The Hardest Year Part 1: CCBH

2015 was probably the hardest year in my entire life. But the beginning of the rollercoaster of 2015 started at the end of 2014.

The story all starts with me struggling in the fall of 2014. I had started seeing a psychiatrist and we were trying out different medications to see if we could try to get my depression under control. We tried a couple medications and they weren't working. During the period of time between appointments, when we were trying a new medication I really started struggling with suicidal thoughts. Eventually I remember having a text conversation with someone from the church and I remember feeling very triggered by him and thinking "well you know what? Then I might as well just end it" and that is exactly what I tried to do.
October or November of 2014 I attempted suicide by swallowing 120 pills. I received no medical attention, just threw everything up and spent a day and a half completely out of it.
December 1st, 2014 I had an appointment with my psychiatrist. I told my psychiatrist about the suicide attempt. They asked me if I was still suicidal and I said I was. The psychiatrist said I needed to go to the emergency room and be there by 5pm that day or she would be sending the cops to come pick me up. I had to leave my job stranded mid-day and head to the hospital, where I met the pastor of my church at the time. I told them why I was there, and not too long after they took me back to the psychiatric area of the ER. I was made to change into paper scrubs and give up all my personal belongings. I was put in a room and evaluated by a social worker. The social worker was an older lady who asked a bunch of different questions. When I told her about the suicide attempt, she rose her voice, telling me I was lying, fabricating the truth just to get attention. She told me I wouldn't be alive if I took 120 pills. She finished her evaluation and put me on involuntary commitment papers. My pastor left after a while and I was left alone. Around 11 or midnight, I was told I had been placed at a hospital and would be transported. I was taken to the Carolina Center for Behavioral Health, a place I would get to know well. I went through the intake process and was finally able to change back into my clothes (which were my work clothes) and go to sleep.
During the first week, I bonded with other people in the unit and was going to therapy as instructed. It took a couple days for my friends to bring me clothes and toiletries and I didn't think they had scrubs in my size so I never asked about scrubs even though they said they had scrubs every morning at community meeting. I realize now that the first few days with me not showering and wearing the same clothes I started to smell and it bothered other people. After a couple days though, my friends finally brought me clothes and I was able to shower and change. I was seeing my doctor every day as I was supposed to and she was messing with my meds a little bit. After a couple days of seeing her, I asked her if I could have my pillowcase. She asked me about it, like if it was a pillowcase that went over a pillow and I said yes. It was my pillowcase that went with me everywhere and I kept it in my purse (but I didn't tell her that part, I just wanted her to let me have it) so I asked her to write an order so that I could have it. She agreed to let me have it and I was able to get it that afternoon. I was so relieved to finally have my security item back. I began carrying it around with me everywhere, like I did when I was outside the hospital. Over the next couple days, I complained of a lot of anxiety so she put me on Vistaril every 6 hours and then every 4 hours when I said it wasn't working. Then one day the anxiety got so bad I couldn't handle it and I used a staple to cut myself on my arm. When I wrote a note to my doctor the next day and told her that, she immediately put me on klonopin and I got put on "Visual" for the first time. Visual meant that I had to be in staff's eyesight at all times. This meant that to go to the bathroom I had to ask for one of the staff to go to my room with me. It also meant pulling the mattress of the bed out of the room into the dayroom and I would be sleeping out where everyone could see me. It sucked. It meant that I had a restless night of sleep. After one day of visual, I was let off of it and back on normal privileges. After about a week of being there, I brought up the idea of me staying through Christmas because of how difficult a time Christmas was for me and because of how unstable I was. She told me we would talk about it as time got closer. A few days later as she stopped making medication changes, she decided she was going to discharge me even though I was still very suicidal and still a major danger to myself. I freaked out and as soon as I walked out of the office with her, I was surrounded by the other patients on the unit who were now my friends and they were holding me as I was crying, telling me that they weren't going to let me leave knowing I wasn't safe. I was not quiet about the fact that if they let me leave, I planned on immediately going out and hurting myself. I found out after the fact that they made a petition to the staff and had everybody on the unit sign it to not let me leave because I was a danger to myself. I asked the staff what I could do and they told me I could file a grievance, which I did. I requested a different doctor and the next morning that was exactly what happened. This doctor decided it would be a good idea to keep me through Christmas as long as my insurance covered it because of the danger it would lead to of me going home. The next couple of weeks we spent making medication changes and nothing really seemed to get better. There were multiple other instances of self-harm (even one when I was on "visual") where I got put on "visual" for a day and then taken off. I ended up getting a roommate who also struggled with self-harm and we both sought out staples for us to use to hurt ourselves and we talked about it with each other. During these couple weeks, I had multiple meltdowns which challenged staff to figure out what to do with me. One night I had a flashback. I sat between my bed and the wall and rocked myself with a staple in my hand, trying to hurt myself. The staff found me like that and had to coax the staple out of my hand and tried to bring me out of it. Eventually, one nurse, Shakira, became the one they called to come help me when I was struggling.
Also during this period of time, my arthritis flared up really badly and I began limping because my ankle was so bad and I was in so much pain that I had difficulty walking. The limping made my other joints hurt because I was putting extra strain on the other side of my body. So one tech thought about getting me a wheelchair to use to make life easier on me. When she got me that and I got in it, one of the nurses saw me and made me get out of it. She was really nasty about it too. She said I had to get out of it or she was going to send me to a geriatric unit. So I got up, but the next day I asked my doctor to write an order for it, which she did. I spent most of the time in a wheelchair to not put pressure on my joints.
When Christmas came closer, there were few patients between units 1 and 2 so they combined the 2 units. This was not a good combination. Unit 1 was chemical dependency and detox. Unit 1 staff was not trained in how to handle unit 2 patients and tried to treat unit 2 patients just like they treated unit 1 patients which was all wrong. This triggered multiple unit 2 patients, including me, especially me. I began reacting to the treatment and things began getting even worse. One night I self harmed really badly and wrote "failure" in blood on the wall. They immediately called Shakira to come help take care of me and bandage me up. I ended up on visual again and staff took a picture of what I did and put it in my chart. A couple days later I received a note in my room from one of the patients. It was mean and basically directed at me being dramatic and such during group I think. I got really upset and unit 1 staff showed no sympathy at all, and said the note was right, that I should stop acting so self-centered. Which just made me upset and want to self-harm, which I think I did. A couple days later I got upset again about how I was being treated on the unit, both by other patients and staff. I started throwing books in my room from the table next to my bed to the desk across the room. This was the stick that broke the camel's back and it earned me a trip to Unit 5. I cried the whole way to the new unit. They put me in a room and I was kind of just left to myself. I spent a week on Unit 5, working with my doctor continuously on my medications, adjusting here and there to see if something might work. One meeting I had with my doctor when I was on Unit 5 I asked her if she thought I was Borderline and she officially gave me the Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis. While I was on unit 5, I was self-harming pretty much every day, but I was hiding it. I did it under my wrist brace so it wouldn't be seen. After a week of being on the psychosis unit, I asked to be moved back to Unit 2. They let me attend groups on the unit for a couple days before officially moving me back there. Once they moved me back to unit 2, I was informed that I would have a doctor change again. The doctor I had did not know what else to do to help me, so she called in the medical director to put fresh eyes on my case and take over. So that was a change. I did seem to calm down a little bit though, once back on unit 2. I do remember having a conversation on the floor with Shakira and a tech Sue when I opened up to them about how I was feeling and how I had self-harmed when I was on unit 5 and how I was worried that it was getting infected. They were glad I told them and were supportive and caring and tried to lift me up. I was still very hopeless through this whole time, even after I got moved back onto unit 2. I had a conversation with my new roommate and just basically explained how hopeless I was feeling and how determined I was to hurt myself when I got out. My roommate then went and wrote me a letter and got the rest of the unit to either sign it or write notes for themselves to me to try to encourage me to not give up like I really wanted to.
After a couple more weeks and some more medication changes, it was decided that I would be okay to try PHP (partial hospitalization program) and to see how that goes. I lasted 4 days before having to be re-admitted to the hospital because I was severely suicidal and was hurting myself.
Upon re-admission, staff immediately just got an order for my pillowcase because they knew I needed it. They did the normal intake stuff of going through everything and putting everything away. Except this time, they made a mistake in putting things away and left the purse strap hanging down from the cabinet, which was just an easy idea for someone like me, who was determined to hurt myself. So I tried. It was a weak and stupid tried but I did try to hang myself with the purse strap. Once I told staff what I did, I was of course immediately put on visual.
This time when I was put on visual, I was sleeping out in the dayroom like I had done multiple times before. I had fallen asleep early unlike the previous times and was sleeping fine when the night shift head nurse decided that I was not going to be allowed to have my pillowcase anymore. I told her that I had a doctor's order for it. She did not listen but I would not give up my pillowcase. I started crying telling them they couldn't take it because of the order. The next thing I knew I was surrounded by people who were putting gloves on. When I still refused to give it up, I was quickly grabbed and it was pried out of my fingers, me screaming and crying the entire time. During this process, they managed to twist and re-sprain my bad ankle which had already been a problem for me, leaving me in a wheelchair earlier in the hospitalization. When I was finally released, I was sobbing uncontrollably. I was angry and hurt. I threw my pillows across the room and bit myself multiple times as well as digging my nails into my skin because I didn't know how to handle the intense emotions I was feeling and the only thing I knew to do was to find a way to hurt myself. I cried and cried and cried because my pillowcase was my security blanket, it was my way of coping with the world, it was how I pushed through anxiety, it was how I tried to ground myself, it meant everything to me and it had been literally pried from my fingers. After a while the head nurse came back to the dayroom and we started talking. She talked with me about what had happened earlier in the day and what she felt and she said things she felt I needed to hear. At the end of the conversation, she felt like I was "safe" enough and I think she realized what the importance of it was, so she gave it back to me, under the condition that my mattress was moved out of the dayroom and in front of the nurses station where they would have eyes on me all the time. Finally, after multiple hours of me being awake, it was returned to me and I was allowed to lay down and try to go back to sleep. I only slept a couple hours that night and was miserable the next day. When my doctor found out what had happened, she was furious. (She was also the medical director of the hospital.) She said it never should have happened and she was sorry it did happen to me. I went back into a wheelchair because I couldn't walk on my bad ankle and limping made my other ankle and knee want to give out and caused a lot of pain. Overall, it was a very traumatic experience for me.
This second hospitalization, there were 2 staff members who reached out to me personally about me wanting to hurt myself. They told me if I had the urge to hurt myself, that I just needed to go tell them and they would help me. They said that they would put lemons and limes in the freezer that I could use instead. So there was one night when I did feel the urge to self-harm and I walked out and they were like "yes Kimberly?" and I was quiet cause I didn't want to say it and they asked me if I felt like I wanted to hurt myself and I nodded yes. They brought me over to a corner of the nurse's desk that was by the fridge and told me to get a lemon and put it on my arm where I wanted to hurt myself and asked me what music I liked. I told them Casting Crowns so they put on Casting Crowns music while I stood there with frozen lemons on my arm trying to get the urge to pass. Eventually, it did and I said I was okay and it worked which was good. I only think I did it one other time but it was a strategy I took with me to other hospitals.
My second stay at this hospital was 2 1/2 weeks. At that point, I was informed that my insurance had run out and I needed to figure out what to do because I couldn't go back to PHP. So I decided I was going to BS everything and say I was fine and agree to just make a schedule for home and then get discharged. I lied to my friends and told them I was fine when I wasn't and lied to the staff telling them I was safe and I wasn't. But they bought it so the end of January I was discharged, in pretty bad shape.