Post-Stalker Quandry

Did I say quandry?

I meant "darkest pits of hell I just want to die because nothing is safe and what is the point in continuing I feel so disgusting I wish I could scrub this off me" despair.

The blackness descends again and again and again and nothing can lift it because there is nothing left that can give me any hope. 

This blog gave me hope. 

And now its gone.

And I am thrown between wanting desperately to be able to write my story in complete honesty so that one day my kids will know that mamma did everything possible to be a good mamma and when she fucked it up, this is why.  So that other people who are dealing everyday with the same fuckingshitsonofabitch nightmare of crazy that I deal with might have some microscopic sense of relief that they are not alone. So that when I write, what I write is on record, and I am therefore more accountable for my actions than if I wrote in seclusion.  Relapse is easier if the whole intertweebs dont know about it.

(Whole intertweebs. That is, all 10 of you.)

But, you know, evil narcissistic stalker.

How can I write anything about my children knowing that the crazy bitch I want to shield my children from is reading it all? After all, if I wanted her to have updates, I would be sending them to her. Which I am not. Because she is a psycho. An "under-the radar psycho" one of my friends called her, for on the outside she looks completely normal. But she's not.

What is the point in continuing to write when my voice has to be censored to protect my little family from unwanted intrusions?  What I write loses its meaning, loses its power and loses its ability to help anyone, myself most of all.

So I wonder and I feel sick to my stomach and I'm climbing back into bed and I dont know what to do because its all fucked up and all those painful moments of 3 years ago come flooding back and I rage and I know its about to get a whole lot worse because, hello, dosage increase tomorrow.

Advice, anyone? Because I am in no way capable of thinking clearly about this.

Dear Stalker (or, why you can fuck off now you crazy bitch)

Really, I should watch what I say, for it will surely come and bite me on the ass. A 24 hour turnaround is rather sudden ass-biting though.

I made a comment an another blog yesterday, about how I didnt care who read my blog because I didnt care what people thought.  This is true. I dont give a rats ass what you think of me. 

I *do* care, however, when someone I have deliberately and with good reason removed from my life somehow finds (or is given the address of - and I'm looking at you, other in-law family members) this blog and reads it. Silently. Like a stalker. With intent.

She's even reading it right now.  Yes, she is. Peering in through the windows from the bushes. Getting ready to phone me in a muffled voice and say "I know what you did last summer".

My mother in law.

In her narcissistic self-righteous wisdom, she decided 3 years ago that it was perfectly acceptable to take my children away from me, without my permission (I was begging you not to, do you remember that Anne?) and against my husbands express desires (he said only if I was completely ok with it, remember?)  And then, then, she refused to acknowledge that she had done anything wrong whatsoever. There was nothing to be discussed, nothing apologised for. 

After many attempts at resolution and much pain, we cut her out of our lives, out of our childrens lives, to protect ourselves from someone who didnt care about anyone but herself, didnt care how much hurt she caused others.  We have had no contact for 3 years, apart from unwanted cards arriving. Token jestures. The worst kind.

Today, an email arrives for my husband. "I've been reading Sharon's blog. Want to talk?"

My husband doesnt read my blog.   What the fuck makes you think its ok for YOU, of all people, to read it?

How long has this been going on, Anne? Have you gone through all the archives? Did you enjoy reading the bits about my cerivcal mucus when I was trying to conceive? What about Ella's birth story? Did it make you stop and think you could have been more supportive at the time?   Did you smirk to yourself when I was in hospital, detoxing from alcohol? Have your suspicions about my being an unfit mother, an unstable crazy woman, been confirmed by my ordeal on various medications for my "mental illness"? 

Did you read the bits about suicidal ideation and think letting me know via your son that you are reading this would push me over the edge?  Give you a window of opportunity? Are you salivating at the thought of a divorce? 

Does violating a person make you proud, make you feel good about yourself?  Because that is what you have done, as sure as a Peeping Tom violates the person they prey upon. Did you used to read your children's' diaries too? Open their mail?

You have violated me.  Again.  You took my children and now you have taken away the one thing in my life that was safe and good. 

Never again can I write in this blog, this sanctuary from the mess of my life, and be safe from the people who wish to do me harm. Maybe that is exactly what you want.

What possessed you to go down this road and read something that you know damn well I would never give you permission to read? What have you hoped to gain? That your son would suddenly forget everything you did and come back to the dysfunctional fold? 

ITS NOT GOING TO FUCKING HAPPEN.

You have gained nothing from your disclosure. You merely confirmed what we already knew about you. You will never get what you want. Never.

I might have a mental illness, but I'm not crazy.

The Fat Controller

zyprexa, as it is wont to do, had me put on 20 kilos in a few short months. After a week without it I have already lost the ravenous appetite that lead me to eat cream straight from the tub, and consequently I have lost my first kilo.

With it, I have regained that voice that says "you dont need to eat. ignore the hunger pangs. have another cup of tea."

That voice was quashed so very well by the zyprexa. As I piled on the kilos, it frightened me that I couldnt get that voice back, that I no longer had the ability to control my eating. Now, I am frightened that it has come back so quickly and so loud.

During this titration period with lamotrigine I have lost control of my mind so I guess it isn't surprising that my old friend Eating Disorder has come back, trying to controlling the one thing that is left.  At least I have the weight to lose this time.

So I sit here this morning, hungry. Nearing a blood sugar crash. And I allow myself one grape from our vine. That and another cup of tea will tide me over until dinner tonight.

The control freak is out of control again. I am at a loss as to how to stop.

Bed Goes Up, Bed Goes Down

A Simpsons' reference for every occasion, including me losing my tiny little mind.

I wake to blankness. Probably what the big wigs would call "loss of affect".  I feel nothing. I want nothing. I want no one. Leave me alone.

I spend the day flipping pages of magazines, just to give me something to focus on. Otherwise I will go back to bed and stare out the window. I am so tired.  Eventually I feel so disconnected I cant do that anymore, and I return to bed. I feel panic. I claw at my own skin. The voices start, telling me how hopeless it is. This illness, this medication, my life. Panic heightens when I think of being like this for weeks as I get up to a stable dose on this new med. I am nauseous, I want to run, I want to scream. I do scream, but it is the scream in my belly that no one can hear.

And then I am calm. Like that. Nothing has happened to induce this change. I am feeling almost normal. But the racing thoughts, they intrude. A thousand different thoughts all at once. So many that I can barely pull them apart to think them clearly. I am awake. Wide awake. Awake and yet unable to motivate myself to do anything. I have a desperate need to communicate yet I do not want to see or talk to anyone.

I have ignored my children all day. They come to visit me and want to know why I am always in bed. "Mummy doesn't feel well" is so insufficient. 

Eventually it is time for sleep and by this time I am wired but still without motivation or desire. Temazepam I hope will be my saviour tonight.

Tomorrow I do it all again. This is the world of starting on Lamotrigine.

This Time Fer Shure

And now for the newest poison on the block, Lamotrigine.

An anti-epileptic, known overseas (and sporadically known here) for its kickass ability to knock the crap out of Bipolar Depression. Not known at all by my gp and she is letting me try it at my extreme insistence. 

Also known for its ability to give users The Rash, aka Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, which leaves the skin as if it had been badly burned, and it can be fatal. So we have to titrate veerrryyy slooowwwllly.

What this means is that the former anti-psychotic Zyprexa is no longer in my system and I am now on such a piddling dose of Lamotrigine that it couldn't cheer up a dung beetle in a pile of dung.

I feel like whale shit at the bottom of the ocean. I am walking through molasses. I hate everything. I don't want to be around anyone. Bed is nice. The drug has buggered my sleep pattern so I am awake at night and exhausted all day. I consider what it would be like it I weren't around anymore,  The whole being trapped fiasco is making the suicidal ideation recur. I see no point to anything.

How long am i supposed to just live with this? Slow titration is one thing, but living with The Awful Blackness as a consequence just ain't right. Should I be sucking this up and riding it out or admitting myself to hospital for some additional medicinals to keep me on the living side of this hell?

My brain is so adrift I cant answer that question.

Stares At Screen Blankly

We now resume our normal broadcast.

Within 24 hours of stopping the Lithium, I could function normally. No more catatonia! conversations! Ability to write!

It didnt last long.

Lithium was followed by Seroquel. Hello zombie-world! Now I can enjoy 16 hours a day of zombification! How useful when you have two young children. Doubly useful when your husband has a hernia operation sprung on him and suddenly I am the one who has to do everything.  If it werent for the wonderful parents at my son's school, he wouldnt have got to school at all for 6 weeks coz mummy was still comatose.

So I kicked Seroquel in the arse and picked up a shiny little hussy called zyprexa. This one promised the world, and for a while it delivered, in the form of a nice little mania which helped the saucepans shine like never before and lots of baking got done. Baking? Are you fucking kidding me? I hate baking.

Of course, there was something zyprexa forgot to mention during the honeymoon phase, and that is how I would turn into a giant tub of lard. Lardy McLardarse, eating her way through the kitchen then baking some more goodies when all else is gone. 20kg I've put on.

20kg.

If you're new here, you might want to read this post to discover how utterly diabolical it is that I of all people have not been able to control my eating to the point of putting on twenty.fucking.kilos.

I've tried sodium valproate for pain relief before and the "dry mouth", well it literally glued my mouth shut.

So what next? Tuesday will tell. I've been stuck on zyprexa over the holidays until my gp comes back and I'm steadily feeling worse. Now I am back in the throes of depression, hiding myself away and staring blankly out windows. Where did my happy mania go?

What will be thrown at me this time? I want to try Lamotrigine but its not on the PBS and I figure that means there is no way I can afford it. Some other zombifying, obesity-inducing poison?

This really is shit.

How was your spring?

The Drugs Dont Work, They Just Make Things Worse

I doubt The Verve were singing about Lithium, but they may as well have been.

Tomorrow I see my gp to tell her I Say NO to Lithium. 

I have only become able to write now through taking a Lorazepam about an hour ago. Prior to that, I was (literally) catatonic much of the day, unable to move or communicate, with strange thoughts like just getting in the car and driving off, taking all the kids' money out of the bank, and not coming back. Ever. (Slight problem: I cant drive.)  I dont want to see people, I dont want to talk to people. Especially my kids. Their incessant noise makes me want to scream and kill kittens.

I cant live like this. I have no idea what is going on. Reaction to Lithium? Has it tipped me over into some strange Bipolar 2 mixed state? Am I NOT Bipolar at all and Lithium is making me crazy?


This drug-induced nightmare, whatever its genesis, has got to end. I was supposed to see my GP next Monday anyway, but the way I have been feeling I cant be sure I would be around by then.  Life was a lot easier when I was drinking all the time. How is this better? How can these effects of medication be better than being mellow on wine?

Fuck. I have felt shit since I stopped drinking and now its worse instead of better.  Did I kill the baby jesus in my past life?

Has anyone else ever experienced horrendous side effects from the meds that were supposed to keep them safe and sane?

Eating Your Self

When I was a kid, I was tall and skinny. My long legs meant I could run faster than any of the other kids and hence always won the 100m races at school.   My only body-image issues were related to the size of my boobs (bloody small) and my nose (big)

As I got older, my body changed shape, as it does when you're female, but I was essentially still tall and thin. The boobs and the nose stubbornly refused to change at all, sadly

I fluctuated somewhere around size 12-14 for all of my adult life.

Then at 32 my life imploded.  A Restraining Order to get my violent ex out of my house was followed a few days later by a sexual assault courtesy of two "friends."

What my traumatised brain did was amazing, truly amazing. Never underestimate the ability of your brain to fuck you over.

While everything around my in my life was out of control, my brain decided there was something it could control, and that was what went into my mouth. Or rather, what didn't. This was all totally subconscious. It wasn't until years later that I realised what I had actually done.

I didn't eat. If I felt hungry I had a cigarette. (I was smoking a pack of 25 36mg cigarettes a day) I drank alcohol, but not a huge amount. I took crystal meth. I took ecstasy. I smoked marijuana. (I am really not expecting to ever work again, obviously.)

When I was at home, which wasn't often, I would drink Multi-V Juice and eat an English muffin with raspberry jam and cream. That was it. That was all I could afford to buy, since my drug bill was so high each week.

In about 2 months I went from a healthy 70kg down to 56kg. From a Size 14 to a size 8.  

I didn't realise what was happening to my body until I had been at that game for about 7 months. I looked in the mirror, and I saw, really saw, what had happened.

The collar bones jutting out. The ribs clearly visible. My wrists, bony. My hips...god my hips...and my pelvis clearly visible, I looked like someone from a POW camp.

This realisation came at the same time as my creditors raised their hands and demanded their money; the money I had spent on drugs instead of giving to them. So instantly, the lifestyle had to change. I had to work. I got hungry and couldn't just smoke it away, I actually had to eat.

Two months later I met my husband. I look at photos from then and I am appalled at my appearance.  I still own a skirt that I purchased the day I met MonkeyBoy. I hold it up to myself now and cannot fathom the mind that thought it was ok for me to fit into that skirt.

What I think happened is this: I never looked at myself and thought I was fat, so it never occurred to me that I had an eating disorder. I never threw up my food, so I never had an eating disorder.  And I didn't strive to be like the waif-thin models that were - and sadly 10 years later still are - everywhere.

But there are more ways to have a disorder than just Bulimia and Anorexia. It doesn't just have to be about not wanting to be fat. And I want you, dear reader, to understand that. If I had known that, or others had known that, maybe there would have been some sort of intervention sooner, before it had serious health consequences.

There are more than just two ways to kill yourself by not eating.

****

My daughter is 3 this week. I already talk to her and my 5 year old son about these images, and describe the women as unhealthy, and how the images have been changed to make them look very different.

We have to start talking to our children about these things when they are so young to get the positive messages cemented in their subconscious so they never ever look at magazines images like these and think they are normal. So that they are happy with how their own bodies look.

What their brains do after that, god knows.  I hope their brains are kinder to them than mine was to me.

The Ties That Bind

Hope.

It has been my life-raft for the last three years.

After events of this week, it is fair to say that I am now treading water on my own.

I feel physically ill thinking about it. Not by the loss of hope, but by the situation I find myself in once hope has gone.

I am trapped in this dysfunctional mind, trapped in this broken and pain-ridden body, trapped in this relationship and in this house in a volatile situation. I am in a box within a box within a box and it doesn't matter how much I might scream no one can hear me and no one can help. I am suffocating in here and the one person who can do something about it refuses.

Here I am again, powerless.  (Yes, actually powerless, unless I want to lose my kids.)  I'm wondering how I managed to subconsciously see this in someone who was so totally different 9 years ago.  I must have, because I can pick 'em every time. No matter the beginning to the relationship, the ending is always the same. My programming has been impeccable.

I am so well programmed from my childhood to live this situation again and again. To accept it, to see it as normal. Nothing was ever done in my childhood until things had reached boiling point and there was violence. It was even made my responsibility to deal with it. Thanks for that, mum. 

And yet now I do not accept it and I do not see it as normal. I see it as chronically abusive but I know there is no help, there is no way out until we get to the crisis and by then the damage is done. I have been here before.

No two year old should have to hold her mother's tear-stained face in her hands and say "Its alright mummy, don't you listen to him."

image copyright Emmy Ryan

I don't want to know what's next after that. For there will be a "next."

There always is.

The Post That I Cant Say Out Loud So I Will Write It Instead

**Warning: this is a LONG post. It is not a happy post. It is not a post to read if you are pregnant.**

The trouble with reading other blogs is that they may one day contain something that is very close to your heart. And that makes you think. And you may not like thinking.

Then in order to avoid thinking about it all the damn time, now you find that you have to write about it and you didn't ever want to write about it but here it is, in your head, so it wants to get out.

I'm looking at you, Madame Bipolar and MrsWoog

So. Here we go.


From the very beginning, the existence of my daughter Ella is very much caught up with negative events.  She was not, unlike Felix, tried for and desperately longed for. She was the "you have got to be fucking kidding me!" baby, the "how the fuck did this happen?" baby, the "anniversary" baby.  Not planned, not even considered to be a biological possibility after the hoo-hah surrounding Felix's conception. We "came to terms with" this baby.

November 2007 was marked by 3 life-changing events.

1. Monkey Boy and I went out(!) on our own(!) to a Crowded House gig (!!!) which was magnificent and wonderful as you would expect.
2. At that concert, I sat down and made the mistake of "chair dancing" which is a bad idea at the best of times because you look like Steady Eddy but more so on this occasion because my back went "Even I know chair dancing is wrong."
3. 2 weeks later it was our anniversary. 'Nuff said. 2 weeks after that I knew, even before peeing on the stick...

So I had managed to rupture a disc in my lower back, by sitting down. Normally this could have resolved itself over a number of months with rest. When you’re pregnant and you have the joint-loosening hormones released, and the additional weight increasing right at the level of the rupture...well, not so much on the resolving.


By the time I was 12 weeks pregnant, I could hardly walk. By the time I was 20 weeks pregnant I was taking Panadeine Forte and seeing the hospital physio, which didn't help at all. By the time I was 26 weeks I was taking PanFortes 2 hourly, round the clock, and begging for them to take the baby out so I could have decent pain relief. I couldn't walk, I couldn't stand, I couldn't sit.  At 33 weeks I finally got an MRI which showed the disc herniation. I knew what it was from the start, having had one before (and had surgery to fix it. Same disc, other side), but no one would take me seriously, not until the MRI.  Even then, to get the decent pain relief, I had to cry hysterically and act like the crazy female and swear at my obstetrician that this state of affairs was unacceptable and if he didn't help me I would take my own life. I was serious.  I was given Endone.  I was referred to the Mental Health Midwife, who marked my file with all sorts of big red stickers.

Endone allowed me to sleep. Blessed blessed sleep, no longer on my hands and knees, rocking on my bed, back and forth back and forth all night while wet fire engulfed my leg as it was torn off via my big toe.  I still needed it two hourly but it gave me some relief. I loved my obstetrician from that point. At 38 weeks we all decided enough was enough. Two hourly Endone, and I can still barely walk and the pain is constant, it never stops not for a second. Ella will have to be kept in the NICU for at least 5 days and be monitored for Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome - or withdrawal from the narcs to you and me.


So I am induced. Have a read of this post and this one  to see how well that worked for me the last time.  Or more to the point, I am induced (Day 1), and induced (Day 2), and induced (Day 3), and induced (Day 4), and had my waters broken and was put on a Syntocinon drip and 21 hours later of 2-minutely contractions (Day 5) I am still only at 4cm dilation. I will never ever forget the doctor’s face as she looked at me and told me we had no choice but to do a C-section. The next half hour is full of memories that I can’t even write. Memories of distance and of pressure to do what I don't want to do, of fear. Raw, primal fear. Memories of things once done and said can never be undone. Of the end of things. Of a line drawn in the sand.

And then there is the operating theatre. And the yellow paper curtain in front of my face, hiding things to awful to see...  And the woman at my head, the anesthetist. Monkey Boy next to me.

And then pain.

White hot searing pain.  Stop. Stop Stop Stop.

I don't know if I screamed it over and over out loud or just in my head. The epidural had worked at surface level only. Once the scalpel had got past the first few layers of skin...  Monkey Boy started yelling at them to stop. "We can’t go on like this" I remember hearing someone say. MB being told he had to leave. Leave? No! Saying goodbye, I thought I was going to die. Then the mask, and I didn't care if I died. "Breathe, just breathe."

She was born - without her parents even aware of it - blue, the cord wrapped around her neck twice, meconium swallowed and inhaled and not breathing. I lost 1.2 litres of blood.

I hear "it’s all over, you've had your baby." Am I in the 1950s? A young child is screaming in a nearby cubicle (tonsils) but he is not my child. Where is my child? Is she ok? Why isn't she here?  The epidural line is still in and they bump up the level because my pain is too much, but the epidural didn't work you fuckers! What is the point in doing this??  It meant I didn't "get my legs back" for over 24 hours.  Utterly stuck. Can’t move. My legs are not mine, they are lumps of meat that are pinning me to the bed.  This causes even more pain in my spine and my legs and feet are now swollen to the point where the skin almost starts to weep.


And Ella. My baby. The one for whom my soul was dragged to hell and left there.  I don't see her for 7 hours. MB held her in the NICU.  He had to ask the staff where the hell she was. No one told him. He took photos, and a short video of her, and I look at them over and over.  When she is brought in and I get to hold her for the first time, I am allowed 20 minutes together. I won’t see her again until her first proper feed, in a few hours. When she screams or when they have staff. If they have staff.

I feel like I went through all that time and pain and damage to my body for nothing. I am alone, no baby. Just pain and immobility. Then suddenly we get caught up in the hospital admin game of finding places to put people.  We get shunted from room to room. Labour Ward is full, women are in full labour in the corridors. 4 times we were moved, with all our stuff. A ridiculous amount of stuff really, but 5 days in the Labour Ward...


The catheter and epidural line are removed after 24 hours. (Day 6)  The catheter has damaged my urethra: It feels like my urethra is being pulled out continuously. (This is a feeling that doesn’t stop until close to a year after delivery.) The doctor comes in to tell me that I am borderline for needing a blood transfusion because I lost so much blood in delivery. Because it is borderline it is my decision whether to have it or not. If I don’t, it will take about a month for my iron levels to come back up to normal and I will feel shit for that month. Who the hell lets a delirious woman make judgement calls like that? After what they have done already, there is no way I am going to agree to more interventions.


I start taking tentative steps, but I can’t do it. I need a wheelchair to get to my baby. Get me a bloody wheelchair! And so I go to the NICU and I see what will be her home for the next 5 days, and see all the other babies, babies who have been there for weeks and will be for weeks more. Not mine not mine please god not mine. We learn their observation and coding system for NAS, we learn the procedure in the Breastfeeding Room, and I hold my baby girl for the first time. She is so beautiful, so soft, and yet I feel nothing.

While MB is in the hospital with me, I can be in the NICU as often as I want. Once he leaves, I am up to the dictates of the hospital and staff levels. By Day 7 I can walk, very slowly, painfully, with much help. I can’t get my slippers on because of the swelling, but I can get to my baby under my own steam and I'm bloody well going to. The NICU is a 2 minute saunter for a normal person, for me it is 10-15 minutes.


She won’t latch onto the breast properly. She snuffles around trying desperately to find it but will not latch. So she isn't eating. Here's another failure to add to the growing list. She is on formula via a naso-gastric tube. They decide to give her antibiotics because she swallowed poo. She has a line in her nose and another one in her hand, securely bandaged like a big boxing glove. There is so much stuff attached to her, I can’t get to her at all.

MB has been sleeping in the hospital with me, on a camp bed. He went home one night to make sure Felix was ok with Nanna. Sadly for me, he chose Day 3 to do it.  Everyone knows Day 3 is the killer after delivery: the tissue box will be too hard to reach and you will start bawling. I had no baby with me, the delirium of 5 days labour and no sleep for 8 days, the trauma of the C-section, the pain of my spine, the pain of the C-section, and no baby with me. Ella’s NAS scores are borderline, which means that she may have to stay in hospital for another 2 weeks and be given morphine.  And there is an awful ruckus in the room next door. Furniture being tossed around. Hushed voices in the corridors. Then Police. Every staff member is in the nursery, around one baby. I have no idea what happened, but it scared the hell out of me. I find out months later the mother had killed her baby. 

This is the start to the Day 3 Baby Blues. For me it was the start of psychosis.

The phone calls from the NICU are incessant this day. There is no MB to wheel me down there and seemingly no staff either. One trip is enough and now I have to make several, on my own. No help from the hospital for the woman who can barely walk.  By 10pm I can no longer cope. The phone rings after I just get back into my bed from being in the NICU for a feed. She is crying again, come down.  WTF???  Thoughts reel through my head: stick a plug in her face, give her a bottle, give her Phenergan, go away, just go away I can’t deal with her.

So I call for a nurse who never comes. But the NICU keep ringing. Incessant.bloody.ringing.  (Fucking deal with her yourselves, I can’t bloody get there.)  Still no nurse, so with incredible pain and utter exhaustion I drag my arse out into the corridor and hold onto the railing, and I just can’t make myself walk down there again. And the tears start rolling, as they do.  A nurse is coming, asks me if I am alright. Bloody stupid question. I try to tell her but I can’t get much sense out of my mouth. Pain, walking, bloody baby, NICU, can't just can't.

"Well there's no point crying about it, is there? Is there? That won’t make it any better." 

Is this woman for real? It is the final straw for me. If I had enough spirit left in my body at that point I would have decked her. The best I could do was look at her and cry more. I silently beg for my mental health nurse to come and rescue me. But she never comes .

Nurse Hardarse rang the NICU and asked them to bring Ella to me. Great, fine, but they leave me alone with her. That's sensible, right?  Distraught mother with known mental health issues left completely alone... (I wonder now if that is what happened in the room next door...)

I fed her. She wasn't really interested. I needed to go to the toilet. She started crying, and it seemed the part of my brain that was used to babies crying and knew i could leave them for 30 seconds had been removed.  I dragged her bassinet on wheels contraption into the toilet with me. Why?? I don't even know. She wouldn't stop screaming and my how that echoes in a tiled room. 

I wanted her gone. I didn't want anything to do with her. And I hated myself for it.


I have no feeling in parts of my right leg.  No one knows why. (Try the epidural placement, numnuts.)  They put me through another MRI.  Have you had to get into an MRI machine 3 days after a C-section when you can’t feel your feet and your back feels like it is folding you in half all by itself.?  I can’t stand, I can’t sit, I can’t lie down. The MRI shows the herniated disc. Wow, yes it’s still there. They don't know why I suddenly can’t feel big patches of my legs: Sudden Onset Post-Partum Patchy Leg Syndrome, first case ever reported.  They are all idiots.

With Ella’s NAS scores so high, we are looking at not going home with her. We ask for the Parents' Long-Stay Room.

Nope. You can stay in this room here, but that means that you are not actually a patient in the hospital and no nurse will come to help you.

I live a 1 hour drive away, which I can’t manage anyway because I have this spinal injury and I can’t sit in the...

 Nope. Other mums do it.

Other mums don't have my spinal injury.

Express your milk and have your husband bring it in every day. 

Eventually they realise that they need to check the nerve responses in my legs (checking for damage from their fucked up epidural) so I get discharged to the “Non-hospital Room” and then readmitted within the space of 3 hours.


Day 10, and Ella is finally given a clean bill of health. Nothing on her blood screens at all, apart from all the drugs they gave me during delivery. No narcs! No Endone! I didn’t harm her in utero!  It frightens me that she came so close to being put on morphine for 2 weeks on the basis of an arbitrary and subjective scoring system.  Its 5 days since delivery and I am so delirious I am unable to see clearly.

My discharge meds in the morning consist of two Endone tablets, which is a four hours’ worth of pain relief.

What’s this?

It’s all we are going to give you, mums aren't normally sent home with Endone

Most mums don't come in here ON Endone…

You will have to see your GP.

And we were sent home. No mental health evaluation, no post-trauma counselling, no referral for post trauma counselling, no social worker visit, and no "we're sorry". 10 days, 1 baby, 1 new source of PTSD, 1 case of Post-Partum Depression, 1 case of Post-Partum Depression in baby's father, no family supports at home. 

The red stickers on my file were never looked at. The fact that my labour was 5 days long was never written in my file. The fact that I was inadequately anaesthetised and could feel them cutting me open was not written in my file.

“Length of labour: no labour” it says.  

It was all a bad dream. My file says it never happened.


So we went home, taking with us much more than we bargained for.  Within a week I was thinking up ways I could get rid of her. (I know, we all joke about this when they are being little shits, right? I actually wanted to get rid of her.) I considered the options: Its cold outside at night, she wouldn’t last long. Hide behind a bush; no one would see what I did. (What was I going to do? I didn’t think that far, it’s pretty obvious my thinking was totally fucked at this point.) Give her to MB's parents.  Just get her away from me! I felt no love, no connection. I didn’t hate her; I just thought she would be better off not with me. I felt sorry for her because she had me for her mother.  I looked for signs that she might love me: anything. I didn't see a thing. To my mind she hated me. Fair enough too, I thought.
And then, after a week, the panic attacks started whenever we were out. I wanted to scream, I wanted to vomit, I wanted to run run run and never stop. I felt like I would explode. The fear, the inescapable fear would grip me from nowhere and toss me on a sea of anguish from which there was no escape.

No one wanted to assess me. We had a CAFHS Nurse and a Mothercraft Helper in our home every week.  No one did anything, even though they both reported to the hospital they were worried about me.  I knew that I was not right but I couldn’t communicate this to anyone. My GP notices after 2 months that I am severely depressed.  She asks how I feel but I dare not tell her about my thoughts towards Ella.  She checks my thyroid and I have  Post-Partum Hyperthyroidism. I have lost so much weight, I am running around like I run a meth lab, I don't want my baby and it takes 2 months to pick it up???

With hindsight, it is clear that I should have been in an institution for Nutter New Mothers I look back with red hot shame at the things I thought of doing. When I see photos of Ella at 3ish weeks old, she is clearly smiling at me, clearly looking at my face with love. Yet at the time I couldn’t see it, not one bit of it. It wasn’t until she was about 3 months old I recognised a smile from her and thought “Ok, now I can mother this child.”

Thankfully, there is a lot of information freely available about Post-Partum Depression. Signs to look for, what to do if you need help, support groups, celebrities opening up about their own experiences, etc.  How about we also take a good look at one of the potential causes of PPD: how we are treated in the days immediately following the birth of our child. How much support we are given by those caring for us, whether we are listened to at all, whether we are given a chance to “debrief” particularly if the birth was a traumatic one, whether anybody stopped to ask “How are you? Are you coping? Is there anything you need to talk about?”

Not one person in that hospital bothered to ask me how I was. How did I feel???  I was in shock. I was severely traumatised. (I still am.) I wanted to die.

Had someone allowed me to process what had just happened to me, in a supportive environment with trauma counselling, maybe I wouldn’t have gone home with thoughts of killing my own child.

\

Hearing Voices

I don't believe I'm worthy, the page in my journal reads.

"Piffle" my friend Lioness offers from Portie-Land, and asks me to think of all the reasons why my friends do love me now, why I AM worthy.

yes yes, plenty of reasons blah blah

But when my head is reeling with noise noise noise that I just want to SHUT UP, its not so easy to hear the distant whispers of those positive words. This noise is so persistent that it is indecipherable, all encompassing and constant.

I want it to stop. I want the silence.

Pink wrote in her song "Fucking Perfect": Change the voices in your head/Make them like you instead.

 
Listening to this song for the first time while in hospital, I came to realise that's what they are, these incessant noises: voices.

Voices of people long gone.
Voices of people dead.
Voices of people dead-to-me.
Voices of people with their own pain, that they never acknowledged or dealt with.
Voices of people who would project their feelings about themselves onto me.
Voices of people with no love to give, even to me, who should have had it.

These voices are loud, constant, persistent, unrelenting and lifelong, starting at birth and continuing through bullying at school and then into relationships. They have had me shy away from friendships that might be positive, or worse, not nurturing them as they needed to be. Shying away from the people that wont treat me like crap. Persisting with those that do, whilst begging them to change.  Rejecting those that love me to pursue those that can't love me and never will. Then I do it to my own children too, rejecting them in favour of things that have no value in my life.

I feel like whale shit at the bottom of the ocean because this is not what I want to do, this is not the mother I want to be.

And the panic, the panic that those voices can instill in me...  The intense cell-level need to flee, to get away from the conflict that is coming, the negating of what I have to say, the denigration, the PROOF that my mother was right. Anything to avoid that...

My psychologist asks me during my session this week about my early childhood (no, not that, do we have to talk about that??)  Who did love me, if not my parents?  And I think.  And I shrug my shoulders and the tears fall.  Because the answer is unsayable. The answer is "no one."

Imagine that?

She explains that if a child has just one person to show them affection, to nurture them, provide care, to show love, make them feel safe and wanted, then their brain will develop to expect that relationships are positive, safe, good things.  If the child doesn't have that one person, then the brain develops completely differently. Relationships are a source of danger, and are to be avoided or sabotaged.

Without that "one person" to show me love when I was no bigger than my own children are now, it is no wonder I behave the way I do, react the way I do, expect the things I expect from people. The voices, they repeat the things that hurt the most in my childhood. The way I react to them and the way I relate to people is result of my brain development.

Does that make a difference?  I know now that my childhood is not something I "should just get over." I know that there is no point in beating myself up for the way I react in certain situations - its like hating on myself for breathing. I know that with self-knowledge comes the ability to change.

I know that when my heart is pounding and every cell in my body screams "danger! love approaching" that my brain is going to try to fuck things up for me.

I just don't know how I'm going to stop it.

Detox Day Whatever*

Apathetic.

Anxious.

Writing furiously and prettily in my journal and have come to some conclusions:

I have had Panic Attacks my whole life.
I have had Anxiety my whole life.
I have had multiple epidodes of PTSD, none of which have been dealt with properly.

When I read my list of the consequences of my upbringing, I can feel the beginnings of a panic attack.

Fuck knows where to start on the mess thats is my mind.

These clouds looked like a good place to start.

The Clouds They Do Beckon 

*Edited to say: its actually 28 Days sober today.

Writing as Therapy Because There Is No Other Option

I've done therapy before. Lots.

Loottts and lots.

Surely somewhere along the way I have picked up some useful information and some of that information could be applied to my current detox hell, AND some of that information might actually have been retained in my alcohol-soaked and drug-addled brain.

Surely?

So I have a notebook and a packet of textas thanks to BFF visit. And a couch to sit on, as you saw earlier, which I find essential to the whole therapy process.

An hour and a half sitting on the couch sure did release a lot of crap out of my brain.

Shit.

Wandering The Corridors Of Recovery

Cant writer much, brain as fuzzy as this picture. Mostly anxious and angry.

"Being Nuts" Part the Third

In which the heroine discovers that the Detox Program she has signed herself into at great personal heartache and mental distress does not, I repeat does NOT have any psychotherapy/psychology/counselling/mental health worker chat type arrangement. At all. At.All.

UM...

WHAT THE FUCK???

The Night Before The Future

Tonight I have told my 5 year old son that mummy has been sick and sad for a while because I was drinking too much wine, and that wasnt good for my body.  He asked me if I drank it because I liked it and I said "no, it was to help take my back pain away, but I drank too much and it made other parts of my body get sick." 

I explained that I would be going into hospital, probably tomorrow, and the doctors and nurses would look after me for a few days while my body got better, and my brain got better, so I could stop being sad and angry and be a better mummy for him and Ella.

Cue crying.

Cue tight hugs from Felix.

"Are you sad, Felix?"

Bottom lip trembling: "Yes, because I'll miss you."


I'll miss you too, my darling baby boy.

"If I Am Not For Me, Then Who Is For Me?"

*Apparently a Jewish Proverb. I read that on Twitter today so it must be true, eh?

If I don't look out for myself, then who the hell else is going to?

The one who almost 8 years ago promised to "love honour and cherish, in sickness and in health blah-blah" is certainly not showing any signs of "being for me", looking out for me nor for supporting me in this, one of the hardest battles I have ever had to face.

And you've read the condensed version of my life's battles. There's been some corkers, hey?

Drinking alcohol in front of me with friends and joking about "now this is really rubbing it in": not supportive.  Screaming at me (in front of the kids) that I have no idea how much I am costing him personally: not supportive.  Making every day so stressful by the yelling - always the yelling - at the kids, that if I hear his voice once more I am going to fucking explode.  Not asking, not ever asking how I am feeling without the alcohol: Not.Fucking.Supportive.

So.

I am for me.

I cannot stand to be in my living room because the associations with alcohol are so strong. I cannot be in the kitchen at dinner time because my automatic response is to get a glass and go to the fridge. And then I remember..."Ohhh, DAMMIT!" I cannot cope with the constant noise and the demands and the yelling.

I want to be alone, so I can have the shakes and cry in private and not in front of my children. I want to be alone so I can hear my own thoughts. I want to be alone so I can feel something other than frustration with my children - because lets face it, boy (5) + girl (almost-3) = nightmare - and anger at my husband.

The only way I can see how to do this is to put my hand up and say "Help me! I can't do this alone anymore." To voluntarily go into hospital and do this with people who know what they are doing, who know how to get people through detox and who are not going to ignore my fairly obvious distress. I had my first panic attack since the birth of my daughter the other day, for no reason other than I was in my son's classroom and there were other adults there. The second was a day later in the car with MB, simply because I was with him.

I need rest. I need sleep. I need quiet so I can hear myself. If I cant hear my own thoughts, or if I cant even process information because of what my body is dealing with, all that happens is anxiety and panic.

If I cant hear myself, how can I help myself?



 If I cant help myself, how on earth am I going to be able to help these  two precious, beautiful children?


I am for me.

I am also for them.

All Alcoholics Are Created Equal

When I lived with my previous boyfriend, who we call Fuckhead round these parts but whose name was John, I had a close-up hands-on experience of alcoholism. When we met he had already been engaging in serious drinking for a few years, and by serious I mean bottle of Scotch in an hour every day serious. Bottle in the filing cabinet in his office at university. He was an academic. He was brilliant. He was - then - a high-functioning alcoholic.

Lets not get into the myriad reasons why I wanted to enter into a relationship with a person who was clearly - and I do mean clearly- a complete write-off mental health wise. Lets just look at the alcohol.

When he lost his high paid academic job (due of course to the alcohol) and could no longer afford the scotch, he turned to the cheapest source of alcohol above metho, which was a 5 litre cask of wine. To this day the sight of a Berri cask of white wine fills me with anxiety and dread. Said cask would be consumed in one night. Or sometimes starting earlier in the day, if it was a bad day, in one afternoon. It would inevitably lead to other forms of abuse. This would happen every single day and we were together for four and a half years.

That level of alcoholism renders one unable to function, not only in the real world but in your own house too. The stories I could tell you of the filth he chose to live in when I was not there to clean up the detritus of another night's binging...they would make your stomach turn.

Of course I tried to get him to stop drinking, and as a good deal of alcoholics will tell you, he said "I'm not an alcoholic. I never drink before 12."  Or "I can stop drinking any time I want!"  What I didn't realise then was that he couldn't stop drinking because he already had Korsakoff's Syndrome which had rendered him brain damaged. I only discovered this only 12 months ago, when I was told that he had died from Korsakoff's.

I mention this story because this is my only experience of alcoholism.  Extreme. Brutal. Deadly.

So when I drank my one, and then two, bottles of wine each night, the word "alcoholic" did not enter my consciousness at all.  After I had Ella, I never drank to get drunk again. Unlike before, where there are many stories of friends holding back my hair in the UniBar loos...  But I digress.

I drank because it helped reduce the pain. I drank until I was relaxed. I always drank white wine because red made me a depressed and melancholic drunk, but white wine has no such effect. At the point I could feel that I was getting slightly tipsy, I would stop drinking and usually toddle of to bed, knowing that I was relaxed enough that I would sleep as well as my non-sleeping kids would allow me.

And this went on for three years. Every night. No one knew, except Monkey Boy., Sure, people knew I liked to drink wine, but that was it.   Eventually though, I got to the point with my pain and my limitations that I was truly suicidal. I had a plan, which I thought about often. I didn't believe any good could come from my being alive. I truly believed my kids would be better off without me.  So of course, my doctor was told about the alcohol, and wanted me to stop drinking immediately.  And I went into a major panic attack.

In conjunction with our social worker, it was decided I would taper my alcohol consumption in the same way I would taper down a dose of medication before stopping it, which at the time seemed logical.  But I couldn't do it. MB was in charge of doling out the exact number of mls each night, and it was torture. Having a little when I knew that I "needed" a lot, and not being in control of what was happening was just not going to work. So I faked not being suicidal anymore and went back to drinking, and I was still thinking that the alcohol was just a form of pain relief.

But then I would start to panic if we were down to the last bottle in the house. I would panic about when we would be able to get to the bottle shop to get some more. I would be in major distress (which I masterfully hid, or MB is blind to my distress) when MB said "Cant you just wait til tomorrow? I'll pick some up then."

I started to look at the clock mid afternoon and wonder if 2.30 was too early to start drinking. Some days it wasnt. but I never drank before 12!

I started drinking when my son got home from school. I would refill my glass as soon as it was empty, and kept doing this all night.  Then I began bringing the bottle into the living room and sitting it next to me so I didnt have to keep getting up to get another drink. Saving myself the pain of getting up and down I said to myself in justification.  Then it occurred to me that John used to do exactly the same thing with his 5 litre cask.

When I got to the point of drinking two bottles of wine every night just to feel "normal" of an evening, and I would wake up shaking each morning, I knew something had changed.

What I realised was that I had become physically dependent on this drug, and that if I continued it would kill me as surely as it killed John. I also knew that I had no idea how to stop.

My doctor gave me Valium to get me through the anxiety I would surely feel, but because of the cocktail of narcotics and anti-depressants I take I was certainly no candidate for the drugs that are used to block the desire for alcohol.

And it wasnt until I stopped, until there was no alcohol in my system at all, until I had gone a couple of nights without touching a drop, and I started to feel SO low, so sad, so anxious, so depressed, withdrawn, unable to stop crying, and so scared that once I had got through these physical effects of stopping, I would still not be able to have just one or two drinks, that I wouldn't be able to stop myself once I started...it wasnt until then that I realised the awful, shameful truth.

That I had become an alcoholic.

That there was no difference between John and I, except for what stage we had got to with our drinking.  Had I continued...I would end up in the same place: liver damage, brain damage, death.  We started for different reasons: he refused treatment for his bipolar disorder and self-medicated with Scotch. I tried every medication available to me and still nothing was working satisfactorily so I tried to use the alcohol to "kick along" the other meds into working better.

For me, the knowledge that I am no better than him is devastating. It tears at my soul, it makes me want to scream, it makes me sick to my stomach.

I am a person who must remain in control of what is happening to me. Knowing that I have no control at all in this situation, that I am controlled by my addiction is terrifying.  I am controlled by something I thought, in all honesty, would help me.

I am controlled by alcohol: I am an alcoholic.

I have been sober for 14 days, but I am a mess, I am having panic attacks, I am frightened, I am sad and I don't know how to get through this withdrawal.