Apologies for my absence

Last Friday I had some kind of psychotic episode and checked myself in to the hospital where I stayed until this afternoon.

It happened out of nowhere. One minute, I was fine. The next, I was cutting up my left arm and chest. Well, I was doing it, but I didn’t want to. It was the first time since January/February that I felt the presence of “them” (the creatures/voices). They kept sending me severely self-destructive thoughts, and I was afraid that I’d die if I didn’t put myself in the hospital.

Contrary to popular belief, these kinds of events aren’t extremely melodramatic (at least in my case). I very calmly showered and put together a backpack full of things for my stay before my mom got home, and then we went out to get something to eat, since we knew we were in for a long night in the emergency room.

We were in the ER for six hours before I was finally admitted. We spent about an hour and a half in the waiting room, and the rest of the time in a room. My mom got the worst part of that, cos although I was having a shit ton of blood taken and nurses prodding me every so often for whatever, I was in a bed; she was in a chair. We eventually turned the TV on in the room and that helped pass the time.

Honestly, a lot of it was severely humiliating. One of the nurses cleaned my wounds and wrapped them and I felt like such a fuckhead. To me, I hadn’t hurt myself, it was them, but I knew on some level that wasn’t the truth and I’d done it to myself. Then I talked to a doctor about my hallucinations, with my mom sitting to the side of me. I stopped even saying that I could tell the difference between real reality and my reality because I thought it was just complicating everything. Even if I can tell that things aren’t real real, I still respond to them sometimes; it’s like watching a 3D film and screaming when something “jumps” off the screen, though you know it’s not really going to harm you. So I sat in my bed gesturing madly and doing my best to describe my “creatures” (I had to do this so many times during my stay). I felt like such a crazy fucker and I kept imaging how I would feel if my mom and I switched places and I were witnessing all of this from my daughter. We kept being asked about a family history of mental illness and we had no real answers. I’m the first person to really be diagnosed with anything. So while we’re sure there’s a history of something, there’s nothing concrete. My mom’s uncle killed himself, but her dad died (of natural causes) when she was a baby, so we don’t have details of why he committed suicide.

Eventually, I was put in a hospital gown and wheeled up to the ward, which made me feel even worse. I found out later that I’d been Baker Acted by the hospital for about a day (because I’d come in through the ER and they apparently do this to anyone they feel needs it). I signed myself in as a voluntary patient my second night there.

The last time I was at this particular hospital, I was sixteen and put in the juvenile ward. I always feared the adult ward because my dad used to work there and only ever had horrible stories of patients committing suicide or having to be severely restrained. I’m not really comfortable going in to massive detail about everything that went on while I was there though, for two reasons; the first reason is that I don’t want to think about some of it and the second reason is because it makes me feel like I’m turning this all into some kind of show for entertainment. It’s not that I think all of you view it that way, it’s just how I feel about it in general. I kept thinking of all the people who’ve only seen mental health facilities through movies like Girl, Interrupted or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and think it’s all really awesome and crazy people are really interesting and something to aspire to be. When the patients from these films are standing right in front of you, it’s not entertaining anymore. It’s fucking sad. A woman came in last night who was dealing with severe psychosis, and she was put in a geri chair to restrain her. She slid out of it once and was sitting on the floor. Her hair was disheveled and she barely spoke. I kept watching her and thinking about she was someone’s mother (the son or daughter had called earlier asking how she was doing), and how upset I would be if that were my mother sitting there.

Anyway, it wasn’t all bad. I’m doing better now than I was a few days ago. This is the second episode like this that has happened, so I doubt it’s the last time I’ll have to deal with this type of thing, but I hope next time I’ll have the good sense to call someone before I cut myself.

The social worker who held one of the groups this morning said she liked how I talked about my mental illness how a diabetic talks about managing his or her diabetes. I had some good conversations with some of the other patients as well. After one of the group meetings, a woman came up to me and said she’d been diagnosed as schizoaffective as well and we talked briefly about that. Another woman who was in her 50s talked to me about cutting.

I suppose the only difficult thing I felt through all of this was that nobody else much knew what I was talking about when I’d describe my situation. Most people associate cutting with depression, but I’m not depressed, and my self-mutilation wasn’t spurred on by self-hatred in any form. I mostly only deal with psychotic symptoms anymore, but because I’m so competent, it’s hard for people to really believe me. I’m really polite to staff members as well, which further screws me, probably.

Anyway, it’s good to be home, and thank God I didn’t have to stay locked up through Christmas. My meds were upped and that seems to be going all right so far, so hopefully it stays that way.

Beginnings Part IV – Psychotic Break Part I

I woke up early on Monday, January 21, 2008 and started to get ready for work, like usual. I got dressed and made coffee and then went into the bathroom to put on my makeup.

That’s when everything stopped making sense.

Looking in the mirror, I couldn’t recognize myself anymore. I couldn’t remember how to apply any of my makeup, either. While trying to apply eyeshadow, I felt a strong desire to smear it across my cheek instead of my eyelid. It just seemed like the more logical thing to do. Some part of me knew that that wasn’t right though, so I stopped what I was doing.

Suddenly, I was gripped with an intense fear that all of my co-workers who were already working that morning somehow knew what was going on with me at that moment and were just waiting for me to get to work so they could tease me about it. I felt like my every move and thought were being broadcast to everyone.

I started to think that if I wrote out “go to work” twenty times, it would fix everything. I didn’t think I would have enough time to be able to do that before I had to leave though, so I just started writing a mental note to myself instead, in the third person. “Kelley is going to go to work & nothing bad is going to happen to her. Nobody can actually see her thoughts & nobody is going to make fun of her. Nobody hates her. Everything will be okay.”

Ten minutes before I was supposed to be at work, I was standing by my front door and desperately trying to shake the fog out of my head so I could drive. I started thinking about everything I had to do at work and it seemed utterly impossible. I was afraid to go out the door and even attempt to drive because I couldn’t remember in what order to do anything. Nothing was making any sense at all. I started panicking. I woke my mom up and asked her to call in for me and say I was sick and wouldn’t be at work for the day. I didn’t do a very good job at explaining what was going on because I was literally losing the ability to talk for some reason, but she understood enough and called in for me.

From that point on, I don’t remember the exact order of what happened, so this might get a bit scattered.

For most of that day, I thought I was just dealing with a panic attack, but as hours passed and I was still lost in a fog, I started to get scared. I could type and write fine, but I was having trouble talking. The desire would be there, but I couldn’t get the words out for some reason. Even worse, occasionally I would get so frustrated with it all that I’d start hitting myself in the head with my hand. I couldn’t control it; it just happened. I eventually realized that if I wrote down what I wanted to say and read from it, I could talk without a problem, so I started to do that.

I started to think that I needed to go to the hospital or see a doctor or something, so I called around to try and reach one of my parents (both work in the medical field) and ask what they thought I should do. I think I spoke to my dad briefly, but he wasn’t able to talk long, so he had my stepmom call me to get a better idea of what was going on, since she was home and he was working. I was afraid to tell her about everything at first because I thought it all sounded stupid and I didn’t think she’d believe me. There were also parts that I knew on some level were crazy and I was ashamed of speaking about some of them out loud. I ended up telling her everything though. I was crying and gasping for air during a lot of it. I told her that I was sure I was going crazy and I felt like I was disappearing and had very little time to get help before “they” got me. I spoke in very broken sentences because I was still having difficulty talking, but I did my best to explain who “they” were to her–the voices and the creatures. I believed that what was happening was due to the voices commanding the creatures to attack me, but they were being held back in their world because there still existed a very thin barrier between me and them, but I didn’t know how long it would hold. My stepmom reacted calmly to everything and comforted me as best as she could, which really helped, as I was completely terrified and starting to fear for my life.

I eventually talked to my dad an hour or so after that conversation, and he did his best to comfort me as well. He said that what I was describing sounded like I might be dealing with schizophrenia, but he assured me that it didn’t mean anything was my fault or that anyone was going to treat me differently. They were going to get me help. I remember crying a lot during our conversation and pleading that someone get me help as quickly as possible. “I feel like I’m disappearing and I don’t know how to stop it. I’m really scared! I don’t want to disappear!” I choked out between tears.

Long story short, since it’s difficult for me to put these events in order because I don’t remember a lot of it, I called around to various psychiatrists (I had to do it myself since I was over eighteen and nobody else could handle my medical issues, legally) but I either never received a call back or I couldn’t be seen for weeks. I didn’t want to go to the hospital and my family was trying to avoid that as well, so I eventually called a psychiatrist I had seen years before and I was able to get an appointment for that Wednesday.

I’ll end this post here because it’s (mostly) the story of what happened in the physical world during this time. Describing what happened in my head will involve quite a bit of writing and I feel that it should be broken off into a separate part

(ETA: Part II has been deleted for the time being)