A day in the life of PTSD.
With my heart pumping hard and muscles unable to let go, I am incapable of doing anything yet. I know this will pass if I let myself feel it, but the act of lying here, in such pain, stuck in my mind with no one able to help; it's torture. I have spent all night reliving the memories I have been trying to push back into the dark recesses of my mind for years. After a trigger, night time is where they come back out. When my conscious guard is down and my subconscious reminds me just how much trauma I still have to work through. In the early hours of this morning, my mind brought forth another new one. Another memory from my past that up until now had been locked away and forgotten. A memory that had me waking up with a scream in my throat; but these screams are almost always stifled by the dry heaving they provoke.
A day in the life of a carer.
Some of the best advice I got was to speak of my child and the illness separately. Her illness didn’t define her, and it was the illness, not her, who was wreaking havoc with our lives. Our beautiful daughter Simone was still here. Our job was to love and care for her while we battled this illness together. It is a long journey and definitely a dirt road with many pot poles and dead ends. My hope and prayer that sustained me was that each day we battled through with Simone was another day with her still here, and another day closer to beating this damn thing!
A journey of finding peace in hospital.
Alone in my room, I look at my list of things to do each day. I tick off the things I have done, fill in my food diary, and decide study and my training diary can wait until tomorrow when I am not so tired. Curling up in bed, I am lonely, but that's okay. I am in the process of learning to feel safe in my own company; to love myself through all the struggles I have, and to not fight back against the waves of emotion that come and go. Yes I am living in a psychiatric hospital, but that is okay. I am where I need to be to feel safe enough to explore where I am at in life. I have the support and tools available to make the difficult task of completely opening myself up and facing my true self possible. I sit with my loneliness, recognising that what I am doing is hard, and that although the pattern I had gotten into of denying my feelings seemed easier in the short term, over time the denial will lead me away from who I am.
The wondrous truth of Electroconvulsive Therapy.
Finishing up on the bike I head to my room and shower, again marvelling at how a task that drained so much energy not long ago can so quickly become part of my normal routine again. At 12:30pm I head down the hall to the treatment room, ready to go in. Despite it being my third time now there is still a sense of anxiety about the process, the seeming seriousness of it all. For such an incredible treatment, the fact that they aren't even sure how it works induces both apprehension and wonder in me. I also start to worry about how much my memory will be affected this time, what I will forget next. Already I can't remember the names of anyone new I meet, and I find myself all too often walking into rooms and in the middle of doing things not knowing why. Still, I'll take that over how I used to feel.