SentientCreature
Member
- Mar 16, 2021
- 87
I first joined this forum somewhere around June 2019 but I decided to ban myself a few months later as I had already obtained all the necessary information. I now have this new account as I have forgotten the login details for the old one. I had had SN for a long time before the attempt, and I found some comfort in knowing that I had the option to peacefully end my conscious awareness if it ever became more trouble than worth. Arguably that's already been the case for a few years now but having known that I had secured my exit I managed to convince myself that living for another day shouldn't be a problem. This kind of thinking stretched over a period of 10 months. A few months ago I finally decided that it was time to do it.
It was a somewhat hasty decision that day; I decided not to follow the 48h regimen as I feared the possibility of changing my mind, so I fasted for about 10 hours, took 10mg of meto 8 hours before the designated time and sometime after midnight, assuming that everyone in the house would be asleep, took another 30mg of meto, a few lorazepam pills, famotidine, paracetamol, dissolved 20g of SN into 50ml of water and added propranolol to the solution and let it dissolve as well. I drank the solution an hour later.
Judging by the message that I sent to a friend(another SS member) I threw up immediately after drinking the solution. I have a vague memory of leaving my room and collapsing in the hallway on my way to the bathroom. I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish by leaving my room, I had already thrown up in my room anyway so it wasn't going to achieve much in the way of sparing my mom the trouble of cleaning up after me. Still I like to think that I had at least that small spark of altruism left in me. I've lost memory of everything that followed up until the 7th day in the hospital but judging from later conversations with my mom and sisters, my older sister heard some noise and found me lying in the hallway, called our parents and by the time they arrived I got up, went to the bathroom and started washing my mouth with water from the sink and complained about pain in my throat.
They didn't think it was serious at first but then I slowly started losing balance and then they started suspecting that I had overdosed on some pills and decided to take me to the hospital.
On our way to the car I completely lost the ability to walk and started repeating some nonsense that my parents couldn't make sense of. I also mentioned SN but they weren't sure if they heard me correctly.
By the time we reached the hospital I had lost consciousness, my lips turned blue and the discharge notes describe my skin as being pale green.
Now I live in a country which doesn't even store methylene blue in hospitals. There are very few toxicologists in the country and the one that worked on my case said to me after they woke me up from anesthesia that she had never seen a case like mine before and that it took her a whole day to figure out what to do with me. What they did initially was they inserted an endotracheal tube down my throat
and put me on mechanical ventilation, started the treatment with activated charcoal and vitamin C and after 2 or 3 days reported the completion of detoxifying treatment. What they noticed then was
that my lungs were collapsing as a result of having inhaled part of the toxic content I had thrown up(it's a condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome) so they had to continue mechanical ventilation for another few days and treated me with a large dose of corticosteroids, antibiotics and blood thinners due to extreme coagulation of my blood.
I was woken up from anesthesia on the 7th day during the process of extubation(removal of the ET tube) which is undoubtedly the worst experience I've ever had. The tube caused so much panic that they had to tie me to the bed or I would have pulled it out myself before they had the chance to assess whether it was time to remove it. I was so heavily sedated that I had no idea what was going on, I was convinced that the doctors had no idea what happened to me and were needlessly supplying me with oxygen whereas I just had low haemoglobin levels, so I signaled them somehow to give me pen and paper and wrote down "I drank sodium nitrite; antidote: methylene blue". The nurse just looked at me as if I was crazy, took the paper and left. That was the moment where my only consolation was the belief that I would soon die of oxygen deprivation and wouldn't have to endure that horrible suffering for much longer.
I didn't die of course. I woke up some time later and they finally removed the tube, I started throwing up all over myself, but it was finally over, they gave me an oxygen mask, gave me some time to recover and then brought a psychiatrist. I could barely talk so I just gave some short answers and then told him that I couldn't talk anymore. I don't remember much of the conversation as I was still heavily sedated but they brought two more psychiatrists during my stay there. They all asked me about my sources of information, I mentioned Phillip Nitschke and tried to discuss the ethics of voluntary euthanasia with them while denying any plans to make another attempt explaining that the experience was traumatic enough to deter me from it.
Wellp... I didn't manage to trick them and they got me locked up in a psych ward anyway. I was transferred there directly after 11 days of treatment.
I couldn't walk without assistance so the security guy helped me walk from the entrance to a psychiatrist/psychologist(no idea what that person was) office where I had a very boring conversation with a woman who didn't seem very skilled at her job. She asked for some biographical information and finally let me go to my room. After a while a team of about 10 psychiatrists came to the room and started asking me questions.
They noticed a book I had next to me - Sartre's Existentialism, and one of them made some sarcastic remark about its being great hospital literature or something along those lines(one of them took the book away from me a few days later and gave me another one - "Veronica decides to die" by Paulo Coelho). I explained that my attempt had no obvious external causes but that I had the chemical for a year as I wanted to feel in control of my existence and eventually decided that there would be no harm in not existing. They seemed a bit puzzled and demanded a different answer but given how sedated and traumatized I still was, I wasn't willing to cooperate much. To my surprise, they left shortly after. I was finally alone and really appreciated the solitude.
I tried reading but whatever part of my brain had the task of paying attention to anything simply refused to perform the task. I was left with nothing else to do but sit and look through the window. Walking was very difficult but I decided to get closer to the windows and see what's outside. Right in front there were broken beds with springs sticking out and some other unused objects that should have been disposed of somewhere else. I imagined for a brief moment some post-apocalyptic scenario where the hospital was the only safe place and therefore I was kept there for my safety. It was kind of fun since I had nothing better to busy my mind with.
I was given some time to rest and then a psychiatrist asked me to have a conversation with him after giving me some sedatives. I only remember bits of the conversation now, it was mostly philosophical as I refuse to have personal conversations with psychiatrists. He had to admit after a lengthy conversation that his argument against suicide is based on the idea about the sanctity of life. That pretty much marked the end of a productive conversation.
That was the first day. It was New year's eve and a lot of people, staff members I suppose, seemed very excited about the fact. I wrote something cynical about that in my journal. Actually, I kept writing cynical thoughts about events in the psych ward that I found irritating until the last day. I mostly spent time in my room, trying to read or just thinking, trying to imagine what awaits me when I get back home. As the days went by I started to realize that the doctors weren't willing to let me go home just yet and that I was going to spend more time there than I initially thought.
Throughout my stay there I wasn't very cooperative as I felt like they weren't treating me correctly. They decided that giving me 3 different sleeping drugs was a good idea(not a good idea for someone with respiratory dysfunction as many different specialists later confirmed) and benzodiazepines in the morning as well and when I asked a psychiatrist why and explained why I thought this wasn't serving me she called me arrogant and said that I shouldn't pretend to understand things that I don't understand. All the sedation practically made me a walking zombie that could barely focus on anything, including basic conversation with other patients there.
After a while they started bringing new patients to my room and in the end I was sharing the room with 3 grannies, the youngest of which was probably close to 70, and that was the end of my peace. For a few days one of the grannies was thought to be severely demented and my only interaction with her consisted of giving her a bottle of water when she asked. She didn't even know where she was or how old she was, though after a few days she somehow became more reasonable and started having more complex conversations with me. She had a nickname for me and would often say really nice things about me to staff members. My only complaint about her is that her hypochondriac tendencies would often result in her screaming for help for hours as the nurses mostly ignored her, knowing that she wasn't in danger. This would sometimes happen in the middle of the night and no amount of sedation would put me back to sleep.
Whenever one of the nurses tried convincing me that I was young and had so much ahead of me I would just look at those women and think to myself - right, there is a lot ahead of me - loss of memory, immobility, loss of basic dignity and a lot of diapers. Marvelous.
A few days later I was invited to some kind of a psychiatric council to answer for my crimes. The main psychiatrist at the council was a very grumpy woman who had no patience for anything but direct answers so I got told at some point that the council was no place for philosophizing. I kept asking myself what it was that they considered pathological in my behavior and tried to get them to say it clearly. I asked her when I could get my freedom back and she said that they weren't taking away my freedom. Then I asked if I could just freely walk away and she said - "no, you're not a rational agent, your parents signed the papers for you as you are incapable of making rational decisions for yourself".
Now that brings us to an answer. People who don't wish to continue living are considered irrational and there's their justification for interfering with someone's suicide attempt and holding them imprisoned. For if I am incapable of deciding for myself what the best course of action is, someone else has to do it, and in their view suicide is never a rational decision. I should have asked for their definition of rationality as it seems to differ from mine. In my view a rational decision is one that, given available information, is the most likely one to lead to the achievement of one's goal. So I think of reason as separate from desires; it is what helps us choose the right action given a pre-established goal.
If they accepted this definition they would have to agree that they aren't pathologizing my rationality and decision-making capacities, but my goals and desires. It is desire that keeps humans in existence. None of us is held here by rational thought processes. You want that muffin because it feels good, so you go for it, and it keeps you alive for a while. What they were accusing me of ultimately was the lack of desires that are compatible with existence, which I would agree with, but they tried to mask it with their usual psychiatric jargon in order to gain a sense of superiority.
In the end my parents agreed to sign the papers for my release as soon as my physical health improved enough that I no longer required infusions three times a day, so I was released after 14 days.
It was a somewhat hasty decision that day; I decided not to follow the 48h regimen as I feared the possibility of changing my mind, so I fasted for about 10 hours, took 10mg of meto 8 hours before the designated time and sometime after midnight, assuming that everyone in the house would be asleep, took another 30mg of meto, a few lorazepam pills, famotidine, paracetamol, dissolved 20g of SN into 50ml of water and added propranolol to the solution and let it dissolve as well. I drank the solution an hour later.
Judging by the message that I sent to a friend(another SS member) I threw up immediately after drinking the solution. I have a vague memory of leaving my room and collapsing in the hallway on my way to the bathroom. I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish by leaving my room, I had already thrown up in my room anyway so it wasn't going to achieve much in the way of sparing my mom the trouble of cleaning up after me. Still I like to think that I had at least that small spark of altruism left in me. I've lost memory of everything that followed up until the 7th day in the hospital but judging from later conversations with my mom and sisters, my older sister heard some noise and found me lying in the hallway, called our parents and by the time they arrived I got up, went to the bathroom and started washing my mouth with water from the sink and complained about pain in my throat.
They didn't think it was serious at first but then I slowly started losing balance and then they started suspecting that I had overdosed on some pills and decided to take me to the hospital.
On our way to the car I completely lost the ability to walk and started repeating some nonsense that my parents couldn't make sense of. I also mentioned SN but they weren't sure if they heard me correctly.
By the time we reached the hospital I had lost consciousness, my lips turned blue and the discharge notes describe my skin as being pale green.
Now I live in a country which doesn't even store methylene blue in hospitals. There are very few toxicologists in the country and the one that worked on my case said to me after they woke me up from anesthesia that she had never seen a case like mine before and that it took her a whole day to figure out what to do with me. What they did initially was they inserted an endotracheal tube down my throat
and put me on mechanical ventilation, started the treatment with activated charcoal and vitamin C and after 2 or 3 days reported the completion of detoxifying treatment. What they noticed then was
that my lungs were collapsing as a result of having inhaled part of the toxic content I had thrown up(it's a condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome) so they had to continue mechanical ventilation for another few days and treated me with a large dose of corticosteroids, antibiotics and blood thinners due to extreme coagulation of my blood.
I was woken up from anesthesia on the 7th day during the process of extubation(removal of the ET tube) which is undoubtedly the worst experience I've ever had. The tube caused so much panic that they had to tie me to the bed or I would have pulled it out myself before they had the chance to assess whether it was time to remove it. I was so heavily sedated that I had no idea what was going on, I was convinced that the doctors had no idea what happened to me and were needlessly supplying me with oxygen whereas I just had low haemoglobin levels, so I signaled them somehow to give me pen and paper and wrote down "I drank sodium nitrite; antidote: methylene blue". The nurse just looked at me as if I was crazy, took the paper and left. That was the moment where my only consolation was the belief that I would soon die of oxygen deprivation and wouldn't have to endure that horrible suffering for much longer.
I didn't die of course. I woke up some time later and they finally removed the tube, I started throwing up all over myself, but it was finally over, they gave me an oxygen mask, gave me some time to recover and then brought a psychiatrist. I could barely talk so I just gave some short answers and then told him that I couldn't talk anymore. I don't remember much of the conversation as I was still heavily sedated but they brought two more psychiatrists during my stay there. They all asked me about my sources of information, I mentioned Phillip Nitschke and tried to discuss the ethics of voluntary euthanasia with them while denying any plans to make another attempt explaining that the experience was traumatic enough to deter me from it.
Wellp... I didn't manage to trick them and they got me locked up in a psych ward anyway. I was transferred there directly after 11 days of treatment.
I couldn't walk without assistance so the security guy helped me walk from the entrance to a psychiatrist/psychologist(no idea what that person was) office where I had a very boring conversation with a woman who didn't seem very skilled at her job. She asked for some biographical information and finally let me go to my room. After a while a team of about 10 psychiatrists came to the room and started asking me questions.
They noticed a book I had next to me - Sartre's Existentialism, and one of them made some sarcastic remark about its being great hospital literature or something along those lines(one of them took the book away from me a few days later and gave me another one - "Veronica decides to die" by Paulo Coelho). I explained that my attempt had no obvious external causes but that I had the chemical for a year as I wanted to feel in control of my existence and eventually decided that there would be no harm in not existing. They seemed a bit puzzled and demanded a different answer but given how sedated and traumatized I still was, I wasn't willing to cooperate much. To my surprise, they left shortly after. I was finally alone and really appreciated the solitude.
I tried reading but whatever part of my brain had the task of paying attention to anything simply refused to perform the task. I was left with nothing else to do but sit and look through the window. Walking was very difficult but I decided to get closer to the windows and see what's outside. Right in front there were broken beds with springs sticking out and some other unused objects that should have been disposed of somewhere else. I imagined for a brief moment some post-apocalyptic scenario where the hospital was the only safe place and therefore I was kept there for my safety. It was kind of fun since I had nothing better to busy my mind with.
I was given some time to rest and then a psychiatrist asked me to have a conversation with him after giving me some sedatives. I only remember bits of the conversation now, it was mostly philosophical as I refuse to have personal conversations with psychiatrists. He had to admit after a lengthy conversation that his argument against suicide is based on the idea about the sanctity of life. That pretty much marked the end of a productive conversation.
That was the first day. It was New year's eve and a lot of people, staff members I suppose, seemed very excited about the fact. I wrote something cynical about that in my journal. Actually, I kept writing cynical thoughts about events in the psych ward that I found irritating until the last day. I mostly spent time in my room, trying to read or just thinking, trying to imagine what awaits me when I get back home. As the days went by I started to realize that the doctors weren't willing to let me go home just yet and that I was going to spend more time there than I initially thought.
Throughout my stay there I wasn't very cooperative as I felt like they weren't treating me correctly. They decided that giving me 3 different sleeping drugs was a good idea(not a good idea for someone with respiratory dysfunction as many different specialists later confirmed) and benzodiazepines in the morning as well and when I asked a psychiatrist why and explained why I thought this wasn't serving me she called me arrogant and said that I shouldn't pretend to understand things that I don't understand. All the sedation practically made me a walking zombie that could barely focus on anything, including basic conversation with other patients there.
After a while they started bringing new patients to my room and in the end I was sharing the room with 3 grannies, the youngest of which was probably close to 70, and that was the end of my peace. For a few days one of the grannies was thought to be severely demented and my only interaction with her consisted of giving her a bottle of water when she asked. She didn't even know where she was or how old she was, though after a few days she somehow became more reasonable and started having more complex conversations with me. She had a nickname for me and would often say really nice things about me to staff members. My only complaint about her is that her hypochondriac tendencies would often result in her screaming for help for hours as the nurses mostly ignored her, knowing that she wasn't in danger. This would sometimes happen in the middle of the night and no amount of sedation would put me back to sleep.
Whenever one of the nurses tried convincing me that I was young and had so much ahead of me I would just look at those women and think to myself - right, there is a lot ahead of me - loss of memory, immobility, loss of basic dignity and a lot of diapers. Marvelous.
A few days later I was invited to some kind of a psychiatric council to answer for my crimes. The main psychiatrist at the council was a very grumpy woman who had no patience for anything but direct answers so I got told at some point that the council was no place for philosophizing. I kept asking myself what it was that they considered pathological in my behavior and tried to get them to say it clearly. I asked her when I could get my freedom back and she said that they weren't taking away my freedom. Then I asked if I could just freely walk away and she said - "no, you're not a rational agent, your parents signed the papers for you as you are incapable of making rational decisions for yourself".
Now that brings us to an answer. People who don't wish to continue living are considered irrational and there's their justification for interfering with someone's suicide attempt and holding them imprisoned. For if I am incapable of deciding for myself what the best course of action is, someone else has to do it, and in their view suicide is never a rational decision. I should have asked for their definition of rationality as it seems to differ from mine. In my view a rational decision is one that, given available information, is the most likely one to lead to the achievement of one's goal. So I think of reason as separate from desires; it is what helps us choose the right action given a pre-established goal.
If they accepted this definition they would have to agree that they aren't pathologizing my rationality and decision-making capacities, but my goals and desires. It is desire that keeps humans in existence. None of us is held here by rational thought processes. You want that muffin because it feels good, so you go for it, and it keeps you alive for a while. What they were accusing me of ultimately was the lack of desires that are compatible with existence, which I would agree with, but they tried to mask it with their usual psychiatric jargon in order to gain a sense of superiority.
In the end my parents agreed to sign the papers for my release as soon as my physical health improved enough that I no longer required infusions three times a day, so I was released after 14 days.
