After inhaling all of those pills, it still took Chris a while to actually believe I did and by that time it was too late, there was nothing he could have done about it. I highly doubt him making me vomit some of them back up would have made much of a difference.
Before long my body started to loosen and expel all unnecessary fluids from it. I was projectile vomiting the brightest blue stomach bile and shitting myself so intense that there were actual feces on the ceiling.
The last thing I remember was laying down at the bottom of the shower sobbing silently and coming to terms with knowing I would take my last breath. I made peace with never waking up while holding onto the little bit of life I had left in me.
At some point Chris finally decided to call an ambulance. Passed out in the shower, he cleaned the vomit and poop off of my body and dressed me so I was decent for the paramedics arrival.
Looking back on it, it was incredibly selfish to attempt to end my life in any way but unfortunately that day I just was not okay that day and when people are not okay like I was that day then something as drastic as suicide seems like the only logical way out.
I cannot fathom what the next few days were like for Chris. He wasn’t related to me so when he called the hospital they wouldn’t disclose any information about my condition and my mother sure as hell wasn’t letting him know how I was. Fortunately, once I finally woke up my sister did text him a picture of me with my eyes open. I’m sure knowing I was alive was a huge weight off of his shoulders.
I suffered a complete organ failure after my overdose. I’d look at my medical records from the incident after the fact and I’m stunned that those records actually came from me. It was 3 days and 4 nights that I stayed in the hospital when it was unclear whether or not I’d wake up to some serious brain damage from being clinically dead for so long. They had to make a small incision in my neck in order to intubate me so I could breathe.
Sometimes I go back and look at my medical records just to remind myself how close to death I really was. It was definitely no joke.
While in my coma, I had this dream that played out on a reoccurring loop. I was holding Zeke on my hip and we were joyously walking around a gorgeous, brightly lit botanical garden. Not a care in sight, nothing but bright big and genuine smiles. It’s what I was longing for the most in my afterlife, just a happily ever after with me and my boy.
I woke up suddenly, like I was in shock. Confused, and looking around I found myself stark naked and laying down inside some sort of tarp and I was wet. Two nurses stood on either side of me, bathing me. As soon as the nurses saw I was awake they vaguely explained to me that I was in the hospital and didn’t want me to panic. It took me a moment to realize what exactly I was waking up from and where I was, I could barely speak from the tubes placed in my throat
It didn’t take long and they transferred me from ICU and into a normal hospital room, with a suicide watch babysitter. Tiffany and Cassie came to visit me, it was the first time I’ve seen her since she visited me at the hospital before I had Zeke. I was morbidly embarrassed to see her and tried my darndest to hide all my pain that I tried so desperately to end just a few short days ago. She saw past my happy facade and in her eyes was worried.
In her eyes the answer was easy. Everyone that ever cared about me thought the answer was easy. Leave Chris and be happy. Like, if I just left Chris then I’d magically be able to get my son back and be cured of all my addiction issues. No one quite understood that despite the hardships I’ve been through in my relationship (the abuse, my cheating, Chris’ delusions and my suicide attempts), there was just no living if without Chris. I knew Chris better than he knew himself and the Chris he presented to me after Zeke was removed from our custody wasn’t the real Chris. I broke him.
I summoned up the courage to call Chris. I needed to check up on him and I never thought I’d hear him so honestly relieved and happy to hear my voice. He was happy, he was crying even. I was alive and that was all that mattered.
After 3 days of eating some of the best hospital food I’ve ever eaten I was taken off to Trinity West in New Port Richey for a mandatory 72 hour psychiatric evaluation, and an additional 24 hours I decided to stay voluntarily. Upon discharge I was put on lithium and a few other psychiatric drugs, I enrolled back into the drug classes and color code drugs tests at Baycare. I resumed my visitation with Zeke whenever possible, riding the bus for 6 hours one way on visits that Chris never went to.
Chris and I started individual and couples therapy with our case worker, Kelly. We wanted more than anything to make it out alive from all of this.
Our case worker was great to talk to. She’d drive the company car all the way to our house for sessions. We started to gain a little bit of hops in the idea that maybe we could be parents again, even though we were still peeing dirty every drug test.
Months went by, I stopped cheating on Chris and we were fighting a lot less and then Chris started to develop meth induced delusions. He became obsessed with thinking that I was tampering with his phone. And if it wasn’t me, he thought, then it had to be Zack and I was probably helping him. I did my best not to give into his accusations and ignore them but I won’t lie it kind of stung to have him think I’d do some crazy shit to his phone.
At this point, we met a tweaker named Erica. She was homeless so she and her boyfriend were given the back trailer to rent. They paid me $50 once and from there I never was able to get rid of them.
Not before long I started noticing some changes going on with my body and I voiced my concerns to our therapist and she brought over a pregnancy test. Sure enough, it was positive. I was pregnant again. There was something different about this pregnancy though. But, I kept holding off on going to the doctors to get checked out.
Very soon after we stopped participating in therapy, groups or urine tests.
Chris’ birthday, the day after Thanksgiving on the 23rd, he had a mental breakdown. He laid down on the couch in the living room and just let all his feelings spill out. He told me how it felt to go to jail and have me cheat on him the whole time he was away, how it felt to see another man wearing his clothes. How he felt like I didn’t love him but only used him because I had no other options. How he was so fucking scared that I was going to die for days not knowing how I was doing.
Somehow, I managed to be oblivious to all the damage I was causing because I was too focused on the pain I was feeling.
Then he told me he downed two bottles of Tylenol when I wasn’t looking. My sweet baby angel Christopher was trying to end his life, and on his birthday.
Luckily for him, I saw that he needed me that day and I spent the entire day doing whatever I could to make him feel better. I rubbed his back, just like old times. I patted his back and stood by his side with water and a towel for what seemed like forever while he puked in the trashcan. Luckily, that’s all he experienced and I didn’t have to call for an ambulance.
We were both our worst enemies and we’ve made each other so angry and so happy.
I shot up meth for an embarrassingly long time before I was able to put it down during this pregnancy. Chris was, too. And for the next few weeks following his suicide attempt I watched him lose every bit of his sanity. His paranoia was at an all time high and by the time Christmas time came along he was convinced that drones and helicopters were following him and that I was in the FBI sent to be undercover with him.
On December 23, 2018 Chris lost it. He seemed absolutely disgusted by my presence. The day started off by him just talking ugly to me, then cussing me out under his breath and then a quick escalation to tossing heavy objects across the room at me. Hitting me in the face, chest, stomach or anywhere he saw an opening. It only hurt a little but I was becoming scared and concerned for my safety.
I dared not make any eye contact, didn’t speak a word so not to agitate or give him more reason to hurt me. My attention was directed straight ahead and my body still. This reaction from me wasn’t the one that he was attempting to arise out of me. He wanted anger out of me. He wanted me to try and attack him back, to put myself in danger.
At one point, after pacing back and forth in the living room with a machete he got so irritated at my lack of response that he lunged himself at me. He pushed me down on the pulled out futon in the living room where I slept. I put my legs up to try and kick him off of me and protect my belly but it backfired as he took my legs, crossing them over my stomach and applied pressure at what I could only see as an attempt to end my pregnancy. I was able to kick him off of me with the force of a mother protecting her baby.
Angry at his failed attempt, he picked back up his machete and paced the room again. Stopping ever so often to try and flip the futon I was on. After what seemed like an eternity he finally went into the master bedroom where he slept to do another shot of meth.
It had been night time by then, and I had no cell phone. In only a nightgown, I grabbed my shoes as fast and quietly as I could, I grabbed Chewie and put him on his leash and I darted for the back door.
I went straight to Eric and Ruthie’s house just two doors down but they were sleeping too hard to hear me knocking. I went around to their backyard and hid in their laundry room. After maybe an hour, I got fearful that Chris might find me so I took Chewie and started walking.
I made it to the soup kitchen and around the back to the shortcut to Loy Street and found a yard with a bunch of abandoned vehicles on it. There I found a vintage fire truck and it was unlocked. I crawled inside and immediately started to sob. I had so many emotions.
At that point, I was absolutely terrified of the man I just ran away from. The father of my children, my soulmate. He turned into an empty, dark man that I no longer recognized. When I looked into his eyes that night, I saw no sign of the man I fell in love with. He was gone.
Sitting in that old abandoned fire truck I, too, became someone I hardly recognized. The longer I sat there and was in my own head the angrier I became. That fear that resonated inside of me quickly became deep, raw anger. Who the fuck did Chris think he was coming at me and trying to inflict serious pain on me. How dare he lay a fucking hand on me.
I was mad because we weren’t a good couple anymore. I hated Chris for ever introducing me to drugs and glorified getting high. I was mad for Chris becoming mentally and physically abusive and always hitting me when I was already down. But, most importantly, I hated what Chris just spent the past day doing to me.
For making me as uncomfortable as he could in my childhood home. For making me think, even for a second, that he was capable of trying to end my pregnancy and hurt me like that.
I didn’t take accountability for any of my personal issues relating to all of it. All I felt was this red, hot anger bubble I was in. Why?!? Because he was the man in the relationship and before I met him I was pure, kind and contagiously happy all the time and he took that away from me.
So, around 9 or 10 in the morning on Christmas Eve I marched my ass home — a woman on a mission! I practically marched back to the trailer, and I had a pep in my step. I had it in my mind I wasn’t going to take his shit any longer.
I was going to fucking kill Chris Willey that night. I was done being a victim, and this night I’d make sure I never was again.
Allie Willey 