The Story of Channon Rose: Lessons between the Lines (8 page)

Needless to say my mom was pissed and disappointed yet again and had to find me another school to attend, bless her heart. This was my third school in one year! Guess what happened? I got expelled from that school too! At least I can add some humor in my story and say that I got expelled for different reasons at each school. Let me explain though, within less than a month at my new school, I found some diet pills in my mother’s house and started taking them to speed up my metabolism and to lose weight. A girl I had met at my new school wanted to buy some from me, so I sold her a whole bunch of them. A few days later I found out that girl ended up overdosing on them. When she was in the hospital her parents asked her where and whom she got the pills from and she had blamed me for selling her “drugs” on campus. Obviously, I got in big trouble for that which was why I was expelled again from another school.

I was on so many medications and was getting into more trouble than ever before. I did not care about much or life at all, but I knew that if I screwed up at the next school, I would be held back a grade. I hated school and couldn’t wait till I didn’t have to go anymore so I did not want to get held back. My fourth school was tough; I did not know anyone and I did not understand anything because of the constant switching of schools. I was so lost in every class and I couldn’t catch up. I was lonely, miserable, and had no friends. I was always the crazy new girl at school that everyone was talking about behind my back. It was a good thing we lived in Los Angeles and had a ton of different schools to put me into.

Every day I became more and more depressed. The kids made fun of my clubbed thumbs, a condition that you are born with. It’s a condition where the tips of your thumbs are shorter than normal. I started hiding my thumbs in my sweaters because they embarrassed me. I was really unhappy in middle school, and there were times when I felt so low and like such a failure that I wanted to kill myself. My life was awful, my parents hated me, and I didn’t have any friends because I couldn’t stay in school long enough to make any so I was just miserable. I felt bad for my parents having to deal with me. I felt like no one would care if I died, and that they didn’t love me anyway. No one would miss me and their lives would be easier without me in it. I felt this way for months and I felt this feeling of being so empty and lost and that I was never going to be anybody or amount to anything. Everything Misty had said about me was true. I was exhausted from life and feeling this way, and decided I wanted to end my life. Another day of this shitty life I was living was too much for me to handle. I couldn’t stand another day of feeling so depressed. I was going to commit suicide. I sat in class and started planning in my head how I would end my life. I couldn’t stop crying thinking about it; I just kept wiping away my tears in class staying really quiet so no one would notice me crying. I didn’t want to cut my wrists, because I wouldn’t want my mom to have to clean that up and I wouldn’t want my little sister to have to see that. After going through a bunch of scenarios in my head, I figured that the best way for me to end my life was to overdose on my Seroquel pills. My mom had just refilled my prescription at the pharmacy so I knew I had a full bottle of pills.

My Seroquel was a very strong medication. As soon as I took one of those pills at night, I would fall asleep in my dinner plate. So I figured if I took half the bottle, it would just put me to sleep and I would die peacefully. I realized that my mom would find me dead, but at least she would find me in my bed and it would look like I was sleeping. People seem to think that suicide is a selfish act but what they don’t understand is how much pain we have to go through every second of our lives. How is that fair to us? The only way I can describe how it feels to want to kill yourself is how someone feels when they are dying of cancer, they are in pain constantly, emotionally and physically. They have a hard time getting out of bed, and they are sick all the time. That is what it feels like to be so severely depressed. It is almost impossible to want to stay alive. We just want to end the pain and suffering. You will never know what it feels like or be able to understand it unless you have been in that situation yourself. I had it all planned out. When I got home from school that day, I went straight to the kitchen where we kept my pills, grabbed the whole bottle, and went immediately to my bathroom upstairs. As I entered my bathroom I stared at myself in the mirror for awhile. It was quiet, as if I tuned everything else out. I watched the tears stream down my face. Then I fixed my hair, I wanted to look pretty when they found me. I saw the pain behind my eyes, the hurt, the regret, and the loss of everything bright and happy in my life. I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I couldn’t do it anymore. The pain and suffering was too much to take. If this was what my life had truly become, then I would give it up. I would rather be dead than live another day in my life. I slowly opened the plastic orange prescription pill bottle of Seroquel and poured the pills into my hand. And just like that, I just started taking five pills at a time until half the bottle was gone.

Chapter 5

C
ommitting suicide doesn’t always come easy. Especially when you’ve chosen a way to die that doesn’t happen instantly. Pills take time to do their job. So what do you do in the meantime? What do you think about? Well, unfortunately, and fortunately, you have time to think of everything imaginable. As soon as I swallowed all those pills I started to get a little scared. It’s difficult to really comprehend death and an ending to life, especially at such a young age. I started to think what if I did not die peacefully? What if I start feeling really sick? I started to panic, and then I was able to calm myself down, only to find myself back to the reality of standing in my bathroom staring at myself in the mirror crying and wondering what I had just done. I wanted to die, but at the same time I didn’t. I started to feel a small sense of regret come over me, which then turned into a huge overwhelming feeling of regret. In addition, I started to feel really strange. My face turned from a flushed red color to pale white then grey and I started to get very light headed. It was difficult to tell how much time had already passed, so I wasn’t sure if I started to have a panic attack or if the pills had enough time to kick in and were slowly starting to kill me. I didn’t know, but at that moment I knew I didn’t want to die anymore. I rushed to grab the phone and I frantically called my mom at work and told her what I had done. I could barely breathe at this stage. I started hyperventilating. The meds were definitely taking affect by this time. I didn’t know if I would be able to control this and stay awake long enough to help myself or have someone save me.

My mom was mad, I could hear it in her voice but I needed her help more than anything right now. She said to stick my fingers down my throat and try to throw up the pills. I tried but nothing came up. I hadn’t eaten much that day, so there was nothing to throw up. I was finally able to throw up just a little bit, but not much, not enough to make a difference. I don’t remember much after that, the pills were doing their job as I had initially intended and they were taking my life away. Sometime later, the fire department broke down our apartment door. I wasn’t awake or coherent during this time. This was all information I received after the fact. Apparently my mom had dialed 911 after I called her and the fire department found me and rushed me to the hospital. In the emergency room they pumped my stomach, and when I came to, they made me drink charcoal—it tastes disgusting. I kept telling the nurses I didn’t want to die. Every time I woke up, I went into a panic attack. I remember grabbing the nurses’ arms and squeezing them so tightly so they couldn’t leave my side. I was panicked that I would die alone. My mom worked far from where we lived, and traffic in Los Angeles doesn’t care if your child is sick.

I stayed overnight for observation. The next morning the doctors told me that with the amount of Seroquel in my body, they were surprised I was still alive and told me I was very lucky. My mom was so disappointed in me but she stayed with me in the hospital that night and told me how much she loved me and how sad she would be if I were dead. That was what I needed to hear, how come she never told me that before? We spoke that night in the hospital about seeing another psychiatrist because the medication I was on clearly was not helping at all. I was placed on a 72-hour 5150 hold in Northridge hospital but got out early because this time I knew what they wanted to hear to let me go. Mental hospitals were something I knew well by this time so I knew how to play the game and work the system. Life moved forward after those incidents and I was now in the 8th grade. I almost couldn’t believe that I had passed 7th grade with everything that had happened during that year. I had been expelled from so many different schools in one year and hospitalized more than any other child the doctors had seen during that time.

I now had a new psychiatrist, who had taken me off Depakote and put me on Prozac.

We were told that it would take around three days for the new medication to settle in my system. I was very adamant about not taking these new drugs. I hated the way the medication made me feel, and I felt that I really did not need it. I remember begging my mother and doctor to let me try being on nothing for a while, but my psychiatrist was insistent. I needed medication we were told, or I would become suicidal again. I finally agreed to take the medication after he said I should try it for a week and see how it went.

Before leaving the doctor’s office, I took my first Prozac pill. The next morning I felt like I was gone. Physically and mentally I just wasn’t there, I wasn’t present in life. I couldn’t talk, I wouldn’t talk, and I didn’t even have thoughts running through my mind. I was almost convinced that I was a ghost and that I was successful with my suicide and this is what it felt like to be dead. The Prozac had stripped away my inner thoughts and feelings. My head felt like it was just floating around. The thoughts that once came naturally were now replaced by empty space. I existed with nothing: no thoughts, no needs, no desires, and no feelings of any kind. It wiped them all away. My mother would talk to me, and I would not hear her or even acknowledge that she was there.

Because the medication took away all feelings, I could not get angry or happy. Instead, I was just sad. I was sad without any reason because the medication had taken all of those reasons away. It just made me okay with hopelessness. The medication had the opposite effect on me that it was designed to have. But as the doctor said, it took time to work properly.

By the second day on my Prozac, things got really weird. Not only was I not talking, I was not eating, and I began to do very odd things. I would walk aimlessly around the house at a very slow pace and I would sit in the corner for hours staring at the wall. My mother even started to worry and took notice, but according to my excellent doctor, this was “normal” as it took three days for my body to adjust. The fact that my mom and sister were now scared of me, and that they stopped talking to me or being around me should have clued them into a serious problem with these meds. I was messed up though and don’t blame them for not wanting to be around me.

On the third day, hopes were high that the medication would magically “level out” and suddenly solve all of my problems. The medication did not help me at all. It did the opposite and made me crazier as almost every kind of psychiatric medication does to people who are given the wrong kind of meds. I hadn’t spoken in three days now and I was like a zombie. By the third day I was walking around the house at an extremely slow pace and I started to do something very strange. I started taking all the family pictures off the walls. My mom and sister were so scared of me at this point that they just let me do it.

By nighttime, I had locked myself in my room upstairs in my mom’s 3-bedroom townhouse. That night my mother was in the kitchen doing dishes when she started to hear loud noises coming from my bedroom and outside the house. She finally went outside to see where all the noise was coming from. When she looked outside, she found all of my bedroom furniture, clothes, and belongings scattered on the ground in front of the house. It was like the aftermath of a tornado my mom had said. I had thrown every single object that I owned in my room out of my window from the second floor for no apparent reason. I had gone insane.

She ran upstairs to check on me and see what was going on. After banging on my door for awhile, I apparently calmly opened the door and looked straight past her. She yelled at me, but I didn’t hear anything she said. It was as if she wasn’t there. I slowly shut the door in her face. My mom quickly opened it back up before the door had shut all the way to continue yelling at me, but I continued to ignore her and looked right through her as though she was a ghost. Then I took a step towards her. She backed away, afraid. My sister heard the yelling and ran upstairs to see what was happening. I continued towards my mother, and when we reached the top of the stairs, I pushed her. She fell down two flights of stairs. She tumbled all the way down, her body twisting and limbs flying all which ways. I could have killed her that night. She laid at the bottom of the stairs and cried. My mom was never one to cry, but she did that night. I do not know if she was crying from the fall, or because of what I had turned into, or both. The worst part was that I was not even slightly fazed by it.

Even if I had killed my mother that night, I would have felt nothing. I did not care if she was all right or not. I had no feelings of remorse or guilt, no shock, no increase in pulse. I was as calm as could be. I slowly walked back to my room and shut the door. My little sister called 911, and the police showed up around seven minutes later. I remember hearing walkie-talkies and people talking down stairs but in my mind it was as if I was hearing everything on TV. It didn’t seem like it was all actually happening. When the police officers opened my door, he was met with a shocking sight. I had covered every square inch of my white walls in my now emptied out room with disturbing writing and drawings. No one even believed it was possible to draw so much in under 10 minutes time. The officers’ report described an eerie energy, an empty room filled with death threats to therapists, doctors, teachers and family members, and also drawings of mutilated babies and people. I had used a box of crayons, and not one crayon nub remained. It took seven police officers to restrain me that night. I was biting them, kicking them, spitting on them, speaking gibberish and it was as if I had turned into a completely different person. I was a monster. I would have been scared of myself. My own family was deathly afraid of me and they had every right to be. Adrenaline is a deeply powerful thing. When it takes 7 police officers to restrain a one hundred and fifteen pound girl you know that is some crazy strength coming out of a girl. The hospital paperwork read that I was a 14-year-old female, bi-polar, and severely emotionally disturbed with violent outbursts of rage. I was to be on high security watch. I have no memory of any of the police taking me away or the majority of what happened that night. I blacked it all out. In my mind it was like it had never happened. This was all told to me after the incident by other people, including my therapist who was called to the scene.

My psychologist was sent to my house on an emergency call after I had been carted off to the hospital in full body restraints. They even had to put a mask on my face because if people got close enough to me I would bite them or spit on them. The whole incident was like something out of a movie. My therapist spoke to my now distraught mother and took pictures of my room and outside our house so that she could conduct a study on me. In her 35 years of practice, she had never heard of or seen anything like this before. I had made “crazy” history.

I was in Northridge Psychiatric Hospital for a long time after that specific incident. Each time I was sent away I was gone for so long. It took a long while for me to recover after being on Prozac for only three days. I was switched from Prozac to Lithium, then Lithium to Depakote, then Depakote to Zoloft, and the list went on. The concept or idea of no medication at all, clearly wasn’t in anyone’s interest but my own. It wasn’t an option in the doctors’ minds, I was too sick. At the age of fourteen, 13 different doctors all from different hospitals had diagnosed me as having bi-polar disorder. All of them were as ignorant as the next; the actual doctors prescribing me the medication never even spent enough time with me in our sessions to know what my true problems were. Instead, they were always in a rush and just prescribed pill after pill.

I had to attend therapy and speak about my feelings and problems. If I did not talk about them—or tried to trick them into believing that I was better when I was not—they would not let me leave. Being on medication does not always make you well, so as long as you are on it when you don’t actually need it, you are not well. I learned what they wanted to hear so that’s what I eventually gave them. None of it was ever real, just the correct words and phrases to get me out of there. By the time I had left the hospital, I was back on the first two medications that I was originally put on years earlier. I wish someone, anyone, had stepped in and taken me off those medications. There is no doubt in my mind that psychiatrists can be negligent and abusive to their patients, and in many cases, they are just writing prescriptions to kids with one thing in mind—money from the pharmaceutical companies, or a quick easy fix for a child instead of really looking into why the kid is struggling or the real circumstances. I still do not know today if I really am bi-polar or not.

I was finally sent home, and life went on. I would have good days and bad days. I would get so sad for no reason at all. It drove me crazy. I would cry so hard for so long that I would end up being tired for days. I put myself into exhaustion. Then some days I had great days and was happy and things were well. But I always felt in my mind that if something good happened, something bad was soon to follow because I believed that was how life worked.

One day I woke up at my dad’s house, and I felt extremely depressed again. I couldn’t figure out why. I had no real reason to be depressed; life was fine, and nothing bad was happening to me. Misty was even being nice for a change. She had braided my hair the day before and had even let me sit in the front seat of her car for the first time. I wondered if she felt sorry for me because I was constantly in and out of hospitals. I wonder if she felt guilty and thought it was her fault? I knew that she understood what being there was like, so maybe she had decided to change and would stop abusing me. Despite things being ok for a change, I felt really bad about myself. I obsessed about all the terrible things I had done and what a bad kid I was for such a long time. Why couldn’t I just be happy? It felt like the sad feelings were never going to go away. They lasted so long.

I wanted to be happy, but I barely recalled what that emotion was supposed to feel like. Then I remembered a girl I had met in the hospital told me that cutting her wrists made her feel better. Ever since I had heard her say that, I had fantasized about doing it myself to rid myself of the emotional pain. Something had to take it away, right? I left the house and went in search of a box of razors from my dad’s garage. I snuck one into my pocket and ran inside to my bathroom and locked the door. I hid the razor in the drawer and left it there. That night when everyone else was asleep, I took out the blade. I knew that everything that I was about to do was wrong but I couldn’t help but want to do it anyway. I was sure that it would make me feel better. One part of me wanted to do it, while the other said don’t do it. I didn’t even know how to do it. I was so scared to cut myself for the first time, but I finally grew the courage to make the first cut. I did it. I took the razor blade and sliced into inside of my wrist. The feeling was much different than when Misty had cut me. I had control, and the guided pain felt good, like I was translating emotional pain into physical pain.