Bad Enough for Hospital

Something strange has been happening to me in the past few weeks. It's a change I can't pinpoint but something has definitely happened to make me behave in this manner. The difficulty lies in describing it.

Imagine something you do on autopilot. Maybe something you do every day, so often that you don't have to think about it. There's no thought process there saying "I'm going to do this", you just go ahead and do it. Maybe you feel like you're in a trance. Maybe you feel like you aren't in control. This is how I've felt several times in the past few weeks. I'm going to talk about one specific time in which I self harmed. (Obvious trigger warning goes here.)

It was a normal day and nothing of note was happening. I ran 10K in the afternoon and then went for a shower later when I was home. Something possessed me to bring the blade into the shower and so I did. Again, to reiterate, I was not triggered by anything. I wasn't even upset. I was in zombie mode. Sitting down, I took that blade and cut my arm in such a way that I started something. Since it was in the shower, it was difficult to quantify the amount of blood that came out. I just know I had created a wound that was at least an inch wide and that the blood was pouring out of to the extent that immediately after I inflicted the wound, my hand grabbed the wrist and applied pressure to try and control the bleeding. The rest of the shower was me trying to stand up again and failing due to feeling so faint. I felt like passing out and I felt genuinely sick. I've never felt that way before just by inflicting one wound. 

I tend to my self harm wounds myself. I always feel like it's the least I can do (why waste someone else's time on something I did to myself?) I bandaged this up and tried not to think about it... but that's all I could do. I was worried. I had never felt so lightheaded and so sick before. I decided to sleep on it and see how I felt the next day (which wasn't such a great idea).

The next day, I saw my boyfriend as planned but asked him to drop me off at the local GP practice/treatment room. I had asked there before for them to look at cuts and dress them if needed so I thought I would do the same this time. Unfortunately this time I had to make an appointment. So I did so and then came back a few hours later having told my mum about what happened. She's always been supportive. She doesn't like the self harm but I think she understands mostly why I do it.

At the appointment, I have a nurse look at the wound and decide it's too big so she needs a doctor to look at it. Fair enough. Doctor comes in, tries seeing how it would close with her fingers, decides it's too big for paper stitches and needs something more. She suggests I go to A&E and also make a GP appointment for the next day to speak about how I'm feeling. The latter is no problem but the former is something I wanted to avoid (something that, had I thought was needed, I'd have done the day before.)

We have to go home and explain to my dad (who is terrible with this stuff; he just doesn't understand why when I self harm I can't be dropped off at the local mental hospital). My parents argue about who'll take me to A&E with my mum refusing to let my dad since I'll be getting crap the whole way up about "why would you do this?" etc. We go up and sit for a good hour and a half or so which isn't too bad in terms of waiting times before being seen.

Now, I should explain my reluctance about going to A&E. First of all, I don't drive. I'll have to get someone to give me a lift up and I feel bad about wasting their time on something I did to myself. Secondly, I've been to A&E once before for something self-inflicted. The way I was treated tainted my view of ever returning for self harm or overdoses. I was spoken to like I was an idiot and wasting hospital time. "That was a stupid thing to do, wasn't it?" is what I received for going in having overdosed on painkillers aged 17(?). This time though, the doctor was friendly. He took at look at the wound and decided it was too late to stitch it so instead he glued it together with little things similar to paper stitches. I was then discharged and told to keep it dry and that it would heal and the stitch-like things would fall off in a few days.

Of course, that turned out to be a total waste of time because as it healed, I removed the stitches and on a particularly bad day, ripped the wound open again. It wasn't as bad as before, but did need to heal again.

I saw the GP on the Tuesday and spoke to him about how I was feeling. I think he wanted to make sure it wasn't some kind of schizophrenia in which I felt I had other voices speaking to me. He's made sure I see him for the past 3 weeks to keep an eye on how things were going and over the holidays I got a call from the community mental health crisis team. The issue there was that I don't think they quite understood what I meant by feeling "out of control". No matter. I also saw my new social worker and filled him in on... everything, really. Right now I feel supported from almost every angle - I guess they think I'm a suicide risk.

A suicide risk. I do wonder... I have something going on inside my head that I feel I can't control. I want to know what it is that's making me feel this way. What causes someone to completely disconnect and dissociate from their body? What happens if I do this and do more than a simple cut that requires hospital treatment? For a while I was practising cutting my neck. I was researching where would be the most effective place to inflict a wound to kill myself. What if I act on that? 

I have a suspicion that it's a side effect of the combination of sedatives, antidepressants and antipsychotics I'm on to treat the anxiety and depression. If so, what can be done? If they're reduced, I get anxious and depressed and hurt myself. If they stay the same, I stay like this. Where is the balance? Does anyone else feel this way on similar meds?

The biggest concern for me right now is that I literally did something so bad that it required treatment at A&E. Where do I go from here? What will it be next time?

Will I do something so severe I can't come back from it?