In this special episode, Colorado Public Radio reporter Dan Boyce uses interviews with friends and family, plus a fishing trip, to piece together lost memories from his own mental breakdown.
A quick warning: This story is brutal at times, and raw. It contains content that may not be suitable for all listeners, including strong language and frank discussion of suicide.
By the time Dan was 30, when most of this episode takes place, he was doing well for himself. He was moving from local reporting in his native Montana, to covering national stories from his new home in Denver.
Dan had previously suffered from bouts of depression through most of his life, but nothing he couldn’t overcome. During this time though, Dan really slipped — descending into a depression so severe that it led to a complete mental breakdown.
On today’s episode, how Dan bounced back from the edge of insanity.
Here’s a story Dan calls “The Long Lonely Lake.”
Transcript
Vic Vela:
Hey, it's Vic. Just want to let you know, this episode contains strong language and discussion of suicide. Please be advised.
In three, two, one.
Hey, it's Vic Vela. “Back from Broken will be officially returning for season two in January. Yay! And we're really excited about bringing you new recovery stories then, but first we wanted to share a bonus episode that's a little different than what we normally do on the podcast. This first-person account you're about to hear comes from my colleague, Dan Boyce. Dan's our reporter here at Colorado Public Radio, based in Colorado Springs. And he's been working on his own “Back from Broken” story for a few years now.
Dan and I chat from time to time and he's a really good guy. Most people at CPR know him as kind of a class clown too, who likes to make people laugh. At the station’s online holiday party this year, Dan just kept slowly adding more and more decorations around himself as the night went on. By the end of the party, he had transformed into a snowman and his screen was a total winter wonderland. It was great, but Dan's a serious journalist who normally doesn't share too much about himself publicly. And I don't think more than a handful of people at CPR know about the struggles from his past.
By the time Dan was 30, when most of this episode takes place, he was doing well for himself. He was moving from local reporting in his native Montana to covering national stories from his new home in Denver. Dan had previously suffered from bouts of depression through most of his life, but nothing he couldn't overcome. During this time, though, Dan really slipped, descending into a depression so severe that it led to a complete mental breakdown.
On today's episode: How Dan bounced back from the edge of insanity. And a quick note, before we begin. This story is brutal, at times, and raw. It contains content that may not be suitable for all listeners, including some strong language and frank discussion of suicide. Here's a story Dan calls “The Long Lonely Lake.”
Dan Boyce:
The way I saw it, this was something my dad didn't understand.
Jack Boyce:
I, I was at wit’s end. I was collapsed on the ground.
Dan Boyce:
I needed to do this. And if I spent enough time at it, I could figure it out.
Jack Boyce:
And it was getting dark and I was exhausted and cold.
Dan Boyce:
So yeah, maybe that meant pacing around Cheesman Park, talking to myself. Fine. Okay. That's what needed to happen.
Jack Boyce:
I'd been chasing you around that park for over five hours, maybe six, just trying to keep an eye on you.
Dan Boyce:
I needed to find that instant. Which moment did this? And dad, he starts just yelling.
Jack Boyce:
To me it was more begging you to come back to the house with me than anything else.
Dan Boyce:
He's gone. Do you even know what you're doing? Do you even know what's happening right now? He never yells. He was clearly suffering, but he did not get it. I had to identify the moment, that one moment from the past, from my past, that could have stopped my descent. If I only could have changed that one thing, maybe I wouldn't have gone insane.
Fort Peck Lake. It's an enormous reservoir in eastern Montana, 134 miles long. There's no self-service, no people. You look at those nighttime pictures of Earth with all the cities speckled by lights. Meanwhile, Fort Peck.
Jack Boyce:
It's one of the blackest places at night that there are.
Dan Boyce:
Dad's driving. We're not thinking about that afternoon in the park almost two years ago when I very much was truly insane. We're not thinking about what we've been through or that I can't remember much of it anyway. We're not thinking about that. We're going fishing.
Jack Boyce:
Because this is going to be like when you were a teenager.
Dan Boyce:
Growing up in Montana, fishing trips were a constant.
Jack Boyce:
We take you out to Fort Peck and you'd be stuck in the boat for days on end.
Dan Boyce:
No TV, no video games, no AOL instant messenger. It was so boring.
Jack Boyce:
It's going to be like that.
Dan Boyce:
And it's exactly what I want right now, that space. Over the last few months, I've been compiling interviews with my parents and two oldest friends. I guess I hope this trip will help me process those interviews, reflect on what happened and reconnect with my father.
Jack Boyce:
I don't know how far we've gone, but we have another half hour.
Dan Boyce:
Depression is a demon we share, so it's good to see him out on this land. His favorite region in the world.
Jack Boyce:
Everything’s okay, no flats yet.
Dan Boyce:
We stop at a small pond on the way to Fort Peck, rough gravel roads and broken sagebrush hills. It is so open. In his fights with mental illness, this place centers him.
Jack Boyce:
It's just a feeling of solitude and self-reliance, and it's real important to me.
Dan Boyce:
I can see it in his eyes sometimes, the subtle body language, the heavy sigh. He's always been more stoic about it than me.
Jack Boyce:
Well, I, I think a person when he's depressed, he often forgets the, the little things that bring happiness and, and the little things that mean a lot. And that's how you get through the day a little better.
Dan Boyce:
He once told me you find happiness in the air you're breathing and the coffee you're drinking. Above all, presence. That's what I hope to find out here. In the six months before dad chased me through Cheesman Park, a swelling tide of sadness crashed into me like it never had. It didn't make sense. Life was going really well.
Jack Boyce:
You’d worked in Montana several years and finally got a job in the city down in Denver, Colorado, and you had a fabulous little apartment and you had a girl and everything was going fine there.
Dan Boyce:
But there it was: depression, sudden and severe and unyielding. As I tried to describe the feeling to my therapist, he would point out I spent way too much time fixated on what might've led to the depression and almost no thought to moving forward. This tendency would later be summed up in a second diagnosis, a particularly destructive obsessive compulsive disorder.
Jack Boyce:
It wasn't so abnormal at first because we'd just be talking about things and, and you'd seem to repeat, and maybe we'd talk about the same thing over and over. And as time went by, it became much more focused. And it wasn't so much a conversation as it was just ruminating on words and small ideas.
Dan Boyce:
That's the demon my father and I do not share. And that is the demon who led me to the edge of my bed with a hunting rifle in my lap. The action is burned into my mind, sitting at the end of the bed, my hunting rifle in my lap, flipping a coin. Wait, what are you doing, man? This isn't funny. I told the therapist and he didn't think it was funny either. He immediately committed me to a psychiatric ward at Denver Health. I rode in an ambulance and everything. The indignity of it, I thought. That shrink did not understand. I needed help, but not this kind of help. That was for crazy people. Of course, I wouldn't use a hunting rifle on myself. My girlfriend had already put it in a storage locker. This was just a momentary thought experiment that went too far.
I talked my way out of that psych ward in less than a day. Months went by and my girlfriend no longer trusted I was working to get better. We broke up and she moved out of our apartment. Dad then moved in, came down from Montana. I barely paid attention. He registered as little more than a shadow.
I would sleep as much as I could or head a couple blocks east to Cheesman Park and walk, walk and walk.
Jack Boyce:
Overwhelmed with this one thought that your life was, was ruined. You'd missed your chance to, to have a utopia life that you'd hoped for. You'd repeat yourself over and over.
Dan Boyce:
I was fine. Things were great. Then it wasn't. I was fine. Then I wasn't. What was it? Why, what did this? It's too late now. It's too late. Everything was okay and…
Jack Boyce:
Your repetitive nature just got worse. And your walks got longer.
Dan Boyce:
That gets us back here.
Jack Boyce:
I'd been chasing you around that park for over five hours, maybe six.
Dan Boyce:
My father did not understand how important this felt to me. And he yelled.
Jack Boyce:
I was at wit’s end. I was collapsed on the ground.
Dan Boyce:
There was no more going forward for me. There was only the past. If I couldn't fix my mind, at least I could discover what caused it to break.
Jack Boyce:
It was untenable. And I had no idea how untenable it would get eventually.
Vic Vela:
More from the Long Lonely Lake in just a moment.
Let's get back to the story.
Dan Boyce:
It feels almost like waking from a coma, pulling up to the Fort Peck Lake with him now. My mind is still fuzzy, caught between future and past and present. This trip is really the first time we've spent together since everything happened. The first time it's just the two of us, anyway. We arrive at the put-in. We load everything over into the boat. You can't drive to the spot where camping tonight.
[sounds of a boat moving through water]
More weeks went by. Dad watched as my decline accelerated. He kept trying to get me more medical attention. His efforts kept going nowhere.
Jack Boyce:
I knew that you needed in-house care. You needed full-time psychiatric help. And your insurance company would just flat out say they're doing everything they can do. And that was once a week with a sociologist or a…
Dan Boyce:
Psychologist.
Jack Boyce:
Yeah, psychologist.
Dan Boyce:
He thought maybe he could figure it out on his own. Maybe he could snap me out of this. He moved me to a different place for a fresh start.
Jack Boyce:
You were virtually no help at all, which was shocking. You didn't help box up or carry the boxes. I had begged you to help me with heavy items, like I don’t know, your bed.
Dan Boyce:
I thought the career I'd worked so hard for was finished. I couldn't even write an email. I was on disability leave, though I was convinced they wouldn't take me back.
Jack Boyce:
They told you flat-out that you weren't going to lose your job.
Dan Boyce:
But for every success there was another setback. And for dad, his stress was building. His own mood was starting to crumble.
Jack Boyce:
Since I'm chronically depressed, I was feeding off of you, and I was fearful to let you out of my sight.
Linda Boyce:
It was overwhelming for him.
Dan Boyce:
That's my mom.
Linda Boyce:
I mean, he had security called on him in a doctor's office, trying to get you the help that you needed, just trying to get somebody to pay attention to him, trying to get somebody to listen to him.
Dan Boyce:
I remember this this kind of morning that I had, what I guess I could only describe as like a fit of catatonia.
Jack Boyce:
It was a morning that we had to go see your sociologist.
Dan Boyce:
Psychologist.
Jack Boyce:
Psychologist, right. Normally you were getting up on your own, and you were just, like you say, catatonic.
Dan Boyce:
So describe…
Jack Boyce:
I couldn't wake you. I mean, your eyes would be open or closed either way. I can't recall, but I couldn't bring you around. So I'm not sure where you were. I mean, this was issues that I could not address and didn't have any concept of, of what they meant. So I went out and dialed 911, and that woke you up.
Dan Boyce:
It was the 911 call that convinced my doctors to commit me again. This time for weeks. So much of this period is lost to me now. But I remember the monotony of it. Jigsaw puzzles and old dime store Western novels by Louis L’Amour, sitting in plastic chairs, waiting for meals or pills, anti-psychotics, antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds. They threw everything at me, it seemed.
I remember staring at a wall, painted a most unremarkable shade of cream, thinking this is exactly what I'd expect a psych ward to be like. It's purgatory and I'm, I'm never leaving. It was too late to recover. I just wanted it to be done. I really wanted to die.
Then, something unusual. I saw this girl, another patient, a pretty blonde gal, maybe a few years younger than me. She was sitting on the bed in her room with her parents. She'd been in the ward about as long as I had and had seemed every bit as hopeless, deadened and done. She was laughing. She was happy. There were tears of joy and her parents were smiling too. How had she done it? What had she tried? And could I try it too?
[Video voice]:
Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, is a powerful way to treat severe depression.
Dan Boyce:
A couple days earlier in the ward, Dad and I had watched a video.
[Video voice]:
But it is used only when traditional medication approaches have failed.
Dan Boyce:
My doctor there thought I was a candidate.
Jack Boyce:
hey didn't have any suggestion other than ECT because none of the drugs were having the kind of results that they were hoping for.
Dan Boyce:
Trouble is, in Colorado you need two independent psychiatrists to sign off on electroconvulsive therapy. And my regular doctors were not convinced. They wanted me to try a six-week trial with new medication first. I would go back to the new apartment and attend daily, multi-hour therapy sessions, reevaluate in a month and a half. Dad was wary of this plan. He didn't know if either of us would make it another six weeks.
Jack Boyce:
I was getting sicker all the time.
Dan Boyce:
Still, it was some kind of coherent strategy. So he needed to head back to Montana, at least for a while.
Jack Boyce:
I was in terrible shape at that point. I had to, I had to come home just for my own sake because I was really screwed up. I just felt horrible, like I’d given up on you and I cried half the way to Casper. I mean, it was just hours, ‘cause I just felt so bad about leaving you. But you had your friends. John was, was there more than anybody. They would stop in and spend time with you.
John Schmit:
I'm John Schmit. I've known Dan nearly my whole life since we were three years old.
Dan Boyce:
And you're talking to Dan so you can say me.
John Schmit:
I've known you my whole life.
Dan Boyce:
John was working as an engineer on a Caribbean island, two weeks on shift, then two weeks off and he would come stay with me in Denver. It quickly became apparent to John, this new stable plan — it wasn't helping at all. And there were still weeks left before I could even potentially try electroconvulsive therapy.
John Schmit:
That's when you're really starting to ruminate.
Dan Boyce:
Despite moments of clarity, I was increasingly losing the threads of reality.
John Schmit:
You'd be in your room or taking a shower in the bathroom and we'd hear you just saying. “no, no, no.” You know, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
Dan Boyce:
It was agony. The depression and the obsessing about the depression were a feedback loop, twisting together and driving ever downward.
John Schmit:
You thought it was all over for you. You thought there was no way you could recover. All was lost.
Dan Boyce:
On the weeks John was not there, he still kept in touch about every day.
John Schmit:
So luckily we were, you were comfortable, like you felt at ease enough to like reach out to me, but you, you texted me. You said, “I'm sitting outside this pawn shop and I'm going to walk in there and buy a gun.” You're like, “I read how, how one bullet right to the temple can instantly end it all with no pain.”
Colt Gill:
So I learned about the fact that you'd been thinking about suicide from John.
Dan Boyce:
That's Colt Gill. John's and my other best friend from childhood.
Colt Gill:
It struck me as a type of situation where you needed to be able to talk to people that you trusted. And if you weren't answering your phone, we needed to actually physically be there to get you to talk.
Dan Boyce:
So Colt drove down from Montana.
Colt Gill:
We had been waiting outside for you to answer the door for maybe like 20 minutes or half an hour. And then you came downstairs and opened the door and you had obviously gained 30 pounds or so since the last time I had seen you, which was only two months before. And so that scared the hell out of me, to see like that.
Your hair was really long and you had obviously not showered in quite a while, had a shadow of a beard, but there were patches gone. You had obviously pulled a lot of hair out there. There were just boxes filled with trash and trash covering tables and the kitchen, all those things flew in the face of who I knew of you as a person.
And it was sort of like you were continually in this stage of meta discourse. Like you didn't have the words to tell what you had going on in your head. You'd kind of have your hands clasped in front of you and put up against the bridge of your nose and just sort of hitting your forehead, like you wanted to physically drive out whatever thought was in your head. There was something in there that was poison and you needed to knock it out.
Dan Boyce:
Colt says over days, he'd been waiting for the right time to bring it up. And on the last night he finally asked,
Colt Gill:
Do you have a gun? Did you buy a gun? And you said, yes. And in that moment, I, I really wanted to make sure that it was, it was real and that it wasn't a cry for help.
Linda Boyce:
We thought you were going to kill yourself. We tried, I called Colt.
Jack Boyce:
We just begged Colt to stay with you, don't let you use that gun before you had a chance to use ECT.
Colt Gill:
I pulled up my bed roll — sleeping bag — into your bedroom and threw it out. And you said something like, “Oh, you don't need to do that, man.” I said, “I think I do, Dan.” And slept right next to your bed that night. By the time we finally went to sleep, I think your folks were probably just entering into Colorado, because they were driving down.
Jack Boyce:
We left that night and drove all night and got down there and relieved those guys. They'd been with you several days. And, and what we found was that you had really regressed.
Linda Boyce:
I, let's, let's see if I can describe it — a suicidal wailing.
Jack Boyce:
Crying out and rarely did you not have tears in your eyes. I'd say, clawing at yourself. But it's to that point where you're just, you know, pulling your hair out kind of thing. But we had hope with ECT. We just had to convince you to hold on, hang on long enough to give it a try, which was only a couple more days. And that was almost impossible to have you hang on that long.
Jack Boyce:
[Nature sounds, fishing sounds] It's really got a lot of pull for a little Northern.
Dan Boyce:
Do you net it head-first?
Jack Boyce:
Oh yeah.
Dan Boyce:
Man, if I can net him and hold a microphone.
Jack Boyce:
I think I'd rather net it myself than have you try to do it one handed. Of course, I’d be doing it one handed.
Dan Boyce:
All right, get in the net. [splashing sounds, yelling]
Jack Boyce:
It’s going right through the net.
Dan Boyce:
Oh God!
Jack Boyce:
That can’t be good.
Dan Boyce:
Woo!
Jack Boyce:
We’re batting 100 percent on the Northerns.
Dan Boyce:
I'm going to say mine's bigger, but it's close. [inaudible] Well of course I want to know. [water sounds]
I remember almost nothing from the first time, maybe a sense of resignation.
Linda Boyce:
And when we parked and we were walking you in, it was just the saddest thing. It was like you were on a death march or something.
Elevator voice:
Second floor. Going up.
Jack Boyce:
It's a hopeful situation, but the other side of that is that if this fails, we're screwed. I mean, there was nothing left.
Nurse:
Can you tell me your full name again?
Dan Boyce:
Daniel Adams Boyce, December 5th, 1985.
Jack Boyce:
Plus we didn't know if it would just take you away from us forever anyway. We didn't know.
Dan Boyce:
But I imagine that part of you thought that, well, maybe that how much of you thought that you'd already lost me anyway? So why not?
Jack Boyce:
Well, absolutely
Nurse:
In that pink bag, you can put all your clothes and shoes…
Dan Boyce:
You take your shirt and shoes off, put on a hospital gown. You keep your pants on though. Nurses take your blood pressure, start an IV.
Nurses:
Anesthesia asked that we just keep all these wires on you. That way they can just plug it in when they bring you back to the room.
Okay Daniel, if you bite down on this…
Dan Boyce:
You get a big foam mouthpiece.
Nurses:
Daniel, I'm going to wrap this blood pressure cuff around your right ankle.
Are you warm enough, yeah?
Dan Boyce:
It's a flurry of activity. Along the way someone straps a white belt to your head with a round metal disc that they place on the right side. The doctor comes in and walks over to this cart in the corner of the room.
Doctor:
Okay everybody, let's take a time out. This is Daniel Adams Boyce, date of birth: December 5th, 1985. Today we're performing unilateral electroconvulsive therapy.
Nurse:
Daniel, you're going to feel a tingle on your left arm.
Dan Boyce:
A sharp burning courses through your arm as they inject the anesthesia. The hissing of the oxygen fills your ears. And you're out.
Colt Gill:
For the first time in almost a year, my phone lit up with a text from Dan Boyce and I took a look at it and it just said, I think verbatim, it said, “Holy s---. The ECT treatment. Holy s---.” And I texted you back. And I said, “Oh yeah?” Like, “Holy s---, huh? What's the deal? Like in a good way or in a bad way?” And you said, “The suicidal thoughts are just gone.”
[crying] Sorry. It was so — oh, it was really good.
Linda Boyce:
It was a miracle. You woke up and you were, you were confused, of course. You know, you didn't know where you were. And there's finally a smile on your face. There was finally a glimmer of hope.
Jack Boyce:
You were a hundred percent different. You were laughing, enjoying the fact that your memory wasn't complete. You're actually enjoying that you had gaps in your memory. And so you were just playing around with that. It was remarkable. It just cleared the clutter out of your brain in one treatment. And then it requires follow-up treatments to make it permanent.
Dan Boyce:
They hit you hard at the beginning, three times a week.
Nurses:
I’ve got your mouthguard here.
Let's do a time out. Okay. This is Daniel Adams Boyce. Date of birth…
Dan Boyce:
The shock comes while you're under, lasts a fraction of a second. It initiates a seizure. Your jaw clamps on the foam mouthpiece. The rest of your body is paralyzed, except there's a blood pressure cuff on your right ankle. It keeps the paralytic from reaching your foot. The doctor uses your foot thumping to monitor the length of the seizure. 45 seconds, one minute, minute 15. They say it's the seizure that helps you. Doctors aren't even completely sure how. One day on, one day off, one day on.
Nurse:
Give me your full name and your birthday, please.
Dan Boyce:
Daniel Adams Boyce, December 5th…
Nurse:
And you’re here for what today?
Dan Boyce:
Uh, electroconvulsive therapy.
What could possibly be the downside?
John Schmit:
I was just like, well, I'll just, you know, I'll come down, right when I get back from the island. And then I talked to your dad and your dad said, you know, that'd be really helpful because him and your mom had been there and they needed, you know, they'd been there for quite a while. They just needed a break.
It was pretty exhausting. You know, to be there. You did shock therapy Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I took you to that. There was really no layers to you, you're just kind of like a robot or a baby, or like a, an old person with Alzheimer's, like you were kind of just experiencing the world without really taking anything in.
Dan Boyce:
It was thick fog, not seeing what was behind me or what was ahead.
John Schmit:
There was just a lot of weird things where we would sit and have a conversation.
Dan Boyce:
And he says that a half hour or something would go by.
John Schmit:
And we'd have, I mean, it was the exact same conversation and I'd laugh at you. I'd be like, “Dan, we just talked about this.” And you're like, “Uh huh, hm.” You know, you don't. You're like, okay.
Dan Boyce:
John cooked for me. He cleaned up after me.
John Schmit:
I asked the doctors a lot, if you know, is this normal? Like how you weren't able to focus on things or were really cloudy. They're like, well, memory loss is the only real known side effect. I'm like, but he's also very loopy, like very out of it. And I said like, it felt like I was taking care of a kid and stuff.
Travis:
Do you remember me? I'm Travis. I think we met one time. I’m a nurse anesthetist.
Dan Boyce:
I don't. I'm sorry, man.
John Schmit:
If you were going to be permanently brain dead or not, like if we're going to have you back, am I going to get my normal, intelligent friend back? Because yeah, that's great. You weren't suicidal, but I mean, you reminded me of all those patients. You see it on movies at the mental hospital, just eyes glazed over, not really interacting with the world. And that wasn't really a great trade-off for one for the other.
Dan Boyce:
One day on, one day off. The days between appointments increased. The fog consumed more.
Nurses:
Daniel, I have this mouse piece for you.
This is Daniel Adams Boyce, born December 5th, 1985.
Colt Gill:
I know you probably gave up a lot of who you are in terms of your memories from the treatments.
Linda Boyce:
It was a miracle.
Nurses:
Ok Daniel, bite down on this.
You're going to feel a burning…
Jack Boyce:
You were 100% different.
Nurse:
Let’s do a time out. This is Daniel Adams…
[inaudible overlapping of sounds from nurses, Dan’s friends and parents]
Dan Boyce:
[splashing] What'd you say the water temperature was?
Jack Boyce:
60.
Dan Boyce:
[heavy breathing] Okay. Okay that’s good.
Jack Boyce:
No, you should do it again.
Dan Boyce:
Okay. [nature sounds] Dad and I stay on the lake for a few days, camp at this tiny inlet where on one side, the earth rises to a small point, overlooking the water. We see the occasional boat, testing some fishing hole across the way. Mostly it's just the two of us and the water, a timeless place caught between future and past and present, the lake stretching on to my left and right until it rounds a corner out of view.
I used to describe the period around my 17 shock treatments as one giant black hole, though, a much better analogy is Swiss cheese. Still, as the treatments tapered off over more weeks and months, I could see gaps in the fog.
It's been almost a year since my last one. Am I still depressed? Yeah, I feel it, but it's totally manageable and stable, adding in medication. And those ruminations have quieted to whispers in my mind.
It's funny — I've had these situations where I'll be with friends reminiscing about something from way back and I won't remember it. And they'll say Dan, you were the one who always used to tell that story. I can't help, but wonder did I forget that on my own? Or is that from the treatment? Is my ongoing memory, is that worse than it was? Have I always been so forgetful?
Hmm. You know, I suppose the answers to those questions don't really matter do they. And there's no use obsessing over them.
It's about sunset on that point, overlooking the lake, my dad's down in the boat, cooking some of the day's catch. He once told me, you find happiness in the air you're breathing and the coffee you're drinking in this moment, right now.
Vic Vela:
“The Long Lonely Lake,” written and narrated by Dan Boyce. Dan, my friend, I'm really proud of you for sharing your story. Thank you. And special thanks to Bishop Sand who produced, sound designed and composed original music for this story. This episode was edited by Dennis Funk and Alisa Barba. Thanks also to Colorado Public Radio’s Audio Innovations unit, Lee Patterson and to KXLO radio in Lewistown, Montana. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, talk to someone. You can call the national suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. “Back from Broken” returns next month, so stay subscribed for more stories of courage and comeback. I'm Vic Vela. Thanks for listening.
