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My husband was the kind of man who worried about everyone's sex life. For years, especially when the children were small, he would grill me for hours about any prior experience I may have had. He would also grill me about the money. I had to account for every penny, yet he always got his toys whether or not we could afford them.

Now you may well ask why I would stay with such a person. My answer is the same as most abused women. I had three children and no work experience. We married before I had been out of high school a full year. The good times often lasted for several years before something would worry him and he would go back to destroying my self-image. I don't know how, but he had me believing he was the only true good and faithful man in the world. To prove it he often related stories he knew about men I knew.

We had just launched our youngest child from home and were beginning to have a lot of fun together when he launched the `other women' campaign and I was just about to transfer from junior college to the University of California Santa Barbara. I realize that his burdening me with these stories and grilling me about my pre-marriage years couldn't possibly be the sum total of all the contributing stress factors that sunk me so deeply into depression. I am a deeply moral person. I eventually broke down and told him every mistake I ever made whether it was immoral or not. This only gave this man more ammunition. He never had to hit me because accusing and using my mistakes against me hurt worse than any physical blow. Sensitive people arereally and truly that susceptible to emotional pain, and I am among the most sensitive.

Without detailing the rest of my stress factors in this two year period, I will list but a few. My father had just died the previous year. My daughter had married a second time and given me my only granddaughter. My youngest son graduated. My older son got married too and my daughter was having serious problems with panic disorder. The root cause of her problems was an incident of sexual abuse by her father. I wanted to die right then.

I guess having to commute an hour each way to UCSB both contributed to and relieved the effects of this steady stream of stress. I always cried all the way home.

The next turn of events was that the stories of infidelity my husband had related started to change. And when I would catch him at it, he laughed at me. I started ideation about suicide a few months after we entered counseling. My counselor then decided it would be better for us to see different people. I would often wake up in the middle of the night begging him just to tell me the truth. If my thinking by this time sounds screwed up, it was.

One Saturday morning after me begging for truth and being degraded for my human foibles, I tried to take a whole giant economy sized bottle of aspirin. He took the half empty bottle away from me and went out to mow the lawn saying his psychiatrist had told him I could not possibly swallow enough to kill myself. My ears are still ringing.

After a few more months of this behavior, he decided he needed to get away for awhile. After all, my condition was all my own fault. The truth was that he had bought a pager, I was getting a lot of telephone hangups, and a friend of mine who worked in the office where he did told me my friend was calling him almost every day. Another elephant kick to drive my emotions in that dark hole.

As I said at the beginning this vicious cycle went on for over two years. My counselor became ill after the first eight months meaning I had no help at all to cope with this.

The eighth and final time I attempted suicide, I found where he stashed his pistol under the seat of his van. My little antique was locked in a safe. I went out into the country but couldn't do it. I did not want to be found by strangers. So I went back home. As I tearfully walked in and took a seat, he ignored me. I asked him point blank `don't you love me at all any more'. His reply was a very angry `not now I don't.' Always before our grilling and storytelling sessions had ended with him telling me that he loved me. Can you believe that? and worse yet I believed him.

I got out of my chair walked softly to the bathroom, leaned over the tub so any slug could not possibly go through the walls to harm someone else and pulled the trigger twice. The first was a misfire that I only remembered later after the policeman told me about their investigation. They had found the misfired shell.

I never lost consciousness completely until anesthetized in St. Francis Hospital in Santa Barbara. I remember telling the ambulance driver my blood type during the one hour ride.

I am unclear how many days I was in a coma. My family has told me that I ended up having two surgeries, one to remove skull fragments and a second to relieve swelling. My records say my right eyeball popped out.

The worst part is over. I got help in that hospital. Despite the fact that the emotional attacks continued whenever my husband was alone with me, medication began to make me feel less like dying and more like the Irish jokester I used to be before I got married. It took a further two years with Psychological counseling and with a Psychiatrist monitoring my medication before my emotions began to be more within normal range. At that point, they pronounced me `in remission' and advised me never to stop taking at least a maintenance dose of my antidepressant.

Since my emotions have returned to normal, just reading my story makes me feel the terror again. These fears have names like `fear of abandonment', separation anxiety, grief stages, maybe many more labels that fall so short of describing how helpless the seriously depressed person is to fight off these exaggerated emotional problems. The magnified guilt feelings have NOT come back to haunt me since my separation.

Though I am left with memory, swallowing, and communication problems, I feel that I am better off post-tbi than when I was a fun-loving singing and joking teenager fresh out of high school. I finally love ME again. Now I am getting closer to being ready to really love other people and you tbi guys are the first recipients.

Email Norma