Had wedding; had sex; had me.

He was unhappy so he left.

Six months old. What’d I do?

Mom remarried and I was adopted.

Three siblings, an unhappy full house.

After five relocations, settled in Columbus.

Dad kicked to the curb; bye.

Dad remarried; woefully unprepared Step-Mom.

I’m 11 years old; chaos ensues.

Turns out Mom woefully unprepared too.

So I’m kicked to the curb.

Living with Dad and teen bride.

Moved again, away from my life.

Everything was bad, all bad. Depression.

Moved again. Horseheads, NY. Far, cold.

Happy! Good times in Horseheads! Finally!

Moved again. Back to bad place.

Life going downhill fast. Wrong crowd.

Teenage runaways, Patty and I. Awesome!

Greyhound bus, 24 hours. Jacksonville, FL.

Two weeks managed on our own.

Jobs, apartment, friends. Working out great!

Busted. Damn. To this day, damn.

Home. Family therapy. All wrong. Bad.

Dad angry, violent. Made me leave.

Nowhere to go. Mom said no.

One last hope: Grandmother in NC.

She said yes! Saved my life.

Goodbye Columbus, again. Hello Chapel Hill.

Grama was wonderful. Everything else, not.

Depression sets in, no surprise there.

Went to school, went to work.

Going through the motions. Life, meh.

Fell in love, left for Greensboro.

Turned 18; married within three weeks.

Bad idea, marriage. Loser and worse.

Divorced at 20. Now we’re talkin’!

Ah, single life. Took full advantage.

No college, no problem, good job.

Great career, sexual harrassment, PTSD now.

Depression diagnosed, finally medicated, changed everything.

Married Mr. Perfect. He still is.

Had three kids over six years.

Forties a blur, work, kids, repeat.

Boss retired, career ended, job hunting.

Crappy jobs, crappy people, got fired.

Fifties brought years of pain, heartache.

First suicide attempt. Failed that too.

Kids to college, never coming back.

Depression, PTSD, Anxiety/panic disorder. Miserable.

Tried everything. ECT, hospitalization, new medications.

Brutal disease, clinical depression. Nothing works.

Miss my kids. Cry every day.

Officially retired. Collecting disability. Sadly easy.

Spend most of my time alone.

A shell of my former self.

Trying so hard. Giving up soon.

Death by suicide voids life insurance.

Life isn’t fair. I get it.

Lonely. Guilty. Unmotivated. Failure. Burdensome. Hopeless.

Crappy mom, inattentive wife. Hate myself.

How much longer? I am ready.

Excerpt From HuffPost Article by Rachel Enberg

Although I am not sicker than most, I am sicker than many, and there are days when I feel indistinguishable from the three- and four-letter disorders that have shaped my life since childhood. I have heard people say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but there is nothing temporary about the chronic, unrelenting and hellish suffering of those with severe mental illness. For these people, for Luna and for me, the permanence of suicide is the precise appeal. Remember that when you are depressed, your brain is like a dangerous neighborhood; you should not go there alone.

MY POSTS TO TWITTER’S @atonguewithbutsixwords (@ATWBSW)

Only regret what I didn’t do.

Remove toxic people from your life.

Unconditional love exists only from dogs.

Aren’t we all just disappointing mortals?

Stop fighting it, be over it.

Born, career, family, die. Absurdly fallacious.

Hatred implies emotion. Apathy? Premeditatively abandoned.

Normal person? You’ve not yet met.

Christmastime? Gangplank To The Abyss Of Purgatory.

Blood disease? Gallbladder tumor? Dues paid!

“Colossal clusterfuck”, I say, every day.

Prompt: poem about learning to not seek validation from other people:

Me? Self love. Don’t need yours.

Prompt: “..about high school and the deceptive nature that comes with making friends here?”

Over 40? BFFs from high-school? Loser.

Sudden silent rejection; arrogant cowardly loser.

Prompt: a poem about learning to not seek validation from others.

I did it myself. No problem.

Prompt: “an emotionally violent relationship.”

He said please, I said no.

Prompt: “an emotionally violent relationship.”

Stop yelling until I’m done yelling.

Prompt: “you’ve gotta fuck up sometimes and experience life to really have anything of interest to say..”

Stay home if you’ve never left.

Prompt: “my passion and purpose, or potential lack thereof.”

I’m a loser, except for weight.

My Personal Opinion

This is by far the best book I have ever read concerning depression and its effects thereon during the period of time one is going through a depression. As far as I’m concerned depression is completely indescribable and undefinable to anyone who has not suffered through it. But the brilliant prose excerpted here contains the most comprehensive set of examples of what depression can truly be like. And I can assure you, based on my own experiences with this dark beast, that all of these passages listed below are stunningly spot on, based on my own opinion, so much so as to allow myself to believe that maybe I’m not alone.

• Forward
  For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of Is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. —Job

  Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, “the blues” which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.

  …so it came as an astonishment to me that I was close to a total ignoramus about depression, which can be as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer.

  …however, I could not put to practical use. The most honest authorities face up squarely to the fact that serious depression is not readily treatable. Unlike, let us say, diabetes, where immediate measures taken to rearrange the body’s adaptation to glucose can dramatically reverse a dangerous process and bring it under control, depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.

  …and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world. This is to say more specifically that instead of pleasure—certainly instead of the pleasure I should be having in this sumptuous showcase of bright genius—I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. This leads me to touch again on the elusive nature of such distress. That the word “indescribable” should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

  “It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.”

  This memory of my relative indifference is important because such indifference demonstrates powerfully the outsider’s inability to grasp the essence of the illness.

  ….was in the sure understanding that tomorrow, when the pain descended once more, or the tomorrow after that—certainly on some not-too-distant tomorrow—tomorrow—I would be forced to judge that life was not worth living and thereby answer, for myself at least, the fundamental question of philosophy.

  Randall Jarrell almost certainly killed himself. He did so not because he was a coward, nor out of any moral feebleness, but because he was afflicted with a depression that was so devastating that he could no longer endure the pain of it.

  My annoyance over all this was so intense that I was prompted to write a short piece for the op-ed page of the Times. The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.

  …but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

  But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. The madness results from an aberrant biochemical process.

  What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

  In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

  There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.

  But the hospital also offers the mild, oddly gratifying trauma of sudden stabilization—a transfer out of the too familiar surroundings of home, where all is anxiety and discord, into an orderly and benign detention where one’s only duty is to try to get well. For me the real healers were seclusion and time.

  Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides.

   

I don’t know of any Mother who thinks she’s doing a good enough job. We, as Mothers, essentially can’t win, can we? By that I mean that the day our first child is born, first of all we realize we’ve been doing this love thing all wrong- the love for our parents, family, “first” romantic love, spouse……we thought that was love until we held our first born in our arms for the first time. And we think to ourselves, “Oh! So this is the real deal! I get it now!”. I’ve always “labeled” Alana as my first true love. And don’t get me wrong, this is in no way meant to disrespect or diminish the love we’ve had for others- it’s just an entirely different category of emotion that we never knew existed.

So we give birth to these amazing creatures that we can’t believe is truly ours to love and care for but what’s our ultimate purpose? Along with being some kind of mythic Mother of the Year, we truly only have one job once we bring them home from the hospital and that is to prepare them on a daily basis, where all moments are teaching moments, TO LEAVE! We have 18 years to constantly prepare them to walk out the door, never to return. (Generally speaking). Well, what kind of fucked up sick joke is that!? I know, I know, it’s normal, it’s what’s expected but you mean to tell me after all I’ve done for you, you’re just going to walk away? Uh……yes, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

Fun fact: 90% of our lifetime that we spend with our kids occurs between birth and 18 years old. And the remaining 10% is spread over what life you have left and that of course depends on our age, what their geographical situation is and obvious other factors. 10%. If I’m lucky. 10%. Oh, and that 90%? Not to complain or anything, but we can’t forget that after we’ve given birth, there are all these beautiful bullshit moments with you, your husband and baby (when all you want to do is sleep), and eventually your husband bleats out, “Well, I guess I’m gonna run home and let the dogs out, get the mail, get something to eat blah, blah, blah”. What the fuck are you talking about? What are you going to do, just leave me here with your spawn I just hatched for you? And therein sets the tone for basically the rest of your life. Guess what Fictitious Perfect Mom? You’re in charge. Of everything. Forever. Good luck with that.

How to Make a “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake in Seven Days or Less

First of all, you must accept that this lovely three layer cake you are about to make will look only vaguely similar to the picture of the cake posted with the recipe. Once you accept that fact, you may actually enjoy preparing this ridiculously NOT “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake. The good news, however, is that no matter how your cake turns out, it is likely to be quite tasty, albeit generally unpleasing to the naked eye.

You must begin by determining that you probably don’t have all the bakeware needed for this task.  This would include a hand held electric mixer (if you already own one, it’s fairly certain you will not be able to locate the metal mixer doodads that are expected to be attached to said hand held mixer in order to use it properly, so you might just as well buy a new one); an array of measuring cups and spoons; three 8-inch round cake pans; a silicone cake-pop-maker thingy; an egg white separator; 3 wire racks; a cake platter; 8 identical small plastic bowls and spoons; 4 plastic spatulas; a large mixing bowl; and parchment paper. Once you’ve ordered all of these items online you are then ready to sit back, relax, and wait for your delivery of these products. This will generally take 3-4 business days, assuming any items, including the unknown and unfamiliar silicone cake-pop-maker thingy are not on back order.

Once you receive your baking products in the mail, you may begin the process of shopping for the necessary ingredients. Basically you need a four pack of food coloring, two boxes of white cake mix, eggs, vegetable oil, cooking oil spray, and four containers of white frosting.  You may choose to use two containers of white frosting and a large container of whipped topping, such as Cool Whip. This little tip provides a tasty little extra surprise for your “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake.

So you assemble all of your bakeware and ingredients on your kitchen counter, no doubt spread all around your kitchen, as this is an astonishing number of necessary materials and most average kitchens do not provide such counter space as is needed for your cake. Nonetheless, I recommend that you do indeed have everything you need available, as you will soon be doing 80 things at once and need to have the easiest access to your cake making items.

You now begin the actual act of making the “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake! The first thing you do is look at the silicone cake-pop-maker thingy and wonder what in the world its purpose is, how in the heck to use it, why did it come with two pieces and question if it will possibly melt when placed in the oven.  This process takes about an hour. There is much discussion if there is more than one person in the kitchen. Once you’ve determined that the smoke alarm in your home is indeed working, you turn on your oven. If you’re unsure how to do this, here are my instructions. Please place close attention here: There should be a dial on the top of the stove that has numbers on it ranging from roughly 200 to 500. You will want to set this dial to 350. Now go ahead and line up the 3 round cake pans and both parts of the silicone cake-pop-maker thingy and grease up everything with your cooking spray. Spray at random until you are satisfied that all of your cookware is sufficiently dripping with oil so that your cake will hopefully come out of said cookware in its proper form.

Now you must prepare your cake batter. Open both boxes of the white cake mix. Please verify that you did not accidentally purchase Angel Food white cake mix as this will not work at all and further delay your preparation of your “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake. Following the instructions on the back of the cake box, please now begin the process of generating the cake batter. At this point, you will need to do two very important things: figure out how to use the egg white separator, and insert the metal stick doodads into the proper holes provided on the nether regions of your mixer. You will not accomplish this on the first or 25th try. One stick doodad will invariably stick out while the other will go in properly. Unfortunately, at this point, I cannot advise you any further on how to use these two products because I frankly don’t know how. But somehow, eventually, after several hours or maybe even a day, I achieved the tasks of separating the egg whites and inserting the metal stick mixey accouterments into the handheld mixer. I simply am unable to explain in these instructions how it happened, but it just did.

OKAY! Now you may combine the ingredients needed to make the cake batter in the large mixing bowl. This is getting very exciting, no? When you are ready to use your hand held mixer to mish-mash the ingredients you put in the mixing bowl per the cake box instructions, you simply stick the metal sticks in the bowl and turn on your mixer. At this point, it is quite likely that nothing will happen. This is because you need to plug in your mixer! No available plugs in your kitchen you say? Well find one somewhere – surely you can locate a spare plug in your home – your bedroom perhaps? Or more likely the bathroom since you use a number of electronic products to style your hair each day? So take your mixing bowl full of unmixed ingredients and your mixer to wherever you’ve finally located an available plug, and begin the mixing process. Your metal mixey stick thingys begin to spin, and the ingredients in the bowl begin to resemble a soupy, unappetizing pale liquid. Once you have completed the mixing process per the number of minutes recommended on your cake mix box, you may remove the hand held mixer with the metal mixey thingy doodad sticks from the soupy substance. A helpful tip at this point: turn off the mixer before you remove it from the mixing bowl. If you fail to do this, your mixey sticks will spatter the soupy substance all over your bathroom or bedroom or den or wherever you are trying to pull off this particular task of making your, let’s say it together now: “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake!

Alright. Now you must put the mixing bowl of soupy pale muck in the refrigerator. (If you don’t know what this domestic device is, look it up; I can’t hold your hand through every single detail).  Please retire to your bedroom and take a much deserved nap. Or just go to bed for the night. You’ve done enough for one day.

The next step in making your “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake is to separate the cake batter muck. Pour some of it in a measuring cup until you’ve reached the big number 2 on or close to the top of the cup. Your goal here is to split up your cake mix soupy stuff so that you may use various portions of it in different ways. Once you’ve acquired your separate two cups of batter, you then separate the two cups of your batter evenly into four bowls! This is getting fun and very interesting! My recommendation is that you pour approximately ½ cup batter into each bowl. This should be about right, give or take a spoonful or three. Yay! You now have four bowls of ashen pasty batter, PLUS the leftover batter that you’ve now returned to the refrigerator. (Again, look it up if you need to). This is indeed “Surprisingly Easy”! Now, drop at least half, but no more than half, of the liquid in your tiny food coloring bottles into the 4 bowls of the 1/4th of the two cups of the two boxes of soupy stuff that came from the mish-mashing task of yesteryear, when you did the metal mixey sticks thing. Your result should be four bowls of different colored muck-stew. This is assuming that you didn’t duplicate one of your colors, thus leaving one color out. If you did make such an error, just stop what you’re doing right now and walk away. Just simply walk away. Hire a HazMat cleaning crew to remove all signs of this botched attempt at making the “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake and forget it ever happened.

Ok moving on then! On to step 25!  Use a spoon to drop 1/3 of each of the 4 bowls of the ½ cup of the two cups of the two boxes of soupy stuff into the silicone cake-pop-maker thingy that you previously, who knows how many hours or days ago, sprayed with cooking spray. Your result at this point should be a silicone cake-pop-maker thingy filled with twelve filled pop cups of 3 each of the 1/3 of each of the 4 bowls of the ½ cup of the two cups of the two boxes of soupy stuff, hopefully in four different colors. Oh please let this be so. If not, again, I must insist you stop what you’re doing and walk away. Just walk away.  I humbly apologize for failing you in your desire to achieve an undertaking of this magnitude. If, however, you feel you are ready to move on, please put the top part of the two part silicone cake-pop-maker thingy thing on top of the bottom part of the two part silicone cake-pop-maker thingy, covering up your lovely array of twelve colorful balls of batter. You may now insert this fine creation into your oven, which is presumably still set at 350 since I never told you to turn it off. After about 7-9 minutes, turn right around and take the silicone cake-pop-maker thingy out of the oven and take a moment to marvel at the fact that this piece of plastic didn’t melt! Ok, now you must take the top part off, reach out for your wire rack that hopefully is still available somewhere in your kitchen and turn the bottom part upside down on top of the rack, and if there is a Dessert God in Heaven, your 12 lovely little colorful pop balls should pop right out! Hence the name silicone cake-pop-maker.

Oh my gosh, I must now reluctantly inform you that you must repeat this POP task two more times! But first you must wash the silicone cake-pop-maker thingy, spray it with cooking spray again, and do the same thing all over again with the remaining delightfully colorful bowls of cake muck, and your goal here is to use up all the muck in each bowl and end up with…. now stay with me here…. 9 pop cake balls of each color, for a total of 36 pop cake balls! Allow the pop cake balls to completely cool. Go have a glass of wine or take a nap or both; I don’t really care what you do at this point.  Amazingly simple isn’t it? And we’re just now getting started!

Next, line your three 8 inch cake pans with parchment paper. Then place 3 of each colored cake pop balls into one of the three cake pans. Your result should be twelve cake pop balls, in four different colors, in each of the three round cake pans.  If this is not the case, I must recommend to you again, just stop what you’re doing and walk away. Just walk away. Again, just call the HazMat cleaning crew to remove all signs of this botched attempt at making this “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake.

If, however, you are still with me, let’s move along! Remove the remaining cake batter soupy pasty pallid muck from the refrigerator. Spread the batter evenly over the 12 cake balls in the three cake pans. Try very hard to put the same amount of pasty cake batter muck in each cake pan because if you don’t, your 3-layer “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake will just look foolish and you will come off as completely harebrained in thinking you could make this damn cake.

Insert the three cake pans into the oven, which is still set at 350, I presume, as I have not yet permitted you to turn it off. Cook the cakes for 23-25 minutes. Remove the now cooked 3 cakes from the oven and set each one on a wire rack somewhere in your kitchen to cool for at least one hour. By the way, you may now turn off your oven. Now you may think you have some free time here! Oh contraire, you do not! No nap for you!  Now you must prepare your frosting for this lovely “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake. Use your four remaining small plastic bowls and divide your white frosting (and whipped topping if desired) into four even portions. Once again, drip your four different food coloring containers into each bowl, thus creating four different colors of frosting, much like you did a few days ago when you made your four bowls of colored cake batter to use in the ever famous, now understood, two part silicone cake-pop-maker thingy. Turn to your cooled cakes and place one completely cooled round cake layer onto your cake platter. Now here is where you may stray from the norm and use your own artistic imagination. Using one each of your four different spatulas for each bowl of colored frosting, begin frosting the first layer of cake with one of the colors. Eventually, use all four colors on this layer, both on top and the sides of the cake, and be as creative as you’d like to fashion a lovely and lusciously tempting, tasty-looking layer of cake. Next, put the second cake layer on top of the first cake layer, being careful not to allow it to slide off and go askew, and repeat the frosting process.  Perhaps you might try a different approach or design. The cake is your palette! (No pun intended). Finally, do the same with the third layer of cake. And Viola! If all has gone according to plan and proper paying attention to the detailed instructions herewith set forth, your finished cake should look like this:

Unfortunately, your “Surprisingly Easy” Cute Polka Dot Cake will actually look more like this (if you’re lucky): But trust me, it is mighty tasty and, in my humble opinion, worth every hour of every day it took to prepare it.

The pain was palpable. It was as if it was a tangible thing; she feels enveloped by a dense aura of impenetrable space. Escaping the agony seems impossible. She cannot believe this has happened. Stupid! Stupid! She has known that this was always possible, perhaps even inevitable. It’s not like it’s never happened to anyone else, but when it happens to you, it just seems so unfair and ridiculous. When the agony is this bad, you just know that no one else has ever had this kind of pain. She wonders why that is. Is she more sensitive to this type of tragedy? Since she’s avoided such a disaster thus far, should she be uniquely punished? It feels like an exceptional type of torture, one of those prolonged events that is indescribable until you actually experience it yourself, like a vicious migraine, childbirth, or passing a kidney stone. In fact, she had actually heard various descriptions of this sort of suffering but those people were clearly not experiencing the true nature of this type of wound as she was right now.

Incredibly, she has a semblance of coherency, in spite of the pain; her wits are somewhat about her to the point that she knows she has to do something, she has to make some decisions about how best to address this situation. Does she call her doctor? Is he even available on a Sunday morning? Should she call an ambulance? Can she drive herself to the emergency room? Can anything even be done about this? She’s heard that this type of pain is treatable; she really doesn’t have to suffer indefinitely, although at this point the idea of being pain free seems absurd. There certainly is no way anyone or anything can alleviate this level of agony. Nonetheless, if left untreated this condition can absolutely be fatal, and often is.

She continues to lie prostrate, not sure if she can even move, let alone behave proactively. The cell phone is in reach, however; she can see it, but what to do? Who to call? The pain does not subside and the tears become uncontrollable. She begins to grasp the ramifications of getting into this situation. It wasn’t an accident, really, but neither was it her fault exactly. If she goes to the emergency room – God, could they possibly stop the pain? – she realizes that this will create all manner of drama, potential awkwardness and most definitely embarrassment. She can probably handle her husband knowing, but the kids? Would they ever forget their Mother had no more sense than to fall prey to this pitiable situation that is incomprehensible to them? They would be so humiliated if their friends and friends’ parents found out. And would the kids worry that someday, they too will be a victim of such a situation as this? Something that creates agony unlike anything previously experienced during their innocent lives? For God’s sake, if she goes to the hospital, the treating doctor, or even her own doctor, might determine that her condition is even worse than anyone thought, although she cannot even imagine anything worse than this, truly. And what if the treatment is complex and lengthy? Who in the world has time for that kind of nonsense? She has work to do, meetings to attend, a family to manage, untold errands every day. So many people depend on her; she can’t simply be out of commission, unavailable. This is a nightmare on so many levels, and Oh My God, the pain! It’s just unbearable. How could she have let this happen? She blames herself which of course just adds another level of pain.

She tries to clear her mind of the agony, the drama, the worrying. She tries to figure out, if this gets fixed, and she has any chance of full recovery, how she can be sure that it won’t happen again? She’s known all kinds of aches and pain before, but nothing like this. No suffering such as this has ever reached her. She’s given birth to three children and that was a cake walk compared to this. She almost chuckles to herself, thinking about how scared she was, knowing her low threshold for pain she had each time she was in the delivery room. It’s laughable now, really. In how many ways can pain be described? Is there a level for which a word has not yet been invented? This is how she feels right now. It is unimaginable.

The thought of explaining her predicament is so humiliating; she wonders if she will be believable? Do healthcare professionals see this kind of thing often? Will they mock her? As bad as the pain is, the shame and embarrassment find a place in her mind to add additional torture. However, it becomes obvious that if she doesn’t do something soon, she might just die right here as a result of this horrible situation.

After a seemingly endless period of attempting to block everything out of her mind or just give in to the raw suffering, she begins to take stock of things and is trying to decide if maybe the pain is subsiding. Would this mean she is going numb? How does that work exactly? If the pain begins to abate, if it actually starts to fade, does that mean the wound is healing itself? Would it be possible that she could walk away from this whole nightmare unscathed? And no one need ever know about any of this?

Incalculable time goes by as she lies motionless, but for a slight rocking, and it is blissfully quiet and still. No kids, no TV, no phone, just the pain, which undulates upon her in waves, teasing her at times into thinking it was decreasing only to attack her with fresh hell unannounced. God damn this pain! Damn the stupidity, the ignorance, the blithe attitude that these things don’t happen to people like her. Clearly, she is getting just what she deserves. She thought she was immune to this kind of anguish, even though, as she considered earlier, not only do these things happen to people all the time but there was always a chance it could happen to her. She thinks again of the implications: the embarrassment to her family and herself, to be labeled one of “those” people, to live with the fear of a repeat occurrence, a fear that would be paralyzing now that she has suffered through this experience and realizes how hideous it can be. Finding herself in this place again would be unacceptable and she knows that she would never be able to allow it to happen, even as she reminds herself that it very well could happen again.

Enough time has passed and she now knows that she must do something, take a step to somehow escape the torture. She just cannot take the agony another single moment; it’s just all too much suddenly, and she reaches for the small black cell phone; she’s going to take action, finally. But it’s not a cell phone after all; deep down she knew that all along. But by God she was going to stop this pain.

The misery is going to be over, finally.

The gun is loaded; she turns the safety off; she puts the muzzle to her head…….

The tormenting pain of depression is a killer.

The End