On June 7 my wife died and I crawled into a bottle. I tried to sober up for her memorial on 6/19, but it wasn’t complete. By Wednesday I felt so lousy, and had been warned about DTs, that I tried checking into rehab at a place associated with my hospital.
“What can we do for you?”
“I need to dry out and get some help for my depression.”
“Are you suicidal?”
“Always have been, to an extent. It’s why I don’t own a gun.” This is where it went south: “But there was this little paring knife I noticed, heh heh heh.”
Freud knew that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Jung got jokes. Modern psych people are distressingly literal, so that’s where I stopped being a recovering drunk with mental issues and became an Imminent Suicide. But they needed to fix my dehydration first. They couldn’t trust the other fuckups around an IV of saline, so off to the ER I went. With none of my possessions, including my phone so I couldn’t tell my family where I was.
First 24 was spent sleeping and watching the soap opera that is an ER. After that I went back to rehab, where they put me alone in a featureless room without a TV. “Hey guys? I’ve been taking Prozac since 1998 for depression and OCD. It’s in my chart. If you don’t have any to spare there’s some in my kit. Guys? Guys?”
What they did have for me was a diuretic because I have lymphedema in my legs, so they started draining out the fluids I’d been given the day before, and then some. So I spent the next 24 hours pissing and drawing deeper into my decreasingly rational and increasingly repetitive thoughts. “Guys, you do know that sudden withdrawal from Prozac can trigger suicides, right?”
I did get five minutes with a psychiatrist, who asked, “How many calories in an ounce of vodka? And how many calories in a Big Mac?”
“About 110 and 500. And your point is?” He failed to explain. “Doc, the hard part of withdrawal is the knowledge that the symptoms will go away if you have a drink.”
“No, they won’t.”
“Yes they do. Have you never tried sobering up?”
“They wait under the surface.”
At that point I gave up reasoning with a man who doesn’t understand what he claims to treat.
Friday it was back to the ER for IV antibiotics for the sores on my legs, then up to a room for more diuretics. There I was left in the care of a series of female nurses aides with urinal bottles. “Why are you here?”
“You are on suicide watch.”
“Huh? Why?”
“You made a comment about a paring knife.”
“Miss, if I had wanted to kill myself I’d’ve drunk myself to death before any of this started.”
Was able to talk to my oldest, who texted her sisters, “Dad’s on suicide watch.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Guess.”
“He shot his mouth off.”
“Yep.”
After a day of the last shreds of my dignity being stripped from me, I could go home.
