Killing me with your Suicide
May 17th, 2008One of the inevitable admissions during any given call will be a suicide; most people have a good reason for it (or at least they think they do) but they end up fucking it up in one way or another and manage to make it to hospital.
The problem is that because they very rarely get it right they end up waking people (namely me) up at four in the morning after spending the whole day dealing with road traffic accidents, 16 year olds with headaches and 35 year olds wanting 3 day weekends
The main mistakes people make when attempting suicide are related to a lack of understanding of the medical concepts underlying their chosen method.
For example I don’t think that people know that when they slash their wrists the should be aiming for arteries that are pretty darn deep (they are in fact closer to the bone than the skin) and they usually end up cutting into a vien and tearing through a couple of nerves causing paralysis and numbness across their hands which is probably going to be there for the rest of their lives and won’t have any effect on their life expectancy in the short term.
Another thing is that people don’t seem to know that panadol will kill you in a very slow and painful manner. If you take a panadol/paracetamol overdose you WILL get acute liver failure which is largely permanent. This results in a slow often painful death (which is not exactly what the person committing suicide was intending) as your body gets more and more jaundiced and the signs of liver failure begin to manifest.
People even manage to get hanging wrong; there are two ways people can die from a hanging (self inflicted or otherwise):
- either by smacking the first two vertebrae in your neck against each other resulting in a hangmans fracture (which is when part of your second vertebra breaks off and embeds in your spine causing paraplegia and instant death)
- or (as in most cases) they end up inducing a far slower and more painful death through asphyxia (cutting off the blood supply to the brain) which may take 40 minutes to an hour. (yes, I know everybody says the brain only survives for 3-5 minutes without oxygen but what they mean is that permanent brain damage starts after 3-5 minutes).
So the next time somebody thinks of committing suicide please bear in mind the following:
- You probably won’t get it right and will have to live with the permanent damage you have inflicted on your self.
- The doctor who is coming so treat you will have a splitting headache, be tired, bitter and will have very little sympathy.
- It will take 24 hours to get a psychiatrist to see you (this is the Ministry of Health afterall)
- Suicide is never the answer. Please consult a psychiatrist (preferably a good one) as soon as you can. Believe it does help and tends to put things into perspective and will hopefully stop you from making a mistake that everyone will regret.
P.S. kudos to the l33t h4×0r who tried to get my password hash last week

