Reggie’s Story

“When I was born they left me in the incubator too long, so I didn’t have much sight, just light perception. My father didn’t like me very much. He drank a lot and would get violent. One night he got drunk and dropped a cigarette in the bed and my baby sister died in the fire. I had problems with my kidneys and wet the bed. My mother would make me take all my clothes off and then she’d use a belt on me. She used the belt a lot. When I was four they put me in Fernald because they didn’t have any other place to put me. I didn’t have any choice.

When I went to Fernald, the children were in ward 21 and the little babies were in ward 22. To the left of ward 22 was a nursery with little, tiny babies. My family would visit on holidays, once or twice a year. We’d sit out in the lobby. I didn’t say too much to them; I was very upset.

I had lots of jobs at Fernald. Every day I had to make 24 beds, six in each row. On Wednesday mornings I had to strip all the beds, put a sheet in the middle of the floor, throw all the sheets inside, and tie that sheet up. After that I’d have to put all new sheets on the beds. If I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, Ms. Gusten would tell me, “If you don’t have all those beds made by the time I get back, you’re going in isolation.” So I had to make the beds; I had to.

I got along with the day nurses. I used to be Ms. Burke’s favorite because I would tell her what’s going on from the eleven to seven shift. I had to take care of the patients that were more disturbed; the ones that would chew their finger nails off. I had to put socks on their hands. I never got bitten by them because I knew when they were going to bite me, and I would put a pillow in front of me, like this: you center the pillow, so when they bite, they bite the pillow.

When I was in my teens I left Fernald and went to the Protestant Guild. They had to teach me a lot: money skills, how to cross the street, how to turn your body so you don’t fall off the curb, how to learn the inside of a building so you could find the room you were staying in.

When I was at Fernald, me and my friend David used to watch the freight trains a lot. We would know when a freight train would come to the Shell heating plant at night. At the time it was a B&M railroad, ‘till it changed to Conrail. There’s a lot of history about the trains. You’d ask questions and learn a lot of things, like how things were shipped, how supplies were put in, what kind of cars they had. I started learning the bus routes when I was at the Protestant Guild. I learned the schedules so if somebody needed to take a bus somewhere, I could tell them. There are 179 bus routes and I know the schedules for half of them, but I love trains the best. I go with the Mystic Valley Railway Society on train trips every year. Two summers ago my roommate Gordon and I took a sleeper car to Montana for a train convention.

Me and Gordon share an apartment in Brookline. Philip is my case manager—he watches out for me.”

Based on an interview with Reggie, a MAB resident since 1974, who lives in Brookline.

Read Artie’s story