Tag Archives: mental health

Flying

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With pyjama bottoms tucked into boots dusted in freshly falling snow I picked my away across the garden to the car, leaving behind my baby tucked into bed and my husband watching from the door.

I didn’t know what else to do. It was like a chasm had opened in my mind and it was pulling me in and although I was clinging onto my sanity with all that I had I just didn’t know, I couldn’t trust myself.

Earlier that night I sat in bed in my nest of pillows and blankets and one minute I was fine and the next…?

I don’t know what happened.

I had a pen in my hand and I knew exactly what I would write because suddenly everything was clear and yes this is exactly what I should do right now.

‘I’m sorry’ I would write. A cliche but true because I am and I always will be.

‘This is all I can do to make things better’ because it is isn’t it? It’s the fairest and kindest thing to do, set my family free from me and set myself free from the pain.

I rolled the pen between my fingers and in that moment the reality dawned and its cold plastic became red hot. I dropped it behind the headboard, the household wasteland of things never to be retrieved.

Out of nowhere in some crazy out of body experience I saw myself sailing through the air, snowflakes falling around me, smattering themselves through my hair and onto my cheeks, a picture of calm.

It was a relaxing thought and that’s what added another level of terror. So peaceful and resolute was the image that I mentally reacted in the same way as I would if I was offered another cup of tea. Yeah, that would be really lovely, thanks.

I stared unblinking through the gap in the middle of the curtains at the snow and the waving branches of the tree and the darkness, stuck in a space between blind panic and resigned necessity.

And so, an hour before midnight and in the middle of an icy blizzard, my mum pulled up outside to take me away to be safe.

Doughnuts and Fear

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The physical and emotional are so closely linked – I appreciate that this comes as no surprise but bear with me here.

When I’m hungry, like really properly hungry and my stomach is growling at me and at anyone else unless they are proffering food as they approach, I turn pretty nasty – short tempered and moody and forgetful and generally all round horrible. All until I eat something and then as if by magic I’m myself again, the non cranky version with sugar around my lips and jam on my fingers (a doughnut is the best way to cure the hunger monster).

I’m finding that I’m having to remind myself of little otherwise useless factoids like this to make myself feel positive and stop myself getting scared or down or rage-filled.

For a long, long, longlonglonglonglong time I had such intense mental pain that it was excruciating just to exist. It’s a pain extremely hard to explain to anyone and a pain I wouldn’t wish anyone to experience. A pain when waking up every morning hurts and then every single second that follows hurts and every breath hurts until you close your eyes at night still consumed by the hurt it’s tough going and it’s no wonder that the mind drifts into I can’t do this anymore and I don’t want to be here territory.

The mental pain is still a pretty raw wound, still fresh in my memory and the fallout still written across the faces of those that I care about.

I need to remember that. I need to remember that it’s going and it’s getting better and I’m excited about things and even happy and so much better.

Not that I go on about it or anything but I have been in what can be simply described as huge physical pain for the last three weeks. Not that I go on. Or that I’m counting.

From the second that I wake up in the morning to the second that I close my eyes at night something doesn’t feel right, whether it’s the dizziness or the nausea or the insane palpitations or the headaches or feeling like I’ve been hit by the flu truck, it hurts and I’m so, so tired.

Physical pain slowly, slowly chips away at my mental reserves and although they remain infinity times stronger than they were and pretty kick ass there is only so much they can take.

That’s what worries me anyway.

I’ve started to climb into bed and dread waking up because what will tomorrow bring and will the headaches be back or will the vertigo step up a notch and there’s really only so much I can handle because I’m just exhausted and so ready for this to be over now.

Dreading waking up is something that I am horribly used to but, as I keep repeating to myself inside my worn out and bruised mind, but it’s not the same.

It feels a bit like I’m re-learning life at the moment, how to think and how to feel and what to do with said thoughts and feelings and how amazing it is to have them all at the same time…

It’s a scary thing after living so long with such intense hurt to remove the one tangible thing that was providing support and of course I’m scared of going back. Of course I’m scared, having been chemically numbed for over two years, of feelings and emotions that frankly I have forgotten how to process.

I lay in bed at night with some bizarre internal monologue, exhausted and battered and frightened and confused; I don’t think I can take much more of this, I’m so tired and scared and I just want to feel better and for these things to go away. I don’t know if I can do this anymore. It’s ok to feel those things. It’s normal and it’s fine and of course you feel them because fuck, look at what you have fought to be here right now and sure, you feel crap but it’s different and it will get better.

There are so many shades of I can’t do this anymore and they are all valid and they are all real but some are easier to deal with than others. I dealt with the last one, so I can sure as hell do this.

Paradox (With Tongues)

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So I made the decision and with all the rightest of reasons and best(est) of intentions. In sound mind I know this. I know the ins and outs and whys and everything’s because I’ve lived it and breathed it and agonised over it and rolled it over in conversations so many times that my voice is horse and all the words have dried up.

The reality of sitting in the middle of it all, cross legged on the floor surrounded by looming towers or doubt and worry skews the plan somewhat.

Is it just me or is it more than a little ironic that medication for depression can cause depressive symptoms? Precisely, these depressive side effects are most prevalent when the medication is first started – leading to weeks of desperate oh my this is just me and I’m all wrong and I’ll never be OK ever again ever - and, of course, at the other end of the scale when you’re trying and willing to set yourself free.

I was OK. Not better, not perfect, not totally there yet, but OK. I had levelled out. The physical effects became stronger than the soothing mental effects. I felt strong enough to go it alone, ready.

Even during the stationary swaying and rocking of the vertigo brought on by reducing my dose by a teensy (medical term there guys) amount it still felt good you know? I mean, obviously I had felt better, but I was positive and I pushed through it.

As the veil lifted I really did start to feel more like myself again which is such a cliché it just has to be true. I did stuff and I did it automatically and happily and just because it needed doing and it wasn’t simply the background notice to another session of self loathing and internal destruction.

The husband even noticed a difference. I felt good. I made stuff and sang and played and smiled and it was all good and it felt good and good good good good good.

And I’ve been wanting to write this post for days. And other posts about everything else and the fact that in the last five weeks when I have been relatively quiet I’ve actually managed to reduce from 150mg to 37.5mg all by myself and it’s a bloody achievement and I’m still here and still battling and still surviving.

I just haven’t wanted to jinx it.

I’ve wanted your support and encouragement because last night was the last time that I reached for the little blister pack beside my bed but I’ve been too scared to ask because what if I can’t do it and what if I don’t want to do it and what if times a million.

I’ve known that I’m going to stop for about a week. It’s time. I can’t keep pumping these drugs into my system when all they were doing was sustaining a level that I’m able to sustain myself now only with a cloud of heavy fog smothered thickly across all my senses thrown in for good (bad) measure.

I need to stop them to get better properly. I need to feel again and to learn to cope again and I can’t do that with the meds. I want to know that I can survive without them and frankly, I just want this whole long chapter to be over now.

I can see now how far I have come and as much as it fills me with pride because I kicked some ass it also makes me want to double over, clutching my stomach in pain because it was all just awful.

I swallowed that last pill.

Hopefully the last one ever but let’s face it, probably not as they say once affected always afflicted and I’m likely to have to battle this all over again to have more babies. Lets not go there just yet. One thing at a time.

The familiar feelings washed over me.

A gentle dizziness, fuzziness, creeping up on tiptoes before quickly closing in on my mind, wrapping it up in cotton wool and…and…making me incapable of finishing sentences.

The feelings that I’ve hated and been so keen to forget suddenly aren’t so bad. As I lay back and allow the stoned waves to gently wash over me they lick at my toes and gently drape my mind in thick, soft velvet. It’s nice. It’s nothing like last night and all the nights before where I felt like these effects were trying to pin me down with arms of steel and knees in my chest as I kicked and struggled and begged to be free.

These drugs, although for the most part absolutely horrible, have been a necessity. They have kept me alive and held my hand and consciously or subconsciously they have been there for me to fall back on when I have needed to.

They pulled me back from the absolute depths of breathtakingly painful misery and they set me down lightly on a tightrope, balancing somewhere between good and bad, up and down, me and…?

There were no great ups or terrible downs rather everything just was. It’s impossible to expect that for something to take the pain of one emotion away it won’t drain out the delight in another isn’t it?

Slowly, very slowly over the last few weeks I have been getting used to feeling again. Like rediscovering your own tongue after its been dormant and numb for hours after a dentist visit, suddenly there it is! and oh god does it really feel like that and I can move it and wow I really take my tongue for granted because it can do all this stuff.

I can cry and laugh and neither are forced and both hit me like a clenched fist in the pit of my stomach. I can feel my nerve endings tingle as I nuzzle into the husbands shoulder and his chin brushes across my head, his stubble catching on my hair. I can feel the love jumping from every cell when I just look at Beans and she does something a bit kooky (ie; all the time).

It’s weird. It’s like I’m being absolutely bombarded. We’re not in Kansas any more  Toto and someone’s switched on the colour and the lights and the sounds and the smells and the feelings and its all so intense and don’t I get ruby slippers as part of this bargain?

I do want to do this, I do. And I am ready. But I am scared. This drugs are addictive and I have used up every ounce of my strength to get to the point where I can say ‘let’s do this’ that I just don’t know that I have enough left to be able to say done.

I’m terrified of going back to where I was. And that’s why it’s so hard to say goodbye.

MAD Blog Awards

This blog has changed saved my life. You have changed saved my life. I would be thrilled if you could take one minute to vote for me in the MADs 2013. If you want to…Maybe? Please? x

Problem

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problem dictionary definition

In life there are many problems, sometimes they seem to fall from the sky and sprout from the ground and divide and multiply until they cover everything in a big problem-y tangle. We all have those days or weeks or years when everything seems to go a bit wrong and no matter how many solutions you dream up the problem remains, steadfast and mocking.

The days when you realise you have run out of nappies at the exact same second that one is ceremoniously filled, when you spill red wine on your new top or miss the bus or forget to send an important email or the boiler breaks. All pain in the ass, tooth grinding problems, thankfully all with solutions of some kind.

Last night as I snuggled under the blanket in front of One Born Every Minute my pertinent problem was that I couldn’t write the post that I had planned to because my camera batteries have run out, and, erm, no one tell the husband, but the charger may be broken. Thanks to my newly discovered ‘no problem’ attitude I threw my blogging plans to the wind and ate chocolate and welled up at all the labours and births and tiny babies.

When the final advert break rolled my problem was that I couldn’t be bothered to move as far as the kitchen to get a cup of tea. So I didn’t bother. One advert made me pay attention, mainly because there was an absence of the usual whoompwhoompwhoomp bass line thud and bright, flashy colours that normally flood the room when people try to sell us stuff.

Ah, I thought, the new Time To Change advert. One I’ve managed to miss since it aired for the first time the other day – which is shocking really, given my vested interest and the fact that I am known to zone out come 7:30pm and spend my evenings lit by the warm, flickering glow of the TV.

The whole Time To Change ethos is something that I wholeheartedly agree with although not necessarily something that I purport to know all that much about. From what I do know, they exist to make efforts to break down the stigma or taboo or whatever you want to call it that surrounds mental illness in a very big and very real way.

Mental illness should be spoken about, I think, it shouldn’t be something that sufferers have to squirrel away and pretend isn’t real. It’s an area that needs to be brought out into the public domain in a positive way – if there is such a thing – to bred understanding and support from the fear and misconceptions that exist.

I like to think of myself as pretty open and honest, I would always be happy to talk to anyone about my experiences with my own mental illness if I was asked to, but saying that I would never introduce myself all ‘Hi, I’m Clara. I like Party Rings and I’m a bit maaaaaaaaaaaad’ firstly because I hate (hatehatehate) the use of the word mad (or crazy or insane or doolally or bonkers or mental or…) but most importantly because I am not an illness, I’m a person and a personality and hopes and dreams and dislikes and interests far bigger than any illness could ever be.

So yeah, lets talk and lets be open in the hope that more and more will understand and care will improve and discrimination will end and all the rest of it. For this ambition, I am whooping and cheering all the way for Time To Change.

But…

I might be wrong here but I imagine that anything, absolutely anything, released into the public arena by any charity or organisation working to change the perception of mental illness is scrupulously checked and double checked and rewritten and reworked and tonnes of other things so that by the time the finished product reaches our blanket wrapped, TV zombified selves it in no way accidentally portrays an image of wooohooo guys we’re all flipping crazy but it’s ok, you can still talk to us, we don’t bite. And for the most part, it does. But I have one little problem.

…when I found out that my son had a mental health problem

…my daughter had a mental health problem

…my friend had a mental health problem

What is wrong with mental illness? Does that not do the job perfectly in summing up what is, in fact, an illness?

It’s funny – the husband and I were watching the news earlier and in a(nother) piece about the snow a reporter was talking to the son of a elderly woman who was snowed in. This man suffered from a heart attack on Friday. Friday! It’s Wednesday lunch time and he’s sat at his kitchen table sipping a cup of tea and wearing a nice jumper. Until fairly recently a heart attack was fatal, people who suffer from a heart attack are not usually brewing up and having a chat in their chintzy kitchen a mere five days later.

Similarly cancer is no longer what it used to be. The research and the improvements and the advancements mean that so many cancers can be treatable now. All this is just amazing and both of these things are big, scary illnesses that are not uncommon, not unheard of and very much out there in the public arena.

But you’d never hear anyone say ‘I have a cancer problem’ or ‘I had a bit of a heart attack problem last Friday but I’m right as rain now…another tea?’ would you?

So why coin the phrase mental health problem? The opposite of health is ill health illness – tomayto tohmahto – doesn’t that do?

I honestly don’t think that I have a problem with my mental health. I know that I have a mental illness. Can’t we just call it what it is? Or is this just my problem?

This Shit Just Got Personal

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…because never let it be said that this isn’t a barefaced, no holes barred kinda blog.

 

The internal monologue of anxiety is an exhausting never ending tirade of doom and dread and fear and every single worst case eventuality that you can think of as well as thousands that you never could. It’s constant at times, like an endless buzz and crackle of static set to play on a loop, in surround sound, right in the middle of your brain. With the volume turned up to eleven.

Anxiety makes me tired and on edge, white knuckled, restless. It makes me want to slide between the inviting sheets of my bed, the safest of safe places, to lay quiet and undisturbed with my eyes scrunched shut while I shout internally that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK in an effort to drown out the fear and the lights and voices and sounds of the world turning and lives being lived that try to penetrate through the cracks.

Only going to bed and burrowing hamster like under the covers isn’t an option. Because I am rational enough to know that the cotton soft, feathery fortress that I drape over myself means that I am giving in. And as much as I want to, need to sometimes, I simply can’t.

No. Giving. In.

The exhaustion and desperation and sheer tooth gritting agony of anxiety leaves me spent after it has built up and up and up and up and OH MY GOD SOMETHING AWFUL IS GOING TO HAPPEN ANY SECOND AND I JUST CAN’T BREATHE AND… over hours days and weeks until I burn out.

I burn out and I sleep a sweaty and restless sleep plagued by vivid dreams and even more vivid nightmares until waking at dawn feeling physically and emotionally ruined, turning back over and slipping into the sleep coma of intense malaise. And it lasts for days.

Oh hi depression. It lurks in the molecules of my own shadow, always there, always following, waiting.

When I’m OK – OK as far as the anxiety is there but quelled, pushed down as deeply as I can manage, the depression is there, chipping away at my spirit with its crushing opinions of self and worth and apathy, this is my OK – I can live and I can function and sometimes I can even have a really nice time but its all there, waiting to creep back to the forefront of my everything.

So when the depression does hit good and proper it knows that I am a captive audience. It knows that it’s done all of the groundwork of slowly pealing away layer after layer of my confidence and my belief and my defences to enable it to jump straight over the crumbling walls and paralyse me with emptiness.

The endless crackle and fuzz of anxiety is replaced by nothing. Funny really when all I want when I’m super anxious is for EVERYTHING TO JUST GO AWAY AND BE QUIET that the quiet that follows is so unwelcome.

It’s not a peaceful silence. It’s not the silence that surrounds you on a summer evening, floating in on a sweet breeze and enveloping you, leaving you invigorated and relaxed and rested, bright eyed and smiling lazily. It’s an all consuming empty silence. So heavy that it sucks the life out of every cell resulting in heavy limbs that simply don’t move, a brain that is rendered completely incapable of thought either trivial or profound. Empty empty empty. I can’t even be bothered to see, to hear, speak, swallow. Blink.

And there’s nothing I can do.

I know that as my anxiety has built over the last few days, even as the breath catches half way up my throat as I try to breathe, while my palms are slick with the cold sweat of fear and my mind races to pinpoint exactly what that fear is for, I know that it’s not real. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing. But my god, I am. And it’s just going to build and build until my body and my mind cannot take another second and slumps with an almighty thud into darkness and despair.

And then I’ll likely be OK again for a few days, maybe even a week.

Before the cycle starts all over again.

And I have my period.

Everything

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I wrote down what I wanted to say because I knew it would get lost once opinions and information flew around the room and because if it was written down I would have to speak it, a promise to myself.

My head was in my phone as I waited to be called out of the pink glow of the waiting room. I read and checked and double checked what I wanted to say even though I had it committed to memory word for word and bullet point by bullet point.

I have lived with this for nearly two years. I have spent every day trying, just trying. I know where the illness ends and I begin even when it takes over and the only bit of myself left is hovering above my prone body, floating to the ceiling and looking down on what I look like when it threatens to take me over.

I talk myself through panic attacks and guilt and the impulses to drag something cold and deliciously sharp across my hot, soft skin. I understand. How could I not after more than twenty months of trying?

I do want help I really do. I want support and guidance and someone who can coax me back out of my shell and stand close as I pick myself up, battered and bruised but with all my thoughts ordered, rationalised.

I have my own coping mechanisms and they are why and how I have come through all these months without a single physical scar, they are the reason I managed to avoid hospital and avoid worse.

What I want now, what I need, is to go back to the beginning and actually say out loud all the things that I never did at the time. I need the distance that verbalising things gives, I need to say the words and hear myself as I do. I need someone to help me understand them so that I can learn that it’s ok and this is why and maybe next time…

Suddenly a hand is being proffered in introduction and I rise and the fake leather cushion creaks and squeaks as it expands back into shape as I am lead into the windowless room with the forms and the tissues. There’s always tissues. I never cry.

I settle into the chair against the back wall. It’s blue and it’s scratchy and one of the front legs is loose. I kick it idly with my heel while my psychologist clicks her mouse until my details fill the screen. I peer out of the corner of my eye and try to read what it says.

June. It was June when I first made the call? I count the months in time with the thud of my Converse on metal.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

The leg moves half an inch and I grip the seat to steady myself. Feet firmly on the carpet I register that it has taken four months to get to this point.

I look at my palms and I think while eyes locked on her monitor the psychologist scrolls and scrolls and outside a car drives past and crunches into gear. I have appointment palms, pink and hot and covered in the sheen of my own sweat that tries to compensate for my dry mouth when I feel under pressure to say the right things.

I go over and over my bullet points in my head until I can see them so clearly it’s as if they’re scrawled in ink down my fingers. And then I realise something. Suddenly it’s really obvious when I feel the most shit. The times when I’m a bit slower to pick myself back up again, a bit more anxious than usual.

It’s this.

It’s the constant asking and begging and pleading for help. I have asked and asked and asked but every time, every single time, I have been put on hold or redirected or turned down or overruled.

And it kills me.

Harder than almost anything else is siting in a box like room sharing stale air across a table with a stranger who has boxes to tick and risks to assess and I just don’t quite fit and they just don’t quite understand.

Because its not just about boxes as ticks and scores and totals and whatever the preferred method of treatment is in that given month. It’s personal and varied and emotional and there isn’t anywhere on the forms for that.

I have to answer whether I think people would be better off without me, whether I’d be better of dead.

Dark.

I answer honestly. I answer yes.

Do I know how I would do it?

No. I have no plan that I would follow or processes in place. It’s not like that for me and as much as I think I’m not worthy to be a mother sometimes I would never ever take myself out of my childs life, just like that.

But these two boxes don’t tally. If you have thoughts then you must have plans because that’s what the official form says and I guess training doesn’t cover any what ifs outside of that. Grown ups shouldn’t colour outside the lines. I try to explain but it comes out jumbled because frankly I find discussing the fact that sometimes it hurts so much that I want to die is pretty…ugh.

I explain how I have made it this far. I explain the revelation that came to me. Is it a revelation? I ask. In a room lit by strip lights and filled with the buzz of a 1990s computer and the stare of this woman who is there only to judge exactly how broken I am my conviction feels just as likely to collapse underneath me as my chair.

When I was pregnant I had everything that I ever wanted; a husband who is gorgeous has a wicked smile, brilliant sense of humour and kisses that make me melt, a baby in my belly, a lovely house in a lovely town, Cath Kidson wallpaper, two cats…everything.

And then there was all of that and a baby and that should have (could have?) just been the most amazing thing in the world. I had it all, the girl with everything.

Only my hormones went a bit mental and sent me a bit mental and made me think that I didn’t love my own baby and that I was going to throw her down the stairs and drown myself in the bath.

Every night for the first twelve weeks of her life as she lay on the husbands chest and learned to hold her tiny new head a little bit steadier on her neck or flex her little pink fingers around the corner of the blanket that cocooned her against her daddy I lay in a hot lavender oil bath. A bath I had been told to have daily by the midwives to help me heal after the birth, a bath that the husband made sure that I had because it was doctors orders.

A bath that I would sob into, hot tears rolling down my cheeks and splashing into the water that lapped at my chin.

I would lay there for a long time just staring at the tiles on the wall opposite me while my skin reddened and wrinkled and life carried on outside the locked door. If the baby cried I turned the taps on so that I couldn’t hear. I would slide down the smooth plastic behind my back until I was submerged, looking up at the blurred ceiling from underneath rippling water.

I didn’t want to come up. I had to stay there.

Every night.

And then there would be a noise or movement or something and time suddenly sped up and I pushed my way up to air and coughed and gasped and took hungry lungfuls of steam filled air and pushed the hair from my face. What the fuck? I don’t want this. I have to get out of here. I rip the plug out on its chain and clamber over the edge of the bath dripping all over the floor and my discarded clothes and some magazines and a forgotten dummy. I rub my hair aggressively with a towel before hanging it across my shoulders so that I can pick my way across the floor and click open the lock. I can’t be here. I have to go.

I leave wet footprints behind me all the way up the stairs in my hurry to get dry and shake the feeling that’s hanging over me. A feeling and a pressure and something outside of me, bigger than me, telling me I should have stayed under water.

Five minutes later, avoiding the damp shadow of my hurried path up, I walk shakily down stairs and into my family asleep on the sofa. The room smells of baby and the husband and the congratulations on your beautiful little girl flowers. I stand leaning against the door frame and watch the rise and fall of their chests in the half light, listen to their snuffled sleep sighs. I feel jealous. Empty. Nothing.

But I’m ok. They’re ok.

I had everything but something had made it sour, made me ill.

And now? Now we have a council house that is still unsafe after more than nine weeks of graft, debt, no job so no income…we lost it all but we are finding each other. Which is such a fucking cliche it makes me itch but its true.

I have a husband who has been my rock and we have a daughter who does love me and who I do love back.

When I was well and life was lovely and wrapped in Cath Kidston print and money and ease I was fine and then I wasn’t. But now look at all that has happened in the time since. The husband left his job, we lost our home and our money and our cats. He lost his wife and she lost herself. We left the lovely town and we fought and battled for housing until we got a total dive…

But we made it though. I made it through. Just how strong must I be to have done all of that while I was empty and shattered and broken and our world was falling apart?

She’s not taking notes anymore, her pen rests in the spine of the notebook and her head rests on her hand. She blinks. I take a breath and shuffle in my seat. I’ve more than said my piece.

Five slow seconds tick by. A dog barks outside. Someone comes and goes in the room next door. The screensaver starts up on the computer (it’s the fish one).

She ticks another box.

‘In our meeting we decided that something called behavioural activation would be best for you. It’s the step below CBT if you like. It’s all about getting you back into doing things slowly by planning on a time table. For example, on Monday you could try to wash up. That would do for a week. And then I will call you in two weeks and we can discuss your readiness to move towards more tasks until you’re functioning normally…’

Are you joking? How…wha…How can a timetable and chores see me beat this?

She carries on. In that room I managed to say more than I planned to and I saw it all more clearly than I ever have before.

Isn’t that more important than continuing the battle for some counselling? All I want is some counselling.

I washed up on Monday night. And then I cuddled my baby and tickled her to make her laugh so she would curl up with delight and nestle in tighter to my chest so I could bury my nose in her hair and smell her smell. I promised the husband that I can do this and we’ll be ok and I’ll be ok while I wrapped my fingers around his and rested my head on his shoulder.

Everything will be ok. It’s my family that will continue to see me through, nothing else.

Reach Out And Touch Me

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We have a game we play, just me and Beans. She will lean across the coffee table/chair/pile of toys/anything to pass me something while letting out the most exaggerated groan of stretching ever heard. She does it with one corner of her mouth turned up and laughter in her eyes. And then I mimic her action and her over the top streeeeeeeeeeeetch groan to take from her baby soft fist whatever it may be that she is proffering. And then we laugh.

We laugh because it’s silly and it’s funny and we’re the only ones that get the joke. The game works because no matter who instigates the first groan the other will be there on the other side with mirrored outstretched arm and open palm, ready to relieve the load.

Because that’s how this shit works, you reach out and you hope to god/the universe/everything that someone will be there, that your fingertips will stretch until they can stretch no more and finally make contact with warm skin on the other side.

Sometimes it is unquestionable, some people will always just be there, their own fingers outstretched before you have even straightened your elbow. Because they know and you know and you both just get it.

There is nothing quite like reaching out into the unknown, across a barren wasteland full of things that you don’t understand while your fingers scrabble and your nails claw at the earth desperately searching for something – someone – to cling to. Your skin becomes raw, your arm aches and your nails are broken and dirty but there has to be someone there. There just has to.

When you lay yourself bare all over again, admitting your deepest (darkest) feelings into the cold plastic of a telephone, hearing your voice echo down the line and fingers taptaptapping at keys recording everything that you’re saying in black and white, making it real. When you do that and find yourself with nothing but air to weave your grasping fingers through it hurts.

It hurts to say things out loud. It hurts as you try to find the right words, stumbling over hundreds of wrong ones on the way. As you force your mouth to form the right shapes so that the words can pass your lips and the truth can be told and your soul bared.

I don’t know why or how or what or when or why I can think terrible, awful things when I am near my daughter. Does there have to be a why? Isn’t it enough that it is and I’m telling you and it hurts?

There is no cure, the why and the how won’t cure me. I just need help.

Promising me something, making me wait those two weeks, every day wondering and waiting and hoping and hurting because today might be the day that finally the help appears and a hand closes around mine and things can start from now.

But it never is the day. I pleaded and cried and bared my all but I’m left empty handed, wearily flexing my fingers through nothingness. Because life depends on it, there is no life without it.

This Is Why

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So, what happens when you pen a lengthy and (hopefully) well thought out letter to the big boss man of the local NHS trust? When you try to articulate through your anger and explain how and why you feel that the wrong choices have been made and the wrong (ie: zero) care provided.

On the final day of the twenty five that, legally, a response has to be received a white envelope did indeed drop through my letterbox. Four sides of A4 that would make interesting reading to no one but me as they detailed every single doctors appointment that I attended from January 2011 to the present day. Words and dates and facts and excuses.

Why was a detailed care plan not set up before I had even given birth? Quite simply because it falls to the health visitor assigned to me to make said plans and unfortunately we had to cancel that appointment as I was in labour on the morning that she was due to visit. Although not something that’s particularly ideal (to say the least) to discuss between contractions or while crowning, it is being implied that the fault lies with me for not being available at that time.

Perhaps I should have crossed my legs.

Perhaps they should have written up a plan with me at the next earliest available opportunity?

Until the final paragraphs the letter continues in the same vain; documenting every single contact with GPs and services and insisting that I reported to be ‘feeling better’ and omitting at least another three pages worth of information about side effects and tears and begging and pleading and…

Finally, inches before the end of the last page the questions that I asked about my care are answered. No they say, my condition was not worsened or prolonged, yes they followed the guidelines set out by NICE. All this written not very clearly or transparently, making the hypercritical sentences that follow even harder to decipher. No, they haven’t caused me any harm or inconvenience by the treatment that I was given, but yes they are sorry for any harm or inconvenience that has been caused. No, I do not have a valid complaint, but yes my complaint has been partially upheld as it has highlighted the need for further training.

Eh?

Without going into the NICE guidelines, which I now know very well after pouring over them to check I wasn’t completely wrong, I can tell you that without a doubt they were not followed (antidepressants as second line of care following CBT/IPT or alongside, referral within one month and therapy/support no longer than three months following, communication to rule out the need for repeated assessments, support and understanding of the stigmas and emotional impact, support for family…).

I spoke to my community mental health worker (yes, I finally have one of those after refering myself) after I had received the letter and she immediately said that she would write a letter stating that the delay in my treatment and the lack of specialist advice I was given regarding my medication did indeed cause my condition to worsen and become more prolonged. She then went on to tell me that I will need to remain on my current dose of medication for at least one year before deciding whether or not I am ready to start the weaning process to come off it.

This means that at the earliest I will not be free of medication until the end of 2013. That’s nearly three years since I had Beans.

PND is a treatable and curable illness. It can be wiped out in a matter of months if it is caught early enough and treated correctly and with the right support. I saw the doctor to ask for help in February 2011 (according to that letter he ‘wasn’t worried, all feelings are normal but patient to report back in one week if still feeling the same’ and the notes from the appointment I made the following week ‘patient suffering from severe postnatal depression. Immediate treatment advised’. What had changed in a week?) I put myself in the right place to be given the right help to have not need to go through all of this.

I feel so much better than I did, I am coping with more, having less bad days and finally finding more self confidence with Beans. But I’m still not free. I wont be free until Beans is nearly three.

PND hasn’t just affected me, it has hugely impacted the husband, Beans, our families…Our lives are still not our own. The choice over when we can try for another baby doesn’t even belong to us any more, it’s down to how soon I can come off my medication.

It is no ones fault that I became ill, I don’t think that anyone deserves to be struck off or fired from their jobs. But. But it is clear that I have suffered in ways and for an amount of time that simply wasn’t necessary. It is clear that training is needed for all staff dealing with mental illness. PND is the number one reason of death for postnatal women in the UK. I have a daughter, she might need that care one day.

And for all of that I want a proper apology.

Absence

4 Replies

I’ve been here in spirit only for the last few weeks. Pining away for my blog like I used to pine for ex boyfriends; desperately wanting to tell them something but not being able to call them anymore. But nothing’s changed, my blog is still here. I could have written if I had wanted.

And I have written. There are snippets and essays and novels and doodles and stuff everywhere. It all remains unpublished though.

At the beginning of April, Beans was with the husband while I was far, far away at my parents. And then the husband felt poorly and I found myself offering to swoop in and rescue him, take the toddler away and allow him to rest and recuperate.

It was an out of body experience, before I realised what I was saying and what it meant Beans was here and the husband was there. What have I done?

My first day alone with her was terrifying. I scraped by piece by piece, hour by hour.

I just need to make it through to 9:30am.

I just need to make it through to 10:30am.

I just need to make it through to 11:30am.

…

I made it. I more than made it.

Since then, with intermittent visits from the husband Beans has stayed with me. Because I don’t want to let her go.

So why haven’t I blogged? I’ve been telling myself that it’s because I’m too busy, too tired, too focused on other things. While all of that is true, none are the real reason.

Truthfully, I don’t want to embarrass myself or jinx anything if I whisper that things have been ok only for them to rocket back into a downward spiral again.

Most importantly, for the first time I have been enjoying being a mummy. Savouring all the time I’ve spent with my nutty toddler and her kisses and cuddles and giggles and tantrums. Everything else has taken a backseat and all my energy has gone into pushing aside all my worries and negative thoughts, like a heavy velvet curtain, to let the light in.

I no longer see myself as that girl who has postnatal depression that got so bad she didn’t move for a week and thought that she was dying. I’m that girl who is fighting, recovering, living. Laughing. 

And that girl is back.

What’s That Smell?

7 Replies

Oh…it’s me.

Antidepressants, although a complete necessity for me at the moment, offer many delightful side effects that no one really talks about. And why not I say? What do you mean they’re a bit, well, embarrassing? It’s good to share!

Ignore the first few weeks when you feel not unlike you’ve been hit by a big truck in an even bigger way. Ignore the sleep problems and the terrifying dreams and the boring bits. It’s the weird stuff that I’m talking about. Here’s my top 10:

1) Nausea. As in perminent nausea. All. The. Time. It’s like being pregnant, only without any of the perks of being pregnant. The slightest thing will make you throw up a bit in your mouth. The general feeling of being queasy never leaves. Yummy.

2) Dry mouth. Excuse me while I peal my parched tongue off the roof of my mouth before I can answer you…no, wait, I’ll be just a second…hang on…

3) Constipation. Because there’s nothing quite like feeling pretty sick and really needing a poo only to find that you can’t go.

4) Wind. You may be so constipated you feel like your bum is going to fall off but you will have wind that can propel you for miles without your feet ever needing to touch the floor. This wind can be uncontrollable at times and will sneak out of even the most clenched buttocks, usually in an opportune quiet moment or when there is someone of above average attractiveness in the vacinity. Or when you’re in a lift. Or when you laugh hard. Or..

5) Pupils like saucers. Honestly officer, I haven’t taken anything illegal.

6) The concentration span of a retarded goldfish. See me sat there staring into space? That’s because my mind is so busy flitting from one thing to the next it’s all I can manage. Watch TV, zone out, come back round ten minutes later wondering why Eastenders is finished. was Eastenders even on? And to make it worse, even while your distracted mind struggles to hold a chain of thought it can somehow managed to cling onto:

7) Stuck record. If a song gets into my head, it’s stuck there. For hours. No rhyme or reason for how it got lodged in there and it could be anything. Not so bad if it’s something half decent. Today it’s Mysterious Girl. To say it makes me stabby is an understatement.

8) The sweats. One second I’m fine, the next, holy shit am I sitting on top of a FIRE?! It’s so HOT in here *mops brow*. Sweat seeps out of literally every pore on my body as I shuffle uncomfortably and hope no one looks at me until I’ve dried off.

9) Heart palpitations. Hours of fun on an otherwise quiet and boring evening. Thud…thud…thud…thud………………..THUD…thud…thud…thudthudthud. ‘My heart totally stopped then, look, feel!’

10) Lack of libido. None, ziltch, nada, nuffink. Ugh, don’t touch me. But that’s a post all of its own.

[Shameless plea: The MAD (mum and dad) blog awards are open for nominations and if you want to make me squeal with delight it will only take a minute. You can nominate your favorite blogs here.]