Survival, Part 2

One urgent care center visit and 2 ER visits later (all for dehydration), I'm still here. Barely.

In recent years, our hospital has started asking a new set of questions when they admit you. It's the Depression Questions, which most of you will know, I find amusing to begin with, since I take depression medication. I really do think that it's great that they ask these questions. I'm all for people getting their depression treated and under control, if they have it. Living with depression is its own nightmare, and I am a firm believer in whatever appropriate treatment works for each individual.

You will also remember that I have to handle my depression with a little bit of humor. So my disclaimer now is that I am not denigrating the hospital's Depression Mission, just finding some humor in it. If I didn't, I would have to sit down and cry and probably never stop.

"Are you or have you ever been depressed?" That's an easy enough question for me to answer, although I suspect that 5 years ago, I would have lied through my teeth to answer it "right."

The next ones (and please forgive my paraphrasing, I was pretty out of it when they asked me), however, gave me great cause for amusement ... or it would have, anyway, had my head not been about to spin off my shoulders. "Do you feel like harming yourself in any way? Do you have any thoughts of killing yourself?" This is a proper technique for addressing suicide, by the way ... but do they really ask these questions of people coming to the emergency room? I mean, come on.

They asked me this while I was in Triage--you know, where they assess you. From my seat there, I could see a baby with a high fever who looked like she wanted to die. And I saw a man stagger in with a horrible grimace on his face every time he put weight on one of his ankles. And I saw a teen-age ball player cradling his hand, and blood all the way down his baseball pants.

I think while we were at the ER the first time, I told my mom, "Just shoot me now." Does that count as wanting to harm yourself, when you're so sick that you've made arrangements for all of your kids and dragged yourself and your mom to the hospital so they can put you out of your misery?

Do you feel like harming yourself? Ha!

As Mir would say, "I'm just saying', is all."