I’ve been keeping a secret from most people for a long time. There are some people who know, special friend that I have shared my pain with, family members that I have needed support from, but for the most part I have tried to protect this image of my family as normal and functional and happy. That is simply not the truth.
I am married to an alcoholic. A depressed alcoholic. And just a little over a month ago, the worst month of my life started. And that’s coming from a woman who sat by her daughter’s NICU bed for 25 days watching her die.
I’ve known for a bout 2.5 years that something really bad was going to happen because of my husband’s drinking. A couple of years ago, he was steadily calling in sick for work because he was drunk. Then, he ultimately called in “drunk.” He literally called his boss and told him that he was too drunk to go to work. That ended with him being put of of work on shirt term disability for 6 weeks while he got help for his depression. After that, he didn’t drink for about six months. I thought, well, he can’t be an alcoholic.
But he started back. And in the past year he got a DWI, spent 5 days in jail, threatened to kill himself, spent 8 days in a mental hospital, and we decided to get separated. I just couldn’t put up with it anymore, and he couldn’t stand for me to get between him and his beer.
That brings us to Feb 4th, 2012. It was a Saturday. Actually, I should back up a couple of days. On Thursday, we had a fight because he was drinking. Actually, the fight was because he was mad that I was mad at him. That doens’t make a lot of sense, but that’s what it was. But yeah, I was mad. Because he said he wanted a beer (which never, never, never, never meant 1–it meant more like one 12-pack). At any rate, I tried everything I could think of to distract him, to talk him out of going out and buying that beer, but he had already decided. So I was mad and sad and disappointed. So we fought and finally came to the decision that the next day he would go to Ohio and stay with his mom for a while and when he came back, he would get his own place.
So an Friday, around lunchtime, he left. It was very cordial. I wanted this life that I was in to be over. I had to go to work that night and the next, so I mad arrangement for my kids to stay with my parents for the weekend. I spent some of the day sleeping. Around 4pm, Scott called and begged me to let him come back home. He said that he had had a lot of time to think and he knew this separation was not what he really wanted and he would go whatever I wanted – including taking the Antabuse that he had stopped taking about a month before. So, being the pushover I am, I let him come home. And I went to work.
When I came home Saturday morning, I was exhausted and went straight to bed. He was there. We said good morning/ good night and I slept the day away. When I got up that afternoon, we watched the Carolina ball game, had supper and I went to work. Everything seemed fine.
I talked to him at about 11:30 and he was complaining that he couldn’t sleep. Then he told me that Mike ( the neighbor) was coming over to watch a movie. It seemed weird to me, and his voice told me that he had been drinking…plus it’s what he and Mike do when the are together. I asked him about it and he denied it. He was lying, of course. That’s what alcoholics do.
About 6:00 on Saturday morning, I was just coming out of a patient’s room when the tech asked if I had a husband named Scott. I said yes, and she told me that the house supervisor was coming to find me. Oh crap. This can’t be good. He gave me his phone and it was the sheriff’s department. My first thought was that he had been arrested for DWI. But no, it was worse. The dispatcher told me that Scott had called 911 on himself and was threatening to kill himself. The seriff’s depratment was there and they said Scott was firing the gun iside the house. She asked if I wanted to come home, and advised me against it. I told her that I just wanted them to get him some help. I didn’t know what to do. I was advised that he would be brought to the hospital where I was first. It made sense to me to stay, because our home is 30 mins away from the hospital and we could have very easiuly passed each other.
I called my dad. He left right away for the hsopital.
I called the sheriff’s dept back about 6:30 and was addvised that Scott was in the woods and the officers couldn’t locate him. But he was on the phone with dispatch, tell them what he was doing.
At 7:00 I got the call that he was on the way to the hospital via ambulance. No status update. I gave report to the oncoming shift and went to the ER. They had just brought Scott in, so I knew he was alive. I fetched my dad, who was in the waiting room by this time and a doctor came to talk to us. Scott had been shot in the face (twice) and in the wrist and the extent of his injuries was unknown. He had been put on a ventilator to protect his airway and was going to be transported to Duke.
My dad and I talked to Sgt. Mayo, who was on scene, and he reported that all of the gunshots were from the police. He said that after Scott was shot, he got up and walked himself to the ambulance.
The next few days are a blur, but end the end, Scott is lucky to be alive. He was shot twice in the head with no life-treatening damage. That’s not to say that there won’t be problems, but he is alive. And he has a new perspective.
One of the big focuses while he was at Duke was his mental health and what kind of treatment would he get when he was medically cleared. He was discharged from Duke on Feb 8th with an appointment for a psychiatrist. Within an hour of being home that night, the sheriff’s department was at the house to arrest him on 4 counts of assault with a deadly weapon against a police officer. The judge would set the bond in a week.
The next week in court, the bond was set for $200,000. It might as well been a million.
As of today, Scott has been locked up for 4 weeks. He goes to court again tomorrow and we are expecting the bond to be lowered, and my parents and his mom are pooling resources to get him home. I believe that he has hit his rock bottom and the life I wasn’t so desperately to be done with is over. He understands that God has given him a second chance.
So will I. (But by that I mean last chance.)
And that’s what’s going on with me.