Note: This post talks about treatment-resistant depression and thoughts of suicide. Please use your discretion.
On April 11th, I was carried out of my house on a stretcher and rushed into emergency surgery. What had felt like pain and tearing in the lower right side of my stomach was in fact a massive amount of internal bleeding due to a ruptured fallopian tube caused by an ectopic pregnancy. A pregnancy I was told was impossible to achieve. A pregnancy I didn’t know about until I had arrived in the emergency room that night. A pregnancy that would’ve been the greatest miracle of our lives. One that would’ve helped to heal our hearts and our family after delivering twins too early to survive back in 2021.
For three hours that night, I was equal parts hopeful and terrified while we desperately waited to learn the fate of our baby. Ironically, I’d finally started wrapping my head around not being able to have another baby, and on this exact night, I felt like maybe, just maybe, the universe had heard my cries—I just wasn’t ready to close that door.
Not quite though. Instead, my body betrayed me, again. This time, the damage felt irreversible.
It’s hard enough being a chronic illness patient, living and managing multiple autoimmune diseases. When you add in infertility and recurrent pregnancy loss, the disconnect between mind and body is often imperative in order to feel any sense of safety.
That’s the reason this specific instance of betrayal broke me. When I came out of the anesthesia, I knew things were different. My body was different. My heart was different.
At the core of my being, I was different.
Going back nearly four years now, my life has been filled with back-to-back compounding traumas. Somehow throughout and after each one, with therapy and medication and varying amounts of time, I was able to process, pack away most of the pain and darkness, and reintegrate back into my life. I was lucky enough to have the tools and resources to tame the crippling anxiety and the depths of depression that continually crept back up inside of me. But as I said, this time was different.
For six months now, I’ve stood at the metaphorical edge of my life—here, but not really. Gone, but only as a wish. Every day, every hour filled with thoughts of how intolerable it had become to live in my body, a body that continually betrays me, a body that I have very little control over, a body that has, in some regard, been my own abuser. Every day, every hour filled with thoughts of how to escape this particular body, how to escape the pain, how to survive within it and beside it. The problem is, it’s impossible to live on this earth without a body, and in the same vein, my body keeps coming for me. So, it’s not hard to imagine wanting to leave my body and this earth behind entirely.
When the suicidal ideations started, I wasn’t surprised. Every time another unfathomable thing happened, my brain went to the same place: “Fuck it. I’m out.” I brought this to my therapist, my psychiatrist, my husband, and my best friends, and I said to each of them, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can’t handle this pain any longer.”
Talk about showing up stripped down to the most vulnerable thoughts in your life.
I could logically tell each of them that I knew I didn’t want to die by suicide, but I also knew I couldn’t continue to live like this either. It wasn’t because I wanted to disappear, or because I felt unloved or alone. It was because the constant level of agony had just become too hard to bear.
That line I’d been straddling got dicey for a while. The suicidal thoughts got louder and came more frequently. It reached the point where I was starting to assure some of the people I loved that if anything should happen to me, if the depression snuffed out all of the remaining light, it wasn’t their fault. They couldn’t have done one single thing more or differently to help me stay, and that even in leaving, I would forever love them with all my soul.
I never imagined living a season like this, one that started with shocking postpartum depression, traveling through dozens of failed antidepressant medication trials, and ultimately desperately seeking some sort of option for my then-labeled treatment-resistant depressive disorder. I had never imagined leaving—without saying goodbye, without giving my partner one last kiss, and most heartbreaking, leaving my daughter without a mother. But depression tells lies. And I want you to know that’s just what they are: lies.
That’s why I’m writing this.
That was the moment when I realized I required something intense and of critical importance to pull me back from the edge. I sat down with my care team and spoke to some specialists in the field, and I learned more about non-conventional treatment options—some of which I tried without much relief, increasing my feelings of hopelessness.
But two months ago, I started IV Ketamine infusions. Ketamine is a medication originally used for anesthesia and pain management, and is now recognized and used to manage diverse mental health conditions—including treatment-resistant depression, the reason I explored this option in the first place. Scientific research has shown that IV Ketamine along with assisted psychotherapy can have remarkable efficacy in alleviating symptoms of long-term depression and anxiety disorders.
I went into the experience knowing this was sort of a last option, and possibly even a somewhat controversial treatment as the medication can cause side effects like lasting disassociation, and also when not used correctly, could come with the risk of addiction. Additionally, Ketamine is not officially FDA-approved to manage mental health conditions—despite the depths of research and success it has shown.
But, I also knew I was desperate, rightfully so, to save my own life. This treatment is practically a full-time job, it’s irrationally expensive and not covered by insurance, and it requires you to surrender to the medication and associated integrative psychotherapy—but for me, pursuing Ketamine treatment has been worth every single sacrifice. It’s taken some time for the effects to start accumulating, but I’ve finally begun to notice differences. Some of the light has come back into my eyes.
Ketamine is slowly bringing me back to life.
Some nights I even go to bed thinking about what I’m going to do the following morning.
What a radical change.
This season I never imagined living has taught me a hell of a lot of things—including that it is possible to think about suicide all day, every day, and to simultaneously choose to fight against it with everything you’ve got, even when you do not think you really want to. That’s where I stand now, here in front of you today. That’s how I know I’m finally in somewhat of a different place, even if that place is just a few steps backward from that line I’d been straddling.
I’m doing the work. And wow, it’s hard. It’s painful, it’s draining, it’s exhausting, and it’s critical. And one day, I am assuming, I’ll look back and know it will have all been worth it, and I will have been grateful to have held on. But today, I can’t button up this post with a stereotypical happy ending. I can’t put my story in a box and tie it with a bow. I can’t even put it up on the top shelf of the closet yet. I’m still very much immersed in it. I’m still using every resource I have, every Ketamine treatment, every counseling session, everything I know how to do to keep my feet planted as firmly as possible on this side of the line—the side that lets me stay. The side that lets me watch my daughter grow up. The side that keeps breathing life into my torn-up, hurting body until one day my soul hurts less than it did; less than it does.
Depression has a way of making us feel incredibly isolated. We’re here to remind you of the truth that you are not alone. We encourage you to use TWLOHA’s FIND HELP Tool to locate professional help and to read more stories like this one here. If you reside outside of the US, please browse our growing International Resources database. You can also text TWLOHA to 741741 to be connected for free, 24/7 to a trained Crisis Text Line counselor. If it’s encouragement or a listening ear that you need, email our team at [email protected].