suicide watch would end and they could give the "Angel Man" a room where he apparently belonged. Of course, a psychiatrist would check on him regularly, and he would be pumped full of sedatives and antipsychotics, to be on the safe side.
Everything happened after I was done for the day.
There was a small power outage (seriously, hospital power outages happen far more often than one would hope), around 6 pm. As it was winter, it was already fairly dark outside, which created a bit of commotion among the patients, even if the whole ordeal lasted a minute at most.
Once the situation was back to normal, the on-call psychiatrist realized Ben wasn't there any longer. The window in his room was open, but there were no signs of him jumping or sliding down and, of course, no body was found.
It was decided that he opened the window as a diversion and then just used the mayhem the power outage created to flee the hospital AMA.
It made sense, all in all. Occam's razor: the easiest explanation is likely to be the truth. I just don't know, in all this, where to place the bloody surgical knife left on the bed, the splotches of blood around the room and the handful of black feathers on the window sill.
