Spiralling

Despite the cries for help, no one really notices until it's too late. That's the most devastating part of the black whole I think. Once you're in, you're in, and they ignore you, they tell you you're crazy, or dramatic, and then when you show them just how serious you are, they dope you up until your feelings are almost robotic. It's numbing. And that, that cold, numb, gut wrenching, emptiness, is just unbearable. All the motivation and energy that little blond girl possessed has been flushed down the toilet. It's like a parasitic demon is just constantly sucking it all out of me. At times, the cons seem to outweigh the pros. And this is when it gets fatal.

Those who explain suicide away as a selfish tradgedy, have clearly never felt the struggles day in and day out that occur with invisible illnesses. Some people will just never experience this amount of exhaustion. I have given up three times in my life. I have thought about it a whole lot more. When it comes to that, when you are at the point where dying is more attractive then the life you live, it is way harder to come down and think before acting. To think of the lives that will be destroyed without you. The first couple of times that I attempted I was younger than fifteen. I failed both of these, and fortunately recovered after a day of absolute torturous pain. The smell that sticks after an overdose is absolutely in my opinion the most triggering part of the aftermath. The smell is comparable to that of holding your face in a bucket of vomit, it is sickening. This smell clings, not only to you, but to each and everything that you touch, look at, or even think of after attempting. But this was nothing compared to my third and final attempt.

At this point, I was seventeen, and it was the beginning of summer. Everyone was partying and having the time of their lives, enjoying one of the last summer's before adulthood, and I was sitting in my room. With the led lights stuck on the pink setting beaming down on me, I stared through smeared mascara at a tiny bottle sitting on my desk. Thoughts raced through my mind, as my intrusive thoughts took over. Grey bags had developed under each eye, as a result of continuous nights without sleep, and continuous nights crying myself into a crust of numbing hell. Staring at my reflection behind the bottle, I realized that the sobs had turned to hysterical laughing. The more I laughed, the more I could feel the rage seeping out of my pores. There was nothing holding me back, no friends, a relationship full of loveless sex, enemies, and a reputation that drug me through the mud. That was when my breaking point had been exceeded, and before I knew it, I was scooping handfuls of little red pills into my mouth and chasing them with the half drinken water bottle next to my bed. One O’clock in the morning marked the euphoria with which I was all too familiar. This would be it, this would be my success. I fell asleep that night with tear stained cheeks, and a nauseous brewing that I knew would either kill me, or make me wish I had died the next morning. I bet you could guess which one happened.

When I sat up the next morning I buried my face in my hands. I knew this would be the worst one yet, and I was very right. Bed ridden for four days, I couldn't eat, sleep, or drink at all, I barely had enough energy to sit up and vomit every ten minutes into the family popcorn bowl. On the third day, I could feel the weakness turning to death. I called the last person I had who truly cared about me outside of my family, at a time where I felt I had no one, I could not bare to tell my mother that I had tried to leave this planet. The only thing I could do was muster enough stamina to say goodbye to the only person I could. She begged me to go to the hospital, but at this point I was calm, I finally felt at peace, so we continued to talk. We talked seriously about death at the tender age of seventeen, I told her I would visit her, and I felt her fear through the phone. As I began to fall asleep, I promised her I would visit the hospital, with no intentions of following through, and hung up the phone. Staring at my ceiling my vision began to blur and my eyelids shut as my body shielded me from the intensity of the pain. The next morning, I woke up in the most excruciating agony I had ever felt. It was six in the morning and I braced myself to crawl out of bed. When my mother met me in the hall I was hunched over holding my stomach with clenched fists and gritted teeth.

“Do we need to go to the hospital?” She was concerned about appendicitis or some sort of stomach disease. I cringed with every slight movement and nodded, unable to look her in the eyes. As I sat on the couch in my living room staring out the bay window at my colourful hallucinations, I felt my first dose of real panic in four days, my mother hurried to get ready, not knowing the full extent of what was really happening. I rocked myself back and forth, breathing through my rapidly beating heart. My head pounded and my stomach was raw with a constant stabbing pain engulfing my liver and kidneys. It took everything in me not to scream bloody murder.

I held my knees to my chest for what felt like an hour of torture in a tiny red car on a very bumpy road. The drive was about twenty minutes and I felt every second of that. Across the hot summer parking lot and into the chilling corridor of the emergency room, my arms remained glued to my stomach, holding pressure on an internal wound.

Before my mother was asked to leave, the nurse at the front desk knew as much as she did, that I was a seventeen year old girl with a sudden mysterious stomach issue. That is until she found out I was seventeen which is when she told my mother that because of the current pandemic, I had to enter the hospital on my own. She obeyed hesitantly and left for the car where she sat in the parking lot for hours while I was tested for the real reason I was there. When I told the nurse that I had attempted suicide, the energy towards me shifted. I was now a risk, and an immediate emergency. I sat in the waiting room for at most ten minutes before I was called to the second desk. I gave my information to the nurse, and was sent to a room with a security officer standing outside my open door. The room was dull and reminded me of a prison. The mirror was made of tin, and the bed was grey, along with each wall. I was gowned and taken to a room where I was given an echocardiogram, various tests took place, and I was soon back in my room hooked to an IV. Alone. I was so alone, in that room, I remained as still as a corpse holding my arm out so that the IV would stay put in the bend of my elbow. Panic ensued and flourished within every bone in my body, I could barely move and that created even more panic. The paralyzing aspect of a severe panic attack for me allows the cycle to spin out of control. I was left alone for an hour like this, waiting for someone, anyone to enter my room, so that I could finally breathe, searching desperately for some sort of security. All I could do was whimper a silent “help” every time my anxiety spiked to the point where I felt as though I was going through multiple heart attacks, back to back. What didn't help this atall was my inconceivable craving for orange juice. I hadn't consumed so much as a slice of toast in nearly a week, and was terrified of having another vomit attack, but all I could think was that I would die alone in that cold hospital room without having satisfied my orange juice craving. It was the thing my mind focused on to cope with the reality of that sentence, that I was dying. When the nurse finally entered my room a sense of false relief washed over me. While she swapped my IV for a new one, I asked if I could have my mom, still hoping for a safety blanket to break the overwhelming horror of being so close to death. As soon as she agreed, I called my mother who was still in the blistering heat of our car, parked in the hospital parking lot. She was consumed with fear and had everyone she knew praying for my recovery. As she raced to double doors, I went over the speech in my head on replay. There would be no easy way of telling her this, but I really had no choice, I was being told that I would need to stay in the hospital for days, and if I died without telling my mom what happened, she would be even more broken then if she had known.

When she stepped into the room, I could see every bit of fear and worry through her eyes. My mouth opened to speak but nothing came out. I looked at the empty white cup sitting in the corner where I had asked the nurse to set my orange juice, the one I had asked for secondary to my mom. “I’m sorry,” I started to feel the tears welling up in my eyes “I attempted suicide four days ago, I overdosed” I anticipated anger and a lecture, but what I got was far from that. Looking back into my mom's eyes I watched the tears she was fighting against poor down her cheeks under the mask. She held my hand in hers and the warmth surrounded my whole body.

“Oh honey,” her motherly tone calmed me as I embraced the emotions that had been feeding on my soul for so long. “I’m sorry, I'm so sorry. I love you.” She held me through it all, reassuring me that everything would be okay. This was the last slice of hope I would have for days.

Still weak, I clenched my fist, squeezing my mothers poor hand, as I felt the acidic nausea that was building up behind the meds. I had held my composure for four whole days, yet in the setting of a hospital, everything was so much more real. Nurses buzzed outside the door, conversations about me were being had right in front of me. “I'm on the phone with poison control, yeah the girl in five OD’d.” A nurse began to walk towards my room, and in that moment, I thanked god that I had told my mom when I did, because this nurse, was not fucking around.

“So how much did you take, like do you know a number or...?”

“I took like a couple handfuls.” I looked back at my mom who was trying her hardest to hold back the crystal clear shock on her face.

“What's a couple? You need to be specific.”

“Like two” I flashed back to that night, trying to remember just how much I had taken. It was a hysterical moment, and I wasn't counting, but watching my mother, the sweetest woman I know, shatter right in front of me, at that point, I wished I had been counting. I couldn't die, it would kill her, and the very thought of that, was pure torment. Not to mention the rest of my family, my little brother, I just couldn't die knowing how it would affect everyone I cared for.

The nurse gathered as much information as was needed, my height, weight, age, everything that needed to be known to properly treat the dose I took. With this, I was wheeled to the open room in the ER, and was given another IV, in the other bend of my elbow. Now, I couldn't move, and the pain, oh the pain was overwhelming. The meds they were giving me felt as though they were ripping my organs out of my body. I was hysterical once again. I couldn't lay down, I couldn't sit up. It felt like there was a knife in my back and a knife in my stomach, and standing would only cause dizziness and an urge to faint. I found myself screaming at everyone, my mom who was desperately trying to get me to eat, the nurses who were changing my IV’s and meds. Everyone. I repeated the paranoia that captivated my thoughts. “You're trying to kill me, they're killing me, the IV’s they're killing me, you're trying to kill me.” I clenched my stomach and my back, alternating positions every time the pain reached an unbearable level. Ignoring the paranoid screams, the nurses came in and out of my curtained room, attempting to ease the pain I was so clearly in. My paranoia took the ignorance as a confirmation, and my hysteria increased. “No, you're trying to kill me, they're trying to kill me.” My mom prayed through the scene as we waited for a room to be opened for me. It was all she could do, I wanted to protect her from this, she didn't deserve it, to be burdened with my failure, but all I could do was scream.

I spent seven days in the hospital, next to a cot where my mother stayed by my side, doped up on hydromorphone for the majority of my stay. Throughout the week I had been close to liver failure, and kidney failure. My potassium had dropped to a dangerous level, and my heartbeat spiked from the fifties to about one-hundred twenty beats per minute, and back to the fifties again throughout each day. I would be awoken for four vials of blood each morning, and again for four vials each night. I refused to eat or drink anything other than ginger ale, orange juice, and water. Not because of stubbornness, but because I had developed more anxiety around food then I had ever had before. I was terrified of returning to the type of illness that had caused me so much anguish just the week before. This fear was stronger than any nurse or family member begging me to eat something. By the time I was discharged, I had spoken to doctors, nurses, and a psychiatrist who had asked me if I felt safe going home, or if I wanted to stay in the psych ward. That's right, this man asked me if I wanted to stay, to which I obviously replied hell fucking no, not really though, I said no, but still, why the hell would I want to stay in this cage any longer then was necessary. I probably should have though, the only thing keeping me alive at this point was the fact that I didn't want to hurt my family anymore then I already had. My boyfriend at the time only texted me the first couple of days, a few times. He didn't call once. At my lowest point, only one person called me, the friend I had spoken to the day before I left for the hospital. I had never felt so alone. So unloved. So unworthy of love. I had created a mess for everyone around me to clean up, and I hated myself for it, I still do.