The Apex

In this blog, I will talk about my childhood, my adolescence and my adulthood. I will talk about what brought me to the point of taking an entire bottle of Vicodin and being committed to a mental unit for one single day. Less than 24 hours to convince someone I am sane enough to go home.

I have always been depressed and anxious, ever since losing my mother at a very young age. I don't think I ever really learned how to be an adult or have functional relationships, as every relationship I was exposed to when I was younger was dysfunctional and full of chaos. 

Here in post one I'll admit that I was admitted to a mental hospital for less than 24 hours. Apparently I am smart enough to know exactly what words to say to someone to get them to do what I want, when what I want is to not be in a Mental Hospital. 

I don't feel like I belong in a unit with people who are locked up because they tried to hurt themselves. I don't feel like that's what I was doing. I feel like all I was trying to do, was make the pain and the thoughts and the feelings of inadequacy stop. All I wanted to do was feel loved, cared for, and to have that concern come from my friends. I wanted someone to come see if I was OK. I did not want police and medics at my apartment. Their concern comes only from a place of doing their job. Their concern is not whether someone is OK or is going to be OK in the long run, rather that they don't want to do the paperwork on finding a body. 

The fact that I am done dealing with the emotional pain and scarring, the fact that I am so beyond fucked up that I can't even deal with my own self, perhaps I would have been better off if I had never come home on Monday. If I had stayed in my car and forced myself to keep the vomit in, I would potentially be in a better place to not be dealing with the pain. 

Instead, I checked myself in. Because at least when you check yourself in, they are more likely to let you out than if you are being held on a 72 hour minimum mandatory hold. So that's what I did. 

As I lay in the emergency department of Local Hospital, I kept thinking how I wished I hadn't answered the door when I knew it was the police out there. I should have rolled under my bed, and just have "not been home". I doubt the Vics I took would have done anything to me. As it were, they didn't pump my stomach or feed me charcoal. They didn't do any of that. Instead, I laid in a hospital bed, watching Seinfeld, and occasionally throwing up. The Emergency Department discharged me, and my friend E picked me up to take me home. I told him what I had done, and he insisted that I go back to the hospital and check in for the evening. I made him stop twice on the drive back to my apartment, so I could vomit on the side of the road. He allowed me to change clothes, and then took me back to the ER, where when I was taken to a room, he had to leave and go to his friend's for a BBQ. It was memorial day, after all. I laid in the ER for another few hours, while a bed was prepared for me on the mental health unit. 

You are not permitted to walk onto the mental health unit, you must be pushed in a wheelchair to this location. I was somehow OK with this, because they took my pants. I didn't want to flap around Local Hospital in an open backed hospital gown. 

That evening, as I checked in, the woman doing my intake mentioned that she knew I had PTSD. This is the first time I had heard of this, but I can imagine after reading what I had told the ER psychiatrist, that this is an accurate description of what is going on. And all the while I thought this was just the anxiety and depression. 

They took away my wallet and my hoodie, because they both had strings, but left me with a hospital gown that had strings, which made no sense. I wasn't suicidal. I just wanted to not exist any longer. 

I fell asleep on the rock hard hospital bed, but awoke every 15 minutes when the nurses opened the door to do checks. My overnight was very unpeaceful, with me waking up at 5am because I just couldn't stand it any longer. 

One of the nurses came to take my vitals and talk to me a bit, because I was up so early. She could tell I was anxious, and gave me a half an ativan to calm my nerves. As the drug started to course through my body, I finally felt relaxed enough to go to sleep for an hour or so. So at 6am, I went to sleep, until 730, when I was woke up because I needed to eat breakfast and get to my first group therapy session.