June 25, 2009. I had just called my grandfather to wish him a happy birthday. The rest of the day is somewhat blurry, though, because of what I did after that.
I have had anxiety most of my adult life. I think this stems from my father dying while I was living with him, my stepmother, and half-brother in England during high school. My father was an alcoholic, who drank nearly every day of his life, up until the day he was rushed to the hospital with a respiratory infection. So my addictive personality could also be hereditary.
I am saying all of this to preface that I was taking Xanax XR, an anti-anxiety medication. And I was taking a lot of it: 2mg twice daily.
Calling my grandfather is all I remember from that day. My next memory is waking up in St. Petersburg General Hospital, with tubes stuck down my throat. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a respirator down your throat, but it isn’t the most pleasant feeling in the world. I would constantly be pushing on it with my tongue, trying to push it out, not realizing that I could not breathe on my own (and couldn’t for nearly 6 weeks after that). I also was put on kidney dialysis, because my kidneys had failed. I also had a bladder catheter, a feeding tube, and a rectal tube. I also had a heart attack at some point before the ambulance came to take me to the hospital. The temporary lack of oxygen to my brain caused anoxia, which made me have to re-learn everything, almost like being a baby again. I had to learn how to walk, talk, and eat all over again
After it was determined that I had, indeed, swallowed the better part of an entire bottle of Xanax, I was promptly given a drug called a benzodiazepine antagonist, to try and get the medication out of my system.
So I spent nearly 5 weeks in the intensive care unit at St. Pete General, then I was in a physical therapy hospital (HealthSouth) for 10 days. Then I had tachycardia, passed out while on a standing machine, and was rushed to the hospital again, this time to Largo Medical Center for 10 more days while they tried to figure out why I got the tachycardia and fainted. It was finally determined that I had a very serious infection, and was promptly given antibiotics.
After quite a bit of fighting with the insurance company, I was re-admitted to HealthSouth.
While at HealthSouth, I underwent speech therapy (I couldn’t talk louder than a whisper, as I hadn’t spoken for roughly 6 weeks), occupational therapy, and physical therapy. They were re-teaching me how to feed myself without choking or putting the food into my lungs.
There are very few places where I live that my health insurance will pay for a young person like myself to go for rehabilitation, to prepare me for going home. But as it still took 2 people to move me from my wheelchair to my bed, and because I still had the stomach tube in, I was then transferred to the Rehab Center of St. Pete for a month of additional therapy.
On October 20, 2009, I finally came home.
The reason I am going into so much detail about what happened to me is with the hope that I may be able to prevent other people from going through what I did. When you are on Xanax, the drug makes you feel invincible. And even after everything that I went through, I cannot say that if it were offered to me, I wouldn’t jump at the chance to take it again. That’s how addictive it is.
