Everybody Hurts

So another teenager in our little Smallville circle has taken an overdose.

She decided the first thing to do after she’d taken the tablets was to text my daughter (yes, the one who did this herself a couple of years ago) and say goodbye. Daughter, in huge distress, rushes round to her house. Teenager is hysterical and explains to daughter what she has done.  Daughter calls an ambulance, teenager is rushed to hospital. Daughter has gone home distraught. I am rushing home from the city to see what I can do to console daughter.

I can’t tell her everything will be ok, because maybe this time it won’t be. The teenager in question is very troubled and has tried this a few times before.  Even if it’s a calculated gamble that she’ll pull through, I imagine that repeatedly putting your system, your kidneys, your liver through this poison and its equally toxic antidote, must weaken it over time – so your calculation might be few points wrong, and then… flatline.

As a parent, I’ve done the frantic dash to the hospital. I’ve sat and waited for the bloods to come back every half an hour to see whether she’s going to make it (paracetamol has a progressive effect so you can feel ok at first, but it’s doing irreparable damage to your liver, and so no-one knows at first whether the antidote is too little to late).  I’ve sat through the night in the adolescent psych ward and it was the most terrified I’ve ever been.

So I was pretty surprised that in all of this, the teenager’s mum has found the time to track down my number and ring me to complain about my daughter interfering in their private family concerns.

I explained that she felt she had no choice. She was told about the overdose and she immediately dialled 999 because time is of the essence.  She knows this from bitter experience. She loves her friend, perhaps she has saved her life.  The fact that the parents were downstairs in the house watching TV and the teenager did not talk to them but contacted my daughter instead is not our fault.

What is the world coming to? So much pain and so much anger everywhere.