Dark Days

 I’d first like to mention this post may be a BIG trigger for some people. If you are in a fragile mental state and hearing about someone else’s fragile mental state may cause you harm, please stop reading here. 

Over the past several months I’ve been working with a therapist. She’s amazing and I am incredibly thankful that her bio made her sound like the right person for me, because she has helped me so much. I’d also like to state early on that I am in a very good, solid mental place and can look back at my dark times with openness and honesty and reflect in ways that make me realize that the person I was during those times was very different than the me before those times and after. I’m so grateful to have found my way back. 

In one very eye opening session a few months ago my therapist told me that I had textbook symptoms of dissociative disorder. “Me? No….” I replied, realizing that I would instantly start researching this disorder once our call ended. Interestingly, she was absolutely correct and seeing the symptoms of dissociative disorder and thinking back at the last few years were eye opening. Her honesty and directness were a slap in my face, waking me up from the foggy headspace I’d been stuck in for however long. When we started talking months ago I told her tearfully, “when I lost my mom it began to feel like I lost a part of myself. I don’t know where I went but I’d like to get myself back now.” Looking back, I had lost a part of myself long before my mom passed away. 

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I know that the whole world is sick of covid. Sick of talking about it. Sick of living with it. I fucking hate it in a way that makes me enraged. Honestly, after some more reflecting I realized that my dissociative disorder began when I was working in an ICU that turned into a Covid ICU. I remember our first deaths there. People literally gurgling and drowning in their thick pink secretions, nurses yelling at each other. People freaking the fuck out. Family members being too afraid to come in to see their loved ones, so most died with strangers at their bedside. Coding people that were impossible to save. Watching the pillars of so many communities waste away, one organ failing after another until people had so much edema that fluid wept through their yellowing skin. I cannot tell you how many times I had to change the bedsheets under my patients because they were saturated in fluid that had leaked out of their bodies, hoping that my moving them wouldn’t kill them. It wasn’t that I wanted their suffering to continue, just that I didn’t want to have to be the one to break all their ribs on their way out of this world. I’ll continue to work so that the depth of human suffering I witnessed during the two years I worked in that setting wont haunt me. 

I remember the first shift when my brain started to feel different. A coworker’s patient was going to be extubated to comfort. Essentially his spouse decided to end life sustaining measures. I fought back tears when she asked me for scissors so that she could take a lock of his hair home with her. Don’t cry Krissy, this woman is holding it together and so should you. Don’t add your sadness to her sadness. An hour later when we went in to turn off his monitors and remove him from life support, I felt numb inside. As the five of us worked and then walked out, I didn’t feel anything. Just emptiness. I made eye contact with his wife and didn’t have to fight back tears. Another loss. Another name I wont remember. Another bed that will be filled by someone else with numbered days. Time for me to go back to my patients and imagine what it would be like for any of these people to go home and see their families again. 

Driving home that morning I cried like a child. I began to have night-sweats (actually day-sweats since I was a night shift worker, but you get it), nightmares full of dead people, panic attacks, low mood, low appetite, and all around low desire to continue on with anything. Every evening that I would drive to work I’d notice that my scrub top would begin to get wet, then I would notice that my cheeks were wet, and then I would notice that I was crying. It was like clockwork during every drive to work. I was so mentally checked out that I didn’t even realize that I was sobbing. Then I’d pull myself together, get to work, sit in my car until the last minute and then finally decide it was time to go in. Maybe tonight one of my patients will wake up. Maybe tonight we wont have to put someone in a body bag. 

Many of the people that did survive the ICU in those first two years of the pandemic did so forever changed. Many had strokes. Many went home with tracheostomies and peg-tubes. After months of taking care of one patient and finally having him well enough to discharge to a rehabilitation facility, he was unable to sleep. He began to write questions to me. He still had a tracheostomy and had not relearned how to speak without hurting his vocal chords. He asked me general questions such as how many people in our area have had covid, how many had survived, how many had died. Then he pointed to himself and mouthed the question, Why me? “Why did you survive?” I repeated back. He nodded. 

“It is difficult to say. Maybe because the medications we give now are better than they were. Maybe because of your physiology and your ability to fight illness and heal. Maybe we just got lucky.” I was beyond thrilled that this older gentleman had survived and would be leaving. Our first person to discharge from the Covid ICU. I felt like all my work had been for some reason, and then I heard his raspy voice.

“SO I CAN LIVE LIKE THIS!?” He angrily pointed to his neck and lifted his shirt so I could see his feeding tube. Then he slapped his thin legs and started to slap at the bed rails. Just when I thought we were winning it turned out we were still losing. My victory was not his victory, it was an existence of frustration, pain and resentment. 

That was the first morning I considered high speed crashing my car on the way home from work. There were so many things I could crash straight into: concrete bridge supports, large trees. For over a year I considered crashing my car on the way to work but ultimately decided that it was too risky. But what if you don’t kill yourself and end up quadriplegic or something horrible like that? Karma would almost certainly win. 

My mental health continued to plummet as family suddenly turned against us. We went from being heroes to being the ones blamed for people dying. I had multiple people tell me that I was the reason that their loved one had not returned home yet. When you hear something once you recognize the audacity of it. When you hear it multiple times you start to wonder if it is true. Was I really the monster they were accusing me of being?

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My days off were spent running because I was training for a 100 mile race. I’m so thankful that I had a goal during those months. It was the only positive thing I had to work towards and gave me a lot of motivation to not lay on the couch, doing my best to personify a lifeless puddle. 

The mountains had previously been a safe place for me. A place of solitude and beauty, however they quickly became a place I had to avoid. On one outing I was running and stopped at a beautiful overlook on top of a very high cliff. I stood on the edge for a while taking in the view, then suddenly I began to think about walking off the edge. It wouldn’t even have to be dramatic. I was up there alone and I could just step off quietly. Having jumped off cliffs and out of airplanes I’m familiar with the feeling of air passing me quickly, the sound of being a human falling through space. There is something beautiful about the power of gravity. For whatever reason on that day I turned around and went home, and I also decided to stay out of the mountains unless I was with others. When friends began to ask me why I wasn’t in the mountains as much anymore, my response was a simple, “I’m am not sure I am able to make good decisions right now.” As it turns out, most people just thought I was too distracted with losing my mom and no one knew it was because I had been a direct danger to myself for some time.

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Thankfully, and luckily, I hired a financial advisor and I’m pretty sure working with him started to save my life. Early in our meetings I had to answer a questionnaire. All of the questions involved dying at some point in time: 1 day, 1 month, or 5 years and asked what you would choose to do with your time you had left. I repeatedly answered that I would either leave my job or feel remorse that I had not left my job sooner. It was not too long after working with him that I quit my job. 

It took a few months after leaving that I began to feel more like myself but I kept having these strange instances of people coming up to me and me having no recollection of knowing these people. As it turns out, people with dissociative disorders often don’t remember things like people or events. In my case I didn’t recall a lot including that I was suicidal for about a year. It was not until a month ago, when I was doing some solo mental work where I was working to remember when I started to have mental health troubles that this all came flooding back to me. 

One day while at work I was talking to another nurse that left the ICU. We were discussing how brutal that work environment was and I confided in her, “I use to think about killing myself on the way to work.” She told me that she use to think about jumping off of the top of her hospital. Surprisingly, but also not surprisingly, the more I’ve opened up to former ICU nurses about this the more I hear that many of my previous colleagues had similar thoughts during the pandemic. I truly wonder how many nurses these past few years have considered suicide. Especially those that have worked in critical care. 

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As I mentioned earlier, I’m in a really good mental place right now. I understand that the things that brought me so much sorrow were real situations, but that none of them were my fault and that we all did the best we could with the resources that were available to us. I’m also thankful that I’m finally able to look back at that time and have some human emotions about it instead of blocking it all out. I’m sharing this because we have lost many good people to suicide and our culture treats it like such a taboo topic. It really isn’t. It is prevalent and real and more people struggle with thoughts of self-harm that we’d like to admit. I’m sharing this in an attempt for others to recognize that even when you are “living your best life” there are people around you struggling everyday to just wake up, put clean clothes on and convince themselves that today is worth doing. I’m sharing this because maybe one day you’ll be one of those people, and you won’t believe that you could ever be anything else, but maybe you’ll think of this post and remember that some people make it through and are so happy to still be here.