Well, the plunge down the rabbit hole was a long one this time: six weeks gone like a bad dream.
I'm back...like awaking...with the oddness of the shift throwing me a bit....Vestiges of the nightmares clinging to me like burrs and I haven't quite successfully made the transition yet. I came home to a house that still smelled clean after a friend came and cleaned for us yesterday. I'm finding myself hesitant to make any mess; afraid to let the house know that this disorganized, more than a little scattered person is back home.
It was gratifying to receive the embraces and enthusiastic welcome from my daughter yesterday when I returned from the hospital. And almost equally good to say "hi" to online friends. I have missed you all greatly.
I suppose I owe maybe more of an explanation about what happened than just that bloody poem I'd left with you followed by a long silence. I'm not really qualified to give one. I don't remember much: just hearing the heart wrenching sound of my husband sobbing in his room as my father took me to a local emergency room...I recall nothing else pre-ER...no reasons...no images....nothing.
At the ER I remember standing in the corner of a room filled with one way windows...looking in; stripped into the denuded humiliation of a hospital gown. Evidently I'd decided to leave that room at some point because the next thing I recall is being in the hall and hearing a code alarm go off announcing a "Code Gray" in the ER. Now having worked in a hospital for a number of years as a Unit Secretary, I know that this means that there was violence in the Emergency Room....Oh wait!--It's ME.
Tackled with more security guards and who all else than I care to know right now I was face down on the floor and very efficiently, I must say, transferred into restraints and carried on a backboard to a room, placed on a bed still wearing the restraints.
Next image: being put onto a stretcher (STILL in restraints!), trundled into an ambulance and sent back to the same hospital where I'd been for my last five admissions. I remember nothing else for many more days...More codes...QA (Quiet Area: a hysterical misnomer that anyone with a psychiatric history will recognize).....Many more injections....weeks passing....Images still scattered and infrequent....
Finally (drum roll): Loxapine. (A drug they tried as a "second-to-last-resort.") Then the pictures begin to clear and sequence....I'd already been to court twice and re-committed twice and was on a waiting list for a state hospital...NJ's dreaded "Greystone."
Thank you, Lord, that the Loxapine worked and that I was discharged before I was transferred.
So now...I'm back.
A bit shaky and (judging from the trail I've left around my house) still as messy and disorganized as ever.
Thank you all for praying; your calls and thoughts while I was gone. While it is good to be home, the transition is a bit like a crash landing: more than a little unsettling. Keep praying for me in the difficult days to come...(and pray for my family too!)
