DaddyR....Keep working dude! I am a police officer and I would love to hear your story sometime if you want to tell. I think it would be interesting! I'm glad everthing worked out for you!! Sounds like you have a lot to be thankful for.........
I should really correct myself. While the PG County Police Department has had some serious PR issues for decades, it was really the one particular police officer who shot me who had an unusual history of shooting unarmed people experiencing mental health crises. As I heard from an investigative reporter for the Washington Post who contacted me years later.
The basic problem was that somehow they got their signals crossed and the officers on the scene had been told I was armed, when I wasn't at all nor were there any firearms available to me. They stopped me halfway down the block when I tried to drive away from them, and surrounded me when I got out of my SUV, yelling at me to drop my (nonexistent) weapon. After holding out my hands for them all to see and yelling back that I had no weapon, and them still yelling "put down the weapon", I realized this was the way I could finally succeed at suicide. So I started dancing around yelling: "Shoot me!", "Go ahead and shoot me", "That's what I WANT", "Just do it". Yes I was totally suicidal, but I never threatened nor approached any of the officers. Nobody ordered me to lie down or anything, they just kept yelling "put down your weapon". Finally the one officer shot me in the left hip area. Said he was aiming for the (invisible) weapon in my (empty) left hand.
The bullet tore through my abdomen, bounced off my hip bone and broke apart, with bullet fragments then putting a whole mess of holes in my intestines. Bruised (didn't sever thank God) a nerve so that it took me about a month before I could walk unaided again. Three days after trauma surgery to patch things up, dead tissue that the surgeons hadn't seen began rotting inside my abdomen, and eventually they had to remove a part of the abdominal wall, at first as big as a softball, and left me with a colostomy for 6 months. I was in surgery for 3 days getting all of the dead and rotting tissue removed and holes patched up properly.
REALLY GROSS story: between the 3 days of surgery, they left the incision (a huge midline incision from pubis to breastbone) open, and packed sterile dressings over it. They gave me one day's break between the 2nd and 3rd surgery, and on that day they "ran the gut". I was wide awake. Somebody held a washcloth over my eyes so I couldn't see, while they literally pulled my intestines out and laid them on my lap. I could feel the tugging as they checked my whole small and large intestines, from one end to the other. Like the disembowelment of William Wallace depicted in the movie Braveheart - in fact I can't handle watching that scene because it brings back that memory. Can you even imagine it? They just pulled out all my guts and set them down on my lap, while I sit there trying not to freak out!
I honestly don't think they had expected me to live at first, which is why they didn't do a more thorough job when they first operated on me. In the end, between the first and second follow-up surgeries (while the surgeons slept after something like 15 hours working on me) I nearly did die and had a little near-death experience I could tell about. In fact I recently met an old friend, who had been told I had died and who thought I was long gone!
I lost over 30 pounds during that first week in the hospital. had to have feeding by hyperalimentation... a tube feeding sterile predigested food (aminos, carbs, fats, etc.) straight into the blood stream in the aorta. I recovered, went back to my job and family, and amazingly (and thanks to them finally getting my diagnosis right as bipolar type 2), have never had a major depressive episode or suicide attempt again. I had struggled with recurring depression and attempted suicide more than a dozen times in 7 years.
Then systemic lupus hit 2 years later. Took 3 years until it went into remission. I won't even mention my childhood experiences with ADHD... no wait I just did. Well, it's been a couple of years of good health now, and I'm really getting myself back in shape!
So yes I've lived a little.