Gonna try again – weighing options.

So…

I was on this site about a year ago. I had rigged together 2 helium tanks, complete with a home-made flow-control option for the gas and a home-made exit bag. I used the first tank to test the gas flow and the integrity of the bag, got in a chair and put the bag on top of my head, with all the air compressed out of it. Around my wrists were some comfortable leather restraints, with a small metal locking device that could be easily clicked into place. I had bought these to restrain my hands after pulling down the exit bag, so as not to accidentally pull the bag off my head once I lost consciousness. Incidentally it was so weird browsing for some suitable restraints in the bondage section of a sex-shop, I felt dirty but it had to be done.

I turned on the gas, and while the bag inflated on top of my head, I took a few deep breaths, exhaled deeply and waited for the bag to be full while holding my breath. When the bag was full and I had felt the gas seeping out from the small opening around the tubing, I pulled it over my head and breathed deeply…

But instead of losing consciousness, as had been described to me in various books, texts and websites, I started to feel a shortness of breath. Hands and feet began to tingle and I felt the acute panic that is associated with not being able to breathe. My vision got blurry and I instinctively tried to tear at the bag, for a moment forgetting my restrained hands. As the feeling of being strangled grew stronger I knew I wouldn’t be able to go through with it, the sheer biological reaction of  complete panic was so violent … I had to get out. I leveled my head, focused for a few seconds and stopped my breathing. Then, fumbling a few times I managed to find and press the release on the metal lock that held the restraints together, tore the bag off my head and breathed in some fresh oxygen filled air…

To this day I don’t know what went wrong. I had all the proper equipment, the flow of gas was exactly within the desired range described in the literature, I had sealed every connection in the rig with screw-on metal bands and silicone tape. Obviously, there was oxygen contaminating the exit bag, which is why I did not lose consciousness, and the helium flow’s displacement of my exhaled carbon-dioxide was not sufficient to prevent me from re-breathing it and generate a build up of it in my blood-stream. (That is where the panic reaction comes from). I am guessing that there must have been some oxygen in the helium tank, or the system must have had a leak some-where that allowed oxygen in. Why the helium failed to displace the carbon-dioxide, I have no idea.

So, back to the counselors, the anti-depressants, the tears and the grind, the psych-ward, the failures and the undignified existence of this man-shaped hole in the world.

Now it’s a year later and I think I’m ready to try again. I’m going for something a little simpler this time. In the immortal words of Walter Sobchak: “Once a plan gets too complicated, everything can go wrong”. I’m considering two fairly basic options, one being a drug-overdose and the other being the age old favorite of slicing open an artery and bleeding to death. Each has their flaws though. The drug overdose is a difficult way to go. It’s hard to obtain lethal drugs, most will take a long time to kill you and the transition is going to be quite painful. On the other hand, while it is easy enough to obtain a razor or scalpel to slice ones wrist, there is a psychological component to this that makes more difficult to go through with it… sitting in that bath-tub until the warm water goes lukewarm, then cold.

In the interest of keeping things simple, I can’t plan to get my hands on pentobarbital or proxypophene, and will have to find some combination of OTC drugs that can do the trick. For now I have bought a set of medical scalpels from an online medical supply store and a local anesthetic creme to make it easier to make the incision into the artery, but I really hope I can find some kind of drug combination that will provide a relatively peaceful and reliable death, as I really prefer the “peaceful pill” idea to leaving behind a bloody bathtub.

So, that’s it for me for now. Maybe I’ll check back in a year and give you another description of a failed suicide attempt, maybe not.

Stay sane out there.