mania

The fall, winds of change

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Even though autumn is my second favorite season, I always feel sad to see the end of summer. I don’t feel like I enjoyed summer as much as I should’ve. The end of summer brings another change, and not just with the seasons.

Tomorrow Arabella has her last court date. After two years, she will now be off of probation. She spoke with her lawyer, and told him she has since been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Hopefully she will be able to have her charges dismissed. Her crime was classified as domestic abuse, without consideration she was in a manic state with psychosis. She didn’t have the diagnosis at the time of her criminal offense, her mental illness was just beginning.

The first couple months out of jail was a rough ride, but once she finally got a proper diagnosis with the proper treatment she has become the daughter I’ve always wanted her to be. Perfect, no. But finally getting her life back together. She has been holding down the same job for the past two years. My son Alex recently told Arabella he forgave her for hurting us and his hatred towards her. She is a different person now, a better person who wouldn’t think of hurting anyone. This past week she started dating someone new. He seems like a nice guy.

Alex starting dating someone too. He is with Arabella’s friend, the girl who went to rehab a couple months back. This past weekend Alex was playing with his band. By the time Paul, Angel, and I got to the show his new girlfriend was wasted. She was hitting on everyone. She met Angel for the first time and it didn’t go well. Angel tried to tell her she was Alex’s sister but Angel thought his new girlfriend saw her as competition. This girl was drunk and out of control in front of Alex while he was playing. At one point, she could barely walk so we sat her down with some water.

When Alex got done playing, he was upset and wasn’t sure what to do. We thought perhaps their relationship would be over. The next day, Alex told us he gave her an ultimatum. He told her if she wanted to be with him, she had to stop drinking. He told her in return he would quit drinking too. I have been really concerned lately about my son’s alcoholism. Since he started with this new girl, both of them took drinking to a whole new level. She wanted them to do shots first thing in the morning. He has been black out drunk several nights in a row for weeks, maybe longer. I don’t always see it.

It won’t be easy to turn away from alcohol in our culture. When Alex plays, fans often buy the band drinks and shots. The last week or so his eyes were opened. While playing he had the opportunity to see what hard core alcoholism looks like, how it can destroy people and relationships. He said with or without his new girlfriend, he was going to give up drinking because he doesn’t want that to be a part of his future.

I see a lot of change in the air.

Green light, red light 6

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Several times during her hospital stay, Arabella put in requests to come back home. On day 10, we picked her up and brought her back home. She was doing better, a lot better than when we took her in. But she was still manic and delusional. Maybe our expectations were too high. Or maybe we picked her up too early.

She didn’t sleep the first night we brought her home. The hospital changed all her medications. Then when she got home, she took her old nightly medications. It was a jumbled up mess so we decided to call her psychiatrist’s office in the morning to figure it all out. The process of figuring everything out took the whole day. By that afternoon, things got progressively worse. Arabella was very manic and kept interrupting us every few minutes to tell us a bunch of nonsense. By late afternoon, Arabella told us she took a couple of gummies and smoked weed. She was stoned out of her mind, and totally freaking out.

My mom stopped by for a random visit right around that time. She wanted to go for a walk, but I was in the middle of a million things. It’s nearly impossible to get all the things done I wanted to get done when I’m constantly interrupted and in crisis mode. That is when we received a call back from the doctor’s office. Paul and I took the call in Paul’s office on speaker phone while both my mom and Arabella came in and talked to us while we were having a serious discussion with the nurse. We were beyond annoyed, frustrated, and stressed.

The nurse said the doctor wanted to discontinue some of the new meds from the hospital while adding back some of the old meds and discontinuing some others. They were going to call the prescriptions into the pharmacy and would be available two hours before the pharmacy closed. She was going to need to start the new medications that evening. I was going to need to figure it all out before she went to bed. I took a bag full of her medications on hand and went through everything while waiting for the pharmacy.

I needed to go through the meds, fold laundry, and make supper before picking up the meds. My mom tried calling several times while I was getting everything together to make supper. I figured she wanted to talk about Arabella since she left while we were on the phone with the doctor’s office. I ignored her call because I was in a real hurry and didn’t want to take the time to explain everything yet again.

Then Paul came into the room while talking on the phone. He asked whoever it was if they were going to be arrested. I knew he wasn’t talking to Arabella since she was in her room. It was my mom. He said that while she was on the way home she hit a guy on a motorcycle with her car. He said that I needed to go pick her up from the scene of the accident. He said my mom was okay. The guy on the motorcycle was alive but injured.

While in a crisis, we got hit with yet another crisis. I abandoned supper to get ready to pick up my mom. Paul said he would pick up the medication before the pharmacy closed. He wanted me to do it originally because it was my strong suit. On the way out the door, I called my best friend Cindy on the phone. She lived a couple blocks from the accident. She told me I should come over to her house and she would drive me because I was way too shook up myself.

Cindy and I picked up my mom from the place where they towed her car and the motorcycle. Good thing Paul picked up the medication because the pharmacy closed before I got home. The pharmacy screwed up the medication. But at least they gave her a prescription for something she was no longer using. The hospital also gave her an injectable medicine the day she left and I got a prescription bottle with a vial of the injection in it.

While all of that was happening, I received a call from Alex’s friend. It was his 21st birthday that evening and they wanted me to come out celebrating with them. It was a sweet gesture that my kid’s friends also think of me as their friend as well. Paul was just meeting with this young man and helping him set goals to get his GED which he just finished. I will always think of my kid’s friends as children even when they are in their 20’s and able to go out to the bars. If anything, I was worried that they would all make it home safely. Especially after the kind of day I was having.

They weren’t the only ones on the road. Dan and Angel were just getting home from a vacation in Japan. The flight back home was a rough one, then they had to drive another 4 hours to get back home. I was anxious all around. My nerves were shot and I didn’t know how much longer I could handle the stress. Bad news doesn’t seem to shock me anymore.

Now I find it shocking when good things happen.

Green light, red light 5

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Another crisis was averted when Arabella rescinded the release order she signed the day after her voluntary commitment. Paul and I decided it was time for us to visit Arabella.

We arrived during adult visiting hours in the evening. Once again we had to lock up all of our belongings including our cell phones and sat in the waiting room with a sad lot of people. Like in an elevator, no one looked long at each other. We all got swept by the metal detector screening us for weapons. Then with a buzz the outside door unlocked and we silently walked down the long hallway into the cafeteria where we waited for our loved ones to arrive.

It seemed like we waited a long time for Arabella to arrive. Everyone else arrived before her. We watched while the others embraced with a smile and sat down as if in a regular restaurant to have normal conversations. Arabella arrived in disarray clutching a notebook with the word password written on it. She said password was the password and if we could read it, we could look inside. She cautioned us that the hospital was bugged. First we had to bug the system to debug the system. It was strange because they were having issues with their phone system which Arabella slid comfortably into a delusion that everything was bugged so we had to go to a different algorithm.

Arabella said she was a genetic freak. She was born of one woman and two men. She had an extra chromosome. She said she was colorblind, men can only see primary colors and women can only see secondary colors. She said she liked apple juice because she ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. When she ate she knew all the answers to all the problems of the world.

She said she needed Bryan to come to the hospital because he was her soulmate, her other half. Her bloodwork wouldn’t be complete without him coming in the have his blood drawn. They were storm chasers and she could leave now because it wasn’t storming. She spoke of science, DNA, physics, time travel, and biology. The things she was saying had an iota of truth but was jumbled and didn’t make a lot of sense. She was unable to hold a conversation with us.

But the most troubling thing was that she was slurring her words off and on. We noticed that when we were talking on the phone several times but thought maybe it was from being sedated. She held her mouth funny at random times and words almost seemed to whistle through her teeth. She said she couldn’t talk because no one ever showed her how to talk right. She also said no one ever showed her how to brush her teeth and she had gingivitis.

We were very concerned about her new symptoms. Then she started singing. They said sometimes she would sing loudly in her room. When visiting time was over, the patients had to line up on one side and the visitors on the other. Arabella went her own way and started to take one of the signs off the wall. We told her she couldn’t take the signs off the wall.

We left in shock. Our daughter was still gone. Would she ever be the same again?

chaos

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Hi sweetheart I think you look good and I would love to get to know you if you let me. My name is Matt. I’m 36. So if you would give me a text my number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.

My 18 year old daughter Arabella went to the mall with her friend. When she got back to her car she found the note above on her windshield. This is not the first time she was hit on by men twice her age. Seriously WTH??? It’s creepy and I find myself scared when she goes out. She didn’t see this guy, but he was watching her. What is it about her that attracts these kind of people? Will this change after the reduction surgery? Is it her personality?

She just got back from Chicago yesterday. She went with a friend, a last hurrah so to say before her friend leaves for college. She seemed almost manic when she got back. She told my daughter Angel and I stories of her time away. She said she went clubbing by herself, underage, and was served alcohol. She took an Uber alone at night in a city she is unaccustomed to. She met some new friends. It was unsafe and crazy for her to do this. But she is crazy. She no longer self-harms but she does dangerous things that you or I wouldn’t think of doing.

She told the stories. She showed the pictures of herself drinking at clubs. She loves the attention and chaos it brings when we told her that it wasn’t safe. It was really upsetting to me. I find it hard not to worry when I have a teenage daughter that does crap like this. Would you want your 18 year old daughter to go out to clubs at night by herself in a major city she is not familiar with that has a high homicide rate? Not to mention trafficking.

Then last night she dropped a bomb on us. She told my husband that she thought Jesus was gay. He was offended and it created an argument within our house. All of my kids got involved in the argument in some way. I want a peaceful house. I hate it when people are fighting and crying. But at the end, I was really upset with Arabella because she created chaos within my house. She knew her comment would create conflict. She lives for attention. If things are peaceful and everyone is getting along, it bores her. My mom and niece Gracie are the same way. I try to not let their actions worry or create a rise in me but they do. They need constant attention and when they don’t get it they create chaos. I hate it and want nothing more than to live a quiet and peaceful life.

Then Arabella decided to clean her room in the middle of the night. Our bedroom is right off the kitchen and I heard her throwing stuff in the garbage and getting ice for her water bottle. She was scheduled to work in the morning so I was upset that she wasn’t getting enough sleep. Plus she woke me up and I laid in bed awake for an hour and a half. It’s upsetting when she makes poor choices and there is nothing I can do about it. I have to remind myself how thankful I am that she is alive.

On a good note. I am pretty much ready for the graduation party tomorrow. I got more cancellations because of the Delta variant. It’s frustrating because I already spent a small fortune on food and drinks. I am hoping the party goes well and that I will be feeling a lot less stress after tomorrow. We’ll see…

Waiting in the uncertainty

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One day Arabella handed me a baggie full of pills. Inside was a month’s supply of sleeping pills. I didn’t understand. How did this happen when I watched her take her medication every morning and every night? I couldn’t imagine it would be that easy to stockpile pills while under supervision.

She gave me the pills because she said she was no longer planning on using them to kill herself. She said she was surprised that I never found them after outpatient said I should search her room. I also remember the late night text from Jordan’s mom saying that she had pills and was planning on using them.

Arabella said that on some nights she wouldn’t take her sleeping pills but instead would drink energy drinks so she could stay up all night. That is what she did to finish high school. I don’t understand why she would even want to do that. At the time she seemed rather manic and didn’t feel the need for sleep. But she didn’t feel like killing herself either. I would almost prefer mania to suicidal depression.

But was she really bipolar then? She told the doctor she couldn’t sleep at night even with the sleeping pills. But she didn’t tell him that she wasn’t always taking them.

I’m glad she handed over the sleeping pills. I finally felt some peace after hearing that my daughter was going to OD on pills but never being able to find anything.

The hard part was that her psychiatrist thought she could be bipolar but said he was retiring and just left us. He never put her on medication that would manage bipolar. At residential, they didn’t think she was bipolar. At home right now, she seems manic.

Over the past year, my daughter has had 6 different possible psychiatric diagnoses. It seems to me that the experts don’t agree. She still needs my help to manage her medications because she is not taking them properly. I still don’t have the answers that I need. I’m not sure what the future holds as far as her care goes. She is having a hard time finding a job because it is obvious that she has some serious mental health issues if you have a conversation with her. I don’t know where to turn.

But as for now, she gave me the pills back. She seems manic which presents itself with other safety concerns. At least she isn’t suicidal at the moment.

But now what? She wants me to butt out because she is an adult now. I can’t in good conscience walk away. I really would like her to have psychological testing for a firm diagnosis. The jury is still out whether or not she is going to be able to live independently and take care of herself someday. The uncertainty and lack of control over the situation is hard to deal with. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see and hope she doesn’t do something to destroy herself in the meantime.