May 2018 to December 2019
Nicole Linton’s mental health struggle started with her first manic episode in May 2018, resulting in a Bipolar Disorder Diagnoses. Up until that point, there was nothing that would’ve led me or other family members to believe that she had a mental illness of any sort.
Around the time of the first episode, she had just completed finals for her first year in CRNA school and was under a lot of stress. From as far back as 2012, Nicole knew she wanted to become a nurse anesthetist. Once she had set her mind to that goal, she kept going and never looked back once. She started out as a surgical tech and moved all the way from NYC to small town Laredo, TX. It was in Laredo, while in the operating room working as a surgical tech where she learned about nurse anesthesia. After that, there was no stopping her.
She immediately started taking pre-bacc classes so she could get into Nursing school, which she did. She then moved to Houston to attend nursing school at UT Health and made sure to secure a job in the ICU after graduation to increase her chances of getting into CRNA school.
While working as an ICU nurse, she was also studying for the GREs and taking post-bacc classes. After a year and a half of working as a nurse, she got into her top CRNA-DNP program at UT Health.
It was such a great achievement, and we were all so proud of her. Out of 400 applicants, she was one of the 20 that got accepted into the program. It is also very hard to get into a CRNA program with only 1.5 years of experience as a nurse. So, in 2017 she started this very intense program and she was finally on track to achieve her goal.
May 2018 is when everything changed for her. Looking back on it, I believe she fell victim to her own drive and ambition. She was achieving one goal after another with no real breaks in-between. I’m no medical expert but it now seems that the stress of school and other things in her life, triggered or exacerbated some sort of underlying condition.
One night, I got a call from Nicole who had been arrested and she placed an officer on the phone who proceeded to tell me that someone needs to come to Houston ASAP because she was “deteriorating” right before his eyes. Recently within the past 6 weeks, I learned that during her booking process, she was first erratic and talking a bunch of nonsense, and then all of a sudden she went into a catatonic state where she wasn’t moving. Suddenly, it was as if the lights went off and she’s there but it appeared as if she couldn’t hear or interact with anybody around her.
The doctor that is currently evaluating her believes that these symptoms may indicate frontal lobe epilepsy, which often lasts around 30 seconds and can cause stiffness in the body and loss of awareness. It is usually followed by amnesia where the person doesn’t remember blacking out. We are hoping the court will give us permission to have Nicole tested for the neurological and psychiatric conditions that can cause these types of symptoms.
This particular type of epilepsy is oftentimes missed by doctors because many of the symptoms can also indicate psychiatric problems. If she does have a neurological condition on top of or instead of her bipolar disorder, we want to be able to test for it so she can be treated appropriately and so we can better understand what happened on August 4th.
I would like to make it clear the family and Nicole was not aware that she was having these seizure like events. That is something that was brought to our attention after the accident and she was evaluated by an independent psychiatrist. From my understanding, the only people who witnessed it was the police and an acquaintance….none of whom are medical professionals.
Now back to the story around her first manic episode. I just can’t imagine how scared she must’ve been with worrying about school, and then getting arrested for the first time ever. I was able to track down her roommate who told me that she didn’t sleep much the night after being released and was up late cleaning, a very common behavior in bipolar individuals. The same thing happened the night I arrive where Nicole spent almost the entire night obsessively cleaning, doing laundry, and shuffling things around. Basically doing anything to keep busy is what it seemed like to me. We tried so hard to convince her to go to the hospital, but she said that she didn’t trust the people there and was afraid they would pump her full of drugs. She kept saying that she works with nurses who make mistakes all the time and that she’s always having to fix their mistakes so she didn’t trust them.
She kept checking her blood pressure and when she saw how high it was, it caused her even more anxiety. At one point she thought her organs were going into system failure and wanted a respirator to open up her lungs, even suggesting we take her to some place that does “floatation therapy”, which she thought would help calm her down and lower her blood pressure.
I managed to convince her to go with me to see a student counselor at UT Health. When we got there, she started getting really anxious again but she was able to calm herself down enough to finally speak with the person. The counselor was somehow able to convince her to voluntarily bring herself into a psychiatric treatment facility and they even provided us with a campus police escort.
We arrived at the hospital and as we were getting out, she started to get anxious again and didn’t want to go in. I was able to get my oldest brother on the phone with her and he convinced her to go inside, which she did. Getting her in felt like a miracle at the time. People who think it’s easy to get someone with a mental illness to the hospital when they are completely paranoid, has never had to experience what I experienced. At the end of the day, you cannot force anyone to get help unless they are a danger to themselves and others. And at that point, we had no reason to believe she was a danger to anyone, including herself.
As we got inside the hospital she started to get more and more anxious. She was pacing around the hospital lobby while being paranoid and ranting about a bunch of things. I just remember crying my eyes out being inconsolable. The lady next to me kept trying to comfort me while Nicole kept pacing back and forth. At one point someone came out and took her blood pressure and I believe it was something high like 163/110. This made her even more anxious and she kept saying that she needed to calm herself down and bring down her blood pressure, which probably made her even more anxious.
Suddenly and out of nowhere, I heard a loud bang! There was a door in the hallway that had a small glass partition and she had banged her head into it, shattering the glass and getting a cut on her forehead. As soon as that happened, the campus police officer that had escorted us issued an Emergency Detainment Order (EDO) and an ambulance came and took her to the ER which was right next door to the psychiatric hospital where we were.
One of the doctors that treated her wounds later told me how even with a cut on her forehead, she was happy and singing Bob Marley’s “Don’t Worry” song and that he was singing along with her. Finally, she was able to fall asleep and I was also finally able to go back to her house and sleep for the first time since I had arrived in Houston. I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.
She was eventually moved from Emergency Psychiatric to the psychiatric facility where she was treated and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was probably there around 5 to 7 days and I visited her every day. I was there for a little over a week but had to leave shortly after she was discharged. She had so much family support during that period to help her get through this. Before I left Houston, her closest cousin had flown in from Atlanta and took over after I left. Then my brother took over after driving all the way from Florida to Houston and was there with her for a short-while. Then my mother flew in from Jamaica and was there for about 2 months from May until July 18th. And then my other sister was there to celebrate her birthday at the end of June. She was also with a lot of family around the end of June because a lot of people were in town for a funeral.
So for anyone asking where the family was during this time, we were there. Nicole had a lot of love and support during this period of her first manic from so many of our family members. I’m afraid to think about all the people with mental illnesses who do not have this type of support.
Her school allowed her to take a year off from the program but she would have to redo her first year. She was understandably unhappy because of how hard she had worked to get there only to have to start all over.
Since then, what I have come to understand is that it can take a year or more for people with bipolar disorder to find the right medication at the right amount. You must have a psychiatrist that you trust and who will work closely with you to help you find the right treatment plan. There are so many factors when discussing bipolar medications: all the negative side effects and the fact that even if you get a medication that is working, sometimes it only works for a brief period and you will need to find a new medication. Also, even while on bipolar medication, it is still possible to have manic episodes.
I say all this to highlight the burden we place on mentally ill people to treat themselves. People are acting as if she completely ignored her mental health when she did receive treatment, she met with doctors and did the best she could to otherwise manage her own illness.
We as a society don’t make it easy for people to take the time necessary to learn about a new mental illness diagnosis, find the right therapist and psychiatrist, and work closely with them on an ongoing basis to adjust the medication as needed. That was not an option available to her.
In the immediate moments after she was released from the hospital, she had to deal with this disorderly conduct charge she was facing and the 80k of student loan she had acquired for a school year that she now has to retake. She had to now find a new job so she can afford rent and buy food. Everyone in her family also had their own lives and none of her close relatives lived in Houston. What choice did she have other than to go immediately back to work? The society we have created plays a huge part in why people with mental illness all over the country struggle to treat themselves.
Another thing that is important to note is that she was a month away from turning 33 at the time of her diagnosis. For her entire life, everything was completely normal, and she was never encumbered by a mental illness. How many adults struggle to change their habits and fail? Yet we place a higher burden on people with mental illness to change overnight. Just because she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, didn’t mean she or the family automatically knew everything about it. It was all new for all of us and we were learning about it as we went along.
Most people in our family have never seen Nicole in a manic episode…not even her own mother and two of her siblings haven’t seen one. I’ve seen it once, my other sister has only seen it once over video call on the day of the accident, and my brother in Atlanta only saw it once. What people must understand is that over 90% of our interaction with Nicole has been “normal” and even when she is manic, it has never been anything that would cause us to believe she was a danger to herself or other people. Not once in the past 4 years was I ever worried that something like what happened on August 4th could happen.
Shortly after being hospitalized in 2018, she was attending a funeral and was completely back to her old self. For a whole year, she seemed completely “normal” and was working as a nurse with no problem. The second time she had to be involuntarily detained happened exactly a year later at the beginning of classes around May 2019. I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide any details around her manic state because she was already in the hospital when I arrived. If I remember correctly, I think it was Nicole’s manager who told me what happened, and I was on the first flight to Houston. As soon as I landed, I got her from the hospital where she was being treated and drove her to the psychiatric hospital where she stayed again for 5 to 7 days.
Similar to what happened in May 2018, the person who witnessed the episode told me that it was “like she didn’t know I was there talking to her” and when I had asked her what happened, she couldn’t remember, which is also why I can’t speak on what happened before or during this manic episode.
After she got out, her doctor had cleared her to return to school. It was at that moment when her dreams to become a CRNA ended because she did not go back to school after that and simply went back to working as a nurse.
Two of the components to the prosecutor’s theory on why she should be charged with murder was that she was not taking her mental illness seriously and that this wouldn’t have happened if she had treated it appropriately. I’m not sure how the prosecutors can make such a claim without know nothing about her medical history. We have been reluctant to speak on anything regarding her treatment plan until we had more evidence in the way of her medical records. And as we gather more and more evidence, it shows that she has been compliant with doctors order. And that during the period when she experienced her second manic episode, she was following the treatment plan. So for the prosecutors to claim that this wouldn’t have happened because she wasn’t following a treatment plan is 1. baseless and not backed by any evidence and 2. a misinformed argument to make because people can still have manic episodes while following a treatment plan, which seemed to be the case for Nicole. And if it is the case that she does have a neurological condition, that would also explain why she would still continue to have manic episodes while complying with doctors order because no amount of bipolar medication can fix a seizure disorder.
The third and final episode that landed her in the hospital happened in December 2019, when she was seen around her complex being disruptive and paranoid. I got a call from a neighbor who had her phone and called me because I was her emergency contact. The ambulance was called and she was taken to the hospital. I was on a flight the next day, and If I remember correctly, I believe I went to the hospital that same day and she was discharged into my care. What we do know is that she was not involuntarily detained and was back to their normal state by the time I picked her up. After we got back to her house, we spoke and she agreed to leave Houston and move in with me in Charlotte.
And that is exactly what we did. We packed up everything and she moved into my guest bedroom and we placed the rest of her stuff in storage. And it was then that she started her journey as a travel nurse.