Chapter 3 -Foiled
A few hours later, my meticulously crafted plan started to unravel. My family came home early that day. Though I had planned on being unconscious once I laid down, I was groggy and awake. Stirring from my drug-induced haze, I thought in a panic, "I miscalculated, I need more pills." Summoning my determination to achieve my goal, I wobbled up the stairs, half crawling, aiming for the medicine cabinet. There, I found my sibling, loitering around in the hallway, playing with a toy T-rex doll.
Mistaking my demeanor for illness and recognizing my need for assistance, my sibling innocently started grabbing and extending bottles of pills from the medicine cupboard towards me. However, before I could comprehend the situation unfolding before me, my body gave out, once again succumbing to the will of the drugs I had ingested. I collapsed.
The remainder of my recollections from that period would forever dwell in a mist of ambiguity. Fragments of distressed voices echoed in my mind, entwined with the shrill wails of approaching sirens. Yelling. My sibling’s anguished voice. The EMTs asking me why I did it. My fractured whisper, "Abuse."
My next recollections emerged from two days after the suicide attempt. I awakened to the sterile environment of the intensive care unit, each hand bound to the hospital bed. A kind African American woman with beautiful long braids in her hair had been assigned to watch over me. She sat in the rocking chair next to my bed and read me Bible passages in a soothing voice. It helped. It felt like an angel was sitting with me. But I couldn't actually comprehend a word she was saying.
Groggy and barely registering my surroundings, I attempted to process the parade of people who entered and left the room. I remembered being asked a lot of questions but couldn’t remember if I answered. And then there was my father's face. Furious. Disgusted. "You gave up" he had said sternly, shaking his head in disgust. There was no sadness. No anxiety. Only disgust. He walked unsympathetically out of the room.
If my mother was there, I couldn’t remember it. She wouldn’t have bothered making eye contact or said anything to me anyways. Most of all, I remember my 10-year-old sibling anxiously pacing the hospital room, faced with the reality that the only family member they trusted almost died. It would haunt me until the day I dids, as I irrationally blamed the trauma from my suicide attempt for every poor decision my sibling made later in life. The whisper of the devil hovering around my head, cooing “It was you. You broke your sibling.”
A few days after being admitted to the ICU, the smog started to lift from my brain. I was moved to a regular hospital room and I slowly started being able to comprehend what was being said to me. My doctor explained to me what had happened. My suicide endeavor had been serious, with a combination of deadly medications, but then thwarted by ingesting absolutely everything from the medicine cabinet including laxatives. A lot of them.
A significant portion of the pills I had ingested had been expelled from my body thanks to the laxatives. The hospital had administered charcoal to prompt the expulsion of the remaining pills. I walked out of the suicide attempt relatively unscathed. Once I was well enough to be released from the hospital, I was delivered directly to a mental hospital, which came with its own set of remarkable tales.