Yesterday, Tom Stephenson wrote an eloquent and rather sad blog piece about amongst other things rural suicide.
I flippantly requested that he lightened up a little with today's posting, a thing he duly did, but once the suicidal fuse paper was lit so to speak, I couldn't quite get the subject out of my head this morning.
I think most of us, at one time or another in our lives have been affected by a suicide. Whether it be, god forbid, from the actions of a loved one, a relative, a friend or a colleague or indeed from in the actions of a complete stranger whose last final attempt at self determination affected your commute to work or daily routine.
All of us have been touched by its fallout
Several years ago I remember being responsible for the planning and implementation of nursing care of a patient who had paralysed herself in a suicide attempt.I will call her Anna.
The woman, was acutely depressed and even though she was paraplegic she remained desperate and resolute that she wanted to end it all.
We nursed her on a mattress on the floor to prevent her throwing herself face first out of bed. my ward nurses observed her constantly as even one moment left unsupervised gave her the opportunity to self harm, by stabbing herself with smashed crockery or even hanging herself with the tracking hoist that ran over her bed.
It was a desperate, sad and dreadful time for her and for the ward staff who had to endure the daily stresses of this kind of nursing care without the intervention of an impotent psychiatric service.
But as a team, we soldiered on.
After weeks of keeping Anna safe under the " protection" of the mental Heath act, the psychiatric services started to respond more favourably in providing trained psychiatric nursing input and our own therapists and nurses started to make tiny chinks of rehabilitation improvement with a woman, who despite being a successful professional in her previous life, still held on to the desperate desire to end her own life.
Our ward nursed Anna for several months, after which she was transferred to the unit's rehabilitation ward. We all hoped that we had kept her alive, long enough for psychiatric interventions to gain some sort of foothold, and that the depression would eventually lift, but the truth of the matter was that deep down we were just glad that she was now someone else's problem to deal with. Caring for someone who wants to die, and who seriously wants to die,is dreadfully hard work.
The misery within the person seems to pervade anything and everything.....and is a recipe for trouble on a rehabilitation unit where everyone is swimming in very choppy waters.
On the surface Anna improved somewhat on the rehab ward, she attended complementary therapy sessions with a dedicated occupational therapist, she learnt to care for herself in her wheelchair, and she was eventually taken off constant observation by her psychiatrist. But behind her eyes, there was always that dead, depressive look of someone who for whatever reason, could not see enough joy in her own existence.
Anna committed suicide nearly one year after being admitted to our unit. That day, she placed a plastic bag over her head and lowered herself unseen from her wheelchair to the floor between two cars in the hospital car park.
I remember the day well.
And riding above my feelings of sadness and regret......I felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
