Eric’s Swan Dive – Part 2

It wasn’t unusual for my brother and his wife to visit. We hung out all the time, traveled together, and Dan and Eric even worked together. 

So their late-night arrival wasn’t a surprise. We were always up for a good time—that was kind of our thing. But this? This wasn’t going to be one of those times. Nope. They could tell right away that something was off with Eric—like, not your typical ‘I ate too many tacos and regret life choices’ kind of off, but a whole other level of OFF.

The question now was simple: what was going on, and how could we help?

Right away Dan grabbed Eric and they left to go on a car ride. I thought they were headed to the hospital. Instead, they went to the beach. 🤷‍♀️

I get it. Dan hadn’t seen what I had over the past day and a half. He needed to assess the situation for himself which didn’t take long. As Eric was shooting at invisible deer out of the car window during the ten minute drive to the beach, my brother quickly realized just how far from normal we were.

After a short beach walk he was able to convince Eric that he needed to go to the ER just to get checked out. But first, they came back to the house to pick up me, Kate, and Ethan. It was going to be a group effort—an all-hands-on-deck situation. None of us had experience with a major mental health crisis. We were all thinking ‘safety in numbers’.

Even with all of us working together, it still took further convincing to get Eric to agree to go. We reassured him that he just needed his vitals checked. “You’re acting a little off,” we said, and after a moment, he admitted he did feel strange.

Phew!

When I asked him to put on shoes so we could head to the ER, he stood up and slid his giant man feet into my tiny flip-flops. 🩴

It was going to be a long night.

So we all piled in and headed southward. Seventeen minutes later we arrived at the Outer Banks hospital. It was 11 PM.

Oh, and did I mention this was during Covid which meant only patients were allowed inside. 😷

As we waited outside the ER entrance, Eric kept coming out in his bare feet clearly uninterested in having his vitals checked. Twice, we had to coerce him into going back inside to let them examine him.

Meanwhile, I was calling everyone he’d been around in the last 48 hours—friends, tenants, coworkers, family. “Did he eat psychedelics? What in the Sam’s hell brought this on?”

Our tenants mentioned he’d been acting strange. Ok strang-er.

Y’all, he’d been on a 12-month spiral so epic it deserves its own Netflix series—or at least a novel. I’ll get to that at some point.

But no one offered any clues that were out of the ordinary. And this was a whole strain of strange no one had witnessed out of Eric before. Sure he was loud, he was a clown, and he wasn’t shy. The world was his stage. Literally. That’s how we met—he was singing with his band at a bar back in 2007. And here we are, still center stage, except this time no one’s clapping.

So after interrogating anyone I could, I learned that he had smoked weed with our tenants, not unusual. (Hey, it’s legal in Virginia, people. And no, that didn’t mean I liked it any more than I did before.) And yes, I had already questioned Eric numerous times on what he had smoked. Thinking he had discovered a new strain and maybe he was just paranoid.

Been there, done that, got the hospital wristband. And yep, in this very hospital decades ago. Now that is a funny story. If I can just get through the current one!

Eric never got paranoid when he smoked. Honestly, he could make Snoop Dogg look like Mary Poppins.

So was it something else? He had already conquered his opioid addiction back in 2013. A few weeks earlier he had taken mushrooms the magic kind 🍄) and swore he wouldn’t do that again. But I still called his mushy buddy who I knew he had also recently seen. He swore up and down that he hadn’t provided him with any mushrooms, or anything that could potentially cause this type of behavior.

So scratch that off the list. 🙄

Then a nurse came outside asking for his wife. I looked around and hesitantly stepped forward. Apparently they had met their match and needed me back there with him. They said it was against normal protocol due to Covid restrictions, but they were making an exception this time. They couldn’t handle him.

The Eric Handler went in, armed with a mask, a prayer, and a whole lot of ‘What the heck am I walking into?’