Chapter 2: Suicide

Sept. 12, 2018

I said in my “There are no words” blog post that we would be going some places here. It’s ok. We’re exploring feelings real ones. Not all thoughts, feelings, and actions are pleasant. It’s ok. You need to ask yourself if you’re up to looking into these places. It’s ok if you need to skip something that hits to close to home. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. A lot of people have been hurt by suicide. I understand if you don’t want to talk about it with me. I’m NOT trying to get 500 emails begging me not to do it or 5 asshats giving advice on how to and telling me to Youtube it for their enjoyment.

About two months into the initial phase of my illness is when I realized how fucked I truly was. At that point, they hadn’t found a reliable way for me to speak on a regular basis yet. I couldn’t work. Couldn’t pay enough attention to watch TV. Couldn’t write fiction. It was then I started thinking about suicide. You start asking questions. Just how bad am I willing to let it get before I say fuck it? What will living as a cripple cost my family vs living without me? Will my wife love me?

I started drawing criteria. One is the ability to read. Reading makes life bearable. Aphasia hadn’t touched my ability to read even though it can so that was a positive. I even considered other modes of reading like learning braille. I didn’t know if Aphasia could interfere with that but I’ll do anything to read. At that time, I needed a lot of minimal help so if my wife had left me right then I would have been screwed. So I made homeless a criteria -I.e. no caretaker then I had two larger problems - Pain and Hyper-Aggression.

Prior to the Night of Hell, I had headaches once or twice a year. Now, I continually suffer from some sort of migraine discomfort. By continually I literally mean 24/7/365. I have had approx 9 symptom free days since Aug .16,2017. Intensity level ranges from a teeny tiny amount of pressure to having the Texas Chainsaw Massacre done to my skull. I have very high pain tolerance. In my former job you had to. I’m talking pain levels high enough to make me lay in bed for several hours crying and using every bit of my self restraint to keep from putting my gun in my mouth to make it stop because my pain pills aren’t getting it.So there’s large bursts of OMG pain occasionally and an almost constant drone of low level that I live with always. You get sick of that. When you stop hurting. You’re afraid to move because it might start again.

With my type of Aphasia you transition back and forth from verbal to various states of non verbal. These can scale from almost unnoticeable slight pauses to severe stuttering to jumbled sentence structure to absolute muteness. I run the entire spectrum though absolute muteness is somewhat rare with me. Now there are soft transitions where the speaker may feel a slight pressure before or as or after the transition occur. Then there are hard transitions that are very painful. Transitions being neurological in nature can also trigger panic attacks like PTSD. For me, the panic attacks are a problem. Panic attacks trigger the fight or flight response. When I’m afraid of something I kill it. If it’s dead it can’t hurt me. So during a panic attack anything I interpret as aggressive is a direct and immediate threat to my survival. I am a trained fighter. I never had these attacks before my illness.

One day my wife raised her voice to me in an angry tone when my back was turned and startled me. I almost attacked her. In over twenty years of marriage I have NEVER raised my hand to her. That moment, I almost beat her. Do you understand? not slap her, not punch her, but put an honest to god street beating on her. I realized what was happening and left the room before I touched her. I spent the next couple of days considering killing myself. I will not become a danger to my family. I decided to give docs a little longer to get my meds right and so far they have. I take sedatives twice a day so even if I do have a panic attack I don’t become hyper aggressive. I keep a close watch on myself, the first time I hit my wife will be my last. They will either institutionalize me or bury me period.

During the early period of my illness my oldest daughter tried to get me to give my word that I wouldn’t suicide (she’s a Social Worker). I refused. I’m a man of my word and I want the option available even if I never use it. I did promise that if I did decide to do it that it would not be a rash act, but one well thought out.