Part 35: Asylum

It was a relief when classes began at UMBC and I could wade into the emergency health services curriculum. The first semester included courses on management, systems, and the history of emergency medical services.

None of the coursework was clinical or medical in nature, since everybody accepted into the program was already an EMT or paramedic. We were being trained to go beyond the streets. We were to become the next wave of paramedic managers, to learn the gospel of the Maryland Way and become its disciples.

Once properly trained, we would go forth to develop systems and programs that save lives.

I enjoyed meeting other guys in similar circumstances—paramedics from other parts of the country who also uprooted their lives to attend UMBC, people who were displaced and in transition, still getting acclimated to this place.

Aside from Bill Brown from New Hampshire, there was Jim Cheney, who had worked at his uncle’s ambulance service in Geneva, Ohio for several years after serving in the Air Force, and Mike Curtis, a paramedic from Milwaukee, was still contemplating medical school as he enrolled at UMBC.

They were all bright, experienced field personnel. We were all new in town, strangers thrown together by necessity. Each was curious about learning the Shock Trauma secret recipe. That’s what brought us here.

One evening after class, Jim and Mike talked me and another EHS student into joining them for a beer in the student Rathskeller, which was located in the basement of UMBC's old administration building.

Located on a hill behind the student apartments, the old administration building is an ancient federalist-style structure with a white cupola. We walked down a staircase into the basement, down a cinderblock corridor to a large room scattered with tables.

We sat at a table with a pitcher of beer and shared war stories for a while. Eventually, the topic turned to UMBC. Curtis informed us that the school is a land grant university, and that the property used to be part of Spring Grove, a large psychiatric facility across Wilkens Avenue.

“This building used to be a mental asylum,” Curtis said.

I looked around the Rathskeller. It was immediately recognizable—the painted institutional cinderblock walls, the wide doorways, the individual rooms around the periphery that students used as booths, the adjoining room at the end with a large pass-through window that they used as a bar…

We’re sitting in an old day room of a seclusion unit. The former nurse's station now dispensed beer.

Unbelievable, I thought to myself. After relocating more than 2,500 miles and starting a new life, I’m back in lock-up.