The Hard Realities Of Life After I Shot Myself In The Head

"I had to ask 'Leon' (her then-husband) what had happened, and he had to tell me," Jessica said. "I was just in disbelief. I thought there was no way I could've actually done this. I thought a) chicks don't shoot themselves, and b) I'm really cute! Cute people don't shoot themselves! It turns out that was about the tenth time he had had to explain everything. I feel so guilty about that -- making him explain, over and over. It was so difficult for him."

That was early in the treatment, but the pattern continued. Her family kept having to explain her own suicide attempt to her again and again, like they were all living in a sadistic Groundhog Day. Once she woke up with her parents beside her, just before a nurse gave her a shot of pain medicine. Jessica didn't even realize she was in a hospital. She just thought it was a stranger sticking a needle in her arm while her mom and dad watched, and did nothing.

"The medication made me throw up. And they hadn't done the surgery to remove the mangled pieces of my tongue yet, so I threw up my tongue. And I'm crying and I can't talk so my mom gave me paper -- I still have this paper -- I wrote down 'Mom please take me to the hospital. I have insurance.'"

These problems sound pretty familiar to most of you. And some things that might seem downright terrifying in retrospect seemed perfectly ordinary at the time.

"We had a handgun for self-defense. We kept it in the nightstand."

Clear signs of trouble, here: drinking, trauma, and a gun. So what was the last straw? What was the final, traumatic incident that made everything fall apart and Jessica decide to end her life? Turns out it was ... nothing.

"I don't know if I can remember the night, or if I've just been told the story so many times that my brain created memories," Jessica admits. "Apparently on this night, neither Leon or I cooked, so I went to get fast food. We argued over Wendy's, and I was mean to one of our dogs. So he stormed into the bedroom and shut the door between us. I put on his swim trunks, got his gun and walked down to a nearby canal. I remember being worried about making a mess and affecting the property value of the building. Then I sent my husband a text message."

"I fired one shot into the water so that I'd know what to expect, and doing that sprained my wrist. And we think that's the first time my life was saved that night, because with a messed-up wrist I wasn't able to get the proper angle once I put the gun under my chin."

When the police first arrived and pulled her from the water, they wanted her to lay on her back. But she started choking on what was left of her tongue and teeth, and kept trying to roll on her side, or lay facedown. It wasn't until the paramedics showed up and let her move that she was finally safe (relatively speaking). She was able to communicate a little through hand signals -- according to the police report, she even gave them a thumbs-up at one point.

It was Leon who called the police, but since the gunfire had cauterized the wound below Jessica's jaw, they only saw the hole higher up on her face, and initially assumed Leon had shot her. He sat handcuffed in a police station for several hours with no idea if Jessica was even okay. When paramedics found the real entry wound, the whole story became clear.

"One day a doctor came in and told me they had to re-open my forehead," Jessica said, describing her recovery. "They injected me with lidocaine. Lidocaine, by the way, tastes horrible. I had a hole from my mouth to my forehead and anything injected in my head dripped down to my mouth. Then they poured water over my face to wash away the blood, and even though I was breathing through my trache, my brain thought I was drowning and put me in panic-mode."

That sounds more like torture than medicine, and it very well could have been. Jessica described an encounter with her doctor that was downright nightmarish.

"One day a man walked in with a few of the residents and introduced himself as head of the department that was treating me, and he was the one making decisions about my care. My mom was with me and neither of us had ever seen or heard of him. We had gotten to know all the doctors, nurses, and techs by then, so we were surprised," she said.

"By the way, Jessica, there are two kinds of people in this world," he said. "There are victims, who get hurt by someone, and we do everything in our power to help them and make sure they need as few surgeries as possible. The second person is the perpetrator. The criminal. Them, maybe we don't help them as much as we should. We don't help them as much as we have to because they don't deserve it. And Jessica, you're a perpetrator."

Needless to say, that is a terrifying thing to hear while you're stuck in a hospital. We reached out to a surgeon from one of our earlier articles to ask why a surgeon might say something like that, and he was quick to explain that it's completely unacceptable.

"Ethically, everyone should get 'standard of care' treatment. If we define that, it's 'this is what a competent doctor does in this situation.' No matter who we're talking about -- a pedophile, murderer, someone who shot a cop -- any ethical, good doctor treats them the same."

But with traumatic injuries, it can be more complicated.

"When you talk about trauma, especially a gunshot wound to the head, we might talk about 'futile' or 'heroic' care. That's where things get iffy. When you look at someone and realize they can't meaningfully survive the situation. If you give them the best treatment possible, you've just turned a perfectly good dead person into a vegetative person in a nursing home. That's tough, and it should always be based on the injury."

That explains the thinking, but our source wanted to be clear that it does not excuse it:

"It's completely inappropriate for any doctor to say that they didn't provide the best care available because of a suicide attempt."

Jessica and her family were furious, and chose to move hospitals:

"The co-chair of the OMFS department (his counterpart) did seem a little too nice, and it was clear he was concerned about ," she told us. Jessica and her family didn't want to press the matter any further, though: "We just wanted out of there."

They never heard from him again, and the rest of the staff treated her and her family with kindness and respect. And that doctor's still out there, following his passion: haranguing attempted suicide patients.

"When I meet people, I feel like I have to bring up and explain the scars. And I wanna joke about it, so people know that I'm not going to cry if we talk about it. I've told the story enough that it's like repeating a grocery list. I constantly think about it when meeting new people, do I wait for them to bring it up? Or do I get out in front of it and tell them?"

It's always on her mind for many reasons, but mainly because, even though this happened all the way back in 2010, her reconstruction isn't complete. Her body keeps eating its own bones.

"I have peach fuzz on the roof of my mouth, because that skin is from my arm. Parts of me aren't finished. Your maxilla is your upper jaw -- your teeth attach to your maxilla. I only have half of one. On the left side, there's nothing. I have a retainer that looks like teeth. They took bones from my hip and put it up in my upper jaw so they could add implants, but my head ate the bone. I didn't realize that could happen, but, yeah."

Turns out if your body doesn't think it has any teeth, it might decide it doesn't need those silly jawbones either.

" was 'okay, we'll take bones from your tibia,' but I lost my health insurance so we had to stop reconstructive surgery."

Thankfully, she doesn't have a lot of work left. Less thankfully, she's still missing bones in her head.

But she did eventually move forward, and it wasn't exactly like in the Lifetime movies and the inspiring Tumblr posts. It all started with the death of her dog:

"A few months after I got out of the hospital, my dachshund Eve injured her spine and had to be put down. I was utterly devastated and cried for months. My therapist pointed out that I wasn't only grieving for the loss of my dog, but for all the loss I had experienced. Up until that point, my only focus had been on surviving and getting to tomorrow because looking at my broken face and life hurt too much. Crying over Evie released my emotions and allowed me to really look at what I'd done and grieve in it."

Tattoos helped as well:

"I won't go into all the ink I have, but two of them helped me recover at different periods of my post-attempt life. The first is the French phrase 'fait accompli' on my side, which means 'a thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them no option but to accept it.' Because I have no real memory of that night, and it permanently changed my life, that seems like a good verbalization of the experience. I also have a large, stylized phoenix on my back. For trauma this big, there's no 'getting back to your old self,' and that can be scary. I think people understand my obsession with the phoenix.

"People can come back from more than you think. I had a bullet travel through my face and out my forehead. I lost 60 percent vision in my left eye, lost my sense of smell. Yet I can drive, work, take care of myself, make friends, and do the things most people do. The confidence and peace I have now, the person I am today, is different from who I used to be. I hate a lot of the things I had to go through. Having my upper jaw cut out of my face, for example."

"I'm not proud of what I did. But I am proud of who I've become since."

The suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255, and you can chat online with them here.

For insider looks at suicide, check out 4 Surprising Things You Learn After Considering Suicide and 5 Disturbing Things I Learned Working At A Suicide Hotline.

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