From Suicide to the VA: The Night Everything Broke and Began

How one night of despair—and a broken system—led me to recovery and to building a community for veterans like me.

Trigger Warning: This essay contains frank discussion of military sexual trauma, suicidal ideation, psychiatric hospitalization, and mistreatment within the VA system. Please take care while reading.

“I fought with myself over that call. So much of me wanted to be dead. Then I dropped to my knees and asked God for help. And He did. I made the call—and that’s one of the reasons I’m still here today.”

Soon after discharge, I started experiencing abdominal pain. I went to the VA. It was chaotic—veterans standing in line, pissed off. The line curved around the room, barely enough space to stand. The irritation and anger in the air was palpable. I felt it. It hyped me up. Now I was agitated and in pain.

I finally got called back to an exam room. I’m sitting there, waiting—always waiting back then. A nurse comes in, looks at me, and tells me I’ll have to wait in the waiting room. Only my husband is allowed in the exam room. I said, “I’m the veteran.” “I’m the veteran” was something women used to have to say repeatedly back then.

The doctor comes in. Asks me what’s going on. “Pain in my abdomen,” I tell him. He takes a little history, and when we get to my ovarian tumor surgery and the radical hysterectomy that followed soon after, he says he needs to do a pelvic exam.

I didn’t think he needed to. I certainly didn’t want one. I’d had enough punishing pelvic exams in my last couple of years in the Navy. But he was the doctor, so he left the exam room to get a speculum.

That proved to be a bit of a quest.

Sometime later, he returned—holding a huge metal speculum. For my brothers here: they come in different sizes, and that size, I was not. So I said, “Nope. Not going to do that.”

We went back and forth a little, and he finally agreed not to do the pelvic. But by then, I was in tears. Terrified of retribution. He didn’t offer a CT scan or any other diagnostic options. Just told me to go home and come back if it got worse.

So I went home. The pain lasted a week or so. I realized later it was probably what the VA would eventually call IBS—though years down the line, it turned out not to be IBS at all. It was Microscopic Colitis.

So that was my first visit to the VA hospital. I had no idea how anything worked. I left confused and agitated. That would become a recurring theme in my journey with the VA.

I left the U.S. Navy in December 1990 after eight years of service. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye. As a Data Analyst (DA), I had risen to the rank of Petty Officer First Class (E-6). Throughout my time in the military, I received a perfect performance eval (4.0) every year, starting from my promotion to Petty Officer Third Class (E-4) until I left. I earned two Navy Achievement Medals and received several commendation letters from Admirals. I received recognition as the “Best Analyst on the West Coast.”

The day after I left the Navy, it hit me hard: total aloneness. Boom. I was no longer part of something bigger than myself. I was no longer part of anything.

I had resolved through therapy my childhood trauma, but the trauma I suffered in the Navy seemed to break open everything in my past—it flooded me. Still, I continued to perform in an exemplary manner. Work was the only place I could shut my mind down from all the craziness going on up there. Albeit, my anger and rage started to show up in different ways that last six months I was in. I think between my medical situation from the last surgery and my performance, they gave me a break—because honestly, there were a couple of instances where I should have been written up. Like the time I suggested the Warrant Officer was pussy whipped by an E-5 in his division and that she should stick to her fucking pay grade. Normally, as they say, that would not be a career-enhancing move. But they gave me some leeway. They were well aware of my treatment at medical and had read the narrative I sent to Navy Medical OIG. Yeah, it was messed up.

I had my guard up—but not for the day-to-day harassment or the way medical sometimes did more harm than good. It included not returning calls, making me drive five hours just to see a gynecologist, and flat-out refusing to believe I was in pain. Every time I complained, they’d subject me to another pelvic exam—painful, invasive, like punishment for speaking up. And they lied. It felt like gaslighting.

I kept my mental fucked-up-ed-ness to myself. I just knew that letting on I was crumbling would be very bad for me. In the beginning of this, I had asked for therapy—and that turned into a waste of time and caused new harassment from the Command Master Chief. It was rough.

The month I left the service—Dec 1990—a Disabled American Veterans (DAV) representative looked at my medical records, saw the fact I’d had major surgery while in the Navy (I’ll save that for another blog post), looked me straight in the eye and said, “You will be 50% for the rest of your life.”

Later in his office, as he filled out my Veterans Affairs claim for my physical disability, I started mentally breaking down right in front of him. He urged me to file another claim for Depression and PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). But in 1990–1991, I didn’t meet the criteria—that came later when the DSM-IV changed the definition, but I wasn’t hearing it. I was in denial. Mental health issues are often much harder to admit, even to ourselves. Besides, no one talked about PTSD back then. I thought it was just a bunch of bullshit.

Everybody seems to know about PTSD now. My niece even tells her friends, “Oh, my aunt lives with me; she has PTSD,” and they’re like, “Oh yeah, you know, my brother’s cousin has that.” It’s so common.

Back then, I didn’t know about it, and I was in so much denial I couldn’t even talk to myself about it. Just couldn’t do it.

Bad idea.

A few months later, I was staying at a friend’s apartment in northern California, and luckily, she wasn’t there that night, or she would’ve thrown me out because I wasn’t doing well. So for the first time, I called the suicide hotline.

The folks on the other end of the hotline talked with me for a while and then told me I could call the VA, which I didn’t know because I was just so fucked up. I understood nothing. Leaving the military and entering the civilian world is very confusing. Even more so with my mental health unraveling.

I took their advice, called the VA, and asked to speak to the psychiatrist on duty. He spoke with me for a long time and eventually told me he would send the police to my house, and they would bring me to the VA hospital, and I would be safe there.

Having the police come to my house at two in the morning seemed like a bad idea, and it took him a while to convince me. But killing myself also seemed like not a good idea, so I finally agreed to it.

Well, about four cop cars showed up with all their lights flashing, pulled up at weird angles like they were coming onto a violent crime scene. I thought, Oh my fucking God! The cops knocked on the door, and I said, “Look, dudes, I don’t have any weapons. I won’t hurt anyone. Can you send some of the other cops away and turn the lights out?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, sure,” they said. Thank God. After the “crime scene” calmed down, the two cops that were left came in and asked if they could look around and check for weapons and drugs and the sort, and I agreed. With that done, they said, “Well, you’re coming with us.”

“OK,” I replied, “I agreed with the psychiatrist that you guys would take me to the VA hospital.”

“We can’t take you to the VA hospital. We have to take you to the state hospital.”

“I ain’t fucking going!”

“No. You gotta go now. You’ll have to work it out. The VA will have to transfer you from the state hospital.” And I realized … I’ve got two huge cops in my house, and I’m going to the state hospital whether I want to or not. So, discretion being the better part of valor, I decided not to fight with them and got into the back of the police car. But the whole time, I was thinking, This is not good. This is not good!

They took me to the state hospital where I sat in this little, tiny waiting room coming un-fucking-glued. I started plunking all my change into the pay phone and called the VA psychiatrist. “What the fuck did you do to me? I’m over here, and you’re not here. I trusted you!” The psychiatrist replied, “Well, tell them you need a taxi voucher. Then call a taxi and have them bring you to the VA.” So I went to the window and said, “I talked to the VA psychiatrist, and he told me to ask you for a taxi voucher.” The lady at the window said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing. And you can’t leave because you’re suicidal.”

I sat down for a minute, wondering what I was going to do, when this gurney rolled in with a guy strapped to it screaming, “I’m going to kill you all! I’m going to kill you all!” And that was it for me.

I went to the window and said, “I’m not suicidal,” and ran out into the night.

Now it’s three o’clock in the morning, and I have no idea where I am, aside from the fact that I’m in a parking lot hiding behind a car thinking, OK, things have gone really badly for me here. I just needed to get home. I knew I had maybe sixty bucks in the bank, which was supposed to be food money for the rest of the month, but at least it was there.

I snuck back into a side door to a different pay phone and called a cab, had the cab take me home, got my ATM card, had the cab take me to an ATM, paid him, and then called the psychiatrist again. He said if I promised him I would go to the VA the very next morning at 8 a.m., he would not send the cops back to my house. I promised him I would do it and showed up promptly at eight o’clock the next morning. But that whole night, I half expected a helicopter with spotlights to fly over me at any minute. Then I’d know things had really gone south!

I will say that the two cops who came in couldn’t have been more compassionate or kind. They were super, and I felt very safe with them. I didn’t feel like they were tricking me at all, but I felt like the psychiatrist didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. This would be my first in a long list of people at the VA who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about.

That wild night was the start of my recovery, and though I didn’t know it, it was the beginning of me learning everything I could about filing VA claims that would lead to the website HadIt.com. Helping other veterans file their claims, get the compensation they deserve, and find community through HadIt.com for the past twenty-five years has become my life’s purpose.

I used to think I was broken. But I was just being remade.