A few years back I had to take my mother to the ER at our local hospital. She was put onto a gurney and wheeled into a small curtained-off cubicle. The only thing separating the patients were the curtains. While I was sitting in a chair in the cubicle next to my mother, I saw a young man, probably early 20s, being brought into the cubicle directly across from my mother's. He was in a wheelchair, and he was helped up onto a gurney to be examined. I overheard every word that was being said, and it seems that the young man had been dumped by his girlfriend, and he had decided to end it all with a bottle of Tylenol. I was always under the impression that Tylenol wasn't that lethal if taken in large amounts, but later found out it was very damaging to the liver if taken in large doses.
Anyway, I could hear the nurses telling him they would need to pump his stomach. He obviously didn't like the sound of that, so he told them he didn't want that. Then the nurses took a very aggressive stance toward him. He was told that he could either cooperate with the procedure, or they could put him into restraints. He got very silent at this point, and you could see the resignation on his face.
A few minutes later, several men (I am assuming they were nurses) entered the cubicle with a rolling table with a large device which I assumed was the machine that would pump his stomach.
The nurses then, rather forcefully, helped him lie down, rolled him onto his left side, then one nurse grabbed his right arm, another one held his legs, and another put his hand on his forehead, holding his head down.
Then the tube was introduced, and within a matter of seconds, all you could hear was the man gagging and even though I tried not to watch, out of the corner of my eye I could see him squirming, and trying to kick and use his hands to pull the tube out, but the nurses had a really firm hold on his arms and legs, so there was no chance of that happening. In addition to the extreme gagging, the patient started to cry, and beg them to stop. I really felt bad for this guy.
When it was finally over, and they had managed to flush his stomach out completely, they helped him to roll back onto his back, and raise the head of the bed back into a sitting position. The humiliation was written all over his face. He had just been witnessed by many other patients and visitors as he whimpered and cried through the procedure.
A little while later I approached his bed, and tried to make small talk with him, to try to get him to forget about his ordeal. He told me that if he had known what he was going to be put through, he probably wouldn't have come to the ER.