I Am Blue Today
Things aren’t always funny.
Sometimes we all forget that the ones who laugh the loudest and have the
gift to make other’s laugh, those people are fighting a war that rages within
their homes and families. Whether its
financial stress or anything else, it’s there, hidden behind a door with lots
of locks and deadbolts to make it easier to be out of sight and out of mind. We try to keep the world from seeing it or at
best, having others finding out about it only to voice how they think we are handling it all
wrong.
Today is not a good day.
And maybe it’s a good time to come out of the closet because I know we
aren’t the only ones who have to live with a ticking time bomb within our
home.
You see, I’ve always known there was something wrong. I saw it when he was a baby. Something just wasn’t “right”. I chose to believe his pediatrician’s
explanations because they were so much easier to swallow than the big bitter pill that has always been starring at us in the face. I wanted to believe that I
was the one who was crazy.
Years go by, things escalate. By the time he was 4yrs old, we had to hide all
the knives and scissors. By the time he
was 9yrs old, we knew he needed help but no one would ever return my calls, and
then he would be “better”, so we just let him be “better”. Until, he wasn’t “better” anymore. Then I’d call for an appointment again, and again,
no one would call me back, and again, he’d be “better”.
This went on and on, year after year.
Until this past April, he started damaging things. He scratched up my car with scissors. He denied it, but we have security cameras
that proved that he did it, and then he proudly admitted doing it with no
remorse at all. We also couldn't trust him to be alone with our pets in fear that he would hurt them so he could never be left alone.
2 days after he damaged my car, he threw a palm sized chunk of asphalt at me
and left me bruised and bleeding. I can
still look down and see the scar on my forearm from it. And that’s when things went into warp
speed. We had no other choice but to
admit our still 12yr old son into a psychiatric hospital for 8 days.
You can never know how that felt for us, to sit there,
locked up in a room for hours with other people trying to be admitted, while we
waited to hand our child over to strangers because he was a danger to me and
possibly to himself.
He was then diagnosed and my fears from when he was a baby
all came crashing down on me at the words, “Bipolar 1 with Psychosis”.
Our son has a mental illness. Our son has a mental illness. Our son has a mental illness. Oh my
God. Our son has a mental illness. Mentally ill.
Mentally ill. No. Anything but this. No. No. No.
Why couldn’t it be cancer instead? I mean, you can see cancer in x-rays and
scans. You can even name it Kanye or Marilyn, and visualize
kicking its ass and brutally destroying it because you can SEE IT. You can try to cut it out. You can attack it with chemicals and
radiation. But this? Mental illness? You can’t see it. You can’t cut it out. You can’t go into remission with Bipolar
1. It’s constantly changing, moving,
adapting, hiding, then uncontrollable screaming at the top of its lungs . Medication works, and then in
a blink of an eye, it becomes ineffective and you have to change the medication
again.
The problem with medication is, you have to get in to see a
psychiatrist to get prescribed the much needed medications. It took us 3 months to get our son into a
psychiatrist that would even see an adolescent.
3 months.
The hospital only gave
us 30 days of medication with stern instructions that he cannot run out or stop taking these pills, or he’ll end up right back in the hospital.
How exactly do you make 30 days of medication last 3
months???
Well, you spend hours every
morning before work on the phone, begging, pleading, crying with anyone who
will listen, to write refills for his current prescription. Thank God, his pediatrician has helped us
with this. Otherwise we would have been
admitting him into the hospital every 30 days for refills.
Why am I telling this very personal and devastating
story?
Because today, I’ve got nothing
funny to tell.
Today I’m crying.
Today he refused to take his pills to the
point where I was afraid that I was going to have to admit him into the
hospital again.
Today I saw the face of
the monster that lives inside of our son and because it scares me to my bones.
Today, our son’s mental illness is scaring me.
And he’s now bigger and stronger than I
am. And on days like this, when he’s
crashing and not making sound decisions and being cruel.
I just feel, sad. Sad for him.
Sad for us. Sad for other parents
who are also dealing with the same hell that we are.
Just overwhelming sadness.
