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.