HOW NOT TO COMMIT SUICIDE
7 of 9 pages 
The human body is hard to kill
Drug overdoses are always unpredictable. The drugs react with other drugs people take at the time, with alcohol, with odd allergies and drugs lingering around in the bloodstream from years before. "One fellow took four cold tablets," McKinney said, "and went to an emergency room complaining of a headache. He blew the blood vessels behind of his eyes out."
Violent death is so often portrayed as sudden and painless, but the human body is harder to kill it seems. For instance, people rarely die from slashing their wrists. "Most people who try it aren't really suicidal," Bedard said. "Usually it's a cry for help. A few want to see what it feels like to cut themselves. We just sew them up and call in the psychiatrist." Even if you cut your artery, which most people don't, it's hard to bleed to death because the bleeding stops on its own unless the cut is extremely severe. Popular wisdom says sitting in hot water makes you bleed faster, but Bedard said he's known people who tried it, passed out and woke up in a bathtub full of cold bloody water.
But it's an easy way to hurt yourself," he said. "You can damage the tendons and median nerve which control the muscles of your hand. People end up with claw hands. Lots of times, with microsurgery, that can be repaired, but it means six to twelve months out of your life, and you still end up with a weak or deformed hand."
The few people who cut their throats also rarely die. "They often cut the recurrent laryngeal nerve," Bedard said, "the nerve that goes up to the voicebox and larynx, and lose their voices. Or they cut themselves and bleed beneath the surface until they choke on a buildup of blood inside the trachea."
Bedard said most suicide shootings he's seen were hostile, done while someone else was around to react to it. Interestingly, you can shoot yourself in the head and miss the brain but merely blow out an eye or part of your jaw. If you die, the death is usually drawn out and painful.
"People can live eight hours with a hole in their head the size of a half dollar," Bedard said. "If you shoot yourself in the temple, the primitive parts of your brain that control breathing will go on for a long time, from minutes to hours. Eventually they may be shut off by pressure from the swelling of the upper brain that was shot. Or they may not be shut off at all. One man I treated is completely paralyzed on his left side, and can't speak, walk or feed himself. It's as if he had a major stroke. He hit the area of the brain which controls motor function."
Jumps and hanging, again from Bedard: "I'm amazed at how far you can fall after a jump and not kill yourself. Some people have fallen 150 feet and lived. They'll break many of their bones or rupture an organ like the spleen. Many people who try to hang themselves don't fall far enough to jerk their head back and snap their airway. They strangle themselves instead, and don't always die; they get brain damage from lack of oxygen." People who try to poison themselves with gas or carbon dioxide may also get brain damage for the same reason.
And finally, just falling into a coma can lead to permanent damage. "If you're slumped on a table, leaning on your arm for a day and a half," Bedard said, "you put pressure on the armpit. You can permanently damage the nerve there and make it hard to use your arm. Or your muscles might start to dissolve into your bloodstream and clog up your kidneys. The muscle damage probably eventually returns to normal."
These clinical generalizations make suicidal people seem like statistical ciphers who made a mistake and suffered the immediate, appropriate retribution. But it doesn't feel like that at the time. Whether or not you are glad you were rescued, recovering from a suicide attempt is like being in the emergency room for any other reason. The flash that brought you there was over in a moment. The waiting, being embarrassed, wondering what will happen next and bearing sharp or dull pain go on for hours.