17 + 17

A thirty-one-year-old woman came in by ambulance after attempting to kill herself. She was five months pregnant with her 17^th pregnancy. She said she had given birth to 2 children, had 3 abortions and 11 miscarriages. She was very depressed from the recent death of her boyfriend, who was the father of her unborn baby. She said she had recently lost sixteen other close friends and relatives to death, for a total of seventeen. This, coincidentally, was the same number of pregnancies she reported having. When she started to have some vaginal spotting earlier in the day, she was afraid she was going to have another miscarriage so she decided to kill herself.

She started by drinking a lot of alcohol, smoking excessive amounts of methamphetamine and taking an overdose of her antidepressant medicine. She then lay in the bed where her boyfriend died, hoping to join him.

When she didn’t die, she lit fires around the house and wrapped herself in a blanket, which she also lit on fire.

The fire department and paramedics arrived after the patient called a friend and revealed what she was doing. The emergency personnel found the house filled with smoke and flooded from a broken water main. The patient was in the bathtub, face down in a small amount of water. She was wrapped in a partially burned blanket, though she was not burned. When she arrived in the emergency department, she was wet, smelled of smoke and seemed intoxicated.

Because she was pregnant, had suffered some degree of smoke inhalation and possibly had some degree of near drowning, she was admitted to the hospital for overnight observation.