I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Chapter 7 Summary

  • Deborah is now in D ward and is terrified. Women are lying about or sitting, crying, and screaming at will. No one is pretending to be normal here. The attendants and nurses here are larger and more muscular.
  • Lee Miller is the first person to come up and talk to Deborah. Lee introduces herself as a fellow psychotic.
  • Deborah has another session with Dr. Fried, who learns that Deborah has been moved to D ward. Deborah shows the doctor the marks on her arm from the tin can.
  • Dr. Fried is very concerned. She informs Deborah that it's possible to live in the real world again, but now she's very troubled and can only move toward getting better if she tells why she cut herself that badly.
  • Deborah tells Dr. Fried that Yr started off as a beautiful place full of gods who were her companions, kept her company, and looked out for her. This was especially true at summer camp and school, where everyone in the real world seemed to hate her, and where her strangeness set her apart from her peers. Yr even had its own language. But as time went on, Yr grew to be full of pain and punishment.
  • There are still days when Deborah is revered as the queen of Yr, but those are only on certain "high" days of the Yri calendar; on the "low" days, she's ridiculed.
  • Deborah describes being screamed at by the Collect and having to answer to the whims of the Censor, whose main job is to keep the secrets of Yr.
  • Yeah, Deborah's world is not what it used to be. It's actually ends up becoming a lot like Earth—full of lies and tyranny.
  • Dr. Fried is pleased with Deborah's sharing during their session and advises her to tell her Yri gods that they will both work very hard and not be intimidated by them.
  • When Deborah gets back to D ward, she feels and hears Yr closing in on her, angry for disclosing the secrets.
  • The ward administrator can tell Deborah's frightened and explains that he will arrange a cold-sheet pack for her. A cold-sheet pack means you're wrapped like a mummy in cold damp sheets for a few hours. It's supposed to calm you down. But when the ward administrator tells Deborah, "It doesn't hurt—don't worry" (Ch.7.37), Yr warns her that those were the same words the doctors used when they told her that the operation wouldn't hurt—and look what happened there. Deborah hears the words and blacks out.
  • Deborah comes to as she's being packed in the wet, cold sheets, and then she disappears into Yr's Pit—a place of isolation and punishment.
  • After nearly four hours, Deborah's freed from the pack and goes back to her room.
  • On the way to Deborah's room, a fellow ward-mate, known as "the unsecret wife of the abdicated King of England" (she's a patient obsessed with rape who is convinced the mental hospital is a brothel), tells Deborah she saw her being raped by a doctor as punishment for not sleeping with him.
  • That didn't really happen, but it lets us get a glimpse of another patient's brand of troubles.