MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — It was a scenario that had played out time and time again. This time, Nicole Condrey says, it was different as she sat on the couch next to her husband, who grasped a handgun.
"I talked to him. I tried to say everything I could, and he got really quiet, really quiet for the first time ever," Condrey recalled.
In the past, she'd been able to talk him down and save him from himself. As a marker of every time she stopped him from killing himself, she'd take a round of ammunition and put it in her sock drawer.
"I told myself I had to have something to show myself what we had been through, and that I was helping," Condrey said. "And it just made me feel like I was helping."
She said eventually there was no room in the drawer for her socks.
Condrey admits there wasn't a rulebook or manual on how to navigate the threats of suicide. Every time her husband Ron would spiral, she said she'd follow him, but always questioned whether what she was doing was the right approach.
"Am I going to cause him to get more frustrated and pull the trigger? I mean, this was, you know, the most gut-wrenching possible thing you could go through. And I decided in that moment, I was going to follow him," Condrey said.
She said Ron's 25 years of service in the Navy working in the field of Explosive Ordinance Disposal left him with multiple traumatic brain injuries tied to everything from concussions from bombs to a Humvee rollover and helicopter crash.
Her husband went to the VA for medical help and programs, but Condrey said she always felt they slapped a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder on him and gave him a bunch of pills without understanding that he was suffering from TBIs and not PTSD.
"He didn’t get the holistic programs that he needed," she said.
The one-time warrior who loved deploying was no longer able to process certain things like he once did, and a diagnosis or label from the VA made things even worse for him, Condrey said.
"A lot of the depression and anger, I think stemmed from his inability to perform like the warrior that he once was, and so he would get incredibly frustrated by that," she said.
After years of trying different things, Ron found Boulder Crest Foundation's Warrior Pathh. The Progressive and Alternative Training for Helping Heroes (PATHH) is a program based on the science of post-traumatic growth, according to the website. The free 90-day program is for active military and veterans.
"When I dropped Ron off, I was afraid he was gonna walk down the bike path in DC and not go," Condrey said.
She says after the program, she had her husband back and things looked promising. But it was too late.
"Ron tells me, he says, 'Life happens.' He got it from Boulder Crest. He said, 'Life happens for us and not to us,'" Condrey said. "If you think about it so deep, it's like, OK, it takes that victim mentality, shoves it away, and says, 'No ... I'm not a victim, I have an opportunity. Because of all the things I've been through, I can do something even greater than had I not been through them to begin with.' And so, I got my husband back after that program. Then, unfortunately, I got him back for only a week."
Ron shot himself through the heart as he held her hand.
Condrey donated his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation Project Enlist, which has a focus on research on traumatic brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. Veterans or service members can go onto the foundation’s website and pledge to donate their brain to further the research.
She now serves on the foundation’s veterans advisory board. She encourages family members of veterans going through something similar to what her husband went through to not give up hope and to keep searching for the right program or therapy.
"There are real resources. They might not have found them yet, but they have to keep trying and find them," Condrey said. "It's just a matter of hitting the right one at the right time and it's never worth giving up on it. But I'll tell you what, the pills very, very rarely are they the answer."
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