Today

Today has not been a good day. I know we need bad days to balance out the many good ones that we enjoy, but it would have been nicer to space things out a bit.

I hired two women to come clean up the yard before Yucheng comes back from China on Tuesday, bringing his female cousin, Lian, with him. The yard has been looking pretty bad, so the women said they’d do the front today and the back tomorrow. I could do it, but my asthma has been kicking up quite a bit this season and I’d rather avoid all the complications of that situation. They did a lovely job and I’m really glad that I was able to find someone who actually works, does a good job, and doesn’t try to gouge me.

In the middle of the yardwork, I got a call from my next-door neighbor’s sister asking me to go check on the neighbor. She had been sending weird texts to both the sister and the neighbor’s daughter, who is away at college. I went over to the house to see what was up and my neighbor was a mess. At first, I thought she was probably drinking again, but that was not the case. She was sobbing her heart out and really upset that she had been fired during her probation with the postal service. She was so happy when she made it all the way through the application, interview, and testing process and had started driving a route. For the first time in a long time, she was looking forward to finally having a good job with benefits and appropriate pay.

I held her in my arms and let her cry it out, then told her I’d go back home and be back shortly to check on her. She told me she was okay, not to worry – she wasn’t going to kill herself. Red flag flies: people who assure you they aren’t going to kill themselves are planning just that, which is why it is in the forefront of their thinking. I said, whoa, and sat back down and talked to her a bit more until she was more settled down. I asked if she had eaten anything and she told me she wasn’t hungry, so I left to go back and supervise the yardwork.

I called both her sister and her daughter and told them she seemed to be getting through her bout of upset, but told them I’d go back and check on her throughout the day. But there’s always that nagging voice that says a person who talks about suicide often attempts it, so after waiting 10-15 minutes, I went back next door. She didn’t respond to my repeated knocking, so I used my key and opened the front door, calling her name to tell her that I was coming into the house. I got no response so went down the hallway to her bedroom and found her “passed out” on her bed. I tried to get her to sit up and talk to me, but she was out like a light. I persisted until she finally semi-roused, and that’s when she told me she took some pills because she can’t face another day.

I called 9-1-1. Lots of things I can do in life, but reviving a patient hell-bent on committing suicide isn’t one of them.

The two women working on the yard were done with today’s work, so they came over to ask me for their pay for the day. I told them I had called 9-1-1 and needed to stay with my neighbor, but I had one of them wait at her door while I ran back home and got their first payment on the work completed.

It took emergency personnel about 5 minutes to show up, with a police officer and a big fire truck the first to arrive. She was really out cold, but I gave my statement to the police officer and then handed him what I assumed to be the empty bottle of pills. The fire department personnel tried to rouse her, but weren’t having a lot of luck. When the ambulance arrived, they immediately put in an IV drip of something based on the bottle of pills she took. Before they could transport her to the local hospital, they had to change out the IV drip because it wasn’t doing what they wanted it to do. Once the ambulance left, I came back to my house – and the neighbor’s sister was arriving in my driveway.

The sister and I had been in contact for about an hour, with me trying to get my neighbor out of her funk and failing miserably. The sister decided to drive out here from Riverside – and she made it in record time. She followed the ambulance to the hospital and came back here about 2 hours later to tell me she’ll be at the ER until a bed comes available for a 51-50, which is a psych eval. She’ll be held on the 51-50 for 72 hours, and then can be held on a 52-50, which is a danger to herself or others. She lives alone, so her sister told me that sometimes they keep a patient for two weeks (or more), unless someone can arrange to be with the patient during the healing process from the suicide attempt.

Her daughter will be home tomorrow for the weekend, so it will be her responsibility to follow up with the medical personnel. I’ll drive over to the hospital if my neighbor is still local and give her some reassurance that this will be okay with time. Whatever that means.

The carpet cleaners arrived as scheduled in the middle of it all, so this was a busy, big day for an old retired schoolteacher!