Crazy Night At The Asylum (isn't that redundant?)

The night shift didn't start in a good way last Sunday night. One of the patients had started hitting other patients again so he had to be monitored by his own 1:1 staffmember. Then we had two registry medication nurses and two registry nurse's aides working with us, so we were missing almost half of our regular staff.
Just about an hour after we stepped into the ward, a new male patient had gone missing but was quickly found trying to have sex with a female patient in her bathroom. Fortunately for us we managed to have a pre-coitus interruptus. So those two had to be watched very closely to prevent the situation from happening again. The male patient was a huge guy and it would have been very difficult for us to stop him if we couldn't redirect him verbally. To add to that, he would try to violate another person's private space intimidatingly the rest of the night and he didn't sleep a wink despite all the medications he received. We lucked out on the girl who slept all night after 10 p.m. But another confused female patient kept on trying to go inside other patient's rooms so we had to watch her very closely too and when she attempted to go into other patient's room, we had to run after her to direct her out of that room. Still another male patient went to bed at midnight and woke up at 3 o'clock and started pacing in small circles in the hallway, after which he started wiping the walls, windows and floors. When he was done with that, he stripped his bed, remade it, stripped it again, and remade it. This went on every few minutes. A classic case of mania. But at least he wasn't much of a problem because he was occupied with his own business.
It was one of those nights when all the staff had to be hypervigilant to keep everybody and everything safe. I hate working on nights like that although surprisingly despite of what was happening I felt relatively calm. Usually I get very tense and anxious when things aren't going very well.
When morning came the two patients who tried to have a tryst the previous night attempted to hug each other but the staff managed to abort that before it happened. You see, we don't allow physical contact in psych units and that includes public displays of affection. Then the other confused female patient went in a room of another patient and tried to lie on the other patient's bed. We managed to direct her back to her room but as soon as we turned around to leave her, she tried to punch me. Luckily, I was far enough so she wasn't able to connect. She was later given an injection to calm her down.
I couldn't wait for 7:30 a.m. to come and when it did, I was out of there like a bat out of hell.