Written 8/18 and forgotten… I know it’s a coping strategy – wholly reasonable and acceptable by most standards, but I feel guilty. This morning when the kids woke up I wanted to play, share their youthful enthusiasm, and take heart from the knowledge that some of that enthusiasm was because of me. This morning when my wife was quietly reading the news, sipping her coffee, I snuck up behind her for one of several hugs, reminding her how much I love her. This evening my dad came over for dinner and I was determined to be in a good mood, [...]
mom
Apogee revisited
I got another call from my father. He got another call from my mother. She’s had another sudden recovery. My dad is overjoyed. I think I disappointed him with my reaction… cautious and skeptical. “That’s cool, but I’d like to see it last more than a day.” I said. My new family title: killjoy. Queue the light-bulb… mom stops taking medication (or takes it erratically), suddenly gets better, starts taking medication regularly, gets worse, stops taking medication, suddenly gets better. I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t think it takes any specialized training to recognize a pattern.
Health insurance and mental health
One of the supposed hallmarks of the U.S. system of providing health care is choice. “Don’t let the socialist boogeyman come and force you to see a doctor trained in Guatemala!” You may not realize it, but that’s pretty funny (not the bit about Guatemala… the part about choice). Well, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of expelling fluids through your head’s secondary and tertiary access points, but it’s still funny. Come on, ask me why it’s funny. You know you want to. You think you may know, but your dying to know if your right (yes, I’m nothing [...]
Not so fast
On Friday I told a friend that last week was the first week I’d worked a full 40 hours since my diagnosis. As it turns out I was wrong. It was my second. I felt pretty good, a little tired maybe, but not exhausted. Or so I thought. I slept through most of the weekend. I hadn’t intended to… it just kind of happened. Last night, after we finished eating pork chops in a ginger glaze (which my dad came over to help us eat – the smell of which remains in yesterday’s laundry), we found out mom had been [...]
What do I write now?
I’ve long ago run out of words. Everyone is in bed, it’s just me, and I want to feel better. A Mac keyboard has been my outlet for a long time… going back to the good old Mac Plus days after my high school graduation. Now? Nothing. It seems like even these words have graced my screen before. Simply put, my mind is a hollow shell. In this ongoing medical drama, I feel worst about my father. (I wrote about him once, though I never shared.) The depression, anxiety, and psychosis have been a life long horror for my mother, [...]
When?
There’s been good news and bad news this week, but I’ll start with the good. The tree scare is finally coming to an end. To date we’ve talked to five tree guys, four experts, and too many friends to count. Opinions have ranged from “cut it down,” to thirteen thousand dollars of pins, cables, fertilizers, and injected fungi, to trimming it up a bit. Depending on the person, we’ve been told our tree is two different species, with two very different lifespans. This week we finally got an opinion from an expert (a certified arborist) which seconded a previous opinion, [...]
Pieces
This morning I got a troubling call… a hearing was going to be set to continue my mother’s involuntary commitment for another 30 days, because she wasn’t showing any improvement. There was panicked talk of lawyers, and… nothing for the rest of the day. It turned out half a day of hearings was all I could take (at work today). I went home and fell asleep; not having planned to, but sleeping through the afternoon and well into dinnertime. The ringing of my phone woke me up this evening. I think the clock on the wall said 7:30 or so, [...]
The urge to purge
My area of relative academic expertise is psychology. I say “relative” because I haven’t put this expertise to actual use since I graduated from UF. I didn’t go on to earn any advanced degrees, and it seems like it’s been a really, really long freaking time since I graduated. Living through my own psychological thriller (of sorts) has given me cause to look back on my psych classes and see them for what they were: a collosal waste of money. Notice I didn’t say my “education” was a waste; it was anything but. I learned so much about life, other [...]
Broken
Earlier this week my mother was hospitalized involuntarily under the provisions of a Florida Law known as the “Baker Act.” When the legal requirement for the hospital to hold her expired, and they determined that her benefits (through her health insurance) had been used up, she was shipped out to the first facility that would take her. It was an assisted living facility, which primarily deals with elderly adults who can – to some degree – care for themselves. My mother could not, but what choice did we have? The hospital staff advised us they called the non-profit, inpatient facility [...]
Bad to worse
The ill-conceived placement with the assisted living facility came to an abrupt end this morning. We got a call from the facility reporting that our family member was “out of control,” wandering the halls breaking lamps, overturning furniture, and upsetting the other residents. My dad left straight away, telling them he’d be there soon to pick her up, with no idea where we were going to take her next. When he got there, a police car was waiting outside… with my mother in the back seat. I am at once depressed, discouraged, tired, and enraged. What the F&%$ was the [...]
