The Devil’S Handmaid: My Journey Through Hell After a Suicide Attempt

By Kirk F. Panneton

Author Kirk F. Panneton battled acute depression for more than a decade prior to his nearly successful suicide attempt on January 27, 2013. Although that moment marked the peak of numerous physical and psychological struggles, it also serves as the starting point for his journey through the fourth dimension during his recovery.

Panneton spent four weeks in a rural ICU in Arkansas in an epic battle for his own survival. During this time, he experienced a passage through hell as a soldier of light, as his loved ones looked on from the sidelines. He chose life and love time and again in order to emerge victorious from the endless and unforgiving tests set forth for him by the forces of evil.

In this memoir, he recounts his story of redemption, both his physical experiences after waking and those that occurred while he was in a comatose state. He shares not only his recollections but also personal writings from himself and from family members during that period describing the events as they lived them. Most of all, he presents a unique, firsthand narrative of his encounter with death in hopes of giving people everywhere a reason to keep going.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480809772

Kirk F. Panneton

Kirk F. Panneton received his undergraduate education at Boston College, later studied at Columbia Universitys Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and finally earned a graduate degree in religious education from Fordham University. He has two brothers and one sister and currently lives in New York.

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Copyright © 2014 Kirk F. Panneton.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0976-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0975-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0977-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014914289

Archway Publishing rev. date: 09/05/14

Contents

Part I

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Gnosis

Chapter 3 Kataben

Chapter 4 Reggae

Chapter 5 PEEP 16

Chapter 6 In the Blue (Suicide Note)

Chapter 7 The Island

Chapter 8 Sipping Wine in Hell

Chapter 9 The Devil’s Handmaid

Chapter 10 Babylon

Chapter 11 Satan

Chapter 12 Targeted

Chapter 13 War

Chapter 14 Delivered

Chapter 15 Somewhere In There

Chapter 16 Godfather IV

Chapter 17 Limits

Chapter 18 The Cabin

Chapter 19 Keep Calm and Hold On

Chapter 20 Pay It Forward

Chapter 21 Stargazing

Chapter 22 On the Genesis of Ninjas

Part II

Chapter 23 Vatican Ropes

Chapter 24 Breathless

Chapter 25 Women and Knives

Chapter 26 Give It Your Best

Chapter 27 Narc

Chapter 28 The Store

Chapter 29 Post-Back Surgery Journal

Part III

Chapter 30 Healing

Chapter 31 Indelible Mark

Chapter 32 Magic Eye

Chapter 33 Witnessed

Chapter 34 Pre-Back Surgery Journal

Conclusion

Chapter 35 Cup of Water

Chapter 36 Good vs. Evil

Chapter 37 Dear Sheila

For my brother Matthew, my mother,

and my Godfather, Paul

Oh, war is the common cry

Pick up your swords and fly

The sky is filled with good and bad that mortals never know.

Led Zeppelin, The Battle Of Evermore

Part I

Chapter 1

Introduction

I f I were going to survive a perfect suicide attempt again, I would have to do some better planning. All things considered, I simply should not be here. Every distant odd was defied in the saving of my life; language cannot properly explain why I am here today to tell this story. A mysterious pattern of events and just minuscule moments stood between me and the next life. The next life, at least, was where I thought—hoped—I was going.

It will be far simpler to explain the events leading up to my suicide attempt than it will be to narrate what would happen to me from the moment of blackout to the moment of true awakening—a total span of five weeks. In that relatively short amount of time, my life was transformed powerfully and permanently.

Leading up to January 27, 2013, I spent about a decade battling acute depression. As it sometimes does, the disease became symptomatic in my young-adult life. It took a great deal of time for me to concede a degree of defeat to depression and seek help. Initially, I’d experimented with every medical treatment inside and outside of hospitals. Talk therapy, at the time, proved insufficiently helpful. Even several treatments of electroconvulsive therapy fell short. Though I did give it my all, I soon learned that only the rare, diligent few ever totally conquer the brutal effects of PTSD and mental illness.

The first earth-shattering event in my life happened when I was seventeen years old. The summer before my senior year of high school, I suffered an ischemic stroke in the back of my right brain lobe. The onset of the stroke was relatively slow compared to the average case—about two days. It was a foggy but unforgettable experience. After coming home from a weekend of sunbathing and light partying, I stumbled through the threshold of my house abnormally exhausted. I was not just tired, though; my body was out of tune. I wasn’t able to speak well. I eventually yielded to exhaustion and went to bed. I slept for twenty-four straight hours; I missed work and was derided for that. I remember then being forced to drive to my uncle’s house the next day and somehow managing to do it. All the while, a blood vessel in my brain had burst, internal bleeding was accumulating, and brain damage was becoming permanent.

My uncle, who practiced medicine with my father, had noticed all of the symptoms, and, barely concealing his inner disquiet, brought me into the emergency room. Let’s just see that everything is ok, he said to me, as he paged his colleague, and I was rushed past the ER waiting room and ushered directly into the MRI machine. When the results were analyzed and it was time to break the news, I remember the feeling of dread that draped over me as my uncle was clearly stalling to report it. He broke the news to me white-faced and fighting back tears. I’d never seen a grown man grapple so honestly with the confluence of so many potent emotions at the same time—shock, dread, panic, untethered compassion, utter perplexity. The number of stroke cases he had seen in his tenure as a physician were probably countless. Never had one of them happened to a young and healthy seventeen year-old, though—let alone a nephew he’d watched grow up from day one.

When I had first heard the diagnosis, the news of the stroke hit so hard because it resonated so true physiologically. I’d never felt so distant from my body. I couldn’t speak, walk, or see well. The effort to stay connected to reality—and to make correlative meaning out of what was happening internally and externally—was met with great difficulty. I instantly understood that this wouldn’t be a quick recovery, but I didn’t anticipate the symptoms to include permanent brain damage. I’ve recovered about 95 percent of all of these functions; however, what was lost in that moment changed me irreversibly. When I am brave enough to remember the emotions of that day, I’m brought back to being in the small room alone with my uncle, where slurred words and blurry vision gave life instant redefinition.

What’s revealing about that moment to me now, though, is that it represents a giant chasm between two worlds: a former life with respective hopes, dreams, plans, and relationships, and another world I was immediately thrust into, which was defined only by grave mistrust, venomous control issues, and an omnipresent case of claustrophobia. It felt like a slab of wet cement was laid in my chest cavity on that day, which hardened over time, and became an inseparable part of who I am.

It was a complicated recovery process in that the most severe wounds could not be tended to by medicine and, truthfully, would not be noticed in time. The stress from that trauma turned into an all-out psychological disorder. PTSD can develop out of seemingly innumerable life scenarios, but it only becomes a psychological disorder when the trauma is not properly treated in its initial stages. Despite a relatively swift physical rebound, pride would stand between me and professional help for years.

After physical therapy, I checked out mentally. It was simple but profound shock, truthfully. If you can empathize with the feeling of pure shock, that’s a pithy, if inadequate, description of my experience. I’d like to believe that shock has been quelled by time and a personal willingness to maintain my all-around health, but this event would alter my course in every way. And my mind had not yet shed its skin of it.

Along with the emotional detachment that I could easily disguise, I would not be smart enough to accept help or reach out. I jogged to therapy. I ran cross-country my senior year of high school. I had youth on my side, and so recovery was swift, if incomplete. But I never talked about the fact that my heart was in knots and I was angry as hell. Six years later, I would experience my first psychotic event. I couldn’t carry the cross anymore. The rock in my chest either became too heavy in a very weak moment, or I had possibly failed to notice the benefits of carrying the load. I had a nervous breakdown. Retrospectively, how I lasted so long without medicine is baffling. I wish I still had that kind of strength. I would simultaneously never wish to return to that existence.

I returned to Boston College two years later to finish my BA in theology and English. My graduation was perceived as more of an accomplishment for family and friends than it was for me. I’m sure standing on the sideline gives you another perspective altogether. Internally, though, I knew I had a long way to go, and I was not sure I’d get there in this lifetime.

After a couple of years of forgettable life experiences, I grew restless and knew I had to make a revolutionary decision. Comfortable with scarce hope in a financially prosperous future, I chose to pursue what made sense to me. I spent a year studying the New Testament at Columbia’s Union Theological Seminary in New York City before transferring to Fordham for a master’s degree in religious education. It was time to start thinking real world. I had spent enough time wallowing in defeat and weary. Luckily, my college work was of high enough quality to gain me admittance to grad school. The transfer from Columbia to Fordham was a choice that made sense. A solid grasp on Christian theology gained at Columbia, and the skills to teach that knowledge, obtained at Fordham, sounded like a good life situation. I have no regrets about that decision to leave Columbia. However, the experience of being alone in the Bronx for two years fashioned me a habit that would be the beginning of the end; at least, it would be a dead end that would force an epic turnaround. I count myself as lucky to look back at this as an improbable turnaround, and not as a final resting place.

The master’s degree landed me an immediate job offer in a small, Catholic boarding school in Arkansas. I accepted it. It was a fair offer but a relentless and relatively thankless job. Not thankless—I loved teaching—but very demanding. And I was very alone in a strange part of the country. Being alone was not anything new—I acquired a taste for that in the Bronx. But, it was not a pleasant existence by any stretch. I also may have been the only liberal in a radius of about five states.

A bulged disc in my lower back, mildly successfully operated on years before, allowed me to see a doctor at a local clinic. I managed to continue my three-year stint on painkillers while working. Looking back, I don’t believe my habit was out of control, but it was nonetheless a classic addiction. I monitored my stock more closely than I did my psych meds. I abhorred the days of detox before I could refill my prescription, and as opposed to life in the Bronx, obtaining a fix on the street was not as simple in Arkansas. People around me could not have known the cause of my erratic, strange behavior on and off pain medication, but I’m sure it was visible. A total of four years straight on drugs contributed to second event that would change my life, and that of my family, forever.

On a Sunday morning in January, 2013, I failed to meet my morning duties as a chaperone in Church. This was no small infraction at a very disciplined, private, Catholic school with a strong emphasis on faith and education. When the Headmaster noticed my absence in Church and decided to know the reason for it, he broke every implicit code of privacy by walking through the locked doors of my office and bedroom. There he discovered me with my knees bent, and back on the floor, barely breathing and regurgitating vomit with the few small breaths I had left. I was aspirating the toxic contents of my stomach with each intake of air. Beside me lay an empty bottle of painkillers and a bloody, dull pocketknife. There was a deep incision from the top of my left wrist up to my lower forearm.

I remember next to nothing about the incident. I can remember the pain and gore resulting from the incision on my arm. Truthfully, I’m not sure how I survived the night. I can remember pouring down pills the evening before; my system must have tolerated at least twenty-five tablets, along with an overdose of antidepressants and every other prescription med I had, gradually throughout the night. I thought that would have been enough, combined with the blood loss, to kill me. Come morning, though, I was still alive. I swallowed the remaining twenty pills left in my prescription bottle. They must have been ingested simultaneously—or throughout the morning hours—around the time I was dressing for Church (I was oddly found half-dressed in a black suit). It was those last pills that did the job. My brain shut down, and I fell to the floor in convulsions. It was the matter of a few moments before suffocation and/or intoxication would claim my life.

The Headmaster urgently called fellow deans and a monk from the monastery. Brother Hank had medical background while serving in the Navy for several years. He saved my life just before about 95 percent of my lungs were filled to capacity. Some colleagues helped Br. Hank put together a makeshift ambulance—it was a small town that usually only requires one ambulance truck, and since that truck was unavailable, they had to improvise with very few resources to make an already unlikely venture possible. The men loaded me into the truck as safely as possible, and sprinted to the local clinic. Within minutes, doctors and nurses informed my boss that they were totally unequipped to deal with the condition I was in. They then kept me alive on a forty-minute drive to the nearest major hospital in Fort Smith. I was not conscious to remember anything of this. I was totally helpless and gripping automatically onto a last strand of life. At the hospital, I was rushed into Intensive Care and many doctors were paged in. In the room that I would not soon leave, Brother Hank sat by my side throughout the night; his prayerful and confident presence helped me endure those first hours on my back, and gave me strength for the existential Hell that lie ahead. I wouldn’t come back to consciousness, though, for about five weeks; lucidity, not soon afterward.

Doctors and hospital professionals agreed I wouldn’t survive if I were awake and aware of the situation. Without sedation, I was instinctively grabbing at the tubes placed in my lungs and this disabled the respirator—firing on its highest level—from pushing oxygen into my bloodstream. I was unable to breathe on my own. I developed a serious case of pneumonia that quickly evolved into an acute respiratory distress syndrome. Several tubes were gently placed into my lungs and served the dual purpose of providing my body oxygen, and vacuuming out the pool of fluid that made my ability to breathe independently virtually impossible. My lungs were vacuumed about three times a day for three weeks, and I was nourished through cables slipped into my arm and main neck vain. Before I would be stable there would be at least eight wires and tubes connected to different parts of my body being tended to by professionals of various trades. You would not have believed how many wires and tubes were hooked into you, my father, a former physician, would later tell me. In forty years, I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the veteran nurses in the ICU were completely astonished.

For four weeks in the ICU, I was tied down, breathless and immersed in a perpetual life or death moment. I had a violent leg tremor and a body contaminated with every toxin you can imagine. I’ll tell you the truth, though: the agony of my experience in the ICU was not entirely related to the impossible challenge of physical survival. My mind took me on a journey that cannot be explained in rational terms, or empathized with by anyone who has not walked the fine line between life and death.

The following account will often read as if it were invented, or imaginary. The cold truth is that this story is honest to the core. For the remainder of my mortal life—perhaps for longer than that—I’ll forget not one detail about the many extraordinary events that occurred during my coma, and I have redacted my story negligibly for improved readability. Nothing short of perfect honesty could have seen to the realization of my journey’s ultimate purpose; therein lies its magic and beauty. I have to ask for the one leap of faith from my readers that being in a coma, despite the low levels of brain activity, is not a mindless process. I can only speak for myself; but, I think I’d be stepping up to the plate for many people that cannot make it back to describe the ‘realness’ of the other side. Truly, life can be far more real in a state of deep sleep.

The most effective and empathic way to understand the first two parts of my book is to consider the fact that I had no awareness at all that it all took place in an ‘alternate’ reality. If I were to ask you to question the validity of your experience in this reality, could that be easily accomplished? No, it would take a very powerful imagination to transcend reality so delicately that the line between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ could be continually located. In this way, you may find it easier to understand why this experience was so powerfully transformative.

I believe (and I hope you’ll soon agree) that my journey is defined by a mobilized journey toward life, light, love and, most importantly, God. However, that is not the setting in which it began. It began in a lonely, extremely dangerous, and very, very dark place—a place no one will ever convince me was anywhere but perfect, pure Hell.

The contents of these aforementioned dreams occupy well more than half of the book (this is what I’m referring to when I warn about its initial implausibility). I can place few of them on a perfectly chronological timeline, and I also haven’t included the entire lot of them. Some dreams unrecorded in this book could possibly help nuance others that I have shared—I have reasons for the choices and redactions I’ve made. A significant portion of this book was written not days after discharge from my hospitalization, and subsequent return to my home in upstate New York. While my story is as candid as anything else you’ll ever read, I’ve deemed some aspects of it unimportant, or possibly inappropriate, to share. Also, because of its accessibility and commonality, this journey should be difficult for all: at times I trudge through dark parts of the soul and other haunting territories of the psyche. In the end, my true hope is that my journey is something you’ll want to cherish, and not fear.

The main literary device I’ve used in this memoir is contrast. Because my subjective experience included events that happened in another domain, and went unwitnessed, I have tried to contrast the real world (which I tend to call three dimensional reality) with the dream world experiences in an alternate reality (to which I am loyal to the term fourth dimension). I have tried to illustrate this contrast by continually shifting perspectives in roughly every other chapter. In order to accomplish this effect, and make it intelligible to follow, chapters in italics will indicate that I’ve brought you into underworld experiences in ‘the fourth dimension’, and that I am narrating in the first person. Chapters un-italicized describe experiences in three-dimensional reality and are, generally speaking, self-evident.

One pivotal and crucial example of this would involve a small community of people in the ICU, all of whom throughout the month were totally invested in the restoration of my life. Those who were close enough to hear it were incessantly terrorized by a computerized mechanism on the respirator that indicated the machine was firing on its highest setting. It was an obnoxious, cacophonous progression of electronic noise that indicated my oxygen levels had fallen to not dangerous, but lethal limits, and any measures to intervene were only hopeful. This happened several times a day for the first two weeks or so, and while nurses and doctors would unerringly file in to help in any way, it was ultimately out of their control. I’m told some instances were simply hopeless. Twice, priests were called in for Last Rites, and family members verbalized their final remarks.

That horn symbolized and foreshadowed the worst of moments for my family because it was most improbable that I’d survive them. Until now, my personal relationship with the respirator horn has remained untold. Though I could rarely seem to locate its source, I understood quite well exactly what the horn meant to say. I knew that, depending on the amount of time it were active, an epic battle was about to take place. It was a sound that mobilized Angels and swarms of demons. It was an indication to all in the underworld that my presence was official, recognized and widely known, and that my fate were uncertain—‘up for grabs’, if you will. The horn became a signal that awoke in me a primitive warrior who refused to face encounters with evil ambiguously. It represented the beginning of dreadful situations that, many times, resulted in gory fights to the death. Some scenarios were quite gruesome; others were more cryptic, and required rational reasoning to escape from. All of them were, in my opinion, urgent and definitive confrontations with evil that required measures of last resort (and sometimes devastating compromises of conscience) in order to survive. Truly, the physical agony associated with the fleshly fights back to life was forgettable next to the psychological toll they took on my mind.

The respirator horn was activated by a certain computation well known to professionals (and my family members) as a PEEP score. High PEEP scores indicate that oxygen levels in the bloodstream are low, or falling, despite the extra work of the respirator. Maxed out PEEP scores over the course of the month were prolonged moments of hell for everyone; it’s truly miraculous I emerged from even one of them without brain damage. PEEP 16 is an expression my brother, Matthew, introduced to me after I woke up, hoping to relay the terror and borderline hopelessness of this experience I mercilessly dragged him through so many times. I hope that in time, and when he is justifiably satisfied with the guilt-tripping, he will see that I was also a direct victim of PEEP 16—that I was rightly punished for what I put him through.

The moments I spent inside the PEEP 16 prison were my closest and most intimate encounters with the ‘fourth dimension’. PEEP 16 can alone account for the experiences I will remember until my dying day; the ones that I think about each morning when I awake and keep me lost in thought for hours on end; the ones that have changed me at my core and keep me in an irrational moment of hypervigilance—as if a reencounter with these people and places were a likely possibility. More real than real is an expression I’ve come to appreciate as a suitable description for my extra-dimensional encounters. It’s why comparing and contrasting the two realities is my most effective tactic for displaying the validity of both. I trust that the symbolism between maxed out PEEP scores in the third dimension, and my self-described confrontations with evil in the fourth dimension are effective ways to illustrate the arbitrary line between life and death—not to mention a most ironic relationship between the two.

What matters more than anything is that you brave this story until the end. I’ll be driving through it as gently and carefully as possible, and I will impart the important messages considerately. This journey means less if I do not genuinely connect with you. I say that not only because the ultimate message is going to embolden you spiritually. If I’m able to do this right, the greatest opportunity being offered is that a unique set of skills—capable of extracting the human soul from the darkest locations it can feasibly slip into—is finally imparted. It deepens my passion for life to know I might be of any help to others in this way, and that this tragedy was not without purpose. So, I thank God (and you) for this chance.

Now, let me bring you a little closer. I’ll have you take a look, from a distance, at the days that led