Content Warning: Suicidal Ideation
I: November. It’s my wedding anniversary, and I have a glass and a half of wine with dinner. This has become something of a ritual for me over the past couple of months, despite warnings from multiple doctors that alcohol and my medications don’t mix, and I can’t seem to stop it. This is something more, though, a little extra as a celebration, and because it’s a special occasion, my husband doesn’t stop me. On the half-hour drive home, the numbness starts: in my fingers, creeping up my arms and legs. I’ve never felt anything like it before—a theme that will recur through every subsequent visit. It panics me. I jump straight to the worst possible conclusions: a blood clot of some kind. Maybe even a stroke.
The problem, when it comes down to it, is that I have a fucked-up body in ways that have confounded even the National Institute of Health. I’m not an anxious person most days, but even the slightest inkling that something might be off about my body sets me on a spiral, a path that only has two ends: the ER, or more self-medication. So he takes me to the ER, because it’s late enough that the urgent care has closed, and I tell my family and my closest friend so that if it all goes wrong, someone will know what happened to me.
They’re nice enough at triage, and everyone I talk to seems to be taking me seriously, but the nerves have another side effect; there’s a part of me that reminds me, constantly, that I’m a crippled woman, less than five feet tall, and I’m rarely taken seriously. Half the doctors I’ve seen over my lifetime didn’t even believe I was disabled despite ample physical evidence. And so when they get some fluids into me and the feeling begins to return to my limbs, I start crying, and I don’t stop for the rest of the visit. And they’re nice about this, too. Remind me that if I was truly that worried, I did the right thing by coming here. Almost a year later, it still makes me tear up to think about it, an odd combination of gratitude and shame.
II: March. I’m two weeks away from a mildly invasive surgery that will involve general anesthesia. I’ve already had the pre-screening phone call, questions I’ve heard dozens of times before, that I could recite the answers to in my sleep. It’s close to midnight, and for the past hour, my resting heart rate has been sitting somewhere around a hundred and twenty beats per minute—worryingly fast, even for someone on a medication that raises her heart rate. My husband works nights, and I’m alone with no car, so after a further half hour of monitoring with no change, my father drives another thirty minutes to take me to the ER.
The process repeats. This time, they can check my heart rate, can see exactly what’s got me so worried. They take me back and hook me up to an IV and a bag of saline, and the doctor tells me he’s not going to assume that it’s just anxiety when I bring up this concern after the requisite yes, I’m mentally ill, and no, I haven’t been diagnosed with anxiety. They’ll run all the tests, he says, and already that’s enough to drop me a couple of beats. The decrease is steady through the rest of the visit, where, of course, they find nothing wrong.
When a tech comes to draw my blood, it’s the same one who did so last time. She recognizes me because of my wedding rings, the only jewelry I’d bothered with. Between her and the nurses, they stick me three times to get the amount of blood they need. When it’s time for me to leave, the nurse who takes the IV out does it so roughly that I’m left with a bruise that covers the back of my right hand and wrist. Two weeks later, the anesthesiologist waits until my husband is out of the room to ask me where I got it.
III: July. I’m starting to get sick of the way my body only breaks down outside of urgent care business hours and always with problems that could, apparently, be solved by fluids and being less anxious. This time, it’s a stiffness in my muscles that won’t go away for hours, no matter what I try. My husband takes me in. It’s the same nurse and doctor I saw in November; I can’t tell if they remember me, and by some miracle, I don’t cry this time. They shoot me up with muscle relaxers, write me a prescription for more, and send me home. The whole process takes just over an hour.
IV: August. I haven’t talked to anybody in nearly three weeks. The sickness has drawn a pit around me and shaded in the walls, clogged up my throat with an ache so intense I can’t speak around it. For days, the only voices that get through are the ones that tell me I know how to make it stop. I’m scaring the few people left who seem to care when I’m like this, and I know it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So my husband takes me in. We pack a bag for me and drive to a different hospital, one with a decent psych ward in case they decide to admit me—and I know that if I’m honest, they will. This has been a long time coming, and it’s finally here.
In triage, I hand over all my belongings and change into rust-colored scrubs and grey socks. They ask me all kinds of questions: do I drink or use drugs? Have I ever tried to kill myself? How? Do you have any thoughts of hurting yourself right now? Do you have thoughts of hurting others? I answer them in the most painfully truthful way I can dredge up, considering the man who’s borne the brunt of my symptoms is only a few feet away. They take me back to a special room, one where all the furniture is unmovable save for a single chair that my husband sits down in, and offer me warm blankets, so I don’t freeze before the nurse gets here. No one bothers to turn the light on in the room, which feels fitting.
When the nurse arrives, we go over some of the questions again. I know I’m softening the sharp edges of some of the answers, as I had before, and I can’t stop myself—the last time I was honest about how bad things had gotten, it backfired. He’s blunt at the end, tells me the psychiatrist on duty will only admit me if I’m actively suicidal. I don’t know if I am. I tell him that, back out at the last minute. I’m sent home with a stack of papers regarding outpatient treatment, a single Xanax, and the knowledge that I might have just made the biggest and last mistake of my life.
V: August, less than twenty-four hours later. My husband goes back into work tonight and there’s a stash of pills under the bathroom sink and I know the second he leaves, I’ll take them. I won’t be able to handle another night alone. The anxiety over my physical health has been replaced, at least temporarily, by the very real knowledge that my fucked-up body won’t be the thing that kills me if I don’t do something now. There was a time when I might have been able to get away with hesitating, taking my finger off the trigger; that time has long since passed.
We repack my things in a different bag, throw in a few books and a stuffed animal that I don’t know if they’ll let me keep. Text my father, who agrees to come up when my husband has to leave for work if they haven’t admitted me yet, so I won’t have to be alone. Go through the entire triage process again, where I don’t cry while admitting I’d just been there the day before. Talk to a different nurse and a different psychiatrist, throw away the sandpaper and work the point of I’m a danger to myself into my skin until I draw blood. Though she frames it like a statement, there’s still a question in her tone when she says we’d like to admit you. Giving me another chance to back out. This time, I say yes.
Isobel Bradshaw (she/they) is a queer and disabled author of fiction and hybrid work. Her short story, “Coming Down,” was a finalist for Write or Die‘s inaugural fiction contest; her work also appears in Tension Literary, Bi Women Quarterly, Major 7th, and FLARE‘s second issue, as well as the anthology Between Queer Teeth from t’ART Press. She has a BFA in Creative Writing and lives in the Midwest with her partner and cats.
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