Dad's First Attempt

Sometimes it can be therapeutic and helpful for me to talk about what happened since remembering the details helps me to process through them. On Sunday, October 15th I was having a normal lazy Sunday when I got a call from my mom around 5ish. She calmly asked me if I had talked to dad today and I said "no". Then she lost it and said she came home from visiting my grandma in the hospital to find dad unresponsive in bed. I'm pretty sure I jumped up from the couch when I heard this and I asked if she called 9-1-1. She said she had and they just left and she wanted me to come get her to take her in to the hospital. I put shoes on and ran out the door. As I was driving to get her, I was hysterical and I kept thinking about what possibly could have happened. Did he have a heart attack? A stroke? A suicide attempt never crossed my mind. I called my boss and left him a message telling him what was going on and then tried to calm myself down so that I didn't get my mom any more upset than she already was.

When we got to the hospital, they said we couldn't go back to see him yet so we needed to sit down in the waiting area. I hated this. It was so hard to just sit there indefinitely and have no clue what was happening at all. I don't know how long we actually sat there, but it felt like forever until they came and got us. They told us that they wanted us to wait in a side room before they would we could see him. Hearing that filled me with dread; if they wanted to talk to us before we saw him, were they going to tell us something horrible? I asked a nurse if he had brain activity and she said she didn't know yet because they had him sedated and intubated. I'm the only sister in my family who is NOT a nurse so I didn't know any more specific questions to ask, but I've seen enough medical shows to know that if the brain doesn't have oxygen for too long, you start to lose your brain function.

Right after they let us in to see him, Jenn got there. We hadn't told Jess what happened yet because she was at work (at a different hospital) until 7pm. My brother, Greg, was on his way up from Philly. I just sat there and cried and held dad's hand. The doctors didn't have any answers for us yet since they were still running tests. Jenn was immediately suspicious and asked mom if there were any empty pill bottles lying around. Looking back, I feel stupid for being so naive, but i thought there was no way that this was intentional. When I was in the hospital after my suicide attempt I remember dad sitting there adamantly telling me "Don't EVER do something like this again. You have no idea how many people this affects" so it never even came up as a possibility in my mind that my dad would ever try the same thing.

After they had him stable and admitted him, it was getting close to midnight and we all left to try to get some sleep. Mom and I stopped at a diner to get something to eat then I took her home and dug through every trash can in the house to see if I could find some empty pill bottles. Nothing. It looked like he laid down to take a nap. Nothing was out of the ordinary. To this day, I still feel some fault because my dad knew how to hide his attempt because he saw what had happened to me. With my suicide attempt, it was very obvious what I was doing. I had left notes, and even if I didn't the empty pill & alcohol bottles were easy to find. Since I failed at the attempt, it was mandatory for me to be admitted to the mental health unit for a 5 day minimum. He knew all of that so he made sure to make it look like an accident.

Over the next few days, as the tests started to come back, the doctors were still trying to figure out what happened. No heart attack. No stroke. When he finally regained consciousness, we asked him if he remembered anything and he was very vague and told us that he had been having trouble sleeping (which was a true statement- he hadn't slept well in months) and said he took a few Advil PM's to try to get some sleep. He would not elaborate any more than that, but he was not himself at all. He was grouchy to everyone and refused any testing or medication that the doctors wanted to give. He stated many times that he was very depressed. I thought for sure he would at some point be admitted to the 8th floor and I was shocked on the next Sunday when I went in to see him and was told that he was being discharged.

Looking back it seems so obvious that he was not happy that his attempt had failed and he was biding his time and coming up with plan B. There are a million "what if" questions I can come up with but I have to try my hardest to not go there because it won't change anything. It's hard being a "doer" and not being great at sitting still- I want to take whatever action I can so that other families don't have go through this kind of thing, but it's not that simple. Right now, the best I can do is to continue to try to raise awareness and help the stigma surrounding mental health and suicide to go away. I took a break from knitting to make suicide prevention awareness pins. If you want one of these to wear, I'd be happy to give you one. It seems small, but the sooner we start talking about it, the sooner we can begin to make changes. ❤