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Worth Saving

By Natasha Tracy
I laid on the unshellacked, ceramic tiles of my kitchen floor. They were each the

size of a dessert plate, hard and cold. The grey grout between them left

pockmarked indentations in my flesh. I pressed my body flat against the floor so as

much of me as possible would touch the tile. I liked to lay there when there was

nowhere in the world I could possibly be. Beside the cat’s litter box, between the

dishwasher and stove, I promised to end my life.

I felt the pain come. Brick walls crushing my bones. I had been holding the

pain back longer than I could bear. So it was here. Vengeful. Aggressive. Needy.

More pain in the form of tears. A flood of acid burned trails in my cheeks,

accompanied by the wailing of a dying animal. It’s the sound you don’t hear unless

you happen to be beside someone with brick walls crushing their bones.

I was pinned. All the energy of the world was screaming from my lungs and

pouring from my eyes; there was none left to move a muscle.

I waited.

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 Nothing to do but wait. Let the pain tear me open and wait. Feel the acid in

my eyes and wait. Hear the echoes of my cries and wait.

The pills and the gin started to massage the edges of my consciousness. On

the very outer recesses of the prison of my mind there was the tiniest hope of a

foggy torture. Instead of the shards of crystalline pain in the rest of my world.

I sat up. I picked up the gin bottle, my friend, sitting on the floor next to me,

and choked back the alcohol. A soothing burn. The sear of anesthetic entering

veins.

--

Bipolar Not Worth Saving. This was not an official diagnosis but one

seemingly written on my chart anyway. A new doctor. With short, flat hair and

creases chiseled into her face from a career of failing to save the insane. I was a

chart to her. An assessment. An assessment she wrote with furious anger as I

bloodlet my medical history in front of her. She never looked up from her scrawl.

She never told me her name. She wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of a line-

up.

There is a special suffering that goes with admitting to a history of anguish

and medical failure. It is an aching, urgent, seething loss describing what doctors

and medications haven’t helped. It is horrific to be expected to detail years of

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insanity with the passionless clarity of this morning’s weather forecast. The doctor

judged me when I didn’t remember the name of the fifth medication, how much of

it I had taken, how long I had taken it and what the side effects were. It was a

decade ago. She didn’t care. It wasn’t helpful if I couldn’t be specific.

I was naked and being flogged.

--

I knew Ativan and gin weren’t a good mix. I knew why. I knew what

happened when benzodiazepines and alcohol slipped into neuronal pathways. I

knew psychopharmacology. I knew it made it easier to die.

I also knew I hadn’t taken enough to do the job. Not hoarded enough

medication. Not enough gin in the freezer.

But the chemicals did part of their job and dampened my sense of concern.

The pain was there. The brick walls came. The acid flowed. But I cared less about

the agony in which I laid.

And there was something I wanted to do before I died. I wanted to slice my

wrist with a shard of broken glass. Glass slides through flesh more easily than a

razor blade. The slice is completed before your brain acknowledges the feeling.

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You just see the blood. And your flesh pushing out through your incision, no

longer held in place by your skin.

I looked up to my Formica countertop and sitting on it was a champagne

flute filled with cinnamon hearts. The red candy in glass had been sitting there,

untouched, for months. I had no need for hearts.

--

After the bearing of soul to the hollow doctor I expected a refrain I have

heard many times.

“We can’t do much for you. You’re treatment-resistant. We can’t make any

promises.”

That was devastatingly fine. I didn’t expect they could take away the crazy.

But instead she told me that there was nothing she could do and I would not

be her, or anyone else’s, patient. She was the assessment keeper. Gate keeper.

Health care services keeper.

Creator of the designation: Bipolar Not Worth Saving.

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 I was stunned. I told her she seemed to be cast from stone and needed to

work on her bedside manner as it felt like being hit by a steel post. It was the best I

could do upon hearing I was a Bipolar Not Worth Saving.

Not a muscle in her face moved. Not a molecule of her being shifted as she

watched me break down, 18 inches away from the frantic script of her assessment.

I choked out drowning questions. I asked her what she wanted me to do

now. What was the plan? Where do I go from here?

She didn’t know. She didn’t care. Bipolar Not Worth Saving. Not her

problem. She told me to go off my meds to get rid of the side effects I was having.

I told her I was suicidal. She asked me what I wanted her to do about it.

Bipolar Not Worth Saving.

I begged for a refill of my existing prescriptions knowing her advice to stop

medication would likely be lethal. With a great show of effort she scrawled on her

prescription pad and handed it to the now sputtering, sobbing, sopping mess of pre-

dead human. Two weeks worth. Enough time to get my things in order. Enough

time to say goodbye.

There was no power that could make me stop crying as I left her office. I ran

into my old doctor on the way out. I looked at him and begged him to help me. For

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a moment a stroke of concern flashed across his eyes. My blotchy red face and

strangled request had resonated somewhere. But the concern vanished in the next

blink as he returned to neutral. He was helping someone else today.

--

I heaved my body up to grab the glass. Cold, hard, solid in my hand I

dropped back to the floor. I positioned myself between the cat box and the stove,

and shattered the glass making hearts fly through the air. I turned and looked to

make sure there was no glass around the cat box. I didn’t want the cats to cut their

paws.

I looked at the different pieces of glass scattered around me. I looked for the

sharpest one. I looked for the one I thought would incise the best. I stumbled to

pick it up and finished the gin while the world swirled around me. A lack of food

for days meant the chemicals raced to bathe my neurons.

I sliced across my left wrist; where a watch band would go; where the blue

and the purple blood can be seen. Shiny red oozed from the stroke. The blood was

so little. The wound was so shallow. I cut again. This piece of glass was not sharp.

Every person in the world had cut themselves more deeply cleaning up a broken

juice glass in the sink. The blood from my wrist glistened.

I found another piece of glass, certain it was sharper. I cut again.

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 There is a momentous pain that goes with cutting into an existing wound.

Slicing into flesh that has already been shredded and ripped, dissected and torn.

This is the pain truly worth screaming about. The pain it takes alcohol and drugs

through which to steady yourself. The pain requiring deep resolve and

inextinguishable need through which to continue cutting.

Now there was blood. Blue-red life flowed from my wrist. It splashed onto

the tile. I watched it pool there for a moment. Then I realized. There wasn’t enough

blood. I hadn’t cut the vein.

I frantically searched for sharper glass fragments among the hearts. More

cutting. Not enough blood. Too late. The fog of drugs won out over the blood. The

last thing I thought as I laid there was that I should make sure and not bleed on the

grout. It would stain.

If you feel you may harm yourself, reach out. Get help now.

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Natasha Tracy is an award-winning mental health writer with a
damaged brain and a mind striving to deal with it. She writes
technical articles, creative nonfiction and fiction and is known for
devastating authenticity and occasional controversy. You can find
Natasha:
ž Writing Breaking Bipolar for HealthyPlace.com
ž Writing at http://natashatracy.com
ž @natasha_tracy on Twitter
ž Natasha.tracy.writer on Facebook

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