Fighting the suicidal thougths

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared as a column on the National Pain Report.

The pain in my ribs has been particularly horrible the last few days.

I’ve rarely been able to get out of bed or off the couch. I’ve been absent from conversations. And I’ve been trying to sleep whenever I can because it’s the only relief I can find.

I don’t want this life.

I don’t really much care if “God has a plan for me.”

I don’t really care if I’m “still needed.”

And I really, really, really don’t care if I’m supposed to “learn something” from this awful experience.

I started taking Cymbalta about a month and a half ago, and I have to admit that it has curbed the visceral suicidal thoughts that started about 3 weeks after the pain started. The ones I was having on an almost daily basis. The ones I used to wake up with and go to bed with. The ones that used to linger in my head as I’d contemplate things like whether I should try to live through the next week to see the next episode of “The Good Wife,” or whether I should just go ahead and slit my wrists in the bathtub that night.

But even though the Cymbalta has helped with primal urge to end it all, there are still plenty of other suicidal thoughts lingering around.

Reason is enough of a reason to want to kill myself. I ration that if I have to endure this horrible pain for the rest of my life, then I don’t want to live the rest of my life.

I start to think that I might have the horrible misfortune of both never being cured and living for the next six decades. And I come to the conclusion that taking a bottle of pills all at once would be better than bearing that.

It’s hard to explain to people just how quickly pain makes you crazy. How quickly it makes you want to give up.

If I had been asked a year ago how I would react to something like this, I would have assumed everything would have been so different.

I would have thought my faith would have given me the strength I needed to get through it. I would have thought that my friends and my family would have understood just how horrible the pain really is and that they all would have rallied to support me. And I would have imagined that I would have been able to go to a doctor and get some sort of relief.

But I would have been so very wrong.

I can understand euthanasia now. I can sympathize with those patients.

And I can’t help but wonder if some of the thousands of deaths each year caused by accidentally overdosing on prescription pain pills are no accident.

When you’re enduring horrible, horrible pain on daily basis, it’s as if your body is hard wired to assume you must be close to death. When you aren’t though, when you just keep on living, day after day after day, well, it makes you crazy.

But then, just when you’re about to give up, just when you can barely breathe, you inhale a gasp of air.

My brother and my grandma and I were in the living room the other day. And we were talking about my other grandma, on my dad’s side of the family, and how devastating it was when she died. And I turned to my living grandma and said, “When you die, it will devastate this family.”

And my brother turned to me, as if he’d been waiting for the right time to tell me this, because he knew where my thoughts had been, and he said, “Crystal, if you die, it would devastate this family for years. You are the rock that holds this whole family together.”

It’s just enough to air help me breathe a little while longer.

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