Hi everyone, I'm sorry for not replying to my thread sooner. I thought I made another post after I got out of the hospital, but guess I forgot! my life has changed significantly since the attempt, and I am trying to recover.
I wish I'd worried more about potential consequences of failing besides getting locked up & any lasting physical harm from the attempt. It sucks but it did get me to change stuff that I wasn't going to change otherwise. Sometimes I wish I had succeeded, sometimes I'm glad to be alive. With the days getting longer I've been seeing a lot of sunsets and it feels nice. I regret failing, I hurt people around me pretty bad with my attempt. But even more than that I regret not trying to solve some of my problems another way earlier. Things were getting out of control for me, when I ran out of distractions after Christmas I started doing acid every week or so. I warmed up to the idea of attempting on my own. It used to be my favorite drug but I think I'm done with it for good.
My last post in this thread was when I was still in the emergency room. That night I was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Weird experience, it ended up being a few hours drive away from home. My phone was dead on the ride there, and they didn't let me charge it in the car. I went three days without the internet and it was the worst. I had to watch cable news to find out what was happening in the world. Phone calls with my (then still gf, now ex) were weird with one or both of us often being cold, upset, not having anything to say, etc. I went into benzo withdrawal while at the hospital (I use them to sleep every night but they aren't prescribed), and between that and having an upset stomach from the terrible food, I didn't sleep the last night I was there. I ended up peeing the bed on the first night and it was never explained why medically. I assume it was a consequence of all the drugs I took during the attempt, I've never done that as an adult before or since. They actually ended up transporting me to a regular hospital's ER and back and I got antibiotics for a UTI.
I otherwise appeared normal enough for them to discharge me after 3 days. They didn't change my psychiatric medications or anything but I did have to go without my digestive meds which made me miserable at times. My diagnosis at discharge was PTSD, "rule out cluster B personality disorder". I think I have DID, and have been diagnosed with personality disorders before realizing I have a dissociative disorder. I told them I have DID, and they wrote down "Says she has been diagnosed with DID", the hospital basically just treated me like I had PTSD and I was fine. When there wasn't a therapy session (and there weren't many), I spent most of the time playing cards. The food was so bad that I threw up on the drive home, and needed a day to recover physically from the cumulative effects of not eating well. The day of the attempt all I had was a pop-tart and I wasn't taking good care of myself before then either.
My partner ended up breaking up with me, more or less. She got rid of my methods too so I don't have a way to attempt again and am not planning to. I've been living with my parents for the past month. I hadn't considered them as a source of support before the attempt because I had cut them out of my life after all of the trauma I went through last year. But a few days after I got out of the hospital, I reconnected. My system agreed to hold off thinking about suicide again for a few months, and I hope we will be doing better enough by then to want to live. I put a lot of work into giving myself a nice space where I have my needs met for eating and relaxing. I feel safe if I have difficult emotions, I don't have to avoid getting triggered, I can let myself feel things and process. I cried a lot during the first few weeks and still cry every day.
They didn't give me ketamine in the hospital, but I've since resumed taking it. My psych is still prescribing it to me, I told him about the attempt, no change to my meds by him either. My therapist was shocked when I told her but for the first time I was finally free to talk openly about suicide. I had been hiding it from therapists and psychiatrists for a decade. I was threatened with hospitalization in 2013 after saying that I felt passively suicidal. I was right to be afraid of the hospital, but it was not the worst part.
Overall this has been a pretty traumatizing experience. I have been dissociating a lot but I have parts that are good at taking care of me, the ketamine is helping me process things. I'm incredibly sad that I no longer live with my ex, but glad to be out of the apartment I attempted in. I have a long way to go if I am going to recover but I am stable. I still see my ex a few days a week and we're trying to help each other with our own recoveries.
I am a little worried about long term physical consequences to the attempt, or possibly from going through benzo withdrawal in the hospital. I've been having eye twitches that I don't recall happening before (though I haven't noticed it happening at all today).
