The Slippery Road to Recovery

    Before starting this chapter I want to introduce a new idea I had for this blog that will help convey my thoughts and feelings of the moments I write about with sounds as well as words. As I'm sure you all know music can be a great coping mechanism for tough times. I personally am the time of person who listens to music they relate to and therefore am constantly changing that music based on my thoughts and feelings at the time. My idea for the blog is to link songs that I listened to in the time period I am writing about to allow for a better understanding of the state I was in at the time. I realize this idea won't interest everyone and so feel free to simply skip the link and accompanying contextual words when I choose to include them and read the blog as you normally would. In regards to my first example, if you've been following along you know that I'm currently writing about a very dark period in my life. As a result the music I listened to during my stay in the psych ward was rather dark and gloomy. Here's one such song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4

Previously: I started having sit-downs with my doctors and parents.

     Something that everyone involved in my care could at least agree on was that my pain, whatever the cause, was preventing me from having even a half-decent sleep. This led to my psychiatrist adding some additional sleeping medications which became a turning point in my road to recovery at the hospital. He had started me on antidepressants some weeks after taking me off all my medications at once but my mood wouldn't improve as long as my sleep remained at such poor quality. Thankfully the new medication worked and it no longer took me hours to fall asleep at night. The quality of sleep still sucked, but it was a start.

     My parents visited once again and this time were allowed to bring my only few months old puppy with. Seeing her again was pretty emotional for me because before I purposefully overdosed she was the only living thing I could say goodbye to without being stopped from taking all those pills. It was to the point where for months whenever I saw her I would have flashbacks of what I thought at the time was my last goodbye. I understood these were ghosts that needed to be confronted eventually and would simply have to make new, fresh, and more pleasant memories with her to replace the sad one. 

    I continued to meet with my parents and doctors because I wouldn't be able to return home until some kind of mutual understanding was reached. I spoke of events in the past that show I am the type of person who is their own best motivator. If I can do something I'll do it without urging, whether it be physiotherapy or getting to school. If I'm not doing something that is expected of me that essentially means I can't do it whether it's because of pain, a bad night's sleep, or both. Therefore, urging me to do something like go to school on a bad pain day by pleading, yelling, or coercion, is counterproductive. As someone who is motivated to do things like exercise or go out with friends I am already upset by not being able to to do these things very often in the first place. Others getting upset at me for not being able to do them as well simply adds stress to all parties which makes it harder to deal with my pain and fatigue and makes it harder for me to do the things everyone, including myself,  wants me to do. For a lot of people, especially teenagers, this isn't the case but I'm sure developing a debilitating illness at age 13 caused me to mature quickly in this regard. If anything I would push myself too hard and simply make my situation worse. Examples of this would be pushing myself to get to school despite feeling horrible and then fainting in class. Or going to school when I couldn't sleep at all the night before and falling asleep in class or in the hallway. These things aren't helpful and I had to be trusted to know my limits to prevent them from occurring. Many times this trust wasn't placed in me. There were many mornings when others were trying to wake me up for school that I would be made extremely uncomfortable until I was forced to get up. Methods for such acts included filling plastic baggies with ice water and dipping my feet in, tickling, or simply yelling that I'm wasting my life away. There's points here for creativity but it's wasted effort and counterproductive if I'm woken up just to faint in class or fall asleep in the hallway. This is why it was so important for there to be a mutual understanding between myself, my parents, my doctors, my teachers, and my friends. Focus needed to be put on improving my health so I could get myself to do the everyday activities of life rather than trying to have me do them before my health was improved and putting the cart before the horse. As the talks made progress it was decided I would have a sort of test run of normal life by being allowed to stay back at home on the weekends. There was still some inter-familial tension but no especially notable incidents.

   These long emotional talks did their job and the focus shifted to improving my sleep so I could increase my functioning. Improving the pain would have been ideal since the pain causes the sleep issues, but I had just come off of morphine and that hadn't exactly gone well. Playing with the dosages and types of sleeping medications for a little got me alert enough to be able to start preparing for a return to school. I hadn't been discharged from the hospital yet, so my options were limited to starting off slowly. I used their computer room to begin an online careers course, easy stuff to get me back in the swing of things. The course went well, and I had started to get my capacity for thought back after the dampening effect caused by morphine. My mood improving followed suit as my confidence to be able to think and work started to come back. The doctor was pleased with my marks, mood, and energy to the point where he said it was time for me to be partially discharged. I would be allowed to sleep at home every night again assuming all went well but would come back to the hospital during the day to continue my careers course. This also involved slowly transitioning back into having a social life as I began attending family shabbat dinners and explaining to close friends where I had been for the past few months. It had been a long hard journey both physically and mentally, but I was now in the home stretch. 

Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?

   It was soon time to meet start meeting with my parents and my psychiatrist together. This also meant the psych ward nurse started caring about my appearance. I had gotten my clothes and ditched the hospital gown, so next on the "Important Things for Me To Do List" was asking me to shave. Now I still wasn't what you would call a particularly "happy" person and so this request annoyed me a lot more than it should have. Surely they knew I was at such a point in my life where the last thing I could possibly care about was shaving. Maybe to them shaving simply gave the appearance I cared which is what mattered. Perhaps if I shaved enough they thought I would start to care. Regardless of their thinking, I was observant enough to know doing tasks like these without complaint assisted in getting you discharged sooner and so I complied. When I was done I was even more angry than before because as I stared into the mirror I saw a gaunt, pale, and hollow cheeked version of myself starting back. I thought, "Maybe if they did something about me throwing up everything I ate from morphine withdrawal shaving would've made sense." Consequently I had the appearance that I cared enough to shave but didn't care enough to eat or go in the sun. Mission accomplished, nurse.

   It was time to have the big sit-down with my parents and my new psychiatrist. It was very tense, and tears on both sides flowed frequently. My sour mood led me to being very frank in explaining my feelings as the psychiatrist wanted to get to the bottom of my attempt on my own life. I explained that too often I felt more was expected of me than I could preform. My pain and fatigue would keep me from family events, sports, and now even school. This alone was very depressing, but it became unbearable when others got angry with me for being unable to do these things I desperately want to do but simply can't. More than once I had been told to get back to school since I couldn't stay at home my whole life. Furthermore I had been given passive aggressive advice that it's simply a case of mind over matter and all that is required is the will to find a way. My psychiatrist supported me on some points, but any of these moments were eclipsed by my rage when he suggested I have a Conversion Disorder. If you don't know what this is, it's basically a mentally ill person converting their mental stresses into physical symptoms. This made absolutely no sense to me; the main reason being that I had no mental health issues until six months after my pain had started. I got sick, I had pain, I realized the pain wasn't going away, and then I got depressed. I did not immediately develop depression after my pain started. Sure, you could argue my pain started out from a physical source and continued due to mental stress conversion but that would still mean there's no easy fix for the pain. Regardless, I was still angry about going cold turkey on medications. He began putting me back on antidepressants but I stayed off any pain medication. I felt at the time this was because of the belief from others that the primary problem is in my head, rather than in my legs.

  Hostility and blame continued for a while. I think something I wrote about the situation at the time can explain my thoughts and feelings better than current reflection can, so here's a little note I wrote down back then that I'm unsure anyone other than me has ever seen:
"I want you to imagine a scenario where someone is suffering for four years. Suffering to the point where they can't take it. To the point where they don't enjoy life anymore, so they tried to kill themselves twice. They want to die. But despite what they want, all through those four years they've been trying their best for those they love, but those they love aren't satisfied. They want more than their best. So they give up, because what's the point in trying if their best isn't good enough. Now imagine how they person would feel. That's how I feel." This tension and fundamental disagreement on my mood and pain problems dominated these meetings. Everyone had a different opinion on the cause and effect and which came first, the chicken or the egg/which came first, the depression or the pain. My viewpoint was such that I normally wouldn't care what others think, but I felt that the difference of opinion would hamper finding a working treatment for my chronic pain. I knew that my pain led me to attempt suicide twice and so if we just focused on my mood rather than the pain inevitably a third attempt would occur. Paradoxically this realization disheartened me and darkened my mood further.