07 December 2006

#2 -- honesty

An admission, two notes about this latest bout with depression and some thoughts on suicide

First, the admission. I lied in my last entry. I wasn’t really sick. I convinced everyone at work that I was because I couldn’t go into the office. I just about convinced myself that it was real, but I didn’t have some sort of bug. Other people in the office do, which made it really easy for me to take three days off in a row, but the only thing I had was depression. I just couldn’t get out of bed on Monday morning and it went downhill from there. Up until today I was holed up in my apartment with Clancy waiting for the drugs my psychiatrist gave me to kick in. I have a good doctor. He saw me immediately when I told his secretary that I really needed to see him and he knew something was terribly wrong when he first saw me. He wants me to call him if things don’t improve by the end of the week. Actually, he said the H word (hospitalization), but there was no way in the world I could deal with that. Besides, I’ve been a lot worse than this and made it through.

#1 I have been so weepy that it’s gross. Everything makes me cry. On Saturday when I was watching my brother’s kids I started crying because his daughter dropped some sunflower seeds on the floor and looked forlornly at them. There were more seeds in the bag next to me. All I had to do was reach in and put some more on her plate. What did I do instead? I started crying. His 3 ½ year old came over and put his hand on my back and asked me why I was crying. That made me cry harder. I told him I hurt my eye because I couldn’t think of any reason at all that I could give him that would make sense.

#2 I knew I had to go see my doctor and get some more meds when the paranoid thoughts set in. It wasn’t just paranoid, it was mildly suicidal. I can deal with the feelings of impending doom and I knew if I didn’t get some medication that it would get bad, but on Sunday night I seriously thought I saw someone in my kitchen when I turned off the light. That didn’t bother me so much as my next thought – which was, “Oh good, maybe he’ll kill me.” Then when I settled into bed waiting for someone to come kill me, I realized that there had been no one there and that if I was going to die, I was going to have to do it myself.

It’s so odd when you’re actually thinking about killing yourself and it’s alarming how quickly it can set in. When I think about killing myself it’s almost as if I’m detached, like I’m watching another person or I’m making a decision for someone else. I tried to kill myself once before. I was 19 and had just had an abortion and I took a bunch of pills. My roommate at the time dropped me off in front of the ER. She was afraid to call an ambulance because of all the drugs in our apartment. I started vomiting pretty soon after she dropped me off and was coherent enough to understand that the doctors and nurses weren’t being very nice to me. They were saying things like “not a serious attempt” and “failed attempt” which is pretty demeaning to someone who wanted to be dead a couple of hours before that. There I was, throwing up under florescent lights with people shaking their heads all around me because I had failed at one more thing.

Anyway, that is neither here nor there, but I think that if you’ve tried to do it once it’s like you’ve stepped over some sort of boundary. Like it’s not off limits anymore. I don’t know. I’m not going to kill myself now and hopefully not ever, but sometimes the thoughts are there. I guess that is why the medication is good.