Part one:
Nine days ago, I wrote a post called "Feel the Angels" that I later took down. It stayed up just long enough to post in friends' blog readers and make them worry (sorry, again). I wrote it at a time when I needed to vent, but couldn't vent to family... then realized that someone who knows our family might see it and it would suck for them to hear about our little crisis that way.
Here's the whole post:
Right now at my house, we're going through some pretty major mental illness-related crap.
I don't want to violate my child's privacy and I haven't told my family about it yet. He doesn't know most of you readers, so it's easier to write it here.
Hubby and I are sticking close together and staying close to our kid.
Going through it relatively alone seems like the best way right now. Privacy, you know. Our child will have to resurface and resume his life at some point and we'd like it to be as smooth a transition as possible.
But right now I need a chance to vent, and support, and prayers.
Part two:
On Friday, March 11, around 12:30, Hubby called me and said he'd received a call from a local hospital. Our son was in the emergency room. He'd been thinking of attempting suicide. He left school and was close enough to doing it that he scared himself and called 911. Two sweet police officers went immediately to him and kept him safe until the ambulance came for him.
I picked up Hubby at work and we went to the hospital together. We spent the rest of the day and evening with our boy until, finally, he was released to our care, but only long enough for us to grab a few things at home for him, and take him to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in a neighboring town.
We had to leave him there, and walk away. In the waiting room, we held each other and I cried. That was when I felt the angels around me.
He spent almost a week there. They played with his medications (hooray for Effexor) and taught him coping skills and helped him identify his "triggers" and counseled with him.
We visited him every day, sometimes twice. We brought him treats and funny little toys from those machines you put a quarter in and turn the knob and a plastic bubble pops out with a toy inside. (The fake mustaches were his favorite.)
Hubby and I alternated between feeling utterly stunned and overwhelmed, and trying to keep life normal for the other four kids. I cried when I was alone, or while on the phone with my parents.
Last Thursday, he came home. Minus the screaming and diapers, it was like having a new baby in the house: we were excited to have him at home, and way freaked that we would do something wrong.
Part three:
With heavenly help, we are making it.
Underlying all the other feelings has been gratitude, which is so not what I was expecting. I have been so grateful this last while - for that strong will to live that our Heavenly Father has been wise enough to place inside us, for 911 - the number and the dispatchers, for ambulances and paramedics and police officers, for hospitals, doctors, nurses, social workers, and MEDICATION. For medical understanding and knowledge. For my family. For my friends. For loving ward members. For good food and a nice home and clothing. For those silly vending machines that spit out fake mustaches.
For our four other wonderful children, who helped keep us going. Otherwise it would have been really easy to just climb into the kid's hospital bed and grab him and not let go, and cry my eyes out (which would have been awkward).
And now, for the "new normal."
Learning about mental illness.
Joking around about mental illness - it can be done.
Enjoying our son's medication along with him (he takes it, we get to watch his pupils dilate). He might need to have it tweaked yet again... but it's keeping him alive and helps him enjoy things he hadn't enjoyed for a long time. How much fun it is to hear him LAUGH again. How long had it been since the last time we heard him laugh?
While running errands, seeing an ambulance with sirens and flashing lights take off toward our home. And following it to see where it goes. And feeling relief and laughing at our paranoia, when it goes down someone else's street. Hoping that wherever it goes, the person needing the ambulance will be OK.
Car voices and house voices. Loud sounds are one of his triggers.
Fielding questions from family and friends. Hearing their stories. Feeling loved and supported and understood.
Hugging all five babies more often.
Easy weeping - for joy and for pain.
Knowing it could happen again any day. Enjoying the good days. Bracing up (and keeping the laundry caught up) for the bad ones.
Knowing that Heavenly Father knows our family, as a whole and each of us individually, and loves us, and wants us to be okay. Knowing there are lessons for us to learn.
And again, underneath it all, gratitude, for all the good things - for all the things it was, and all the things it wasn't - for what could have happened, that didn't.
I will be forever grateful.
