Schizophrenia Bites- a reblog from last Dec.

12-13-10 3:20 a.m.

no ideas what to write about...and the way my mind has been working lately you should put on a seat belt to read this because you're in for a heck of a ride. I"m beginning without a topic...which is always interesting because it's like taking a journey without a destination in mind. And when that is the case the JOURNEY itself is what is important and what is the point.

I'm on a bit of a journey and while there 's one likely destination....not one I'm hoping for.....the journey has been interesting...but I don't want to look back at it other than to say that along this way I've met a new friend who has been my balance when I've lost my own. she is the voice of reason that has kept me from Golden Gating or going postal. Schizophrenia bites. (That would be a GREAT blog name!) it' s taken huge bites from me and from my life....masticated and extruded them in quite a mess.

my mind has been pogo sticking around all night, pausing for an occasional hallucination (don't want to get run over by one of THOSE, always best to stop....and do a seat belt check) and tippy toeing around those pits of despair that seem to spring up like the natural hot geysers at Old Faithful National Park, spraying their stinking muck all over anything ....so like your mom said, wear your seatbelt and your raincoat....! Good advice for any schizophrenic or friend of one.

so that out of the way....what dowe talk about next? I could really go for a cup of coffee. It is a bad addiction from years past ...I'd quit the stuff completely in the past five years of healthy eating....but an occasional treat has turned into more of a regular thing of late. Now CIGARETTES ...that's another topic I could go on about. and they are not unrelated....especially to the person with SZ. There is supposedly great almost unbreakable power in the physical addictive potential for those two substances in the person wiht SZ (and I've beaten them both....just a self -pat on my back.... :P ) However, as hard for us to overcome as they may be...we have great strength of will , concentration and self will (any one who has to learn to function DESPITE continuous the continuous distractions and interruptions of hallucinations etc HAS to have focus!!....just to make it to the bathroom. And if you've ever been in a bathroom in a psych hospital, you'll know that not everyone meets that aim. :dd)
Any way enough potty talk....light me up a "fag" (as my British friend puts it)....sometimes I really miss them , even though I hated them passionately. I find that absence does NOT make the heart grow fonder....Absence of consideration is the only think that keeps me from buying a pack sometimes ....I cannot let my mind even GO THERE.)

The stress of the past several days of psychosis has brought a lovely psoriatic sheen to my face as my psoriasis is in bloom in (naturally) the most conspicuous area I own. It has also brought demolition to my bedroom. It'snot that I don't clean it...I do...daily. But the HAVOC I can wreak in mere moments is astounding. I'm trying to contain my powers of mass destruction within this room alone. The rest of the house doesnt'miss me. In fact, it's been sending me thank you notes for my absence. Except for the kitchen sink....; it is begging me for some of my attention ....but hey it can wait its turn....my attention is too scanty to be handing out right and left.

so that's the journey...a five minute voyage that took me WELL over three hours to write because of the diversionary tactics of a hallucinating mind. ah well. It's been an interesting trip (just HOW interesting you'll never know, because I'm not gonna tell you. )
oh and yeah. the cig and coffee pic is done by "dancinpantless" (her name choice, not mine)

Facebook Panic

We've all felt it - unless I'm some kind of aberration and the rest of you are perfect people with perfect lives - the panic you feel when a friend from say.....well,....30 years ago, suddenly makes a friend request on Facebook. And in your excitement at hearing from the cute guy who sat behind you in your American History class in 11th grade, you forget momentarily that your WHOLE LIFE is spread out online for any who should look around even slightly, to see. There are moritfyingly bad photos of you; things you wrote when you were, well, NOT in the best frame of mind and which you really really weren't thinking of being viewed by your high school friends and...not-friends (to be polite) when you posted them. And now terror grips you as you feel your pride crumble and the pile of arrogance on which you'd been standing, suddenly give way into a massive landslide.

Frantic possibilities for solution come to mind; "Scour your blogs and every document with which the internet is littered and try to remove these incriminating items?" "Quit Facebook NOW before it's too late?" "Try to infect Google and Facebook with some kind of horrible virus?" (jk Google and FB, ...and internet police...) Throw your laptop from a cliff and never, ever go online again and then just PRAY you don't run into anyone whose SEEN that pic of you in your underwear and having had one too many? (And no; this is hypothetical folks, don't go looking for such a pic of me online! lol)

And what about the fact that you discover that best friends, which whom you were neck and neck for the top grades in school; are now the leading doctors in places like Harvard and Yale and you are....ummm, disabled and unemployed with nothing better to do that to embarrass myself online? (OK, granted this one is ME, but you've all doubtless felt something similar--unless you are a leading specialist at Yale or Harvard yourself and have probably done nothing shameful -publicly anyway).

In the end (for me, anyway, although yes, there are a few articles which I am strongly considering removing from my blog) in the end, we must eventually come to the place where we can relinquish the pride and say, "What's done is done" and relinquish every drop of self-flattery and pretense in us and just let it be. LET them think what they want ... The truth is you did the best you could with the events, disabilities, disasters and challenges that came your way. And it is NOT what your high school crowd thinks of me that counts anyway. It's what my Father i n Heaven thinks that matters in the long run. And--I'm fairly certain--He approves.

Thoughts from the Homebound

You know your life is boring when you begin to take photos of the way the light shines through your water bottle.

You know your life is boring when the greatest excitement of the day is choosing and then struggling to get your socks on.

You know your life is boring when a friend offers to take you with her to pick up her kids from school, and you JUMP at the chance...just to see another human face.

....when your spam gets you happy and you actually READ it!

....when you start ordering books you already own on Amazon for your Kindle, just for the fun of it.

....when you stare at the light filtering through your white curtains and are entranced by it, knowing it is the most beautiful thing you will see all day.

....when you get into the car of a friend to go to the pharmacy and out of sheer joy, you want to hang your head out of the window like your dog used to do...to let the wind make your cheeks flap and to feel the fresh air on your face.

....when you are dismayed that you have Vonage and thus never get any phone calls for advertising purposes...It would be REALLY nice to talk to someone...EVEN someone who mispronounces your name. (I always wonder if they deliberately..the name is so simple, you'd have to do it deliberately to get it wrong).

Make someone's day today. Stop in for a visit. Give a call on the phone...Offer to take them to the store...It's an easy way to be loved.

knobby hands and revealing shirts

I'm 48--chronologically. However emotionally, I think I am 19 or 20: the age I was when I became sick with schizophrenia. I truly think that I will always view myself as being that age; that I will always be more comfortable with people in their early twenties than I am with the middle-aged folk with whom I should be associating. And this could just be the reason I think nothing of wearing a sweater-dress with leggings and boots...or a young-styled shirt which leaves nothing to the imagination...Never once considering that my body would more appropriately be hidden.

That's my emotional age...MY physical age however is something more like 90. This is evidenced by hands that are contorted by arthritis and will no longer leave their gnarled, clenched, claw-like position with fingers straightened. It is evidenced by the fact that in the past ten years, I've probably spent more time IN the hospital than OUT. It is evidenced by the fact that I spend no time outside of my bedroom except to go to church or to a doctor's office.

These thoughts beg the question: how old am I spiritually? A healthy, mature age? Or five? or am I decrepit there also??

Where am I??

Can you imagine waking, opening your eyes one morning, stretching your body and feeling that something is not right? You look around. What is this place? How did I get here? That was me this morning. and the scary part was that I was in my own room in my own house. I knew that something recently had happened to me physically...my body felt pain....I searched my memory...and found it curiously empty and very very confused.

There is Something. Something with a capitol "S" looms...something to be dreaded. Something big. What is it?? WHAT??? I search the mind that seems to be not working and curiously empty this morning. I look around my room and examine each of the objects, looking for clues. for triggers to my memory which has abandoned me. I recall little tiny bits at a time. I remember that this is not the first time that I've woken blank , with nothing but the present in my experience. Where was I the last time? It was not long ago. I was in a hospital. Is THIS a hospital? Am I crazy again? NO, the room is too personal, too disorderly and too packed with belongings to be a hospital room. What hospital was I in? And is that why my body does not seem to be right? not obeying commands and hurting with every move I make?

It dawns. I had surgery. Why though? I test my body trying to focus in on the source of the pain. There seem to be several...but I knew that the searing back pain was a "standard" (at least I know that much)...It is my hip. They both hurt. But then I remember ...the left one had just been replaced.

Now I know that I'm in my room.
What is this DREADED thing coming?? Why the weight on my heart which I could feel despite the absence of memory?

I see the Valentine's Day card on the shelf at my side. I pick it up. NOt signed. Then I remember my daughter's laughing voice saying she couldn't bring herself to sign it because it was too perfect. My daughter. The pain on my heart intensified.
She is leaving. Soon.

AS I recalled this, and slowly the details of that piece fell into place... carefully put it aside to be considered later ...after I solved the rest of the mysteries around me. What happened yesterday?? Where was I ? What did I do?? Was I with anyone?? These questions remained...and did not dissipate until later I confessed my ignorance to my daughter and her astonished and worried voice said, "MOM, that was YESTERDAY. Yuu don't remember YESTERDAY??" And no, I really really didn't.

And still there were questions. I picked up an object on my desk. It looked familiar enough that I knew it was mine. But what was it?? Where did I get it?? I opened it and looked at it carefully, and the answer did not come for several lost minutes. It's my Kindle. the one I got in early December...two months ago. I'm getting frightened now. More frightened than I was at first, waking with no past and no future. Now I'm thinking things like, "How HOW will I manage to survive and care for myself with my child/woman gone? Getting dressed was beyond me. Doing ANYTHING was beyond me. I need her. I need her to care for me. To explain mysteries like my yesterdays. How can she be leaving me. NOW??

Terror grips me.
There is something wrong with me. Something bad. Something more than forgetting a word. Something more than losing my keys.

I then recall the ECT...and how I used to wake up from it feeling like this. the "where am I?? " WHO am I?? questions that would terrify me and propel me off of the stretcher in mad fear.

But that was a while ago.
Years.

I've had horrible problems with short term memory loss since then.
But I'm afraid. These mornings of total history erasures are becoming more frequent. More total.

Something is very wrong.

Coming Home

You know, when you are away --say in the hospital for a couple of weeks--it's so easy to forget those piles of laundry, unanswered mail...the piles of filing which should have been done months ago...and all you remember are the loving, smiling faces of the ones you love and your comfortable room and bed....and all of the care at the hospital seems unnecessary and a thing of the past.

that is: UNTIL you step into the laundry littered home...and find there's no place to even put your walker down on the floor, let along transverse it! And the pain pills you didn't fill, thinking, "oh they weren't really helping and I don't need this junk" suddenly at around 1 or 2:00 AM seem suddenly SO VERY necessary and you think "why oh why was I such an idiot?" and the nursing aide that you turned down now seems to be essential....OH God! What am I going to do????

And after several moments of blind panic, you drift off into a horrible pained sleep and when you awake you realize that there was One you left out of the equation. The Master Mathmetician...the one who not only knows the solution but who WROTE THE PROBLEM. So, go to it Lord, let me see what you have planned for this mess here.

WORDS

• Words should come with warning labels.
  They can:
  
• be misunderstood;
  •open rifts;
  •get you locked up;
  •get doors slammed in your face;
  •When spoken into silence, make you lonlier than a crowd;
  • They can take ten friends and make them none;
  •they can hurt the last heart you want to wound;
  •they can twist your own heart like a dirty sponge;
  •provide just the right encouragement to err
  •make excuses when there is none.

The Whisper of Wings

Having survived a cancer scare and heavy hemorrhaging for a number of weeks and a mass of tests for that issue; I then had to approach the scheduled surgery on my hip to revise a replacement done last May. And in the pretesting for the surgery, it was discovered that my sodium levels in my blood were critically low...to the point that they could be life threatening. So, as per my usual pattern, I hopped from crisis to crisis, thus far besting them all and thumbing my nose at Death who has skulked a step behind me for the past ten years...and who has in every case (apparently) been defeated...Because you see: NO matter what Satan's plans are for my demise; they will each and every one of them fail, until I get to that moment, where battle weary and hopefully with a spirit ready for Heaven, I lay aside this body which has been put through the mill and don a body made for heaven and await the resurrection and perfection of this one. And I will get to watch with great joy as the enemy who has given me his best shots...gets the best shot of my Savior...and from that boot in the rear, he will never again arise to threaten me or anyone else with his Grim Reaper visage that he flaunts so successfully to bring people to a place of fear or dread as they contemplate the very true fact , that we EACH have an appointment with death.

For me, that moment holds not an ounce of fear or dread. Even these past weeks, as I really thought that Cancer had gotten hold of me, I felt not a drop of fear...I only had excitement at the thought of my earthly pain ending and of seeing the much-anticipated face of Y'shua as he welcomes me to the only Home I've been designed to enjoy. I am not in love with death. I am in love with LIFE but you see, the problem with most people is that they do not comprehend the fact that this "life" holds little more than but a few drops of the REAL life that God has planned for us to enjoy in his kingdom. We hold enough life in us here so that we can recognize the real thing when we see it...enough living water to tease our parched tongues into unbearable longing...enough LIFE in us so that at the hearing of unbearably wonderful music; or incredibly inspired art or literature...or see a ball perfectly hit right over the wall.....we KNOW that there is an other worldy power at work....and we were privileged to get a glimpse of it. And our heart instinctively longs for the moment that we too, will not only view such life, such art, but will create it, participate in it. WE will watch our doodles explode into panels of wonder...listen to our tone deaf wispy voices swell with power and soar to unbeliveable heights on a scale we have not even "invented" here in this copycat planet.

And this IS a copy cat planet. A flawed broken version of what God had intended for us to enjoy...And when man smashed and besmirched the original design with his prideful disregard for the terms of the "lease"....God, moved by his endless mercy and grace, put into effect the next part of his plan (having known all along the disastrous choices that mankind would make) the Godhead, had consulted, decreed and assented to the part of grace that aches with the pain of Death, assumed by the very Trinity itself...as He snatched back from the hands of death, the Life that the enemy had attempted to consume and destroy.
And then went back to the temporary location of the kingdom to resume work on the next best part of the gift to man who had so callously spit into His face. The best part of the gift was already given and that is what He, himself, gave us: the Life; His life; His very essence, which we spilled out all over Calvary's rocky ground...but that life, once it was freed from that very blood; that very broken body...now entered those who were claimed by Him as HIS. And now that life that spirit within us, echoes and resounds with the beating heart of God as we see tiny glimmers on this planet--this broken planet--of the Life just beyond our current reach. And we await the clock's ticking announcement that there is a moment approaching...when this aching, groaning, gasping mass of tangled cells will lay its labor down; its work complete.

And we will then be escorted into HIs presence and receive that LIFE in full.... and watch as the final chapter of Earth unfold...and participate in the joy of the assumption and habitation of the NEW Earth as it descends...it's millenia of preparation completed and ready for occupation by the now FULLY alive children of God....

So tell me, why should there be fear in the face of such wonders as these? Fear when I am ushered into the blinding presence of the shekeinah of God...yes..tremulous wonder...that I broken, flawed, rebellious and SO very unworthy me....should be permitted to see him at all, let alone to live there with him, enjoying that radiance daily. Eternally.

So here, in this hospital bed that has doubtless hosted the last earthy breaths of many many others, I have no fear...merely awed wonder at the beauty of the Plan...and of His Love which put the whole thing into motion. And Yes, I've been dogged by the enemy of my soul, my life threatened time and time again...And I am honored to be counted as enough beloved of Adonai that the enemy considers ME to be his enemy. There is no one I would rather be a threat to than he. And each brush with angels wings as they gather to gather me up to God's presence, makes me pause. RE-evaluate. And wonder. How can I make him (small 'h') hate me even MORE??? And I've found time and again, that I'm alive and given more time to do just that.