Smooth Sailing...Back to Self

                                                     Photo cred: Austin Chan on Unsplash


After two months at Bayside Rehab, I was released to an upscale sober living environment ("SLE") in the exclusive town of Tiburon, California.  I had my own private room overlooking the bay, and I was sober. I was finally free, or so I thought. 

I ventured out to an AA meeting one night and met up with a guy from the Bayside cohort. We were having a nice evening until he turned and said: “If anyone relapses, it will be you.” I was devastated.

Unmoored and pissed off, I stamped my frenemy's confrontational message onto my heart and carried it with me back to my room. The minute I was alone, I took a half bottle of pills and blacked out. I'd show him! Revenge-using? To hurt no one other than myself? No problem.

Proving him right was yet another new nadir. 

In the morning, I was taken to the local hospital, with which I would become very familiar. When I woke up, I was strapped to a gurney gazing into the eyes of an RN. 

"You are okay, honey, and you are on suicide watch," she said. 

What? The words were not coming. I wanted to tell her I was frightened, but not crazy, and I wanted out of the restraints.

Then it occurred to me, supine and strapped down, that maybe I was some kind of crazy. Surely, medical professionals thought so, which is why I was confined like a convict.

Another nurse approached with a blood pressure cuff. I managed to turn my head to read the meter: 200/200.

"You are high risk for having a stroke. I want you to breathe deeply with me," she said. 

I tried to breathe with her, but the vision in my head of her was that was a carny in front of a ride barking: Step right up, ladies and gentleman, and bring your popcorn! This woman is at risk of offing herself or stroking out!

I lived through that part. I was floating outside and above, peering in and below. It seemed to be happening to someone else. This, my cadre of subsequent therapists would tell me, was disassociating, a coping mechanism. 

My sense of hearing on the gurney was intact. People were talking about me in the third person, like I wasn't present, prostrate before them, with my life in their hands.

Should we send her to the ICU or the psych ward? 

Neither!  I wanted to respond, but as in a dream, I had no words. 

While pondering my medical dilemma, a case manager sidled up to the gurney. She asked me myriad questions designed to ascertain whether I really was thinking about ending it all. 

"Nope, I'm good," I said, surprising myself (the naloxone injection, IV drip and assisted ventilation had worked apparently). 

After all my life was ostensibly perfect. I unspooled my uneven history for her, sharing that I had recently turned the corner, two months sober in rehab, after a three-year bout with opioids. This was a little setback because I was set off by some thoughtless, flippant "friend."

"But me suicidal? Never."

For some strange reason, she wasn’t buying my minimizing story. She stamped the very official forms and called for the weekend staffers to take me away.

"To the psych ward." She didn't look over her shoulder as she strode out of the room.

Away.

“Look,” I implored, my desperate words coming fast now “no track marks on my arms: I'm just an ordinary pill popper.” And if you have access to any, I'm happy to take them. 

The two large men who spun the gurney one hundred and eighty degrees in a fraction of a second to wheel me, smooth sailing down the corridor, were well trained. They knew to avoid eye contact.

Tears were streaming down my temples and into my hair when I heard: “KODIMER! YOU CAN GO HOME NOW!” 

To this day, I do not know how it happened. Maybe the nurse was trying to scare me—taking me right up the precipice. Perhaps a doctor read my history and decided I didn't meet 5150 criteria (or as we say in California, "short-term crazy").

I entered the hospital that night, assessed as a suicidal maniac. I walked out a run-of-the-mill drug addict. Free but alone.

​Again.



​