@shutterbug
My mom is not really a bad person, she’s a Pollyanna who is in denial about how much worse my mental illness has become.
She was pretty awesome when I was diagnosed with multiple personality back in the early 1990s. Drove me to my pdoc biweekly and to a weekly hospital support group for DID patients. Was the only one who visited me in the three weeks I was hospitalized, and came almost every night.
I talked with Chris last night after I posted here. We decided that we kind of understand where she’s coming from, feeling out of control, and confronted with the reality that my illness is so bad.
I was in biweekly pdoc treatment for DID for several years. Every penny of it was self pay out of my trust account set up to pay for college. I couldn’t begin to drive myself there, so she always took me. She took me everywhere, as I was way too incapacitated to drive.
Then I actually had 5 years of relative “stability.” I held a higher level admin assistant job for 3 years, and divorced my first husband after 10 hellish years. She started to relax a bit that everything might be okay.
I had moved out from my husband in February 2002. Had met my current husband online on hockey message boards in 2001, and we had escalated to long distance romance before my 6 month waiting period passed where I could officially file for divorce.
I spent 11 days with Chris in Calgary in July 2022, and in August announced I was engaged and immigrating to western Canada. I wasn’t even divorced yet.
She was confused, but didn’t protest or try to stop me. My MI was in remission and I hadnt been diagnosed sza until early 2015. So she was worried but quiet about it.
My mental illness blew up again in late 2006. I was soon mostly out of work because I couldn’t hold my sh it together long enough to stay employed.
With the Canadian medical system, I never got the psychiatric care I desperately needed. So I just kept getting more and more psychotic, all the way on the other side of the country and up on the Canadian side of the border. That must have been really hard to watch, especially from that distance.
Then when I came back, I was even way worse than that. I was getting outpatient psych care from a teaching hospital. The revolving door of resident doctors never diagnosed me sza, but they pumped me full of drugs that never helped. At one point I was on 7 psych meds and still completely psychotic. Again, she felt helpless. I was geographically only 2 hours away, but I had pretty much lost all sense of reality.
Then the sza diagnosis in 2015. And you have all seen that just keep plummeting.
She thought things were bad in the 90s…now I had all those problems again, plus sza. We have a very small family - there’s just my mom, sister, and me from my family of origin.
If I look at it from her perspective, I’m sure she feels completely helpless and confused as to how I’ve been in weekly care with a great and dedicated pnurse for almost 2 years, but am still trying to get the right med cocktail, and I have never been worse than I am now.
She feels helpless. I think she’s trying to kid herself that I can still recover. But if I go back to the hospital like I did in the 90s, she feels like I’ll be totally lost again. Can’t be in denial about how much worse things are if I land at the end of the line in a locked ward again. That has a way of smacking everyone sober.
I guess you can probably relate if the same thing happened to your daughter and she was so far away in a different country and not getting help, then she was too far gone to help once she came back to the same state.
This is already horrendously long. But I’m starting to sober up from my latest string of rapid cycling, and I’m seeing things from her side. Obviously I am not doing it on purpose, but I’m her firstborn and have been putting her through hell since I first entered treatment in 1987. And I have never been worse.
About insurance, Chris works in a call center at the university hospital, and I have stellar insurance with a reasonable out of pocket maximum. A hospital bill would suck, but it wouldn’t send me into bankruptcy either. She paid $30k out of her divorce settlement when I was inpatient in 1993, so the prospect of 2023 dollars must scare the crap out of her.
Sorry so long. No one is gonna read all this, lol!
