At the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley, near Southampton, Ronnie is assigned to the insulin ward. There, schizophrenic patients are given insulin injections at 6 a.m., and within a few hours they slip into a coma, as a form of shock treatment. The insulin puts them in danger of having an epileptic seizure, easily triggered by exposure to light, and so the ward is kept in complete darkness; the staff wears headlamps in order to see at all. By 10 a.m., the doctors and nurses begin pumping glucose through the patients’ stomach tubes to slowly reawaken them—if they are under for too long, the coma may become irreversible. For the rest of his life, Ronnie will remember his time in the darkened room, moving between the 20 beds of these men who are barely among the living.
