Reply #32: Was he two days in hospital after taking the pills?

[bdf]

I don't remember seeing that in any thread other than this one. But the turnover in posts on DU means I
have to speed-read through some of them and even then I can only hope to look at a fraction of them.

If he was two days in hospital then it wasn't codeine that got him but tylenol. And I just do not believe a guy that smart would use that particular method of suicide and botch it. He might not have known the exact dosages required, but he'd have known that too little would not take him out cleanly. So he'd either have researched it and taken the right dose, or chosen another method, or accumulated enough of the stuff to take a megadose that was far higher than could possibly be needed.

There are plenty of ways to kill yourself. Many of them are slow and/or painful. But few of them compare to the protracted agony of tylenol. If you make a botch of hanging yourself, instead of breaking your neck you strangle slowly for five minutes—nothing compared to tylenol. If you can acquire a hypodermic you can inject air into a vein and cause an embolism that gives you a fatal heart attack—no fun at all for a couple of minutes, but nothing compared to tylenol. If you yank the power cord from a desk lamp, dip your hands in salty water, then grab the bar ends you'll send enough current through your chest for a fatal heart attack. Even in a situation where you have to improvise (like a hospital ward) you can usually find a way to do it provided you're willing to put up with intense pain for up to 10 minutes—nothing compared to tylenol.

The one advantage the codeine/tylenol mix has is that you can take it without feeling pain and, if you're lucky, die in your sleep. It might superficially seem attractive to a more painful method. But only if you're completely unaware of what happens if you don't take enough.

But assume Ivins didn't know the correct dose, or thought he did but miscalculated. And assume he didn't have the courage for one of the other methods which guaranteed some relatively brief pain, or none of those were available to him. So he took the codeine/tylenol mix, but a low enough dose that he woke up the next day and realized that it hadn't worked. Realized that he now needed to get treatment for the tylenol or in a day or perhaps two he would then face two days of intense agonizing pain before death. Would he decide to just wait for the intense pain to kick in, or would he seek out immediate treatment, or would he cast around for some other means to finish himself off quickly before the two days of intense pain kicked in?

For him to have been two days in hospital before death, he must have had at least one day in which to either top himself a different way or to seek treatment. Yet he chose to just wait until the pain kicked in.

It does not compute.

Oh wait, not everyone knows about what an overdose of tylenol does. But he was a scientist at USAMRID. More to the point, some of his LTTEs show that he was widely-read outside of his own specialized field, including a reference to a research paper linking homosexuality to a gene complex that determines the direction of whorls on the head (or something very obscure like that). That's a man with a pack-rat brain. A man who always wins at Trivial Pursuit. A man who is a glutton for knowledge. A man who probably reads Scientific American and/or New Scientist as recreation. So even if he were not in a position to research the exact doses required, he'd almost certainly know what an overdose of tylenol can do.

OK, it's possible to come up with a complex explanation to account for it, requiring all sorts of ad hoc assumptions just to make it hang together—a prime target for Occam's Razor. But it's still something you might just about be able to swallow. Until you consider every other thing about the official explanation of every aspect of the case requires similar complex, implausible, unbelievable arguments to bolster them.