Today I went on my first job that I got through my new agent.
“What was the job, Erin!?! Are you going to be in a commercial? A movie? A Taylor Swift music video?”
Um…no.
This was a training video for psychiatric hospital employees (I know! Stop being jealous), so this morning I played an asthmatic, epileptic psych ward patient who was being improperly restrained. I spent my morning lying in a hallway on the dirty floor of a rehab hospital. I writhed and yelled and wheezed and rolled my eyes back in my head while two women held my shoulders down and pressed their knees into my back and my face into the floor. Over and over again. (In case you didn’t know, this is an improper way to handle another human being.) Evidently, I was playing out a situation that actually happened in which the patient died. Yes. Glamorous AND uplifting.
I’ve got an awesome bruise on my left hip bone from my seizure that I will lovingly refer to as my “epilepsy bruise” for the next several weeks (because bruises LOVE me so much that they stick around for ages), but other than that, I had a really good time. In the afternoon, we demonstrated several more proper and improper ways of handling patients, which required me to be manhandled, twisted up, and sat upon by a nice young man I had just met. (You make friends fast in this business.)
All in all (especially when you count the free Doritos, trail mix and Caesar salad I got out of the deal) it was a fantastic experience that my hipbones and I shan’t soon forget.
