This is a public service anouncement

If you're going to attempt suicide, at least don't be stupid about it. Here's a tip:

DRINKING ANTIFREEZE IS STUPID!

Chances are excellent you'll wind up doing something stupid. For example, you might sit in the corner of your bedroom and rock back and forth and giggle. Your family might notice this is strange and before you actually die or respiratory failure (which, just so you know, TAKES A WHILE after you drink the antifreeze), they might call 911. EMS will get you to the hospital just in time to jam a tube down your throat to ensure your continued survival.

Or you might become addled and fall down your stairs and quite possibly THIS won't make you die. It won't even make you brain injured. But it will make your nose crooked and put scars all over your face so that EVERYBODY you see henceforth will ask you: "What happened to you?". This will likely make you very uncomfortable and might not nearly have the musical swell and soft focus you were envisioning.

The EMTs, the nurses, the doctors who bring you back from said suicide attempt (because you did not have a DNR) will not ask questions about your suicide attempt in a hushed tone of voice. We use normal tones of voice. It's the holidays and we have heard this story. We just stopped you from dying. Sorry, that's our job. If you'd chosen an alternate method, we might have not had such an easy time of saving you.

I'm not saying your life doesn't suck. Not at all. I'm saying your life is not the only one that sucks. It's the holidays. Get in line.

I find it interesting that the two ethylene glycol ingestion cases I've had just this week were not done in the "city" hospitals in our area, they were done in the Four Seasons Hospital in Cul-De-Sac Haven of Affluence, Colorado and the Hospital Hilton of Gated Community, Colorado. I'm not implying that money = less depressed or has less cause for depression. I would like to make the point, though, that if my patients had been further down the socioeconomic bracket, at least I could argue that they might have had less access to Google, PubMed and Wikipedia.

Fortunately or unfortunately for my depressed patients, ethylene glycol (like most alcohol-esque substances) dialyzes out very quickly. It might cause permanent damage to say, your kidneys, and now you're an end stage renal patient dependent on dialysis for the rest of your life.

And you thought you were depressed before.

I mean: GOOGLE IT, PEOPLE!


Duh.