It’s been one week since I tried to kill myself

I wake to blinding white light, bits and pieces coming back to me as I come back online. Dried blood is splashed on hospital clothing I don’t remember changing into. I don’t know what happened to the tattoo shop T-shirt, leggings, and RomantiConn hoodie I had on when I rode in by ambulance. I don’t remember anything between after I first arrived in the ER around 1 AM and when I woke up around 8 o’clock Saturday morning.

Looking around, I start putting the pieces together. I’m in an ER trauma room. I came in a little after midnight, when I finally listened to my inner voice and dialed 9-1-1. A terror unlike anything I’ve ever felt consumed me.

“Am I too late?” I’d asked the EMT as he put in my IV. “Am I gonna be okay?”

He made eye contact with me, his face calm but his eyes warm and sincere. “You’re gonna be okay.”

I eyed him, gauging whether he was just trying to make me feel better in my final moments.

The ambulance rolled to a stop, jerking me a bit on the gurney. We were at a red light. They didn’t even have the lights or sirens on, I realized.

I’m going to be okay, I thought. I called just in fucking time.

I didn’t want to die. I knew that with everything in me about thirty minutes after I swallowed an entire 30-count prescription bottle of 50 mg amitriptyline pills.

I was taking amitriptyline to help manage my secondary fibromyalgia and endometriosis pain. I’d also hoped it’d help my complex PTSD.

Instead, it made me too foggy to think, too confused to see up from down. I wandered in a fog and barely realized it, my pain better but my short-term memory trash, my temper high.

This was exactly what I’d feared, that yet another medication that was supposed to help me would instead steal me from myself.

It was exactly why I’d asked my doctor for genetic testing, so that I could avoid any adverse side effects. Over the years, I’d tried many antidepressants, all with the same result: less motivation and energy, more anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. I didn’t love the idea, but I needed to try yet another antidepressant, as some have been shown to lower pain in patients like me.

Chronically ill. UCTD Lupus. Benlysta probably for the rest of my life. Prednisone, too. Secondary fibromyalgia, another gift from Lupus. But wait, there’s more: endometriosis with its evil twin interstitial cystitis. It was too soon for another surgery, yet I was in excruciating pain. I’d read that Myfembree, Lupron, and other endometriosis medications could cause patients adverse side effects; at least one of these drugs has a black box warning. I tend to be sensitive to those kinds of drugs. In me they cause worsened depression and anxiety, stripping me from myself, turning off my inner voice, and turning me into a stranger.

Usually, on a bad day, I can cry my way through uncomfortable feelings and even suicidal thoughts. A good cry sets me straight. I feel my feelings and then carry on, using my gut as my guide.

In the weeks leading up to my suicide attempt, I completely lost myself. I was gone in the fog.

Which was why I found myself lying on a gurney in an ER trauma room that Saturday morning.

Trauma—what an understatement.

I ask for a phone so I can call my mom and husband. Mom first, because she works in the hospital. Disoriented, I don’t realize it’s Saturday morning and Mom is more than likely at home, not at work.

“Mom, I’m so sorry, I’m in the ER. I’ll try you back in five minutes,” I remember saying to her voicemail. I call Mike next. I say pretty much the same thing to his voicemail, then try my mom again.

The third time I call Mom, she picks up.

“Mom, it’s me. Are you sitting down?” I hate to hurt her or anyone else. Or scare them. I’m shellshocked by what I did. For that Thursday and Friday, it was like someone else controlled me.

Someone I hope I never see again.

I tell her what happened, sticking to the facts. I was alone in the hotel room Mike and I were supposed to be staying in while our landlord did some long overdue repairs on our apartment. It should’ve been a fun weekend, even with its added stressors like “How will we afford the hotel’s daily parking fees?” and “How will we afford food when we only have SNAP and the hotel room doesn’t come with a kitchenette?” Things were looking up, even if it’d taken almost three years to get them to fix the leaking skylight in our bathroom and get rid of the rotted window and wall, and black mold.

I’d used the first opportunity I saw to start a fight with Mike, isolating myself by dropping him off at his sister’s, then I checked into the hotel. I stood in the room, numb and somehow also out of my skin. I hadn’t eaten much that day.

I went back down to my car to grab a couple things I needed, in too much pain and too weak to carry much. I smoked a little weed, and felt a bit better. My appetite even perked up, and I munched on some chips.

I’d just enjoy myself, I decided. I’d take the night to just chill out. In the morning, Mike and I would work it out. Everything would be fine.

I made the bed into a cozy little chill spot, with chips, my Nintendo Switch, and trashy TV. On autopilot, I booted up Animal Crossing, my daily game since I got it in September. But I couldn’t focus on the game I normally loved playing. My dread and anxiety and hunger and all my worries crashed down on me.

Our energy “assistance” electricity payment was about to double, to nearly $400 per month. We couldn’t even afford rent. My body had no stamina. I was so angry at Mike all the time, projecting old trauma and our problems onto him. Bills were piling up and no matter how many corners I cut, there was never enough money with just my SSDI. If I could just focus and finish revising my next book, I could write the next one after that and get another advance from my publisher.

But to write, first I had to make breakfast and coffee, and get my morning meds into me. By the time I did all that, I’d shuffle over to my laptop and stare at the screen, too tired to focus. Too hungry, too—the most basic self-care tasks wiped out my already low energy.

Even when I could get those needs in check, the noise from all the renovations went on seven days a week, from 8 AM to about 5 PM, with no reprieve. I didn’t mean to bug out from all the noise, but I couldn’t help it. My therapist explained that it was sensory overload. It triggered my PTSD hypervigilance, keeping me constantly on edge.

Then there was all the pain.

Hot, stiff pain in my joints. Twisting, scorching serrated knife pain in my pelvis. Pins and needles all over. The amitriptyline kept the fire to a dull roar, but there was still a fire.

Emergency, emergency, my body screamed. In hindsight, I see there was some part of me that knew something wasn’t right.

Mike knew something was wrong, too. He saw it even through the haze of his own hell, TBI with near-constant migraines, surrounded by all the noise from the renovations being done in our apartment building, and worsening pain in his back due to fractures from the initial injury in December, his progress slowed even more by two subsequent falls.

He’d most recently fallen just the week before. I’d called an ambulance and we went to the same ER. Except they dismissed him, even when I practically screamed at the doctor that I was concerned about my husband having once again hit his head and concerned about the numbness in his feet that caused him to fall—after she told me there was no medical reason for her to admit him.

This was after I had to chase her down, hours after they took his blood and ran him through CT; no one ever came back to update us, leaving him in a hallway on a gurney with a “Fall Risk” bracelet and stern instructions to get help if he needed to use the bathroom. They left us with no call button. Not even a nurse checked on us, even after I’d told every provider we came into contact with about our situation.

My husband has a TBI and fractures in his back. I have UCTD Lupus, secondary fibromyalgia, and endometriosis. He was my caregiver before and since his injury I’ve become his, except my conditions were still mine to deal with, compounding our struggle. We’re dirt poor, barely surviving on my SSDI and SNAP. We’d been telling anyone and everyone who’d listen that we were SOS, going down.

Except no one heard us.

The doctor told us the plan was to discharge him to short-term rehab, that way both physical therapy and cognitive and speech therapy services would come to him (instead of us driving 45-plus-traffic minutes there and another 45-plus-traffic back every week, exhausting him and me). But he spent a couple days in the ER in a sort of limbo, not admitted so technically not there, ignored by the people who were supposed to help. When the department social worker finally came down to talk to us, she told us that Mike was too well to go to short-term rehab.

“You know what, we’re outta here,” I told him. “I wanted to take you to the hospital where your neurologist is. Maybe we need to just go there. No one’s listening to us and I’m done with this shit.”

The social worker and case worker kept talking, telling us about services we’d long ago signed up for, going on as if we’d said nothing.

Growing more and more furious by the moment, I tuned them out and soothed myself. We’d leave AMA if we had to. I was fucking done.

“Can I speak to you alone for a sec?” the social worker asked me.

I thought she was going to tell me I needed to calm down, that I wasn’t helping matters by getting loud. I didn’t mean to stress Mike out or make a scene. But they just weren’t listening. Mike and I were both starting to feel like we were losing our minds, and we kept taking it out on each other, hurting each other purposely, isolating ourselves.

I took a deep breath, preparing to apologize for my attitude and explain our situation once again.

She surged ahead before I could speak. “You’re going to need to place him in a long-term, 24-hour, lifelong care facility,” she said. “He won’t even remember who you are or that he’s there. You can visit him. You’re too young to deal with all this.”

I stared at her in shock. There she stood, speaking my deepest fears into reality.

From the moment he’d first gotten hurt, slipping on sawdust on the wet stairs outside our apartment and falling nearly an entire flight, I’d been terrified that each concussion, each seizure, each fall would be the last one, the one that ended in goodbye to this person I loved so dearly. The person who got me in ways no one else did. The person I wanted to spend my Friday nights and every night with for the rest of my life. My “Teddy Beard.”

Thankfully, he wasn’t gorked. Thank fuck. He was going through enough as it was. The facility where he was doing his concussion clinic protocol therapies believed adamantly that there was no timeline for TBI recovery, that every patient is different and recovery and regains are always possible, no matter how much time has passed.

But in that split second, in the fragile, fogged headspace I was in, I believed the social worker.

“What?” I gasped through tears pouring down my cheeks. We stood in a hallway perpendicular to where the case worker still yammered on to my husband about applying for SSDI and SNAP.

“Oh, I’m sad for you,” the social worker said to me. “I’m going to cry with you!” Her eyes were dry and insincere.

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, fists clenched as my fury reached a boiling point.

This woman had just told us Mike wasn’t sick enough to qualify for short-term rehab, that she supposed she could try to apply for us, but she already knew he wouldn’t be approved. And now she was saying he needed lifelong care.

She had the nerve to pat my shoulder and I dug my nails in deeper, breathing through the swirling anger sweeping through my whole body.

I could barely contain it in my body. There was just too much to hold.

She didn’t even offer me a tissue. She turned around and walked away without another word. I stared after her for a moment, my inner voice on repeat: I need to go outside and calm down before I say or do anything else.

As I rejoined Mike, the case manager was saying she’d get his discharge paperwork started, then walked away.

“I have to step outside,” I told him. “Are you okay here?”

“I think so,” he said.

“I will be right back.”

I all but shoved myself out of the ER and into the fresh air and sunshine. I was going to call my mom once I got to my car, but she called me first. I’d texted her the bare bones while the social worker was talking to me.

The second I answered her call, the floodgates opened and I sobbed into the phone, Mom putting the pieces together while I both blubbered and screamed the story.

“What…?! She’s cracked,” she said, referring to the social worker.

Once I collected myself, I marched back inside. Mike had his papers. Even though I didn’t want to stress him any more than he already was (on top of a 7 out of 10 migraine, after a night of no sleep in the ER under bright lights), he needed to know.

We were still settling from all that when our landlord decided to finally address the black mold in our bathroom. Maybe it was because a week earlier, I’d called the police department to come document when a worker accidentally cut our power while I was in the shower. I was lucky I didn’t slip and fall in the nearly pitch black bathroom.

He was giving us plenty of notice, he said. He knew it was inconvenient for us, but he needed to get this done, he said.

Never mind that we’d needed it to get done almost three years before, when he first bought the property and assured us the bathroom was his priority, because of the water damage and structural damage.

That was how I ended up alone in a hotel room with a newly-filled prescription of a drug that clinicians no longer prescribe for depression because of its easy overdose and high fatality rate.

I tossed my head back, poured the entire bottle of pills into my mouth like a tube of mini M&Ms, and took a sip of water. They got stuck, so I took a final big gulp of water, washing them down.

Adrenaline rushed through me. There. It was done. I was done. Done with everything. Soon it wouldn’t matter that I couldn’t tell up from down, that no one was listening to us, that we were destroying each other while everything around us fell apart.

I’d go to sleep, forever.

I laid down with YouTube on my phone, and waited to fall asleep. My heartbeat raced in my ears though, and I couldn’t focus on the video. Watching City Planner Plays usually relaxed me, sending me off to dreamland. But I wasn’t getting sleepy at all, even 30 minutes into the video.

Sometimes, when I took my usual prescribed dose before bed, amitriptyline kicked in slowly. I realized it might be two hours before I died.

I googled “amitriptyline overdose.”

I’d thought I’d just fall asleep. But an overdose of that medication could cause seizures and cardiac arrest. That didn’t sound as gentle as drifting off to sleep. It sounded fucking scary. I didn’t want to go through that alone in a hotel room in the sketchy downtown of the city I grew up in. And I didn’t really want to die, anyway. I just wanted off the insane rollercoaster Mike and I had found ourselves strapped onto, unable to apply brakes, careening through twists and turns in the dark.

I called Mike, feeling sleepy as the phone rang—too sleepy. Some nights, on my prescribed dose, I became what we jokingly referred to as a noodle. I’d scurry off to bed without even washing my face because my body would start to go kinda floppy. It made sense, since exhausted was my baseline.

That night, though, that floppy, drugged feeling felt alarming, unsafe. I didn’t know how much time I had left. I’d called Mike because he knew our room number (420), and I thought he could call 9-1-1 since I was on the verge of passing out. I was afraid I’d fall asleep before I could explain enough to be saved. But the phone kept ringing, and when his voicemail picked up, the fog in my head finally lifted.

Call 9-1-1, my inner voice demanded. NOW!!

Still, I hesitated for a moment. I knew where this road led. If I survived, there’d be a psych hold. There’d be judgment. There’d be cold and robotic providers who wouldn’t listen to me, who would dope me up on yet more psych meds, no matter how many times I told them I cannot take these kinds of meds.

Assuming I’d survive.

If I had any chance, any shot at all, I had to make the call. Immediately.

I barely recognized my own voice as I explained to the dispatcher what I’d done. I sounded like a five-year-old, my voice so small, terror and tears making it hard to slow down enough to explain coherently.

“Am I too late?” I asked her. “Am I too late?”

“How long ago did you take the overdose?”

I did the math, painfully aware that I suck at math on a day I’m not under life or death stress. “We’re probably coming up on an hour now. Am I too late?”

“They’re almost there,” she said, just as someone knocked on the hotel room door. “That’s them.” She asked me something about a bolt and I didn’t understand. I struggled to grasp her words. Everything was just so fucking foggy, wisps disappearing just as I closed my fingers. Then it clicked: she meant had I bolted the hotel door. “Can you let them in?” she asked.

Standing from the bed, I took shaky steps to the door, pushing myself harder than ever to overcome the sleepiness dragging me under, the black slowly creeping in. A different kind of adrenaline shot through me, this time coming from within me, not from the medication I should’ve known was a bad idea.

After months of trying to get genetic testing ordered so I could find a safe drug to manage my pain, I’d hit a wall. My doctor’s manager wouldn’t let her order the test for me. She’d suggested I just try amitriptyline. I did some research on its effect on fibromyalgia and endometriosis pain, and since it seemed promising, I figured I’d give it a shot. I knew what warning signs to look out for. I’d just stop the med if it worsened my depression. No big deal. It was worth a try if it meant pain relief, if I could get some of my life back.

But it wasn’t worth the price of my life.

I wanted to live.

Throwing back the bolt, I yanked the door open with the last bit of strength I had.

And began the fight of my life: the fight for my life.

Author’s Note

I wrote this to process what I went through last week and what I’ve been going through for quite a while now. I’m deeply sorry if it upsets or worries anyone. My intention isn’t to hurt or scare anyone; I want to share what I’ve been dealing with because if it helps even one person, then it was worth it. I’m writing this from home, discharged and on bed rest, trying to navigate the beyond broken mental health system. Now that I’ve been off amitriptyline for a week, I feel more clearheaded, the events that led up to this all clicking into place.

The healthcare, social services, and mental health systems are deeply broken. My suicide attempt could’ve been avoided so many times, in so many ways. I’m enraged that this happened to me, to Mike—I’m enraged that it happens to so many others, all the time, often in silence.

My fight hasn’t ended. I’m done suffering in silence. I’m done being made to feel crazy for having perfectly normal feelings in response to what is happening to us. I’m done being dismissed and gaslighted. I’m beyond disgusted and heartbroken by everyone who let me down.

I feel so clearheaded now, it’s like night and day. Even though I’m physically weak and exhausted, I feel energized, galvanized, and getting stronger every day. It’s time to shine light on the cracks and chasms in the system, so that maybe, just maybe, things can change.

The hospital discharged me with depression information that said elderly people and people with chronic illnesses tend to experience higher rates of depression and poverty. But with modern treatment, they can overcome depression. I laughed and then cried and then laughed some more when I read that.

I’m putting out the tip jar so that if you want to, you can. After the end of the year, I don’t know where we will live, and I have no idea how we’ll afford our electric bill for December. Any donations will be deeply appreciated and used to help us get back on our feet.

I’m resting and processing for now, and I’m only just getting started.

Thank you for reading.

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Photo by Andreea Popa on Unsplash