Self Help

I often find myself distracted to an alarming degree.  It doesn’t so much seem to be the particular intensity of those fugue-like wanderings of thought, which grip me from time to time, that so unnerves me.  Instead, it is the unpredictability of the moments they choose to infringe upon my conscious.  More unnerving is the sudden dawning that I have, at least this once, been active in that…state.

“Whose hands are these?”  I found myself, little more than three hours ago, mumbling aloud.

Looking down, I had stared into my sink with mute incomprehension.  My hands were in the water moving back and forth, back and forth as they washed a plate.  Taking it from the water, turning it, examining it, I laid it in the rinse sink atop a small stack of flatware.  The dishes were done.

Behind me, the television was playing the Andy Griffith theme song.  I glanced at my watch and frowned at my forgetfulness in having failed to remove it before washing the evening’s dishes.  It was seven in the evening.

Not more than five, maybe seven minutes had elapsed since I had first filled the sink.  I had no recollection of having heard the conclusion of Happy Days, nor any of the quantity of commercials, which surely must have just finished playing.  That would have taken what, three minutes? 

I remembered washing the pan I had cooked stew in.  It was crusted with hardened leftovers from the hour it spent on the stovetop unwashed.  With the serious scrubbing it had needed, that alone should have accounted for two or three minutes in the cleaning.

It wouldn’t have taken long to finish washing the remainder of the dishes.  There had only been a single drink glass, a coffee cup, two plates, one bowl and several pieces of silverware.  How long should that take?  Maybe two minutes.  Possibly three.

That is, of course, assuming that I had been focused and aware of my actions.  Mulling it over for a second, I decided that it should probably take less time if I were operating solely on a mechanical level while my mind had wandered to places unaccountable.

Drying my hands, I walked into the living portion of my laughably titled great room and turned off the television.  Sitting down on the edge of my couch and shaking a cigarette loose from my pack, I tried to recall just what I had been thinking that was so engrossing it had overridden my conscious perceptions.

“Whose hands are these?”  I repeated to myself, trying to call forth the thoughts that had been associated with that question.  There was nothing.

How much time had I lost?  I pondered a moment, shrugged my shoulders.  For no other reason than that I suddenly possessed the firm conviction it had been four minutes, I decided it had been exactly that.

It is disorienting to have to think on such matters.  Trying to account for minutes recently spent, of which there is no conscious memory, forced my mind to sidestep, or maybe squint a little.  And, as I turned on the bathroom light I realized that thinking of these occasions often perpetuates them.  Having reached that conclusion I decided immediately to desist from my current musings.

Unzipping my pants and taking aim, I started at what I saw in the toilet.  Forgetting my need to urinate and kneeling before the bowl I extracted from the toilet a small crumbling pill.  A faint feeling of unease ran through me, accompanied by the impulse to stand up, walk into the kitchen, select a sharp knife, and slash my wrist.  I fought the impulse down easily, not realizing that it would fight back, and fight dirty.

“What the hell?”

The pill was immediately recognizable, due to its diminutive size, as one of my Seroquel.  Prescribed for a nervous disorder which causes loss of sleep, I had been taking one every night for the better part of a year.  Well, that’s not quite accurate.  Several weeks into the prescription, I had reduced the dosage to one quarter of a tablet.

I began casting for sight of other tablets in the bathroom.  Glancing beside the toilet and in the wastebasket, I saw nothing.  My brow lowered, though, as I spied, in the tub, a prescription canister lid.

“What the shit?”

Standing abruptly and feeling the blood drain from my head, I swayed and clutched the vanity counter for support.  Grayness flooded my vision, closing like an incredibly slow camera shutter.  The sounds in the house began to fade, overcome by the rushing of blood in my ears, which blotted out all other noise.  Sleep suffused my being, sank into my bones.  I felt the dim unconscious recognition of returning to some long forgotten place.

Grunting, I twisted my head sharply, felt a bright flash of pain somewhere behind my eyes and turned to face the sink.  With my chest heaving as I leaned over the basin, I felt the hot wind of my breath rising in my throat, passing over my tongue, past my teeth and through my lips.

Slowly, full perceptive consciousness returned.  Opening the door to my medicine cabinet, I found the Seroquel bottle on its side, lid missing.  I plucked it from the shelf and confirmed its emptiness before dropping it in the sink.

Roughly four seconds passed for the panic to blossom in my thoughts, and from there subjugate my actions.  Dropping to my knees, then to all fours, I looked behind the toilet, turned over the wastebasket, ripped open the vanity door and pulled the cleaners and toilet paper out.  Nothing.  I threw back the partially open shower curtain and stared into an empty tub.

Thinking of the trap in the sink drain I dropped to my knees again and peered into the vanity cabinet.  It was black plastic pipe and I wrenched the “S” shaped piece from the drain plumbing, turned it over and inspected it.  A trickle of foul smelling water fell to the cabinet floor and I threw the piece into the bathtub.  I had accounted for one of approximately forty pills.

“Shit!”

Standing, I left the bathroom and walked back to the kitchen, watching the floor as I went, looking for more pills.  I found one near the refrigerator.  Bending to pick it up, I paused.  What did this mean?

Without contemplation, I leapt to a conclusion.  I had blacked out, left the sink and its dishes, walked to the bathroom, emptied the Seroquel bottle into my hand, returned to the kitchen and consumed enough pills to kill myself.

I couldn’t bank on that.  Shaking my head, I tried to deny the conviction.  There was no firm evidence to support it.  Evidence?  If I remembered correctly, I had filled the sink and placed the dishes in its soapy water before blacking out. 

“So what?”  I muttered.  “So what?  So what?”

It was important and I wasn’t sure why.  Some inner voice insisted that I focus on that for a moment.  Why did it matter?  I turned it over in my mind, set it aside for a second and considered the implications of finding a pill in the kitchen. 

There was no reason I could think of to have carried the pills into the kitchen other than to find something to wash them down with.  I let it settle in for a minute before it clicked.  Looking into the rinse sink, I found a cup which I had not used at dinner and which I rarely used, finding it difficult to clean.  I turned it in my hand absently, trying to get a rope on my thoughts.

I opened the fridge and peered in.  There, next to the milk were two more pills.  I pulled the jug out and found the cap missing, some of the contents gone.  There was no way, absolutely no way that the cap should be missing.  I had picked up the fresh gallon on my way home from work and had polished off the remainder of the old one with supper.  Returning to the sink, I found the cap in the sink strainer.

“Okay.”  I spoke aloud, hoping it would help me focus. 

“Okay.  Just…sit down.  Just sit down and think.  Figure this out.”  I crossed the kitchen to the living room and took a seat on the arm of the couch, lit another cigarette and concentrated on smoking for a few seconds, letting my mind go blank as I watched the smoke swirl and rise to the ceiling.

Seroquel is a barbiturate, and though I knew little about it, I got the distinct impression that taking fifteen or so tablets would undoubtedly be more than sufficient to kill me.  That belief was birthed from knowing the effects of only one small tablet.  So, the question was…had I taken any?  And if so, how many?

I had found pills in the kitchen and bathroom.  There were two next to the milk.  The milk lid, like the prescription lid had been removed and tossed aside.  In the sink there had been an extra cup.  According to what I had seen, I believed it likely that I had overdosed myself.  What time was it?

Consulting my watch, I realized that not more than eleven minutes had passed since I had filled the sink and begun cleaning my dishes.  It took something like fifty to sixty minutes for the Seroquel to take effect, shutting my body down for sleep.  In about thirty minutes, I typically begin to feel the drug reaching through my blood and taking hold of organs, nerves, muscles, and my thoughts.  Would the amount I had taken increase the speed at which it worked? 

I had started my prescription at one full pill, at bedtime, every night.  Since then, finding the lingering lethargic effects of it lasted throughout the day, I had reduced the dosage, first by half, then again reducing that amount by half.  I had noted no difference in the time it took for the Seroquel to begin taking hold.  It was most reasonable to assume that the time it took for the effects to become noticeable was due more to my metabolic rate than the dosage size.  If I had, in fact, done what I suspected, I should be able to tell in (check my watch) eighteen minutes.

I stood up, started pacing and tried to determine a course of action.  I thought of calling 911, explaining my situation and asking what to do.  What if I did that?  No.  It would sound like a suicide attempt.  What if I hadn’t taken the pills?

Undoubtedly, I would be picked up in an ambulance and taken to the hospital where my stomach would be pumped.  From there I would be monitored, possibly given epinephrine. 

If a blood test failed to reveal the drug in my system, there was the possibility of serious repercussions.  Certainly, I could expect court ordered counseling and a trip to the old third floor of the local hospital for a few days of evaluative observation.  And if I had taken them…well, I would wind up on the third floor anyway.

“Shit!”

If only I was one hundred percent that I had overdosed, I would call.  But, as it was, I had no desire to risk the pursuant trouble associated with the call if I didn’t need to.  I made up my mind right then.  If I passed forty minutes without showing signs of having taken them, I would call anyway.  The very first noticeable sign I recognized of having ingested the barbiturates I would call. 

That left me with about seventeen minutes to kill.  Seventeen minutes to die.  Seventeen minutes that I needed to act within.  But what, what could I do?  How long would it take for the pills to dissolve in my stomach? 

I had no idea.  Worse, I had no way of finding out without calling a medical professional.  What if I had taken the pills but they were still not fully dissolved?  I could induce vomiting.  Going to the refrigerator, I pulled the milk out, remembering something I had once been witness to.

I had a friend who claimed to have read that it was virtually impossible for anybody to consume, within one hour, a full gallon of milk.  This had been during the middle of summer, years ago, at a music festival in the middle of Illinois.

To prove his point, my friend had pulled the gallon of milk from our cooler, popped the cap, and throwing his head back, began to guzzle like he was chugging a beer.  After polishing off a quarter gallon in one long draught, he had pulled the jug from his lips, held it towards me and after one lurching step, emptied his stomach onto the ground.

I remembered how cold the jug felt, my skin warm from the hot, late June sunshine.  I watched my friend retching and heaving, thin strands of bile and saliva hanging from his lips and chin as I turned my head away.  As revulsion brought my own gorge higher in my throat, I looked at the milk, tipped it, and poured its contents onto the ground.

It sounded funny when it hit the grass.  The sound was almost with a metallic ringing quality, like rinsing a metal bowl with a sink hose.  I felt the weight diminishing in my hand as the milk drained from the jug.  I cursed as, returning from the swirling depths of my reminiscence, I realized I had just dumped my milk down the sink drain.

“Shit!”

I checked my watch.  Fourteen minutes had passed since the first black out and now I’d had a second.  With the recent loss of consciousness, just past, I was frightened.  Of all the times for that to occur, why had it happened when I was in the act of self-preservation?  I sat down on the kitchen floor.

Two times today I had experienced something like a fugue.  Possibly, I wasn’t sure, they were fugues.  It didn’t matter.  What did matter was the import of the sudden realization that both times it had occurred I had done something harmful to myself. 

Once was a fluke.  Twice was more than coincidence.  Reaching a sudden decision, I stood up and pulled my cell phone from my pocket and flipped it open.  Dialing 911, I returned to the living room, sat on the couch and pressed the send key.

When the phone failed to ring I blinked stupidly, pulled it from my head and stared at the blank LCD display screen.  Puzzled, I held the phone in front of me for a few seconds before noticing a difference in its weight.  I turned it over and then threw it against the wall when I found the battery pack missing. 

“What the fuck?  What the fucking fuck?” 

It had been on, I had looked at the display, saw the numerals appear on the screen as I dialed, heard the keytone beeps.  When in the hell had I removed the battery? 

There was no doubt in my mind that I had done so.  Twice, now thrice, I had taken negative actions against my best interest unaware and unconscious of the fact.  Was I going to be able to get help?  I looked towards my front door, decided to leave and get help.

Even if I were unable to drive myself to a hospital, I lived in a heavily populated apartment complex, it was still not yet eight in the evening and there were plenty of kids playing outside, and someone would surely notice if I passed out, or was acting erratically.  I went for the door.

My hand closed on the knob and turned.  I pulled with no result and cursed.  I was standing in front of the bathroom.  There was no longer any denying it.  I was for some reason unconsciously keeping myself from getting help.  I glanced at my watch, wondering vaguely why I hadn’t by now smashed it.  I had about eight minutes to go before I knew for sure whether I had taken the pills.  Eight minutes?

I double-checked.  Yes sir, eight minutes.  I had lost a few minutes again, not just some momentary blanking of thought in which I had changed my course of action.  What had I done?

Nervously, I pushed the bathroom door open.  Stepping inside, I made a quick inspection of the room and noted no changes in it since earlier.  I went to the medicine cabinet and checked that.  Nothing different. 

In the bedroom, there was no sign that I had moved anything around or been up to any other mischief.  Padding down the hall, I moved back into the kitchen area and pulled the refrigerator open, scanned the contents and closed the door.  In the living room, I found what I had been up to.

There was new writing, in black ink, on the top page of my work notebook.  I picked it up and read the short note, dropped it to the floor and collapsed to my knees as my thoughts swam and my breathing became fast and ragged. 

“I’m so sorry, but I cannot live without her.”  The note had read.

“No! No! No!”  I pounded my fist on the floor.

There was every possibility that everyone I knew would buy that.  I was only a year and two months out from having lost my daughter in a car accident.  I had been devastated; refusing to eat, sleep or move more than what was minimally required of me for the first week.  After that, it had been a long arduous journey even to regain the motion of living.

My family had stood by me.  Even my ex-wife had come by, sharing meals with me, helping me to get my home back in order, and eventually had negotiated the terms of sale for my house, where I had lived as custodial guardian over our daughter.  She had suggested I move in with a family member until everyone agreed I could be trusted not to take my own life.  And so I had.  And so, I thought, I had persevered.

Letting the despair of the moment wash over me, the grief of my daughter’s death renewed in my breast, I lay on the floor and sobbed.  After several minutes, the tears subsided and my breathing began to return to normal.  Rising to my knees, I picked up the notebook again, tore the page out, lit it with my lighter, lit my cigarette with the burning paper and dropped it in the ashtray.  I made my way to the couch and sat down, hunched near the edge. 

Smoking my cigarette, I thought the situation over.  Already I could feel the effects of the Seroquel as it overtook me in a slow dark tide.  My muscles were beginning to relax, my scalp seemed to be moving, and my thoughts were clouded.  What to do?  What to do?

I tried for the door again.  When I found myself opening my bedroom door instead, I decided it was useless.  I had some time left.  Perhaps, even, hours.  I was always a strong believer that I could fight my way through anything, and had on occasion, struggled to keep grasp of my consciousness while heavily sedated and triumphed.  I doubted I could combat and eventually win the death match I had started with myself, but felt certain that I could at least forestall its eventual resolution and stay conscious for quite some time.

I put on a pot of coffee.  I finished my cigarette and lit another.  Pulling a frozen pizza from the freezer and dropping it on the counter I set the oven to preheat.  I tried the door again.  This time, when I found myself opening the door to the bedroom, I went to the closet, selected my absolutely favorite shirt and exchanged it for the one I had on.  Selecting my favorite jeans from my dresser I donned them. 

That accomplished, I picked up my bedside lamp, hefted it and flung it through my window.  At least I tried to.  Even as I heard the glass breaking and the volume of the outside noises increase, I knew it was imagined and after blinking several times realized I had returned the lamp to my bed-stand.

Nodding my head grimly, I left the bedroom.  In the kitchen the coffee had brewed far enough to pour myself a cup, which I did.  In the living room, I sat down with my coffee, enjoying its warmth and bitterness.  I picked up the notebook and stared at it.  I picked up the pen and clicked it several times, then set it back down on the coffee table.  I laid the notebook next to it and went for the door again.

So here I sit, after three hours and four thousand attempts at leaving or catching somebody’s attention.  I have eaten my pizza, drank four pots of coffee and smoked close to a pack and a half of cigarettes.  Since the last time I had mentioned going for the door, I have been writing, only pausing to light a cigarette, fill my coffee cup, use the bathroom, or eat.  And, of course, I have tried to get help many times.  I can’t even scream. 

It’s extremely hard to think straight, to carry one idea to the next without suddenly finding myself off track.  I remember my daughter the last time I saw her.  Six years old.  Going to stay the night with her best friend.  Her friend’s mother had picked her up and had been killed with her in the crash.  It wasn’t her fault.  The drunk driving the other car had gone off the road, driven through three yards, crashing through a large privacy fence and back out onto the road and into the blue Subaru that was carrying my Chelsea.

She was wearing a blue sweater that day.  I loved that sweater.  It was pale blue and brought out the icy grayness in her eyes.  She had smiled at me, waving with her hand sticking out the window as they had pulled away. 

At least, when they find me, they will know I didn’t kill myself.  Not consciously.  I used to wear a blue sweater like hers.  It brought out the icy grayness in my eyes.  Like hers.  Like her old man.  Spitting image.  I don’t like the icy hands pulling at me.  I don’t