The Invisible Illness

As my name on this blog tells you I consider myself a skeptic but I do not do scientific skepticism here much, and I will not do it here either. I want to talk about how grateful and blessed I am by modern medicine and the scientific method that has provided us with this ever changing, improving medical science.

I have always been very healthy in body most of the problems I have ever had are pretty much in my head. The health problems I have can not be seen on the surface, even by medical professionals sometimes. This does not mean they are incompetent, this means they can not read minds. You can not see pain or mental illness on the outside often that is why they are misunderstood by observers, and sometimes even by sufferers.

I was very lucky. When I had my breakdown and I descended into my dark place of depression and psychosis I received treatment but every step of the way I had to fight to get it and advocate for myself. I seemed calm rational and sane even as I was breaking down. I tried to explain to doctors that I was breaking down but  they just saw someone who seemed to be alright. When I was at the hospital the psychiatrist was not sure I necessarily needed anti-depressants. I had to explain to her this was not a temporary condition that would go away as the initial stress went away. She believed me and medicated me. 

I got so lucky. The first medication I was given worked. This does not happen every time, often people have to go through years of trial and error to find the right medicine. Thank you medical science, thank you God. It also worked fast. After three weeks I felt like I turned a corner. One day dramatically things looked different, less enormous. It was like the elephant I had to eat was chopped up into bite sized pieces and I saw that there was a possibility that over time I could get over this and the task in front of me could be accomplished with time. I was cautious. I made them keep me another week. They wanted to send me home after a week at first, then two, then three but I had to make them keep me until I was ready to go, until my medicine was working, until the feeling of facing the world outside did not fill me with unspeakable terror.

 

My struggle continued outside. Things got harder as I got out, as they tend to. I had to face the world, face my husband and the stresses of being out on my own for the first time ever. I still miss being at the hospital sometimes. It was so safe there. I had to now convince a whole new set of people I was sick. I was optimistic and full of enthusiasm to get on the path to my new life but every one had their own idea about what I should do and they did not ask me what I needed.

 

I had to convince a new mental health nurse I was sick, and eventually that my depression had worsened and I had regressed several months and had to up my medicine, also I had to convince a psychiatrist. They were not incompetent, or blind, or anything. They just could not read minds. I was clean, my clothes were nice and I took care of myself and I felt better when I talked to others. How could they possibly see the dark moments of depression and loneliness I experienced? They were not in my messy apartment as I forced myself to make something to eat and broke down crying in the middle of slicing vegetables, collapsing to the floor and swearing tourets like: Bastard, fucking passive-aggressive douche bag! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fucking asshole!

The real difficulty was convincing the non-medical people. I have been told by so many people that I should not have tried to kill myself because suicide is a sin. Really? Wow, you know, I did not grow up in the Christian culture so I really had no idea. (What is the font for sarcasm?) My parents, every time my medication comes up, are still trying to convince me I should stop taking it. They do not understand. It was even worse in the beginning listening to my father's two hour lectures about the evils of psychology. Don't get me wrong, my parents are great and supportive in this time. They just do not understand, or even in some cases, acknowledge my sickness.

People tell me I should just pick myself up by my boot straps and clean my home. After all, it won't take that long, it is a small apartment. Just pick up after yourself. I wish I could. I really wish I could. Get a job, any job, earn money and quit living off the government. Even immigrants who do not know how to speak Finnish can get jobs in cleaning because they want to. People are poor in Kosovo and things are bad there but they have no depression.

That is what I hear. It is hard, I am alone in my sickness in a lot of ways. Make no mistake about it. I am ill. Just because I am not visibly ill does not mean I am fine. If you were to take a look at my brain under an MRI you would find that my hippo campus has drastically shrunk from what is normal for a 31 year old woman. The functioning of my frontal lobe is different and impaired. I have a drug to treat the chemical imbalance and slow the re-uptake of serotonin but only by taking it for a long time and going to therapy and in general living a healthy happy life can I hope to fix the physical changes in my brain. There is a hope that one day I will be fully cured and my depression will go into remission forever, but I may have to be medicated for the rest of my life. The first possibility is what I hope for but I am alright with the second. I am willing to take my chances.

What about the long term side effects of anti-depressants? We are not aware of all of them. Some may say. I answer: What about them? I have a friend with diabetes. There are long term side effects with having to take insulin too, but no one worries about that because it is necessary for her to live and they understand she will take it forever. I do not see how my case, if I am medicated for the rest of my life, is much different.

How my Life Fell Apart 2, The Crawl Foreward

When someone asks me when I am Christian I usually tell them the story of when I got saved when I was eight and tell them that God spoke to my heart in love and asked to let him in and to become his beloved daughter. He asked nothing from me, only that I love him back. This loving back was not a condition for me to get his love, no. He loved me anyway.

He had created me and watched me grow and knew all my weaknesses and strenghts and saw me at my worst and at my best through out my life, before and after I met him. I have failed so many times in my life to love him back properly but his unconditional love has never wavered, lessened nor drawn back.

Tree months ago I tried to kill myself as a result of my husband leaving me for another woman and completely shaking and leveling my whole world. My family was all I had. I had nothing, I could not sleep or eat and I suffered from crippling axiety. 

Suicide is a big no-no in Christianity, the unforgiveable sin, almost. In this case God not only forgave me but protected me and loved me even more noticeably than before because I needed it so much. He made sure I was picked up by the police who took me to the hospital where I recieved good care and recovered from the physical results of my suicide attempt. He also was with me in that dark place that I fell to. 

After my husband pulled my entire world out from under me I was alone and could see no light but I was with Jesus in this lonely darkness. He held me as I wept in shock, sorrow and rage. He bore my childish fits of screaming "WHY!" He loved me not because I was so special but because he is love.

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8

I think I have come out on the other side of this tragedy. I have accepted that my once happy life with my family is over. I am making a new life for myself wth its highest goal being to find God's plan for me. If I am in God's will, I know I will be happy because: "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God" Roman's 8:28

I am still in the all things phase but I am starting to believe strongly that they will work out for good, soon. 

I do not usually include verses in my posts but I have been gaining a great deal of comfort from these verses because I am missing a lot of tangible love that I once had in my life. It was ripped from me suddenly with no warning leaving me experiencing withdraval symptoms. So I hope you will indulge me posting one last verse that made me cry earlier because I was overwhelmed by its beauty.

38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:38-39

How My Life Fell Apart, part 1

I wrote this essay/blog entry a day before yesturday. I did not post it because it did not feel like the right time yet. Now more has happened and it does seem like the right time to talk about my feelings I had then. I will write more soon, and tell more.

When I wrote a research paper in the ninth grade I did it because I suspected I was depressed and I knew next to nothing about the subject. The first sentence of my paper was a quote: “Depression is like a murky pool.” I never understood the quote at the time but I thought the imagery was neat. For years I thought it meant that understanding depression was like groping around in a murky pool, you never knew what was underneath there. Now I understand, years later, that being depressed is like being in a murky pool. You are alone, you can’t see much. You cannot see the light above the surface clearly, if at all, and you can’t breathe. You are being weighed down with lead weights tied around your ankles. I was in that pool for years.

The main reason I got out was my husband’s help and support. He made me feel a love and acceptance I had never experienced before and in that positive environment I felt like I could be myself and slowly those lead weights came free. I did not even notice the ropes slipping free and how I began to float towards the surface and for the first time in a decade I was able to take a breath and see clearly in the free light and air with my head above water.

The terrible thing in this story of beauty and triumph is that in my wonderful recovery I hurt my husband a great deal. All those days, months and years of living with a depressed person, wondering if they have hurt themselves or will you find something worse when you come home, is very draining. Your life starts to revolve around that person’s disease. You lose yourself and you chop off little pieces of yourself to take care of your sick loved one. That is what happened to my husband.

He not only became burdened down with the weight of my lead weights he forgot who he was and forgot why he even did it. I was like a vampire or a parasite slowly sucking away his happiness and sense of self to gain those things for myself and I never noticed that. We were happy. We loved each other. Our marriage, despite all the financial and social things, was the real consistently good thing in our lives. Or so I thought. I projected my happiness onto him. I thought: I have become a better person in the course of this marriage; he influenced me for the better. I must have done the same for him. We grew together.

Well, that is what I thought. It felt amazing to be liked, loved and accepted by someone so completely, warts and all. I did have this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind, somewhere in the worst fears section of my brain, that he did not like me as much as I liked him. I figured it was just my old low self-esteem talking. I mean he was so great, kind, patient and nice. He was so talented, capable, funny and smart. I was a loser with no real talents or skills. My IQ was painfully average, my humor was often bristly and mean and not nearly as funny as I thought. On top of that my youthful good looks were not nearly as youthful or good as they had once been. Come on, that is just my old self-esteem and fear. I am great, people like me, I like me etc. I had all this new found self-esteem and he told me he loved me like a million times a day, of course he liked and loved me. 

Wrong, so wrong, I had created my happy marriage as a work of one sided fiction. I just really wanted this wonderful person to love me. It turned out all those little worrying red flags I had experienced really were signs that not all was right. My husband’s occasional signs of depression and not being able to keep friends very actively. He was feeling like an old loser after he had stopped doing things and hanging out with people because he felt he needed to just take care of me and cater to my needs. There was the way he never complemented my personality, intelligence, sense of humor or anything internal like that and how all the compliments on my looks just stopped coming, even when I specifically asked for compliments. I figured he did not need to do that, he loved me anyway and it was ridiculous to need compliments, I needed to have my confidence standing independently.

Now here I am, I have to peer to the surface of the murky pool and stare the plain truth in the face. I am a loser. People like me only when they don’t know me. The one person who truly knows me does not like me and this not liking has worn down the love over the years making his responses of “I love you.” as hollow and empty as a looted tomb. I just fell off a cliff, how are you doing?