by Band Back Together | Oct 26, 2010 | Abuse, Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Anger, Anxiety, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Feelings, Forgiveness, Stress, Trauma |
One MAJOR roadblock I had when I reclaimed my life from the childhood traumas that haunted me was forgiveness. One small word, one LARGE hurdle.
You see, I didn’t want to forgive my stepfather who sexually and physically abused me.
I. DID. NOT. WANT. TO. FORGIVE.
But that damn rat bastard word, forgiveness, kept rearing its ugly head. In books I was reading for my healing, conversations with my counselor, in the news, on TV shows, in song lyrics. EVERYWHERE. Forgiveness was haunting me, stalking me. I had to deal with it.
I didn’t want to forgive because I felt that forgiveness was saying that what he did to me was okay. I thought that if I forgave him, I was giving him a free pass. A get out of jail free card.
“Yes, you were beyond horrific to me. You scarred my soul and took away my childhood. You abused me in every way you could think of. Ah, never mind.”
I didn’t understand what forgiveness was about.
So, I turned the tables and I began stalking forgiveness. I read books and articles about forgiveness. I listened to sermons and personal testimonies about forgiveness. I talked at length about my dreaded enemy, forgiveness, with my counselor and others I trusted. I devoured any information I could find on the subject.
I learned a lot. I learned that anger and bitterness really only hurt the person carrying it. My stepfather didn’t feel any effects of my anger. He was living far away and had no clue how I felt. Nor would he care if he did. I was the one suffering. Stress. Pain. Anxiety. Anger. Hatred. Not a lovely mix to carry around inside of me.
I learned that almost everyone struggles with forgiveness in their life. Most importantly, I learned that I needed to forgive – not for him, but for me. The pain, anger and bitterness was going to eat me from the inside out if I did not find a way to release it and let it go for good.
By forgiving him, it does not mean what he did was okay. It will never be okay. It will never be right. It will always be horrible. It will always be pure, unadulterated evil.
Forgiveness means I will no longer carry the hatred and burden for what he did.
Since I did not want any contact or relationship with my stepfather, I did not have to forgive him face-to-face. No letter, no phone call. Nothing. It was only important that I knew I had forgiven him. So I did. I have to admit, spitting out the words “I forgive my stepfather” was vile the first time I did it. Part of my body rebelled and I wanted to vomit after I said it. But I knew it was important. I had to say it several times before it didn’t make me feel physically ill.
Then, one day I said it and finally, I felt the shift. I had forgiven him.
Do I thank him? HELL NO. Do I want him in my life? HELL NO. Do I hold anger and bitterness toward him or wish him dead? Also, NO. Forgiveness set me free to feel absolutely nothing toward him. I have no investment at all in what his day-to-day life is, what he is doing, where he lives. Just like I don’t have any investment or feelings toward someone I pass at the DMV.
I simply don’t care. His hold over me; over my life, is over.
Forgiveness is a gift I gave myself.
I’m thankful that I did.
by Band Back Together | Oct 25, 2010 | Abuse, Child Abuse, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Forgiveness, Happiness, Helping Someone In An Abusive Relationship, Hope, Psychological Manipulation, Self Loathing, Shame, Stress, Trauma |
Sometimes the only monster we see is when we’re looking into a mirror.
This is her story:
I was controlled by a destructive, angry individual who did everything in their power to destroy the very core of my being.
The sad part is that I allowed it, and not only for a little while … oh no … I allowed this person to eat at me every single day … all day … for years, until there was nothing left but a shell of my former existence. They were mean and hurtful, yelled at my children, they could have cared less about my happiness … their main goal was to make me and everyone around me pay for their misery. They let their selfish need for pride crumble the walls of my life … I was sure there was no way to rid myself of this person … I was trapped … the very thought of ending the darkness they brought was unfathomable.
Murder.
I could simply just kill them.
The thought crossed my mind on more than one occasion … but what little common sense I had left stopped whatever notions that crept into my mind.
To escape this person was to escape my very self.
I was her … she was me, and deep down in her head, buried under the anger and depression was a tiny flicker of light that called out to her … “don’t drive your car off the road … you know better than that.”
The problem was that no matter how deep I analyzed myself, I could come up with not one valid reason to feel this way. What was wrong with me? … why was I spiraling into a hole? What was my problem?
Was it a learned behavior? … it was possible.
Was it genetic? … that was quite possible as well.
One morning I woke up and opened the refrigerator … a tub of margarine fell out and you’d think the world had just ended. My ranting and yelling and crying over something so trivial was ridiculous. Kind of like when my Dad didn’t have enough milk for his cereal in the morning … off he’d go to the store … tires screeching down the driveway … he couldn’t just have a piece of toast or something … no that was too easy … he had to upset the entire household.
I know now after seeing the same behavior in myself that it had nothing to do with the milk, just like it had nothing to do with the margarine. It was a sickness … one that I was passing down to my own children … I was well aware, yet I still refused to do anything about it.
Excuses.
I had a reason for everything.
I’m not getting help because I’m not a failure. I’ll be fine … it’ll go away. I’m not going on medication because I don’t need a crutch! And to hell with gaining any ten or twenty pounds by popping the pills either. Ain’t happening. Instead I chose to make my family walk on egg shells. Instead I chose to stop caring about my health … Instead I chose to put myself at the very bottom of the list.
I was and I still am stubborn.
Thankfully, there is a voice of reason in my life. A voice that knew how I felt … someone who had been where I was … someone who had made his way through the darkness … someone who said, “you don’t have to live this way and the only thing on my wish list is for you to get help.”
I felt like I was giving in … succumbing to failure … and making that phone call was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.
I thought for sure I was making a huge mistake. The doctor would put me on medication and that would be the end of me. I’d be a fat emotionless entity who drifted through the rest of her life wishing she could just be ‘like everyone else’.
I was given medication … my doctor said, “if you couldn’t see very well, would you not want to wear glasses?” … I filled the prescription … then I made my second mistake and scoured the depression forums like a mad woman trying to find out what was to become of me. The best advice I could ever give a person who’s never taken an SSRI is to stay the hell away from those forums. STAY AWAY. They will scare the living crap out of you.
I took the medication.
Slowly and surely each day was a little brighter. Each day, life became less hectic in my head. I could think … I could breathe and most importantly, I stopped bringing misery to the lives of those nearest and dearest to me.
Today I’m happy … I’m not fat, I didn’t gain the seven thousand pounds I was certain of gaining … I wake up every morning without that nagging rage. If I see a dirty coffee mug sitting on the table, I don’t start the next great war … nor have I lost my ability to emote.
I was wrong about getting help … I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried.
It hurts me to see people who feel the helplessness that I felt.
You don’t have to live that way …
you really don’t.
by Band Back Together | Oct 10, 2010 | Anger, Anxiety, Birth Defects, Birth Trauma, Encephalocele, Fear, Feelings, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Resources, Hope, How To Cope With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Loneliness, Medical Mystery Tour, Neural Tube Defects, NICU, PICU, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sadness, Stress, Trauma |
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer, please God, hear my prayer.
I instinctively checked the monitors as I approached my daughter who was sprawled out, getting a sunbath underneath the warmer. Her stats were picture perfect, I noticed, breathing a little more easily, and I made my way slowly to her bedside where she was sleeping peacefully.
I slogged my soggy bottom from the wheelchair onto the rocker that had been shoved into her tiny NICU room; barely even a room, more like a broom closet. She was sandwiched in between two misbehaving (“misbehaving” means that their alarms were constantly blaring) babies who I could hear misbehaving.
Most of the NICU, I noted as I was wheeled past, was full of Feeders and Growers. That’s NICU slang for babies that were, for whatever reason, finishing their gestation outside of the womb. It”s always evoked a pleasant picture of a garden of freshly hatched babies. A Baby Garden.
Of the other babies that I could see cooking away merrily in their incubators, Amelia was the biggest, fattest, and likely the only full- term baby there.
According to her room placement, though, she was the most ill.
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer, please God, hear my prayer.
My ass firmly planted now onto the chair (I’d had a traumatic vaginal birth mere hours before), I held Amelia’s lone sock as a talisman, hoping it would ward off the Bad News. I was preparing to nurse my daughter again, just waiting for our nurse to come and help me sort through the tangle of wires my daughter was attached to.
It was hard to believe only thirty or so minutes had passed since we’d heard “there’s something sinister on your daughter’s CT scan.”
Our–Amelia’s–nurse walked in and introduced herself to The Daver and I. I was openly weeping, holding onto Mimi’s sock and my iPhone – where the Pranksters live!- as a life preserver. The Daver was pale(r) and stalwart.
I handed off the box of Kleenex that had been pressed onto my lap as we left Mother/Baby and my daughter was brought back to me, hooked up to so many wires that she looked like an electrical outlet. The nurse stood there, kindly talking to us, but not revealing anything.
We still had no idea what was wrong with our daughter. A diagnosis would take weeks. Her life, as far as we knew, hung in the balance.
I begged the nurse to have the house neonatologist visit my daughter as the pediatric neurosurgeon was busily operating on someone’s head somewhere other than the NICU. It’s probably good I didn’t know where he was or I’d have stalked him down and dragged him to my daughter for a diagnosis.
The neonatologist – the one I’d met a lifetime ago in the delivery room, the guy who was always drinking a bottle of something – he came over to Amelia’s “room” and he told us that there was a “bright spot” on Amelia’s CT Scan. He didn’t mean diamonds.
I had no fucking clue what that meant and he didn’t follow it up with much, although I did see his lips move, I couldn’t understand his words.
Guess that’s panic for you.
After the doctor left, the nurse came back in to ask if we’d wanted to see the chaplain; rather to have Amelia meet the chaplain. A thousand times yes.
She was amazing. Just. Incredible. For the next year, it was her words, her warmth and compassion that I kept coming back to. She blessed my daughter. My daughter was blessed.
And she is so, so blessed.
We sat there in the NICU; just the three of us. I couldn’t tell you how long we just sat. Time in the ICU is timeless. 4 AM and 4PM are the same.
Soon enough, I had to go upstairs to change my undergarments and ready myself to see my boys. My sister-in-law was bringing my sons to visit, and I had to put on my Poker Face. Given the raw, chapped and bleeding state of my cheeks, was going to be damn near impossible.
Back in my room, I saw that I’d gotten some flowers and a basket from two of my Pranksters and it made me cry. Then again, I think the package of Saltines that had been ruthlessly thrown on the floor the night before might have made me cry. I wasn’t in a Good Place.
Alex and Ben came in a bit after I’d gotten cleaned up. I held Alex very, very close as Ben showed me some pictures he’d colored of Amelia. Ben knew his sister was sick but Alex (only 22 months old) had no idea what a “sister” was, let alone what being “sick” meant. I held them and faked normal until I got the call from the NICU. Time to nurse the baby.
Talk about being torn.
I cried as I said goodbye to my youngest son–my eldest just wanted to get home and I couldn’t find fault with that–and he cried and yowled “Mooommmmyyy” as he was led away to the elevators that would dump him back into the outside world.
By myself for the first time, I tearfully found my way back to the Secret Place, The Land of Tears. Never have I felt so sick to my stomach in my life. People stared sympathetically as I wept in the elevator, leaning against the walls for support.
I begged God to let her live, even if she was retarded and her IQ was 43 and had to live at home for the rest of her life, just please let my baby girl live. I didn’t care what was wrong with her so long as she made it out alive. I begged God to take me instead. I’d had 28 wonderful years on the planet already, and she was less than 24 hours old. Certainly, I’d give my life to save her in a moment.
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer. Please God, hear my prayer.
After scrubbing the top 50 layers of skin from my arm and signing a reasonable facsimile of my name, I wobbled to her bedside. There she was, my girl. Perfect stats, thrashing about her isolette, pissed as hell and looking for something to eat.
In the brief time I’d been gone we’d gotten a new nurse.
When she came in to assess my daughter and saw me crying as I nursed my girl, for the first time in a day, someone asked me what was wrong. I explained that I didn’t know if my daughter would live or die. I told her that no one had told us what could be wrong with her, what that bump COULD be, why she was in the NICU, nothing.
She looked pretty aghast that we’d been told nothing, and for the first time, someone tried to reassure us. I remember leaving the NICU several hours later slightly less burdened.
That night, we ordered a pizza and tried to relax in my somber room. We tried to let go of some of The Fear. I didn’t feel much like celebrating anything, so no balloons, no stuffed animals, no signs that I had just given birth decorated my room. I could have been on any floor, in any room in the hospital.
The nurse brought me my Ambien and the NICU called to tell me that they would bring my daughter up to nurse every 2 hours (the NICU runs like clockwork. It’s no wonder that new parents struggle to care for their NICU graduate when they get home). I turned on the sound machine to blast white noise over The Daver’s snores, and waited, trying to fall asleep.
Unsurprisingly to no one, I couldn’t get anywhere close to sleep that night. This made the tally of nights without sleep 3.
I was about to lose it.
Somewhere around 4 AM, after someone had barged into my room to empty the wastebasket, waking me from the lightest of light sleep, I panicked. I’d sent Dave down to the NICU to sit with our daughter in the vain hope that having him at her side would set my mind free.
I was alone. The panic that had been a constant dull buzzing had morphed into something much more sinister and I knew what was about to happen.
Frantically, I paged the nurses station because I knew I needed help. I explained as carefully as I could that I was about to have a panic attack and that I needed my nurse NOW. My nurse came in, I don’t remember what she did, but she didn’t want to call my doctors because they would be rounding in a couple of hours and I could ask for something for my anxiety then.
Fucking bitch.
She told me to “relax” and then left.
I tried to “relax” which was as useful as punching myself in the face with a hammer. It didn’t work. I put a call back into the nurses station, begging; pleading with them to call my doctor. I begged for help.
My last rational thought was to quickly inventory anything in the room with any sort of calming properties. The best I could come up with was a bottle of Scope.
I didn’t end up drinking it, but I did call the NICU and beg Dave to come back up. A nurse passing by my room took pity on me and called my doctor, who prescribed me an Ativan. A swarm of people all happened to come into my room at the same time: a partner in my OB practice who looked terrified by me but discharged me anyway, a nurse with that beautiful pill, a tech to get my vitals, and my husband.
It sounds, in retelling this, that they were all there to help, but it wasn’t really like that. Dave and the nurse were trying to calm me down, but the tech, the doctor and whomever was washing the floor were doing their jobs. With spectacularly bad timing.
Ativan on board now, I was trying to gulp some calming breaths and stave off the panic. They’d turned off the lights, and covered my still-swollen body with fresh sheets, cleaned off the bedside table and turned on the white noise machine.
Finally, I began to relax and beat the panic away, if only slightly. Dave held my hand and told me over and over and over again that my daughter was just fine, she was perfect, she was wonderful, she’d done great overnight, she was beautiful, she was going to be just fine. It was soothing to hear, but what would have been MORE soothing? Having her bassinet next to my bed where it belonged instead of three floors below.
Then (dun, dun, DUN), the absolute worst person to show up did.
Lactation services.
Lactation Services showed up, because they say they’ll come by every day you’re in the hospital with a new baby, and they do. It’s awesome for people who need help because breastfeeding is nowhere NEAR as easy as it looks on those weird Lamaze videos.
(also: why are people in the Lamaze videos always naked?)
But I didn’t need help. And when she showed up and saw me shaking in bed, being held by my husband while the nurse clucked around me like a mother hen, lights off, white noise blaring, she should have excused herself. This is not a debate about breast and bottle feeding, this is about decency. But no, she didn’t get the hint.
No.
She introduced herself perkily and asked me how breastfeeding was going, and through clenched teeth, I answered that it was fine. Kinder than the situation warranted.
I expected this to be enough for her, but no, she followed that up with, “Do you have any concerns about breastfeeding?” Wrong question, dipshit. Time, place, all that.
“You know what?” I snarled, “I’m MUCH MORE concerned that my baby is going to die than if I have proper latch, okay?”
Again, she could have gracefully bid be farewell. But no. She kept on keeping on.
“Well, what about your concerns with BREASTFEEDING?” She asked, just not getting it.
I responded with, “Look, if she’s dead, I’m not going to give a FUCK about colostrum, okay? Please!”
I began to sob heavily again. It was the very real truth that my daughter could die. We all knew it. Nursing her wasn’t going to help an encephalocele.
Dave told her to get the fuck out of our room.
Finally, with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door, I slept for a few hours.
I awoke when The Daver bounded in and announced, “the neurosurgeon ordered an MRI! And he’s really nice! And not concerned! He thinks it’s an encephalocele! It’s a piece of brain or something that’s herniated out! We can go home after the MRI! And follow up with the results next week! Oh, I wish you’d met him. He was so, so nice.”
And just like that, we went from critical to discharged in less than 36 hours.
by Band Back Together | Oct 6, 2010 | Multiple Sclerosis, Stress, Trauma |
Three years ago, I was diagnosed with MS. It took about six months from the time I first saw my neurologist to get the actual diagnosis, but he and I were pretty sure we knew what it was from the beginning. I loved my neurologist.
When I say “my neurologist” I actually mean my second neurologist. My first neurologist was a ball-licking douchebag with the bedside manner of a used tampon.
For a couple years before I was diagnosed, I felt “off.” My memory wasn’t as sharp as it had been. I had occasional periods where I would lose my train of thought. I had periods of shaking and twitchiness and I often felt like I was in a fog. My primary care doctor sent me to Dr. Douchenstein, who spent all of five minutes with me at my initial appointment.
He examined my eyes, asked me how I felt, banged my knee with the hammer and said he thought I was fine…but if I really wanted to pursue this….*deep sigh*….he would go ahead and order an EEG.
When my EEG came back with “some small slowing in the left frontal lobe,” he said it was no big deal. He saw nothing remarkable and that there was no seizure activity indicated on the EEG.
In short; I was fine.
I saw him about 9 months later and he spent even less time examining me and indicated that no further tests were necessary. I could see the receptionist on the way out to give her my co-pay. Wham-bam-thank-you-man.
My primary care doctor believed something was wrong, though she didn’t know what. She sent me to see a new neurologist and this dude was the polar opposite of the first one. The initial appointment was over an hour long and he asked about everything.
Through his questioning we found out something very interesting.
As a child, I’d remembered taking an orange liquid-filled capsule. I’d stopped taking it when I was around 16 or 17 and I never knew what it was for. The truth is that when I got old enough to question what it was, I had taken it for so long that I didn’t think twice about it.
Dr. Raddude had me ask my mom what the pill was for and (finally) at age 40, I learned that I had petit mal seizures as a child. You would think that would be the kind of info I would have known, but nope. With this new information in hand and an extremely thorough initial evaluation, the doc went to work investigating.
Approximately 15 MRIs, a CT scat a PET scan, two EEGs and a spinal tap later, I had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. I was having small seizures still but honestly, at the time our focus was on diagnosing the MS. The diagnosis of the actual type of seizures has been in the last month, mainly because they’ve returned and have been getting worse.
MS affects everyone in different ways and for varying lengths of time. If you’re not sure what MS actually is, it’s a degenerative disease of the nervous system. It’s not fatal, but it does lower your quality of life. There are four types of MS and each is slightly different than the others, but there is one common thread: no two people will necessarily have the same symptoms.
My symptoms tend to be dizziness, loss of balance and coordination, dropping things, stumbling over my words or slurring words, losing my train of thought, straight up forgetting things (things that I should absolutely know) and (this may sound funny, but is NOT a joke) I had one more symptom in my head to tell you, but I cannot remember what it is. Whatever it is, it’s kind of new to me and I was going to tell my doctor about it, but as I said, I forgot to write it down.
When I was first diagnosed, I was in the midst of my first big MS attack. It lasted about a year, and in that time I had to use a cane, could not walk more than a block or two without getting completely exhausted, had to write everything down in order to remember it, fell I don’t know how many times, including a half dozen times in the shower and went through a two-month period where I needed to sleep 16-18 hours a day.
This wasn’t stay-in-bed-like-I-have-depression, this was sleeping because my body needed the rest. My neurologist said it’s not uncommon for some MS patients to go through that and it completely sucked for me.
Throughout all of this, I had full custody of my daughter. Luckily, I had nearby family who could help me out. For a while, I was having a hard time with doing simple things like fixing dinner. There were nights when I would try to cut veggies and my hands were shaking so badly that I was afraid I would cut a finger off. Other nights, I repeatedly dropped whatever I was carrying–plates, food, knives, you name it.
I couldn’t drive for almost a year because of the dizziness. Luckily I got state disability for six months, but was denied SSI. Why? I really have no clue. The crack medical team that evaluated patients for Social Security was holed up in a shitty storefront office with 1970′s equipment and they said I didn’t need it and that was that.
Assholes.
The kicker was the woman I was dating at the time. She is a RN at a very well-respected hospital and one night she told me this, “If you can’t work and can’t do the normal things you should, what good are you?” And with that, she dumped me. Swell, huh?
For two years, I did pretty well. The symptoms were minimal and except for a couple of small episodes I remained symptom-free. Until about two months ago. Things haven’t gotten as bad as it was the first time. Yet. Maybe it never will. That’s the thing with MS–you just never know.
Since the first attack I’ve moved far away from my family. I have a new neurologist that I absolutely love. She’s as thorough as the first one and is the one who actually diagnosed my seizures as Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy or JME.
Thanks to the seizures, though, she is pulling my drivers license which means I need to look for a new job.
My current job requires a license. Plus, I deal with people on a daily basis and it’s tough when I keep stumbling over my words. I’ve been mocked by some co-workers on a regular basis as well. A couple of days ago, I was standing in front of my boss’ desk for about five minutes and we were talking. In that short time I dropped my pen three times. He never said a word, but the last couple of days I’ve had co workers pass me in the hall and drop whatever they had in their hand. They will generally bend down to pick it up and say something like, “clumsy me.” It’s childish and makes me feel both pissed and like less of a person–though I know I’m not.
Things are starting to suck ass again, but it’s not the end of the world. I have a couple of friends here that I can count on and I have a wealth of them back home and ones that I’ve made through my writing. I consider Aunt Becky (ed note: I love you, yo) a close personal friend and I would help her in a second if she needed it.
The bottom line is this: I have MS and JME and they will both (to a degree) diminish my quality of life and will make things more difficult for me, but neither disease is who I am. I will find a way to get by. I’ve taken this and put my own touch on it. I occasionally have to use a cane, but I found one that has flames painted up it.
It looks way awesome and it’s my way of looking at the MS and the JME and saying, “blow me.”
