Being forced to apologize for being molested takes a lot out of any person, but when you’re a person that suffered from 5 years of heinous sexual abuse, it is horrific. Add to that, facing the person who molested you earlier in the day and feeling blame coming at you from all sides, as if it was your fault, you almost got raped by a man who was old enough to be your grandpa, well then you have the makings of a real mental breakdown.
After realizing that I was not going to just give up and kill myself because I couldn’t cope with how dysregulated I felt from the events of the day, I decided to call psych crisis.
Psych Crisis in Berkshire County (which is where I live at Side By Side Assisted Living ever since I was discharged from the nursing home Hillcrest Commons, also in Berkshire County. Before that I was living in Springfield, MA) is the Brien Center and they can be hit or miss, but I surrounded myself with my Build-a-bears and dialed the number and explained my situation.
“Do you feel suicidal?” They asked me.
“I feel like I just don’t want to live anymore, and I almost took a whole bottle of Phenergan but then I changed my mind, I just want to feel better, but I’m scared, I don’t trust myself.” I tried to explain.
“Do you think you’d be able to contract for safety?” The lady on the other end of the phone asked me.
Contracting for safety means you can promise someone that no matter what you won’t try to hurt or kill yourself or someone else. This may sound like a simple, easy, straightforward thing to do, but when you struggle with mental illness this can feel near impossible at times.
“I don’t think so,” I told her honestly.
The feelings of wanting to just give up and die were coming in and out like high and low tide at the beach. I could make no promises.
“I think you need an in-person psych crisis eval then,” the psych crisis lady told me.
“Well, what do I do? I live in the independent living section of Side by Side Assisted Living, I’m wheelchair-bound and there are stairs that go in and out of the outside of my apartment and I can’t do the stairs unless someone physically carries me up or down them and I have no aide here right now. She won’t be here for two more hours. I’m not allowed to get any help from the CNAs at the main building because I’m not in the Assisted Living section, and even if I could get out of the house, I don’t have a license or a car to get to the crisis center.” I explained.
“What we can do, is we can send the police and an ambulance to bring you to the ER and they can do a crisis evaluation there. If they decide you need to be admitted to the psychiatric unit then they can just transfer you over to Jones because you’ll be right there.” The crisis worker explained.
“How soon will they get here?” I asked.
“I can call them now,” she explained.
In my body, I could now feel all my nerves going even more haywire. I didn’t know if this was the right choice, I was now having major second thoughts. I hadn’t been in a psych unit for close to two years, and the last psych unit I’d been in was Mass General’s Medical Psych Unit where I was also followed by Complex Care. Berkshire Medical Center didn’t have a medical Psych Unit, they just had Jones II which was more voluntary and for less intensely psychotic patients, and Jones III which was more secure and for people that were floridly psychotic or at extreme, extreme risk of immediate harm to themselves or someone else.
I had no idea what unit they would put me on, I had no idea how they’d handle all of my complex medical issues, I had no idea what I was in for, and I was terrified, but I also knew that my thoughts were going in really dark places, and with the intense flashbacks, I didn’t think I could trust myself. I was so close to graduating from Elms College with a BA in writing. I had published a full-length novel that Amazon had secured a deal with me over after I was one of the winners in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition (if you guys want to check it out, it’s called “When One Door Closes,” and you can find it by writing Becca Pava in the search box on Amazon). I had published Literary Journal articles in Luna Luna Magazine and blog content via Verblio.com, my writing career was just taking off. I had just met Jeff, and he was amazing, I needed to get to know him more and see if it went anywhere. Right at that moment though, the dark thoughts were so powerful they were clouding over everything else, and in-the-moment I’ve been known to make some pretty bad decisions, so I knew I needed to get help, but I was just so scared.
I wish life came with a how-to manual where you could just look up something in the table of contents or the index, like; how to deal with overwhelming suicidal thoughts that in-the-moment drown everything out so much that you come really close to acting on them and don’t know if the next time you’ll be able to resist?
Do you:
- Have crisis send you to the ER for a crisis evaluation?
- Try to tough it out on your own at home and risk killing yourself?
- Just screw it all and kill yourself right away because this is all too complicated?
In the end, I told her to call for the ambulance and the police, and I transferred myself into my wheelchair packed a bag with a few clothes that didn’t have strings, metal, or underwire in them, and hooked myself up a little early to the IV fluids, putting another bag of IV fluids on ice so they would make sure to understand that I required the IV fluids daily and couldn’t go without. We didn’t need a repeat of Jillian and Hell-Crest Commons on our hands. Then I topped off my tube feeding bag to make sure I would have enough to last me, packed my liquid narcotic pain medicine so that they could see it was scheduled at home and that it was something I regularly got prescribed and would need to be continued to avoid severe pain and withdrawal symptoms. Last I grabbed Softia and put her in my lap, then I waited in my wheelchair with my heart frenetically dancing through my chest so hard I thought the thing would pop out and land in my lap.
My heartbeat reached a crescendo when I heard sirens and then a knock at the door.
“Can we come in?” A voice called out from the doorway to my apartment.
I invited the two police officers in and tried to use some of the deep breathing techniques I’d learned over the years in Partial hospital and therapy and inpatient psych programs. Big breath in through the nose like you’re smelling roses and big breaths out through pursed lips like you’re blowing out birthday candles.
“Are you Rebecca Pava?” The shorter, chunkier police officer with the goatee asked me.
I nodded.
“What’s going on today?” he asked.
“I’m just having a really hard time, I feel like I wish I could just go to sleep forever, and I almost overdosed on one of my medications.” I explained.
“Did you actually ingest anything?” the other police officer asked me.
“No, I got as far as putting my syringe into my J tube and opening the bottle of medication, and I was about to pour it, but then I got a message from a very special person and changed my mind and called crisis.” I explained.
“Do you still feel like you want to hurt yourself?” The first police officer asked me.
“I feel like I wish I could just turn off for a really long time and then reset and try again years from now.” I explained.
“But can you contract for safety? If we were to leave you here alone tonight would you be able to promise that you wouldn’t hurt yourself?” The police officer was sounding like he was getting annoyed with me, but I was just trying to be as honest and accurate with him as possible.
“I can’t trust myself, so no. I’m afraid I’m going to lose it and kill myself.” I told him.
Finally, the police officer seemed satisfied with my answer.
“Well, we have an ambulance coming to bring you down to the hospital where crisis can do an evaluation and decide from there what the best way to help you is.” He told me.
I just nodded, I already knew all of this.
“We would bring you, but you’re in a wheelchair and we can’t get you down those stairs leading into your house, plus we wouldn’t know what to do with all of your medical equipment.” The taller, thinner police officer with the shiny bald head explained. “The ambulance should be here soon though.”
We sat there in awkward silence waiting for the ambulance to arrive. When they finally got there, they helped me transfer out of my wheelchair into their stair chair that they would use to carry me down the four stairs. The heavyset girl EMT with the long curly strawberry blonde hair held my tube feeding bag, pump, IV fluid, and also my IV pump, while they got me down the stairs. Then they set me down on their stretcher and hung everything on their IV pole. I hung on to Softia for dear life.
The ride down to the hospital was only about 10 minutes. The girl EMT rode in the back with me. I didn’t know how much to disclose about the situation, as I was under strict orders from Eve not to bring up what John had done to me, yet what John had done to me was eating away at me, corroding my mental health, and making me feel like I didn’t even want to be alive anymore.
I didn’t mention John in the ambulance, I just explained that I’d had a lot of traumatic events happen to me, and I was feeling like my life was pointless and painful and not something I wanted anything to do with, but that part of me wanted to hang in, and that self-preservation piece of me is what had pushed me to call crisis and agree to go to the hospital to get evaluated.
Once again, the ground was littered with those proverbial eggshells, and I knew it was going to be near impossible not to stomp all over them and crush them into the ground.