Dec 2019 to Aug 4th 2022
Nicole Linton’s journey as a travel nurse started in Charlotte where she lived with me for the first 6 months, and it was such a great experience having her around. I genuinely enjoyed her company and my dog Ziggy loved all the attention he was getting from her. She loves listening to reggae and dancehall and we would always have these mini-dance parties with just the two of us. If you were someone on the outside looking in, you probably would’ve never guessed she had any mental illness. She was even dating a guy while in Charlotte and they hung out all the time for months. I am friends with him so when this all happened, I reached out to him and he had no clue that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He was in complete shock and said how “that’s not her…she is so caring and nurturing.”
Additionally, while in Charlotte, I don’t believe she was seeing many Covid patients and I remember her telling me how quiet it was at the hospital where she worked.
After Charlotte, she worked as a Travel Nurse in Maryland before taking her journey to Atlanta to work at Emory University. I believe this is where she started seeing a lot more covid patients but was still able to manage well mentally through it all. She moved in with a mutual friend who knew about her struggles with bipolar disorder. She lived with this person for about 6 months and even they at one point started to believe she might not have bipolar disorder and this person is a physician.
After 6 months of living with that person, she moved in with our brother who also lives in Atlanta for about 3 to 4 months before finishing up her 1 year with Emory. It was while living with my brother where she had her last manic episode, before the August 4th car accident, which was sometime around mid to late February 2021. It followed the same signs as all the other manic episodes: Lack of sleep, obsessive cleaning, disruptive behavior, and paranoia. Our brother told me that up until that point, she was completely normal and a pleasure to be around. That manic episode lasted for about 24 hours and she was right back to her normal self after getting some rest. I believe the following day of her manic episode, she was even promoted to Charge Nurse, so it seems that no one from Emory was aware that she had a manic episode the day before.
So between the last episode that happened in December 2019 and the tragic accident that happened on August 4th 2022, there was only one other episode that lasted for about 24 hours and she was back to her normal self after getting some rest. The last two episodes were much more mild compared to the first two. Her last manic episode did not require any hospitalization, unlike the 3 other incidents I described earlier, there was no harm to herself, and, according to my brother, she was back to her normal self within 24 hours after she got some sleep.
What has been frustrating are the media reports that made it seem as though her episodes were getting worse and worse, culminating into this tragic accident, and her family stood by and did nothing to intervene. It was 17 months when we last saw any signs of mania, and to the family, it seemed that she had finally found a way to manage it—especially because she really took it upon herself to engage in a lot more self-care and remove the people and things in her life that caused stress. Nothing we had seen within the past 4 years of her struggling with bipolar disorder, would have given us any concerns that something like the accident could’ve happened.
Immediately after her last episode in February 2021, she really started taking her mental health a lot more seriously. In following weeks, she bought a wedding band that she wore on her ring finger as a reminder of the promise she made herself to always “love and spoil myself”—a ring she had on the day of the accident.
It was around that time when she also started treating herself to spa days, working out, eating right, and spending her days off going to places like the aquarium, museums or the zoo – essentially anything that would help to reduce her stress. She really tried to keep that promise to herself and made self-therapy an important part of her life.
It was also in March 2021 when she decided to make therapy an important part of her treatment and found someone that she really loved. From my understanding, she was seeing this one specific therapist for about 3 months but had to find a new one after the therapist switched jobs.
For her birthday, which is at the end of June, she decided to spend it in Jamaica with our mother, who lives alone in a very rural and remote part of the country. She chose to spend her birthday with our mom, especially with all the isolation she had to endure due to Covid-19.
During this entire time of self-care, she was also working with a lot of Covid patients. There was even a period where she took a break from social media after watching one of her patients die. Apparently 4 other nurses had lost patients that same day as well. But even with Covid and her mental illness, she was thriving and after a year in Atlanta,
A reporter wanted to know about the gap in manic episodes during the height of covid and how the pandemic affected her ability to manage her struggles while working as a Travel Nurse. I truly believe it’s because she was around friends and family and took a lot of steps to manage her stress. For almost an entire year and half before moving to Los Angeles, she was either living with me in Charlotte, or with our mutual friend and brother while in Atlanta.
After completing her Travel Nurse assignment at Emory, she decided to move to Los Angeles and continue her journey there.
LOS ANGELES
The reason why I’m sharing so many photos of her is because I think it’s important for people to see her growth and the success she’s achieved while managing this mental illness. I also think it’s important for people to see that she wasn’t this person that was constantly in a manic state. For the most part, she was just a normal person who had bipolar disorder that occasionally experienced manic episodes. This didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of working as a nurse or that she was a danger to her patients. So, it’s important for me to show how she was the majority of the time and that she was not running around “crazy” everywhere she went.
While in LA, she continued with that spirit of self-therapy and was doing the best she could to self-manage, right up until the accident. She started seeing a therapist again in Oct 2021 and would continue to see a therapist, that we know of, until December 2021. We know it was a struggle for her to find a therapist that she loved as much as the one in Atlanta. We also know that she also went looking for a new therapist around Jul 24th, over a week before the accident because she wanted to talk to someone on how she could go about reconciling her relationship with me, who she hadn’t spoken to in over a year.
As part of her self-care, she also got into reading books. Here are some other books that was included with the stuff from her Airbnb that was shipped to me.
While in LA she was constantly immersing herself in nature by going to the beaches, hiking mountain trails, and exploring as much of California’s natural landscape and sites as she could.
There are a lot of claims being made about her being suicidal which is simply not true. She had so much going on and was excited about the future. She was supposed to fly out the next day to Houston to pick up furnitures for her new house. She was also making plans to do her next travel rotation in Hawaii and had recently got her Hawaii license. A close family member was moving out there and Nicole wanted to be near them. Before the accident, she was in the process of looking into Airbnbs in Hawaii and getting quotes for shipping her car there before the accident. She also wanted to go to med school to become an anesthesiologist and was in the process of studying for the MCATs. She was supposed to start an online pre-med class the week after the accident—a class that I had to cancel.
A month before the accident, she was in Jamaica again to spend her 37th birthday for the second year in a row with our mother. Even weeks before the accident, she was still surrounding herself with nature, which she used a way to help her manage her stress.
Everything she had done and had planned to do, just does not point to someone who is suicidal. And for as long as anyone in the family as known Nicole, not one single person was ever worried about her being suicidal because that is simply not true . She loves life, her family, being a travel nurse and had so much hope and plans for the future.
Her faith was very important to her and suicide is something that completely goes against her faith as it is one of the sins she believes that will not be forgiven. Since the accident, I had to cancel her $7.99 monthly subscription to the “Pray.com: Bible & Daily Prayer” app. We spoke about the app while she was in jail and she said it’s an app that sends you new prayers and scriptures daily and she would listen to it in her car everyday. She said there’s also a section of the app where James Earl Jones reads the bible and she had a goal to read the entire bible. She was in the process of reading through the old testament before the accident happened and still plans on reading it cover to cover.
Nicole dedicated her life to saving people and we believe wholeheartedly that this was not intentional or a suicide attempt. Something happened that caused her to disassociate from reality and I hope that with further medical testing, we can figure out what that actual cause was.