Thursday 12 March 2015

Waiting for the Other Shoe...

When we lived in Bosnia, we were fortunate that our landlord's daughter spoke some English.  One day she was telling me about a product she didn't like and she told me, "It is sheet."  I was taken aback at her language.  Then I realized that she didn't understand the offensiveness of that word.  To her, it just meant, "worthless" or "no good".   I totally get her now.

Last year was sheet.; serious sheet.  I'm afraid this year might be it's ugly twin.   Our family is in crisis.  I don't know how to write about it...we are battling a sinister alien who has taken one of our children hostage.  The doctors have named it Depression.  Anxiety.  Possible Bi-Polar Disorder.  We went through four emergency psychiatric facilities and a long term residential hospital in nine months.  Those nine months included four attempted suicides, two runaway incidents an one melt down in a police car.  Our child called Child Protective Services after an altercation in our home.  They wouldn't close the case until  they knew that this child (suffering from a poor cocktail of SSRI medications) was locked safely away in a residential treatment center so that the other child in our home would be safe.  

Residential treatment was the ticket.  It got the right meds on board and we have been 50+ days without a meltdown.  But that *@$! hijacker is back, this time clothed as an eating disorder.  Our baby is melting away, starving, terrified of food.  Our child's hostage whispers lies, makes the image in the mirror look distorted, ugly, fat.  Our beautiful child won't even eat half the calories needed to sustain health.  This makes our usually cheerful child morbidly surly and critical.  Today I hugged my baby and gently murmured that athletics needed to be cut since there weren't enough calories to maintain that level of activity.  "I'm afraid for your heart.  I love your heart.  I don't want it to be damaged," I whispered quietly.  Tuesday, we go to the pediatrician to get the ball rolling on this newest development.  I feel like we are trapped in Satan's own Fun House where each turn is met with a new and more fearful specter.  I feel like we are strapped into a roller coaster from hell being pulled slowly up, up, up.  I don't know when the drop will come, only that it will.  I hate roller coasters.  They are sheet.