Present Tense - 4/17

It has been hard wanting to write a post.  A lot has been going on and I've not had time to digest things, much less write about them.  When I last wrote in January, Jessica was toggling between good and bad days.  Well, bad became the overriding mood.  She just about completely stopped all medications and her anxiety deepened.  I practically begged her to just try the meds again.  She said she felt better not being on them, which I have such a hard time understanding because her outward actions seemed to indicate the opposite.  I can only presume that in her mind she felt relief.  Again, externally it seemed the opposite.  She began her pacing rituals again, which I'm not sure I've talked about before, but basically consist of her pacing back and forth while rubbing her hands on her thighs and vocalizing everything she was worried about.  This devolved into her having "thoughts" (which I think are auditory hallucinations but it is hard to know) that she needed to leave to get better.  She started again with how the house we are renting has caused her mental problems.

It is so hard to see her suffer.  I try to reassure her but there is now way to do so.  There is no logic that can convince her that she isn't a bad person who needs to be away from her family.  There is no reasoning that can help her be at ease.

All this culminated with her being hospitalized for a week right before Easter.  She asked me to take her to the hospital, but once there she decided to leave.  I will write the details later, but the police and courts became involved.  Her release was contingent upon her agreeing to take medication and she has been assigned a social worker.

I'd like to say things are looking up now but they aren't. The medication seems to be working in that she is not in an acute phase where she has to leave and all that, but she never feels peace.  She is struggling to continue at her job - but the prospect of her being home alone terrifies her.  She met with her psychiatrist yesterday.  The guy knows nothing about her since she has met him twice in her life and he really only knows her by reading the notes and charts from the hospital. He put her into a tailspin by being incredibly unfeeling towards her, bluntly telling her she would be sick the rest of her life and she should get used to it.  This may be true, but the manner in which he dealt with her, his lack of empathy or sympathy, his imperious demeanor all worked to undermine her.  He was not there to talk to her and help her, he was there to check her med levels and adjust dosages.  It is a terrible excuse for treatment.

Jessica is feeling bleak.  She remembers what is like to be happy and is afraid she never will be again.  She remembers what it is like to fell smart and confident, and worries she will never feel that way again.

I spend my time worrying about her.  Sometimes I feel like I can't do one more day.  I've stopped being able to have friends.  I don't go to any support groups.  I feel so bad for her and yet I can do nothing to help her. I try to keep a lid on all this and protect the kids.  Sometimes it is so hard, but I try to remember there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Back to the Hospital

Cont'd from Lost and Found

The last thing I wanted was to call the police, but I had no idea what else to do.  I couldn’t leave her in the road, in the cold, sitting half in a snow bank and half on the wet pavement.  I couldn’t get her in the car myself.

Reluctantly I dialed 911 again.

“The police will be there shortly,” the tinny voice said.

I hung up and waited.

While we waited I worried.  I hadn’t wanted to call the police because even though our local police aren’t known for being abusive or for overreacting you never know.  What if she didn’t respond and they tasered her?  What if they tried to move her and she resisted?  Would Jason and I have to watch her get slammed to the ground and handcuffed? 

 It took about ten minutes for the police to show up.  I told them what was going on, about our earlier hospital visit, about her leaving the house while we were sleeping.  Jason stood next to me as we spoke.  I didn’t want him there but I didn’t know what else to do with him.  And he probably wouldn’t have left my side anyway.

Both police officers walked up to Jessica.  She still sat crossed legged on the edge of the road.  Jason and I watched from a distance. 

“Ma’am, we need to get you off the road and inside.”

She didn’t reply.  Or move.  One of the officers put his hand on her shoulder and shook her.  She didn’t respond.  He shook her a little harder.  Still no response.  I stood by, hands in my pockets, sheepishly watching.

The officers talked quietly to each other then walked over to me.

“We’d like to get her in your car and then take her to the hospital.  We will meet you there. Once we get her looked at we’ll know how to proceed.”

Jason and I got into the car and I slowly moved it next to her.  I told Jason to stay in the car while I got out and opened the back door.  I told him he shouldn’t be worried but he might be upset watching us try to get her in the car, so it would be best if he looked away.  The two officers and I approached Jessica.  They put their hands under her armpits and tried to lift her.  Her limp body was hard to move.  I tried to help by picking up her legs but I don’t think I was helping much.  We somehow dragged/moved her to my car.  They slid her upper body into the backseat and her legs were sprawled out the door.  One of the officers moved to the other side and was trying to pull her in far enough so we could push her legs in.  As he pulled, her shirt rose up exposing her braless breasts.  I reached in to tug it back down and thought how humiliated Jessica – the Jessica I had known before today – would have been for this to happen.  I kept hold of her shirt while we pushed her legs in and hoped Jason hadn’t seen his mother exposed and catatonic and being shoved into the back of a car. 

We got her into the car, finally.  You would be surprised how hard it is to move a limp person.  I followed the police cars to the hospital and pulled into the emergency lane.  The police were already out and talking to the hospital staff.  An orderly was rolling a wheelchair our way.  Once again I helped wrestle Jessica’s limp body, this time out of the car and into the wheelchair.  They wheeled her inside while Jason and I went to park the car.

I held his hand as we walked from the parking lot and into the emergency room.

“It’ll be okay, buddy,” I said even though I had no idea if this was true.

Present Tense - 1/11

Things have been looking up a little lately.  Although I’m not sure if Jessica has been taking all of her meds, she is at least sleeping a little better.  She seems a less anxious.  I can usually tell by her eyes.  When she gets worse, her eyes change.  I can’t describe it but they become almost weirdly sharp.  When she has had been hospitalized her eyes look like someone else’s.  I’m not sure that makes sense to anyone but me.  It’s almost like her eyes change by degree until they are completely not hers.  Right now, her eyes look good.  They look Jessica’s.  

Present Tense - 1/6

So we have come to this again – Jessica says the house is making her sick and she has to leave.  This is a recurring theme when Jessica starts feeling worse, especially the needing to leave part (which the Past Tense entries have talked about some).  Jessica is convinced the house we are renting is making her sick.  Not physically sick, but mentally.  She says she received messages before we moved in that we shouldn’t, but she ignored them.  We moved into the house a little over a year ago.  The house is oldish – built in the 60s – but in pretty good shape; it has been kept up pretty well and the landlord does her best to keep working on upgrading things that need it. 

I think part of the reason Jessica blames the house is because it was about five months after moving in that she was hospitalized (the events covered in the continuing Past Tense entries).  She thinks she was mentally fine leading up to our move.  She wasn’t.  She was convinced that a huge destructive event was going to happen in March 2012 and that we were soon to be living in a semi-post apocalyptic world.  She spent months and over a thousand dollars buying supplies – much of which she tried to hide from me.  She even sold a ring of mine without telling me in order to get money to buy supplies.  She also made many tearful calls to her sister in Hawaii begging her to leave the island because she was sure in March 2012 it would be devastated by a tsunami. 

Obviously she was not well.  The thing is, she was never thrilled about moving into the house - she wanted us to move our family of five into a tiny duplex because it was a little cheaper and a lot newer. She says the house is old and junky (it is not junky and the kids love living in a real house like they used to before we had to sell ours), yet she will do nothing to make it better.  She won’t hang pictures.  She won’t decorate.  At the time when we were deciding where to move to, she was at a point where her mind was cloudy and she didn’t trust her judgment and she told me she would agree with what I thought was best.  While that worked at the time, I see that as she is becoming less well, my decision to move into the house has given her illness something to grab onto, something to use as a reason she has to leave.  She says I shouldn’t think of it as her leaving me or the kids, but as her leaving the house.   Rationally I know that if we were in the tiny duplex or had never moved, she’d have come up with some other reason she has to leave.  Sometimes it is hard to keep that in mind.

 I know this is her illness talking, but it is so hard to keep that thought present.  I find myself so angry at her, and if she does somehow find a way to leave (monetarily her illness has cost us everything so I have no idea how she could afford to leave), I don’t know how I will be able to keep my feelings about her and her illness separate.  I am afraid for the kids, especially Jason the youngest. 

I feel like I’m getting to the point where I can’t do anymore.  She won’t regularly take her meds, nor will she take the prescribed dosages.  If she does leave I’m not sure where that will leave me.  I’m not sure how I can subject the kids to her knowing she isn’t trying to help herself.  I’m not sure of anything.

Present Tense - 1/4

Even before mental illness was an issue in my life, I have never been fond of the holiday season.  I love Thanksgiving, but Christmas and New Years have always been a time to survive, not a time I looked forward to.  I’ve never been good at buying presents, perhaps because I’ve never been at a point where the prospect of spending money on presents hasn’t been stressful. 

Now, with us trying to survive on one teacher salary and the money Jessica makes at her part time retail job, the stress of present buying is omnipresent.  It’s not that I want to lavish my kids with all sorts of crazy presents; I just want to give them enough so Christmas can seem somehow normal.  I don’t try to match what their peers get, and I don’t want to and couldn’t anyway.   I don’t want the kids to feel like we are no longer middle class.  We are, I guess, but barely hanging in there.  I want the kids to enjoy themselves, even though I realize I make it harder for them to do so since they can sense my tension and ill feelings.

Adding to the financial stress is of course how everything affects Jessica.  She did pretty well over the holidays, even though there were some bumps.  She was just about in tears over the Christmas tree because she felt the decorations were lacking and no one wanted to even decorate it. That is only partly true; my 16 and 18 year old sons didn’t want to decorate the tree, but Jason, my 11 year old was into it, at least at first.  Jessica’s anxiety and overwhelming control issues (which peak when she is stressing) made him lose interest.

 

But we made it through Christmas. 

On Christmas day we began our planned for trip to my mother-in-law’s house – a ten hour drive.  I was not looking forward to this because I didn’t know if Jessica would be able to handle it – all three of the boys stuffed into the back of the car for ten hours seemed like a recipe for disaster.  Jessica was very fearful and anxious – saying she had a bad feeling about the trip.  She was fearful of the drive, of the car breaking down, of the weather.  And yet she felt that since mother was counting on us being there that we had to go.  My fear was that if Jessica did get to a tipping point from the stress of the drive and her symptoms got worse (if she started hearing voices or whatever) we would be hundreds of miles from home and probably on a highway in the middle nowhere.  And then there was of course the week to be spent at my mother-in-law’s house – while Jessica and her mother get along, her mother is a huge stressor for Jessica.  Luckily my fears were for nothing.  While the drive was sometimes a struggle for everyone, the ten hours in the car was not the apocalypse I had thought it might be.  The kids did a good job not killing each other and Jessica was able to handle the ride well too.  At her mother’s house, while Jessica did have her moments, she overall felt pretty well.  We made the return trip without any major problems.

New Year’s Eve depressed me.  We used to have friends we did things with – family parties we would go to.  Not anymore.  Jessica’s illness has left us pretty isolated. I can’t blame it all on her illness, but her illness has been a large part.  Jessica has slowly pulled herself away from almost of her friends.  She also can’t stand being in crowds for very long.  She says she gets affected by “entities” that are attached to people.  I’ve also found myself pulling away from friends because I can’t do the normal things of life that people do.  Whatever the reason, we’ve found ourselves alone on New Year’s Eve for the last few years.  Jessica was in her room when the ball dropped; the two older boys were out with friends, so Jason and I whooped it up while watching Dick Clark. 

But the holidays are over and we survived.

Housekeeping

Just a note on the organizational structure of the blog.  I've created another page that will have the all of the longer posts that build upon one another.  This way, if you want to read them together you don't have to work your way backwards. It also will come in handy for new readers.

You will notice the link for this page is called,  "Past Tense in Total."

Present Tense - 12/4

One thing I’m worried about with this blog is that through telling my side of the story I’ll sound like some kind of super-supportive saint who is always behaving perfectly instead of just a person dealing with life as best he can.  I don’t always react perfectly or even well to some of the situations that occur.  It can be hard to hold it together.  Over Thanksgiving I did pretty well.  Jessica wasn’t feeling well, I knew this going in, and so I had it in my head that I had to be in control of myself.  I had to keep up whatever front would work to give my sons a happy holiday.  It can be easier to do that for an event – it’s kind of like getting psyched up for the big game. 

Day to day living is harder.  Sometimes I am so angry at Jessica that I want to scream.  I know she is sick, I know she doesn’t want to feel bad, yet I get mad.  I’ve been told this is normal.  People dealing with loved ones who have physical ailments such as cancer often have the same feelings. 

Yesterday was a bad day.  Bad for Jessica -- the night before she once again skipped a dose of Geodon in her off and on quest to be drug free.  This caused her to be unable to sleep and for her anxiety to spike.  It was a bad day for me too.  I was tired because when Jessica can’t sleep she also can’t stop herself from waking me and telling me her fears and concerns.  So, neither of us was in a good place when Jason starting having a tantrum about some school related project.  I threatened to ground him from sports if he didn’t stop, which caused him to storm out of the room.  Jessica was livid with my threat, telling me that my threats didn’t help but only resulted in him escalating his behavior.  At this point I just wanted to run away.  To just leave and never come back and when I walked out of the room Jessica yelled to me, “Please don’t walk away. I need you here with me.”  When she is feeling bad she hates for me to be away from her, even if it is in the next room.  I started losing my temper and told her I couldn’t take being tied to her.  I stomped around like a two year old and slammed a door and said again that I couldn’t take it.  Jessica started crying and I calmed down.  I hugged her and she started telling me how much she didn’t want to feel bad, and that she was scared and while I held her and wanted to help so much of me was still so mad.  I shoved all that anger and frustration back down and put on my game face.  But I’m no saint, I can’t always do this right and some days I know that more than others.