Happy Mother’s Day
Hope everyone has a happy Mother’s Day!
My mother is doing a little bit better at the hospital. If you’re not on my Facebook profile (and you should be as I don’t bite!), I was given some shitty news from my stepfather that turned out to be a lie. He was either told the wrong information, or he intentionally gave me the wrong information, and that is really an awful thing to do to someone. So I went into panic mode. I was really afraid that my mother was going to die. Then I went to see her on the 8th. She was stable, her body is fighting the infections she had (pneumonia and sepsis with some fungal infection). She was asleep because of the infections and is now on morphine to stop the pain. But she is alive, she is stable, and I want to repair my relationship with my mother. This bad-ass attitude that I have towards her is really for the birds and I have to get my affairs in order.
As of May 7th, for the next few months, I have a new shrink. I’m not crazy over him, but he seems to want to help. First thing he wants to do is stick me in the institution and have some observations and test run. Of course he does. What the hell? Am I the first schizophrenic patient these shrinks have ever encountered? Oh well. Might as well get it over with while I still have time off from work.
Have a fun, safe Sunday, everyone!
Summer Sunshine
Not much has been going on with me. Chloe had a good birthday, and I had a pretty good
vacation. I wished it didn’t have to end. I didn’t to come back to my daily, depressing life. I guess James just treats me better than Dennis does. He always has. So why didn’t I marry him? The baggage. I have enough baggage of my own, I don’t need to be supporting someone else who was emotionally a mess at the time. Rough, I know.
Finals were yesterday. I got them all graded and ready to put into the grade book, but to live up to my reputation as the “bitch on wheels” at the University, I won’t be putting them online until Monday afternoon. If then. hehe. The students will live, I promise.
Even though the summer semester is over for students, I have paper work that I have to do all next week and the week after. We have two weeks to get the syllabus ready for Orientation in two weeks, plus approve of a text book. There are so many things professors do on the time out part of the school schedule, that it really made me appreciate my kinder professors that I had.
I haven’t felt well since I returned home from New York City. I just want to sleep and watch TV. That’s really not right since I know that my family depends on me, but I have been super depressed. To make matters worse, I’ve been letting things go all month long, and that’s just creeping up on me at the end of the month. I don’t know what to do with myself, other than keep taking medication that isn’t working, and continuing with a routine that doesn’t seem to be helping me at all. Mostly, I am contemplating my life choices and wondering if I made the right decisions years ago. It’s not like I had any real friends that I could bounce ideas off of back then. Most of the people I knew wanted me to fail, and I secretly knew that. But I humored them and played dumb (I’m really good at that), all while taking notes and making observations (another thing I am good at). By the time I had gathered enough evidence, I just threw in the towel. It wasn’t worth writing up a huge essay over, but this caused the nothings to think that they had won. Whatever. It wasn’t a game, to me, but why should I take away their fun? Let them find out in the end what they really are.
Still, many people have told me they don’t understand why I am not happy. They don’t? I don’t have an amazing life, just because it’s comfortable. I often wonder how it would have turned out had I gone through with what I was really planning to do. Where would I be now? Would I still be a nurse working in the psych ward, or would I be a potential patient to one? Maybe I really do not want to know the answer to that.
Mother’s Day. Yet another holiday created by the Hallmark corporation to stereotype women. :0) Just kidding! I don’t live with that type of an attitude! So, for a simple treat, I am going to go through my day, from the time I woke up until now. I realise that even though I share a lot on this page, I don’t share enough. If I share too much, I am accused of putting my family in danger. If I don’t share enough, I risk some bozo claiming that I am lying. I have a funny story about that, but today is not the day to post that. Today I am going over how the majority of my summer days are going to go. After getting the little ones fed and off to their toys, I sat down at the computer and figured up what all I needed to purchase and download. I had three seasons of a show that I needed to get downloaded, and I got right on that. The next part involved me fiddling with the site while trying to correct my error that I keep getting here. I gutted the site and started over from scratch, except for my WP data base. That ate up twenty minutes. While I was waiting for files to delete and upload, I sorted the laundry and took out some shirts, panties and socks to change into tomorrow, for court. Yes, I have court tomorrow. It’s nothing that I really want to get into yet, but I will in due time. I also set out my new inhaler, keys and synced my iPhone so that I’ll have something to listen to while I’m waiting to pass the time tomorrow. I dumped my extra coins in Chloe’s tin piggy bank, and folded and put away some clean laundry that I have been putting off for a few days. I listened to fifty-seven songs on one of my favourite playlists on iTunes, and sorted out my papers for court tomorrow. I have to remember to pack my meds and some water and ginger ale for the afternoon. In case I become ill during court.
Good thing that Dennis is fixing dinner tonight, and caring for the dishes. He’s going to fix the bed while I am taking my bath tonight. Work, work, work. I’m glad University is out for the next three months, so I don’t have exams to attend or papers to grade. Although I would rather be trotting down the isles of medical work stations at the University and cutting arteries on goats for surprise features of exams, and reading grad students suck-up papers than preparing to go to court over something that truly has had my heart tied in knots. It has me second guessing things. Am I doing the right thing? Well, at one time, I think I was conscience enough to not want to be put in a mental asylum, so I assume that I will always never want to go in one. How could I put someone else through it for the rest of their lives? Some one that I care so deeply about? But do I have the will power to take care of another person? Do I have the strength to be the person I once was, or am I going to lay down on the job simply because a few years have passed?
I’m afraid.
Dennis is going away this weekend, on an artist job thing, and I will be alone with my medicines and sickness and children from Friday through Monday. If court is short, I will be, basically, one child more in my care. I have been feeling better since kicking the risperidone, but for how much longer can I possibly fake it? There are so many questions, and I have no answers. I cannot come up with any on my own. I have searched my soul and the text books of my life, that I have been penning since I was eleven, and the answers are not there. That tells me that I am on a new path, one I have never had to take before, and I am afraid. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of going it alone. Afraid, afraid, afraid.
And that’s not being fair to my family or the people who love and need me.
Leaders aren’t supposed to be afraid. Leaders aren’t supposed to be questioning themselves at the time of a new path to go down. Leaders take lead, and lead their family down that new path with courage and strength. Here I sit packing Vicodin for a court date in the morning, telling myself that I will do fine in the court room as long as I have my narcotics. It’s like spinach to Popeye.
I think the best thing for me to do is go and enjoy myself. It is my day after all! Mommie Dearest was on earlier. What a movie to show on Mother’s Day, huh? There’s a thriller/slasher flick from the late 70′s/early 80′s titled Mother’s Day about some women who get lost in the woods and some demented hillbillies chop ‘em up. I think it was made before the days of Jason. Whenever it was made, it’s one of a thousand reasons why I will not go into the woods to this very day. Only thing better to watch? Sybil. Yeah. Let’s get the child abuse themed movies on today in honor of our mothers! Because nothing says I love you Mom! like watching horrific depictions of child abuse or slashers! Even if it’s watered down with Hollywood-isation, it’s the idea that counts. Remember and celebrate your mother with love, not evil moms or hillbillies gone wild with chainsaws. It’s her day, after all, and mom does a lot for you and everyone in your life. Even if you can’t see what she has done, you know she has been there. You’re gonna miss her when she’s gone, or if she went on strike. I say this from experience.
I must be living on some alternate planet and time line. The doctor gave me Vicodin yesterday. Sixty of them. For the next three months. I’m screwed. Three refills. Three chances to fall from grace. A new chance to fall in another way: to selling the shit out of the pub. That isn’t me, but the alternative of taking the medicine when I do not need it scares me. There is a chance that I could get addicted. There is a chance that if I gulp down the pills, I will be searching for more the day after I have them refilled. What if I drive while under the influence? Or wander?
I have a doctor appointment after work (yes, I’m breaking the rules, blogging from work, so what?), and I am afraid of that appointment as well as what I know he will want me to do. He wants me to go back for observations and other medically unnecessary procedures that I feel uncomfortable in doing. Maybe I should bring that up? Hey, if he can get out of writing me prescriptions that make me feel comfortable, maybe I can get out of psychiatric counseling because it makes me uncomfortable! It’s worth a shot!
Why aren’t people commenting here? Whose leg do I have to hump to get some real comments? Not the spammers that I have to delete every day cuz ID won’t install a simple captcha!
End of an Era
It’s no secret. I take meds. I take them in the morning, I take them at night. I take them for diabetes, I take them for psychosis. I have taken them for the past four years of my life, with little to no change in the outcome of my mind, starting with the death of my best friend Christopher (oddly enough, I dreamed of him last night). My life still sucks, I still sense things I am not supposed to, whether I am gulping down drugs or dry-docked for the night. My nights and days are the same whether I am on my meds or not, and it has come time where meds are starting to become a chore for me. I feel no therapeutic effects from the medications anymore. To me that’s a signal to either stop the meds cold turkey or find some that do agree with me.
What I am specifically referring to are the psychotropic drugs that I have been on for the past six months or so. They were supposed to make my life better, but I still see it as major suckage, with senses on overload, and my primary care physician is no longer comfortable with prescribing psychotropic drugs for me and wants a psychiatrist to exclusively prescribe them, so I am stopping the meds with the honor of my primary care physician in agreement only because it’s determined that I can no longer afford to see a psychiatrist. Either financially or emotionally. So I no longer need the psychotropic drugs.
See how pharmaceuticals work in this day and age?
I didn’t know a cure was that close!
This also cures my sleeping disorder, but only through my primary care physician. I can’t afford to see a psychiatrist on a regular basis, that’s $40 per session. But Byron, the neighbourhood drug dealer, doesn’t charge for sessions, just a 10% mark up from pharmacy prices, and a bigger guarantee that I will fall asleep or he’ll be back with something stronger the next night! Hey, I wonder if he has something to cure my nightmares while he’s at it?! Probably! There’s no end to what I can get cured when I am in total, one-hundred-percent of the drugs that are dispensed to me from Byron. Now, the only difference between Byron and my pharmacy? They have a license to make the psychotropic drugs I need legal to be sold to me. They care about me as much as Byron does; MONEY! and REFERRAL! Oh, and don’t report them for the mouse carcass in the middle shelf of medication, and we’re sitting pretty. Yes, everyone I know is doing something against the rules and laws. No, I have never turned one in, yet.
What has come to annoy me the most is that I had no warning that I was going to have to get the psychiatrist to renew and start refilling these prescriptions, that, for the past four years, my primary care physician has filled, and was the original prescriber, without issue, for four years. Then all of a sudden, the rug is pulled out from under me. This caused much bitchage from my mother, whose phone I had to use because my better half is using our land line for god-knows-what, and I am out of minutes on my cell phone. Unless doc would take calls at 5pm, I can’t communicate with him through the cell phone, and seeing that he won’t even honor and renew prescriptions that he has been the primary writer of for the past four years, until my appointment on May 10th (a week away), then I don’t see him bending a finger to try and resolve this anytime soon.
No, that is not a typo.
Doc could have refilled my prescriptions with one more refill, that would have lasted me through this up coming visit, and then dropped the bomb on me. But since returning hom from Las Vegas and since I was starting on the road to recovery, and we can’t have that, I am in the process of changing psychiatrists, one to suit the needs of my higher up, and I did not have the knowledge to ask on my final shrink visit April 24th. No warning. No letter. No nothing stating that doc was too much of a pussy insecure to finish my prescriptions on his own. It doesn’t come as a shock to me, just as an annoyance, as I have been getting my pain medications from a pain specialist/weight loss asshole doctor for over a year now, because my primary is unable to write narcotics for someone in chronic pain. Yet anything my mother asks from him, he does. No matter what. Bent over backwards with the lube in hand, I might add. This just breeds her asking constant questions of me that I cannot answer, so the normal answer is, “I don’t know.” or “He doesn’t know.” and this ultimately pisses her off.
Don’t tell me seeing a therapist is going to be another one of those life-long things that I will forever fear being locked up in a nuthouse for for the rest of my life. I couldn’t live like that.
I stopped updating. The entire time I told myself that I would write again, only when I was ready and not before. I was ready many times, but I could not force myself to sit at the computer and write. Just write. Just close my eyes, think of my day, open my eyes and type for all that it was worth. I use to find that so therapeutic.
Then I relapsed. Then I relapsed again and ended up in the hospital.
Then I had the two positive drug tests and I felt ashamed. Ashamed not because there was drug use in my system, but because I wasn’t just destroying my life, I was also taking my best friend down with me, and he was the one who provided the drugs. I forced him to provide the drugs. I belittled him when he asked me why. I told him that I had a back ache or that I had a knee pain and all that could settle my storm. This was someone who loved me and was taking care of me, or so he thought, and here I was, verbally abusing him and running him into the ground.
That wasn’t me.
Taking a look around the hospital ER room after an IV full of benedryl, fluids and an antidote, I was coherent again and able to take in my surroundings. My friend was sitting in a chair, in the corner of the room, looking scared. I quietly asked what happened and he said I was “rolling” for three days. On the third day, or that night, I started begging for help. I had not been eating. I had only taken one dose. Then I started seeing stars inside and floating. This went on for three days, and he had to call in to work, and he had to deal with my husband coming by asking for me. He thought he was doing me a favour by keeping me hidden from friends and family because they shouldn’t see me like that.
And I shouldn’t be remembered like that.
Remembered? The next seven words made my hair stand up on the back of my neck: “I thought you were going to die.”
Two days later I walked out of the hospital with him, holding hands.
I made some affirmations right then and there. No more drugs. No more asking for them. No more brow-beating one of the truly few friends that I have for drugs. No more. No more. No more. No more pushing others to do drugs with me. I didn’t pick up a Bible and become religious in that time frame, but I became more spiritual. I scared someone who loved me dearly, and I should not have done that. On the long, silent drive home, he said that I knew I was dying. That he could not sleep because I might stop breathing and he didn’t know CPR.
So I asked, “What now?” he shrugged. Sitting outside my house with a small overnight bag on my lap, I leaned over and hugged him. I held him in my arms. Our silent tears were all that we needed to realise just how real this all was.
I slowly went back on my prescriptions. For a day or so, I was too afraid to take anything, thinking it was an over dose of one of my prescriptions. I basked in the warmth of my daughter and sons showering me with “Yay! Mommy is home!” and my husband’s look of relief before asking where I was. I promised to tell him when the time was right. I sat down and did glitter crafts with my boys and little girl. I diapered dolls with my little girl. I wore a pink gem stoned tiara and dressed up as the queen and the boys were my little princes. I got out my old pins and mounted them on a framed cork board with my husband. I wrote in the journal that sits on the night stand. I watched TV endlessly with him. I played video games with the boys. I played Nintendogs with Chloe. I returned all the phone calls that I had been thinking about getting back to. I bought my mother scented candles and Godiva chocolates. I bought my father a stuffed rabbit with chocolates. I told my parents that I appreciate them. I wore the hoop-diamond-drop earrings that my Nick bought me for Christmas on my 18th Christmas. I put on the simple silver ring for my wedding band. I took nothing for granted anymore. I ordered a new journal and some stickers with Chloe and we have been making little scenes in the pages of my journal.
I take nothing for granted now that I know it can all be taken away from me so quickly. I never would have known my life was ending.
The next part I did Sunday evening. I went to my friend’s work and watched him take drinks to several of the tables, back a fourth. He didn’t even see me there. Shame that he was working on that day. I ordered a glass of merlot and waited. When he delivered it to me, I stood and held out my arms to him. We were instantly pulled together in a tight embrace. I whispered in his ear that I loved him and thanked him for being there, for letting me live another day. When the hugging was over, I asked what was in that final pill. I specifically said nothing harder than a barb. He said he wasn’t sure, he’d gotten it from the john that was always asking for me. I sighed and told him that we could still be friends, in fact, I had made him a cake that he needed to come over and celebrate with me with after his shift. He gave me a wide-eyed look. “You know what…” he began. I nodded. “I know it’s your birthday. Happy twenty-fifth! Come by after your shift for cake and ice cream!” I replied. His face immediately brightened.
I celebrated my friend’s birthday with him, just the two of us, just as he had envisioned it. I’m not going to lose a friend because of an accident. I apologised to him for all that I had done, and I hoped that he would forgive me. He says he has. We should go on an adventure. We will. Just not this week, or the next. I need to rest up.
It’s good to be alive.
Off to The Clinic
I have to be at the doctor’s in an hour. The situation here is strained at best. Everyone wants to do this or that, they don’t want to sit down and discuss what is going on vs. what it is doing to us as a family. At this point, from what they have been exposed to, I wouldn’t be surprised if my kids grew up to be substance abusers, or if they’re won’t become one in a few years. I know I would.
Actually, I was exposed to much worse as a child, as when my parents got done physically abusing each other, they turned on me, the only minor in the house and there fore the only person they thought could never tell what happened to her. Right. I told everyone I came across, except it all fell on deaf ears. Nothing was done.
Here’s hoping that I am still sane enough to be sent home from the clinic.
Something weird happened as I was finishing this entry. My keyboard went nuts and started deleting everything. I had to take its batteries out. I don’t have the time to check it right now, but I will when, and if, I get home.
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