I have always marveled at people who kill themselves without leaving a note, I just don’t understand it. I see reports of confused family and friends saying “we don’t know why they did it”, as someone who has thought long and hard more than once about ending it all I always envisioned myself leaving a note detailing exactly why I was done with life. And this is where today’s story begins!
Recently I got pretty seriously injured at work leaving me in excruciating pain almost constantly and rendering my arm and shoulder pretty much useless (But I’m much better now). As a result of this I was of course taking some seriously large doses of painkillers and muscle relaxants and was more than just a wee bit dopey.
The simplest of tasks was pretty much impossible but after about a week I decided really did need to find a way to clean myself properly. Since standing for even a few moments left me dizzy I figured I’d try and take a bath, in retrospect this may not have been the best decision I’ve made.
I ran the bath full of water and as I went to get into the bath I realized that with only one functioning arm “lowering myself into the bath” was more of a “crashing uncontrollably into a steel object”. I put this out of my mind and started to try and get down to cleaning myself up.
I immediately realized the ridiculousness of my situation when I tried to start shaving my legs. I was trying to use the wrong arm to shave and was making weird wobbling shaking lines up my leg and started to desperately hope that I wasn’t going to start lacerating myself. It was at that point that somehow the blade portion of the razor just flew off and I heard it *plop* into the bath water.
As anyone who has ever taken a bath knows, trying to retrieve something that is partially floating in a bath is damn near impossible with two working arms, yet here I was with less than that trying to grab floating razor blades! I started out pretty confidently but after a while my arm was getting tired and I figured “hey, it isn’t like I really NEED shaved legs right now, I’ll just finish washing and get out then once the water is gone I can get the blades”.
You’d think this was the end of the story… but sadly not!
It was when I tried to get myself back out of the bath that I started to realize the danger in having a bath unattended when you only have one functional arm. I first tried to lift myself out of the bath the normal way, but my right arm collapsed under the pressure violently twisting my body and somehow jamming me sideways in the tub with my knee pinning my hip across the tub pretty solidly.
I was flailing about unsuccessfully attempting to dislodge myself but I couldn’t seem to get the leverage needed because my gimpy arm was on the wrong side. It was that point that I suddenly remembered that I was flailing around in a tub that had RAZOR BLADES floating around in it!
I started to laugh at the situation realizing that I was likely to be found some days later completely lacerated and floating in a bath full of water and people would say “I wonder why she killed herself”. Then I started thinking about the phenomenon of “accidental suicide”, maybe that’s what I was about to do?! Maybe that’s why some people don’t leave notes?!
Anyway, as you can tell I did manage to make it out of the tub (but not without smashing my head off the safety bar and also the wall on the other side of the room). But the other important thing I learned was that if you’ve had one of those razors with the disposable heads for a long time the spring action weakens and it can start ejecting the razor blades when you don’t want to…
SO… Pro Tip:
If your razor handle has been around for a bit maybe it’s time to upgrade before you accidentally commit suicide and your friends have to try and figure out why you didn’t bother to leave them a note.
~ Elena <3
