3 am in the ER

Of all of the abusive things I do to myself self mutalation seems to be the hardest one for other people to understand. Sticking my fingers down my throat they follow- its not a choice they would make for themselves but they get the basic sentiment. Just about everyone in our society these days has some spoken or unspoken desire to change something about the way they look. You’ll even hear healthy women talk about eating disorders like they are a dieting option ‘oh I would give anything to be able to be anorxic for week’ is a statement I’ve heard many times. But hurting oneself is much harder for outsiders to understand. Maybe its because as humans we spend so much of our lives doing every possible thing we can to avoid pain but people just don’t get it. I don’t get it and I did it. And the fact that its socially unacceptable is only compounded by the fact that its so visable. Cuts are a difficult thing to hide. If I was in a program where they said if you throw up you will be kicked out- I would just throw up quietly and lie and say I wasn’t doing it. But scabs and scars are harder to hide. That’s why so many mutilators I know have scars on their asses and inner thighs. Places where only the most diligent guardian would take the time to check. I never hid it- that defeats the point to me. Its like getting a beautiful and personal tattoo on your back- I wanted to see the cuts. At a time in my life when everything I did was based on trying to please the people around me, I was told that one of my only coping skills made everyone sad, angry and overall very upset. So I decided to stop- before I cared about it what it was doing to my body, before I was ready, before I had found a different better way to deal with the pain- I decided just to quit cold turkey. And I did a lot of stupid, sometimes dangerous things trying to avoid the one thing they had deemed inexcusable.
I’m 16 and I’m scared and full of nervous insatable energy that I can’t make go away. And all I know is that if I cut it will make mom and dad sad and the therapists angry and everyone- everyone disappointed in me. And the therapists tell me to hold ice in my hands and snap rubber bands on my arms, clench my fists really hard. Which never works and only proves how much they don’t understand. And the energy grows and all I want to do is cut. All I want is to make it go away. And im a horrible unlovable person already and I just don’t want to make anybody hate me more. Don’t want to make anyone else sad. But the pain, the energy, are so much, so deep, so intense, and I cant make it stop. But I want to be a good girl- a good person. So im on my bedroom floor crouching on my knees, digging and ripping my nails through the carpet like a crazed, rabid animal. I’m ripping the heads off of teddy bears, pulling off the arms and legs, throwing the stuffing around the room like frienzied snowballs. I have memories of crushing up and snorting meds, cutting all of my hair off, piercing my eyebrow with a safety pin, giving myself a tattoo with a sewing needle and India ink. Im on my bike riding as far as I can go. Im throwing up more. Im running away in every way I know how except the one that actually works. Now im not saying that cutting is healthy and who knows if I would have kept at it if I would have done something stupid and irreparable by accident in the process. But I do know that trying to avoid it left me in an ER at 3 am with a nurse trying to shove a tube up my nose in the aftermath of the stupidest, most dangerous thing I have probably ever done.
It’s a summer afternoon and im alone in my house when the energy starts crawling inside of me. Im roaming the house aimlessly searching- for release, for salvation, for an answer somewhere to the questions that my mind is throwing at me. Whats wrong with you? And why can’t you just stop this? And finally and unquestionably- why not. I try to escape to my room and theres a scissor on the floor so I scramble out and down the stairs. I try to zone out into the tv and theres a bread knife staring at me from the brown matted family room rug. Its like a movie or a dream, its seratted edges taunting me. Like it was placed there. Like it’s a sign. Still to this day this memory is almost comically sad to me. Im huddled on the couch hugging my knees staring terrified at a random bread knife in the middle of the room. In my memory but not necessarily in reality the sunlight hits the metal in a single stream making the blade sparkle and glow. I literally run out of the room. Sat there shivering, huddled into myself until I was almost certain some part of me would lash out and grab the wooden handle without my permission, and then launched off the couch and hugging the wall, sprinted out of the room. Down the hall and into the kitchen. Which is not a good place if one is trying to avoid knifes. I plant myself on a stool in the middle of the room and grip onto the bottom of it. And somewhere in the fear, in the haste, in the terrifying energy, I decide that I will drown the pain. In medicine. .i don’t know what I expected it to do. Don’t know what I expected to happen. I guess I thought it would numb it- numb me. Carry me out of the dream. So I reached on top of the refridgerator pulled down bottles and started swallowing pills. A handful of this, a dozen of that. Prozac and depacote, Zoloft and paxil. Pills I was on combined with pills I had been taken off of. Medicine that had proved it didn’t work along with pills we were still waiting to see the effects of. Nothing ever seemed to work for me so I had been going from one dose to another to a whole new prescription for months. And I swallowed the remains of at least 4 different bottles. And then I thought about how the drs had told my brother not to drink on antidepressants because the pills mixed with the alcohol can get you very drunk very quickly which sounded about exactly what I wanted so I went searching for a beer. Which I found in a cooler in the backyard and drank a sip of and promptly spit in out. Which only shows how much I really hate the taste of beer. Plus just the act of swallowing 3 dozen pills had somehow calmed the feelings somewhat so I figured it would be enough. And my friend called to see if I wanted to go play tennis so I went off on my day. Oblivious.
And we played tennis for a little while but I felt weak and increasingly nautious so we stopped early. And I told her what id done and she seemed worried but no more worried than everyone seemed about me those days. And she dropped me off at home and I tried to make myself throw up but the bile was disguisting and it burned so I stopped. And the next thing I remember I’m in a car being driven to my weekly Eating Disorders meeting and I don’t say anything about it to whichever parent drove me there or anyone else in group even though my leg has started tapping feverishly and I can’t stop it. I also don’t say anything to my dad as he drives me from group to the theater where my boyfriend is in a play that night. I do tell my boyfriend but I don’t know if its before or after I lose feeling in my legs. Before or after the room starts to spin and I start to hear music that isn’t there. I don’t go into the theater- I don’t watch the show. I spend the next two hours in the back of his car watching the pattern on the back of the front passenger seat dance and animate in circus scenes. Turn into elephants and giraffes and bears in party hats balancing on balls. I hear the entirety of a sesame street album I loved as a child blaring in my ears. I pour myself out of the car and try to figure out who would be blasting children’s music so loudly in a parking lot. Somehow in the craziness I come to the understanding that it isn’t really out there and crawl back into the car. And I wait for him, understandably pissed off, to come off the stage. And he takes me home and he takes me to my room and he goes downstairs. And he tells my mom even though by then the hallucinations have stopped and I can feel my legs again. And I hear her on the phone with someone although I don’t hear what shes saying and they tell her to bring me to the ER even though its fully 8 hours since I’ve swallowed the pills. And so we’re back at the same hospital where my ED group took place 4 hours ago, back at the same hospital where I was admitted for anerxia and depression 4 months ago. And my mom is worried and my dad’s pissed off and my boyfriend’s just there with the same scared tired look he’s had for months. Its his second time in this ER in a quarter of a year. He’s visited me in this hospital and the other one more than a dozen times. Hes been the one ive called in tears, hes held me and listened and done his best to understand when and why his girlfriend morphed into someone else before his eyes. Hes tired. And my dad who normally tries to understand- who has dealt with his own demons and by all accounts should understand has hit the breaking point from sad and worried to just plain angry. Well probably worried and angry but the anger is what I see. He sits in the waiting room not talking and stewing. He later tells me he was so angry because I sat in a car with him for 40 mins and didn’t tell him. Because I could have died- could have killed myself and I didn’t say a word. I can never explain how that thought never crossed my mind. That there was a consequence of my actions longer lasting than the immediate never entered into my thoughts. Still now it doesn’t quite sink in. when heath ledger died a few months ago and his family all stood by and said that he would never kill himself on purpose it hit me a little (don’t ask why heath ledger as opposed to any of the other celebrity or non-celebrity drug deaths made this sink in. I have no clue) People die without meaning to from doing the very same thing I did at 16 just with a different combination or number of pills. People die. But for me as a teenager I was just running. I was just avoiding what they told me not to do. I was being a good girl. But in that ER nobody saw that.
I don’t remember much aside from the anger and the humiliation and the thought that everyone was making way way too big a deal of this. Its over already. Its all gone. I can feel my legs. I can even control my legs. There is no more Jim Henson- no juggling bears in tutus. Can’t we just go home now? And the silence of my dad’s anger is defeaning. And my boyfriend leaves because its late now- I don’t know how late but its late. And my mom is an angel. My mother has handled everything to that point and even to this point with a grace and sanity I can only hope to find in myself one day. My mother is not blameless in my disease- no one is blamed more than me but no one escapes totally unscathed. But there is no one I would rather have on my team in times of crisis than my mother. She is a woman- she is a human, and as such I have seen her break and cry plenty of times but when she needs to get through something or needs to get you through something- my mother somehow has the strength to turn it off. Do what needs to be done. Get through it. You can lay down your head and cry when its over. And she does, and she did many times back then, I know. But through a crisis, when there is a task at hand- the woman is amazing. And the most amazing part is that she does it with sympathy and caring- she has the incredible ability to turn off part of her emotions while still keeping others in tact. Turn off the part that affects her and concentrate only on the wellbeing of those around her. She held my hand symbolically through much of this just as she physically held my hand that night. Held the plastic blue bean shaped tray that they gave me to vomit into, held my head up and my hair back. All the while I kept instisting I was ok- why can’t we go home now?
We can’t go home because one of the medicines, Depakote, a medicine I actually was on at the time fucks with your white blood cell count. So much so that while on the correct dosage prescribed to me I had to go get my blood checked every other week. And I took at least two weeks worth. At once. So no. I couldn’t just go home. They had to take my blood. And wait for it to come back. And while I was waiting- just to pass the time- I got to drink a cup of charcoal. I personally think this was more to teach me a lesson than for any actually health benefit, but then again we have already established that I don’t actually grasp the complications of what I did. If you’ve never seen a cup of charcoal imagine think black paint mixed with handfuls of sand and you’ll get the idea. We are not talking a small cup, a measuring cup, no we are talking somewhere close to 12, 16 ozs. Keep in mind we are talking about a girl whose stomache has shrunken from close to a year of anorexia- a girl who would probably have a hard time keeping down a 16 oz milkshake or smoothie. Or anything else actually appetizing. They give me the glass of thick black liquid and when I say I won’t be able to keep it down they gave me the aforementioned plastic blue tray. My mother tries to coach me on different ways to get it down. I try to shoot it, I try a straw, I try to chug it. Your body does not want to drink 12-16 ozs of think black sandy goop. It revolts. I can barely even get any of it past my tongue and into my throat. I gear up, suck down a little and inevitably 3/4 of it comes up into my mother’s tray. The nurses have no sympathy. My father has no sympathy. The nurse keeps coming in to check on me and threaten that if I didn’t finish it she will have to stick a tube down my nose to pour it down. After a couple times of hearing her somewhat empty sounding threat I finally say ‘do it. I’ve had 3 sinus surgeries. I can handle shit being stuck up my nose. I prefer you stick a fucking tube down my throat than to have to drink this shit’ I most likely claimed it was actually impossible for me to just drink the liquid. This is when my father left. He was angry and he was fed up and he thought I was being a baby about it all. At least that’s what I thought at the time. I don’t know what I think now. I guess I still think that. So when the nurse comes back it’s just me and my mom. And my mom holds my hand while the unsympathetic nurse attempts to shove a tube up my nose. I say attempts because she didn’t actually do it- well she succeeded after a decent amount of force on her part and decent amount of pain on my part to get the tube up my nose- and even part of the way down my throat before she gave up. Just said she couldn’t do it and I would have to finish the black drink manually. I believe I was rather pissed off myself by this point and I said something- probably not calmly or quietly- about how if this when 3 months ago and I was still on the eating disorders floor she would have figured out some fucking way to get a tube down my throat if need be. My cursing and my irrateness doesn’t help garner her sympathy and she quickly yanks the tube out and leaves. And through the crying and the vomiting and the blood dripping out of my nose I keep telling my mom I can’t do it and she just keeps rubbing my back, petting my hair, and saying yes you can. In that soothing yet authoritative voice usually reserved for a 5 year old trying to read their first big kid book. I didn’t finish it all. They came back and said the tests were fine before I could muster the strength of character or stomach muscles. Whichever was needed. Sometime before dawn a woman from 5 west comes to talk to me. 5 west was the physciatric ward. I knew that because when I was on 3 east (eating disorders) there would be hushed rumors about people coming down from 5 west. Like we with our patients starving themselves into comas and throwing up into drawers so noone would see, were the sanest of the sane and 5 west were the crazies. I did not want to go to 5 west. I tell the woman this- probably in not very nice terms. She informs me that if we were in the state of ny this would be taken as a suicide attempt and I would have to be admitted, by law, whether I wanted to be or not. To which I respond something snotty about how I'm lucky that we aren’t in new york then, huh?. In the end I convince her that I wasn’t trying to kill myself and after a bunch more buracracy that I only remember as lots and lots of offices I am allowed to go. And in the growing morning light, close to 20 hours after I had sat alone in my parent's kitchen with a carcophony of pills, my mother drives me home.