Poor Mildred.  She lives a terrible life obsessed with the soap operas that invade her home daily on the wall size televisions she has installed in the living room.  She lives to act out her part in the soap opera and anxiously waits for the daily script she receives to practice her lines.  She lives a life controlled by entertainment and fake people who represent a family to her.  Mildred has fallen victim to the mindless, boring society that has taken over her life.  Her life is in shambles although she doesn't know it.  She lives in a loveless marriage, and she has no real purpose in life.

 Montag must help Mildred when he comes home because she has overdosed on medication she takes to be happy and fall asleep.  Montag finds her in bed with the "sea shell" headphones in her ears.  He quickly calls an ambulance, and it arrives in just a few minutes.  The technicians proceed to drain Mildred of her blood and replace it with new, fresh blood to flush the drugs out of her system.  Mildred is once again saved from killing herself, and this is about the third time she has tried it.  Mildred is unhappy, but doesn't know why.  It is an unconscious attempt to commit suicide on her part because of that unhappiness.  She doesn't really know why she is doing it because she is unable to clearly express her feelings.  This seems to be something that is common in this society because the ambulance drivers are always kept busy.  

Montag, in reality, saves Mildred from herself.  In return, Mildred turns in Montag to Captain Beatty for the book he hides in the house.   

In Part 1 of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, when Montag gets home after meeting Clarisse for the first time, he finds that his wife, Mildred, is lying motionless in bed. While the narration specifically notes that Mildred is laid out "uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb," at first Montag thinks that his wife is just asleep as usual. Then he finds a "small crystal bottle of sleeping-tablets which earlier today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in the light of the tiny flare." Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills and needs to have her stomach pumped in order to survive. Montag calls the emergency hospital, and two men come with two machines, one that pumps the stomach, and one that simultaneously empties the body of blood and fills it with "fresh blood and serum". 

The next day, Mildred denies having taken the pills when Montag confronts her about it, saying "What would I want to go and do a silly thing like that for?" She acts as if she doesn't remember anything from the night before, but we as readers know that the overdose probably wasn't an accident.