I have come a long way!

As I sat in my room crying into my pillow, my hand pressing the red button over and over again, I was in the depths of despair. I had just tried to commit suicide and stopped myself just before I blacked out. I had made a pair of underwear into a noose and tied it very tightly around my neck. As I started to see white spots in my vision and my ears began to ring, I quickly loosened the ligature and took in some slow deep breaths. I got up off the floor and jumped onto the bed where I continuously pushed the red button…but no one came.

As the hospital was short staffed it was difficult to sit down with any of them because there were three nurses and a student looking after thirty-six patients on a good day. On the weekends there were just three nurses. It sounds like there is one nurse to every twelve patients, and there was, but that wasn’t taking into account that the nurses needed to eat and have their breaks. They were doing thirteen-hour shifts after all. It worked out on a weekend that there was really only one nurse on the ward at any given time, one who was dealing with all the drama of the whole ward.

In theory they were supposed to check on you once an hour, but on the weekends, they did two checks at a time so you really only saw them once every two hours. On this particular day there were two agency nurses and one staff nurse on duty. The staff nurse, Kelly, had been threatening me for days now about going down to special care. I knew that if I told her what I had just done that was exactly where I was going. I quickly got up off my bed and pressed the button to cancel the nurses call. It was a Sunday and I was in denial from the gravity of my situation.

The next day, I saw my doctor and told her. She has only been my doctor for seven years and it took two of them for me to be able to put my trust in her so I felt comfortable in telling her what I did. She didn’t want to send me down to special care but I knew she was seriously considering it. Instead, as a compromise, she moved me to the bay so I was opposite the nurses desk at all times. All they had to do was look up from their notes and there I was. I knew I was broken and wondered if they felt the same.

The next day was the MDT meeting, where a member of each of the different areas that were looking after you met and discussed your care. The nurse who was in the meeting approached me when it was over at eleven am and told me I was going down to special care for a few days. I cried, ‘no!’, but they insisted and they sat with me as I packed up my stuff and continued to sit with me until a bed was finally available down there.

It took three nurses to escort me into the locked ward and then into the locked ward within that locked ward. I was taken to a room of my own and they went through all my things. As it was the ICU area of the hospital, I wasn’t allowed any technology whatsoever or anything sharp and they had to cut the chords off of my pyjamas. I wasn’t even allowed have deodorant because if you sprayed it with a flame in front it could be considered a weapon.

I sat in the bare room and thought to myself, ‘what am I going to do now?’ I was being checked on every fifteen minutes and as one nurse left, I scrambled to the wardrobe and retrieved a pair of underwear and moved the chair so I wasn’t visible from the door if I sat on the floor. This all ate into my fifteen-minute window of opportunity. I quickly made a noose again and tied it tightly around my neck. The next thing I knew was there were strange faces looking down at me, all in masks of course, and I struggled to remember what had happened. I heard someone yell, ‘call an ambulance!’, and saw a familiar face in the crowd, one of the nurses from the ward I had just come from, Sarah.

Before I knew it, I was being transferred to the medical hospital just up the road with leads coming from everywhere. After two hours of observation they sent me back to the mental health hospital where I refused to go back into the locked box of a ward. The nurses had changed hands within the medical hospital to an agency nurse who didn’t know me from Adam and couldn’t stop me as I pressed the button for the lift. I got off on the second floor and made my way to the open ward I had come from so many hours ago. As the nurses saw me coming, they tried to turn me around but I was bulling through them determined to avoid the box.

Eventually, three nurses and a security guard later, I was escorted to a different bed than I was in before, a bay bed right beside the window to the nurses desk. They opened the curtains in such a way that there was no getting away from them. As they were different nurses than I was used to, they didn’t know that when I sat on the floor I was actually physically and mentally grounding myself. They didn’t like that.

Over the space of three weeks I tried to commit suicide twelve times, each time they got to me just in time. I was banned from any of the private rooms and was confined to a bed in front of the window. As the room from where they dispensed the tablets was literally across the hallway from my bed, I made a dash in there twice before the door locked completely and tried to take medication from the trolley. I would have succeeded too if there weren’t as many bloody nurses on the ward. They were in the ratio of one nurse to three patients down here and there were only eighteen patients.

People came and went and when they finally drilled into me that even if they found me unconscious, that they would resituate me until they got me back despite whether I was in for brain damage or not. They said they never had anyone die on them yet and that I most definitely wasn’t going to be the first.

When I got that message into my brain, I decided to play nice and obey their rules until I got back up to the open ward where I knew personally of three people dying. As my doctor wasn’t allowed be my doctor in the special care unit, I was left with a lovely psychiatrist by the name Dr O Dwyer. She upped my medication and after a week of no ‘incidences’ they moved me to the outside ward. It was one which was locked but you were allowed have your electronics and some people could come and go as they pleased. They began to do safety contracts with me. I signed one every morning and every evening for two months…until my insurance days were up.

Yes, I spent six gruelling months in the hospital and even though I was far from ready my doctor had to leave me go. The cost of keeping me there would have been €1,000 a day.

I never got back to the open ward, I was released from the locked ward which is typically not something they would do. Neither my doctor, my mother, my brother or myself felt I was ready to come home but home I came with a copious amount of luggage. It was the last six months packed into five suitcases and two Ikea bags.

I’m writing this today because I needed to look back at how far I’ve come over the past four months, since I entered the SCU ward. I still think I’m not ready to be home but I have a mother who is so supportive and who I respect enough to tell her when I’m having a shitty day. Today is one of those shitty days and upon reflection, I have come a long way!