This part of the story will take a bit longer than most of my pieces, because I believe that breaking this final stretch into parts would do it a great disservice.
November 28, 2023
The moment I arrived at the E.R., it became increasingly clear that I would be here for a while. I had texted Cole from the back of the police car on the way asking if they were coming, and he said they were on their way. Therefore, I will pause here at about 1 AM, with me arriving and being checked in, waiting, having my vitals checked, and having a urine sample being taken, to recall, as best as I understand it, what happened with my friends during this time.
Kent had been at Waffle House with Jack, another friend named Eli, and one or two others if I remember correctly, so had I knocked on Jack’s door before leaving, there would have been no answer. But now, they had long since gotten back to Bryan, and a few of them and others were hanging out in Jack’s room.
Cole, Will, and Robert returned to Bryan College to dress more suitably for the weather. While they were here, they remembered that Jack was the closest of my friends, and sent Robert, the only one who already lived in Woodlee, to let Jack know what was happening.
The very first thing out of Robert’s mouth—after confirming that this Jack Smith was the correct one of the three at Bryan—was that they had found me at the bottom of the lake.
Jack was only in that state of shock and fear for a short moment, because Robert then clarified that the lake bed was dry. Hearing this, Jack assumed that he was referring to the very small pond near the baseball field, but was no less worried, and immediately left with Eli for the hospital, along with my other three friends. When they arrived, I was told that only one of them could come back with me.
By this point, I was quite angry at myself and stressed over the fact that, so far as I knew, my insurance no longer covered me as a 19-year-old, so the hospital bill would have to take the place of paying for college. And what would I tell my parents? They knew virtually nothing of my mental situation, but now I would have to tell them.
With all this in mind, I was once again not thinking clearly, so when the nurse opened the door, I did not take in the faces of my friends outside. To this day, I would not know, had I not been told, who was there in that room. But for some reason, as the nurse asked who I wanted to see, I immediately lifted one arm and pointed toward Jack.
I could not recall, in that moment, who he was, how I knew him, or really anything at all about him or any of the others in the lobby, but some animal instinct in my mind knew that, whatever the reason, I wanted him by my side.
When he got back to the room I was in—a small, cold room with nothing more than a single chair and a pad on the ground to lie on—something about his presence, even after no more than a minute or two, had cleared my state of mind enough to know exactly who he was, and to talk clearly with him. But this also caused many of the memories from the previous hour to come quite clear, and these I spilled to him while I had my blood taken and waited on whatever was next.
Jack had already emailed his professor to be exempt from the class he had at 8 AM the next morning and assured me that he would stay there with me. Despite how badly I felt about his staying up simply for me, he refused to hear of any argument to the contrary.
As I explained to him my worry over the financial implications that a hospital bill had on my future at Bryan and told him how ashamed I was in general about the entire situation, he told me that God had a purpose, and that he would work everything out to His glory, and that I would come out on the other side with a powerful testimony that few people in similar situations would ever return with.
As he was telling me these things, someone from the front desk entered and asked me to sign an authorization to bill my insurance, replying to my confusion by saying that the insurance came back valid and had no apparent issues. When he left, I turned to Jack with the first hint of humor I had felt all night, and told him that if he said “I was right”, I would punch him.
“I’m not gonna say anything,” he replied with a smile, turning to look up at a corner of the room. “I’m just gonna sit here and grin.”
That smile, and the light-hearted mood into which he had somehow managed to lift me, were more helpful to me in that moment than anything I could have asked or wished for.
When the mental crisis evaluator—who I spoke to via webcam—was ready to speak with me, Jack left the room, telling me that he would be there when I was done.
The basic summation of that virtual meeting was that the crisis evaluator would speak with her supervisor and decide between a few options that would involve me being placed in a mental hospital for a day or two. I would have to wait, however, for the final decision.
When the meeting was over, Jack was not there. It was nearly 4 am, and I was faced with the one experience that I wanted to avoid more than anything in the world—a fact that I had also reminded Jack of that very night.
I was alone in a hospital, and would certainly not be leaving before morning.
I did not blame Jack for leaving, especially since I was the one who had told him that he needed to get some sleep. I was also still blaming myself for the entire situation and told myself that it was a fitting punishment for the trouble that I had caused. But at the same time, lying there on that little pad in that cold room, with no way to know how much time was passing or even if the entire world was burning outside that room, I felt a touch of bitterness as his assertive voice repeated over and over in my head.
I’m not leaving. I’ll stay as long as you need.
And then I would open my eyes again, see that empty chair, and fight down tears that, if released in isolation, would flow in vain.
The final determination came to be that I would be sent to a facility in Cleveland, where I would be for a day, maybe two. And at around 11 that morning, an ambulance arrived to transport me.
Right before I was rolled out on the stretcher, I was given a sticky note with Jack’s phone number. All of my belongings had been taken when I was admitted, so this sticky note was the only thing I had, and I held onto it like a lifeline as I rode to Cleveland in the back of an ambulance.
I was thinking clearly by this point, but I was alone, and I was extremely scared. I was missing classes and commitments and had no way to know if anyone else in the world knew where I was or why. All I knew was that I was watching as the people I knew and trusted were moving further and further away outside the back windows of the ambulance.
The people at the Cleveland hospital needed my insurance card, so I was given my things for a few minutes. While they put everything into their system for admitting me, I was allowed to let people know where I was. So I wrote down two more phone numbers that I wanted to remember—Gabriel’s and my RD’s— and then sent a text to eight people.
I have been hospitalized due to a mental health emergency
I am in Cleveland
[…] Behavioral HealthI may not have my phone for a bit
to Gabriel, Dad, Two Friends, A Coworker, My Roommate, Another Friend, and Pat, 12:02, 12:03, 12:06 & 12:11 AM
When I was questioned yet again by the nurse during the admission process, I was told that I would probably be there for two or three days rather than one or two. And by the time my visit with the actual doctor came that evening, I had heard everything up to seven or ten.
So while I waited for the doctor, with the exception of an EKG reading, two meals, and a religious meeting led by a lady who was clearly Pentecostal, I laid in my bed, just as alone, practically numb from being cold nonstop for twelve hours, with every possible thing going through my mind.
The most significant thing to me at that moment was the fact that I would not be allowed to have any visitors except by appointment on Tuesdays, not including the current one. When I asked the nurse about this, he said something about post-Covid and low staffing.
Meanwhile, my Dad had communicated to my mom, and she had reached out to the school and both hospitals, but tried in vain to learn anything in the face of endless privacy regulations aside from a conversation she managed to have with one of the people at Bryan.
Finally, the nurse who had admitted me told me, despite it not being within the usual phone hours, that I needed to call my mom and talk to her. After I told her what had happened, and that I was alone with no possibility of visitors, I hung up and went back to my room until phone hours opened up.
There was no line for the phones at this point, so I was in no hurry, but The first person I called was not Jack or anyone in my family. It was my RD.
I do not to this day recall exactly what he said, but his words and the tone of his voice touched me as deeply as if he were standing right there, giving me the hug that by this time I wanted and needed so desperately. By the time I got off the phone, I was sure that the one thing I needed more than anything was to return to the love and support of that community, where I could seek help—which I knew full well that I needed by now—from that starting point.
While I sat in bed, falling asleep as I waited to see the doctor, I remembered something else I had seen in the document I mentioned earlier, that I had the right to:
Refuse care, treatment or services in accordance with law and regulation and to leave the facility against advice of the physician.
from Patient Rights and Responsibilities, […] Behavioral Health
I was suddenly wide awake, and spent the next hour contemplating all of the implications, reasoning, pros, and cons of such a decision. I considered everything I knew about myself, and everything I had been told about my state of mind by the the crisis evaluator, the nurse, and a medical student who had evaluated me right before the religious meeting. Finally, I determined to be as transparent as possible with the doctor and to then ask him as explicitly as possible what his opinion was on my condition.
He asked the same questions I had been being asked for the last fifteen hours, made his recommendations, and then asked if I had any questions for him.
I asked every question that I could think of until I was satisfied that the doctor, while professionally obligated to recommend treatment that turned out to be nothing shy of a week at least, was not concerned about my actual safety as I was currently. Finally, I asked him directly if I would be in danger if I left.
He said no.
“Then respectfully,” I replied, fortifying myself against the efforts of him and the medical students in the room to persuade me with the “give us a chance” approach, “I appreciate and respect your advice and your opinion, and appreciate your eagerness to help, but I request to be discharged tomorrow morning.”
November 29, 2023
I was released at 12:30 in the afternoon and spent the entire drive back talking with my mom and dad. For the first time since leaving on Monday Night, I arrived at Bryan College at 1:36 on Wednesday. The first person to notice was Cole, who received a notification on his Life360 and texted me immediately.
UR BACK?!?!!??!??!???!!!!!!
1:36 PM
LETS GOOOOOO
from Cole, 1:36 PM
I had a few things to deal with, and wanted to go to my Intro to Honors class at 3, so I did not want anyone to know I was back yet, and told Cole not to tell anyone yet. I had told my RD the same thing when I told him that I was returning, and he was the only person on campus aside from Pat Wesolowski, who we were going to see, who knew I was coming back.
After I took care of the things I needed to, it was nearly time for me to get to class, and I sent a text to Cole, who I knew was very likely quite excited by now.
You can go crazy now
to Cole, 2:21 PM
I then walked into Woodlee, stopped in my room to grab and drop a few things, and then left the room. My roommate was not there at the time, so I rode my bike around campus for a little while, grateful to be back on my own feet in what had become my native habitat—grateful to be home at last.
But just as I was about to go to class, I saw one of my classmates in the class I was headed to and remembered his roommate, the one person who, out there in the cold and dark, was the one person I was most surprised to meet there, because I never knew how much he actually cared about me until then.
My classmate told me that his roommate was in their room, so I sped to Woodlee, climbed to the third floor, and knocked on a door.
The first welcome face I saw after returning to Bryan, aside from Pat’s, was the face of my unexpected friend Robert, who smiled more brightly when he opened the door than I had ever seen him smile before that moment.
The Aftermath
No matter how undesireable, these events were an icebreaker with my parents, revealing that my fears and concerns had been misguided from the start. The very simple fact that I could talk to my parents, although for the most part I still don’t, has taken a great level of stress off of me and significantly improved my state of mind even in the darkest moments. And finally, my parents’ awareness and involvement have opened the door for me to take more definitive steps in seeking mental help.
The fear of repeating these events or similar ones has quite effectively outweighed my fear of being a burden, and I have been much more able to knock on the door. Even if I don’t talk about what I am struggling with, being around people, especially those that I am closest to, allows me to relax and allow things to flow smoothly through my mind.
Wednesday evening, I went back to the lake. But this time, I went in the daylight, and I took Gabriel, and as I walked, I told him the story. But when I reached the place where I had stopped—which I could clearly remember based on a few lakebed landmarks that I had stumbled across—I took a very small glass jar inside which I had placed the two hospital wristbands and pressed it firmly down into the ground.
Not all of the outcomes, however, are positive. Few people know that those hours alone in the hospital took a heavy toll on me in a way that I don’t know how to explain. To this day, I still have a persistent nightmare of finding myself in an empty, white space, feeling unspeakably cold. There are people all around me at a distance—faces I know and love, all drifting away from me, seemingly unable to hear my cries for them to stay.
And all of them keep repeating the same phrase over and over, in unison, louder and louder, until it wakes me from the dream at the point of tears.
We’re not leaving. We’ll stay as long as you need. We won’t leave.
But they always drift away, and I always wake up—Cold, and Alone.