A Thing Possessed

I thought you were going to look after me. I thought I was meant to be safe here and fed and cared for and allowed to rest. Stop coming in here trying to give me medication like I'm in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I mean, do you really have to bring in drugs on those cardboard trays and put them in those little white cups? I'm an informal patient, that means I don't have to take anything I don't want to, right? Right? Am I RIGHT? Stop bringing in doctors and medicine and instructions, I can't think straight. I won't take anything until I understand what it will do to me and to my baby and I can't think straight until I have had some sleep. Is the problem that you think I can't sleep without them? I can. I can sleep on my own, naturally. Just give me some space and let me show you. I birthed my son without any drugs, so if you just let me use my relaxation techniques I can show you. I'll show you now.

I showed them alright. I showed them that I could sleep for a whole 8 minutes without medical intervention. That was how in charge of this illness I was. It was a few hours after this that I was put on a section 5(2) which means I was being sectioned for 72 hours. I was no longer in a position to make my own decisions. I was a danger to myself.

I was shocked at how quickly the "Hackney Holiday Home" became a horror home, but before that transformation begun I had momentary respite. It was the deepest peace I have ever felt. When I first arrived I was given an hour or two alone in my room with my husband and my son. Once again I made sure they were both comfortable and sleeping and took several photos to document that my boys were doing well, and then frantically reached out to the real world. I sent messages to my loved ones like a thing possessed, desperately wanting to leave a trail; messages that could trace people back to this moment where I was still alive: where "I" still existed. I sent out messages to the only people in the world that knew what was happening:

"I am safe. We are in our room at the "Hackney Holiday Home" I don't know where that is exactly, because...well...as you can imagine, I've had a pretty tough week (to put it mildly). There is lots of lovely rest and recovery going on here. My boys are both sleeping. I want you all to know that I love you & I need each & every one of you that knows. There are 10 of us in the world, apart from all the incredible NHS staff, that helped me walk through hell to freedom"

There was a tranquility, a peace, and a clarity that I experienced in the silence of those couple of hours. I remember sitting on the big red chair in my room, feeling like Alice after she'd swallowed a "drink me" bottle. I felt so small and yet so safe. I had made it here. It had taken almost everything I had, but I'd done it. My heart swelled with a powerful understanding of what it was to be alive; to be a woman, a wife, a mother. 

Not only was I those, I was my husband, I was my son, I was all of creation. I was everything and nothing. I felt utterly insignificant and truly vital simultaneously. My identity had been shaken so deeply that I didn't know what "I" even meant. Was it me doing and saying these ridiculous and profound things? What was "me"? I couldn't take anything for granted any more. It was a moment to moment existence. I was surviving. Just.

It's easy to have the illusion at this point that I was a woman capable of understanding and communication. The reality was that I had, by this stage, virtually lost my ability to speak; my throat was scratched red raw, my speech was so pressured and full of Tourette's that getting through a sentence was agony. I had developed an intricate sign language in the vain attempt to keep myself calm, to reduce the terrifying stress and physical exhaustion my spasms would induce. These spasms would surge through my body if anyone said the wrong thing, and by this stage people only knew what the "wrong" thing was after it was said. 

After my sacred couple of hours left to myself in my room, two doctors came in to talk to me and assess my situation. Needless to say my "situation" was painfully clear, as 15 minutes later I was chasing them out of my room screaming at them to leave me alone. As I charged out of my room, running after these doctors four or five nurses all leapt in on me. I was being restrained. 

I was a mad woman.

I knew from this moment that there were very real consequences to my actions. I was involved in a very very serious business. All I felt was that no-one was listening to me. That feeling of being restrained is one that shocked me to my core. This was me. I didn't do things like this. But I did. I was. I was doing them. This is me. This is my reality. I am the me I'd never met. The me I didn't expect to ever meet.

Things went downhill. Fast. I almost can't bring myself to share what it was like to go through that next 72 hours. I did things that I'm ashamed of. No matter how many times people tell me that it was the illness and not me, I can't and may never accept that. I know it on an intellectual level, but it is very complex to disentangle yourself from your behaviours in psychosis because they come through you, and you are used as the messenger for its powerful and twisted message. One nurse said to me, "Think about whether you want to do that, think about when you have recovered." That was the most helpful and hardest thing I heard in those turbulent hours. It knifed me to know that I was ill, dangerously ill, but it soothed my soul to hear that word...recovery. It echoed around the vacant corners of my sanity and rested deep in my heart. I was ill. I would get better. I would recover.

But this was just day one.

Love and Fuck off Tourettes,
Mutha Courage x 

A Place of Safety

It was a journey that should take two and a half hours. Even less, given that we were travelling in the early hours of the morning. Five hours in, and we were still very far from a place of safety. The three adults in that car with me were becoming increasingly hounded and verbally battered. They were effectively my hostages, while I was convinced they were my captors. My tiny newborn baby slept. He couldn't have done anything else that I needed more.

After countless stops already, I see a petrol station. "Pull over. Pull over. I need some soothers for my throat, it's red raw." It was true. It was. I did need them, but this was yet another stalling device that psychosis was cultivating to put me closer and closer to danger and trouble. 

It was at this stage that I started developing the frequent habit of threatening people with all kinds of legal action for disregard of my human rights and of treating me improperly. This petrol station was just a few miles away from my Mum's house and I was desperately trying to bargain with Hero and Shadow from the crisis team that if I could just stop off there and have a shower and some sleep, that everything would be so much better and so much more pleasant for all of us. They had kept saying that it was their duty to get me to a "place of safety" and, as far as I was concerned, places didn't come safer than my Mum's house. Even weeks into my recovery I still couldn't see why we couldn't have done that. 

The truth was that every minute that I prolonged the process of getting to a psychiatric ward I was making things much much worse for myself. This is not an illness with patience or understanding. It is rampant and destructive, flattening anything in its path, including its victim, like a bulldozer over a field of poppies. If I had gone to my Mum's I wouldn't have slept; I hadn't really slept in 11 days and being there wouldn't have changed that. I wouldn't have washed. I had had countless opportunities to do both for the last 36 hours, but couldn't do it. The Thing didn't want to just destroy my sanity and normality it wanted to degrade me and shame me, so that I would never be able to stand up to it.

It was at that petrol station in the early hours after Valentine's Day, that love saved me once again.

I'm in the back of the car with my husband in the middle seat and our son in his car seat next to him. I am getting more and more upset, angry, agitated, confused, guilty, ashamed. I'm getting louder and louder, my body is spasming and contorting, I'm feeling out of control; the car is a cage and I am a wild animal, too big for this claustrophobic and confined space. My limbs are thrashing, my hands are claw-like, I'm squawking and shaking and I lash out. I'm crying and shouting and threatening and warning my husband that I am going to hit him, punch him in the face if he doesn't get out of the car. The tears I am crying are coming deep from within. Why am I saying this to the man I love? To the man I shared vows of deep connection and joy with? The man who has been by my side through everything; the birth of our son just days ago and all of this. He is removed from the car. I see him through the glass of the petrol station. This fine, tall figure of a man looks broken. His head is no longer proudly perched on his strong shoulders: he has sunk. I continue to talk feverishly to Shadow, the woman of the team, who says little in return, while Hero goes in to see my husband. 

Little did I know that my husband was doing far more than buying me some soothers. He was fighting for my life. He was fighting to stop the police being called, to stop me being sectioned and placed in an acute psychiatric ward and more than all that he was fighting to keep me with my son. The crisis team were running out of options and one more distraction or stop from me on the journey and I would give them no choice but to call the police and have me sectioned. My condition was escalating and I was becoming a danger to myself and the people around me.

I can't remember the words my husband said to me when he got back in that car, but I remember that he whispered them straight into my heart. He said them with an intensity and love that The Thing couldn't hear, but that the Me cowering inside me absolutely did. I knew I was in a very very precarious position. I knew that I was running out of chances, and I knew that the alternatives of me walking into the 'Hackney Holiday Home' of my own free will as an informal patient looked desperately different from what I wanted. 

My husband held me and we whispered to each other for the rest of the journey. I didn't trust anyone but him right now, not even myself, but I knew that in this moment my only real place of safety was him and I was going to fight with every part of my being to keep me with my son, and to avoid the atrocities that I could see in my mind's eye if I lost this intense and terrifying battle.

We arrived at the unit in the early morning. I was escorted out of the car by three psychiatric nurses that I called my "Three Graces". They were angelic to me. I had become a small, bird-like woman. Fragile and weak, making my way into my new nest. I felt peace. I had made it. I asked if they would look after me and give me food and sleep and a bath. They spoke with a reassurance and compassion the like of which I may never know again. I knew I had walked through hell, but this was no time to take off my shoes. The Thing did not take kindly to my defiance.

Love and throat sweets,
Mutha Courage x

Darkest Before the Dawn

I sprang out of my wheelchair and bolted for the automatic doors. I was dying for fresh air. I was determined to show The Thing that I could fight him. It may have only been one breath of the cold night air, but it was my breath. My tiny victory. At the close of play each day of my psychosis The Thing had definitely won, but I was gaining territory. It was hard to see that when I was surrounded with the wounds and suffering of another defeat, but I was determined to battle to the death.

To put this micro-win into context, I had been trying to get out of the hospital for approximately 12 hours. After a massive episode that lasted nearly and hour and a half prior to this the Crisis Team had been called and it was agreed that I needed to be transferred to a psychiatric ward immediately. I only found out a couple of weeks ago that they had asked my husband if he felt he could care for me at home and he had to say one of the most difficult things he's ever had to: No.

In many ways deciding that the transfer to the Mother and Baby Unit should happen was the easy bit. In my lucid moments I would clearly and desperately state that I knew I was ill and wanted to get better, that I would accept any help that was offered to me, and that I surrendered. Unfortunately, as soon as my mania and paranoia was in full flow I didn't trust anything that was being said to me and I was actively hostile to the help being given. I made severe threats if it ever looked like I wouldn't get what I wanted: even when what I wanted was a cheese sandwich. I couldn't bear not having strict control over every single person in my presence.

I had never felt so powerful and so weak in all my life. I could make demands that were acted on in a moment and yet I couldn't speak a full sentence without having my voice box hijacked by this destructive demon. Everything. Everything had to be on my terms. Well, on the terms of my psychosis. For 4 hours we stood by the door of the hospital with me desperately trying and hideously fearful of leaving.

My husband look terrified. This proud new father had lost his glow, dread filled his eyes and his mouth was tense with anxiety. He took me aside, out of earshot  of the nursing staff, the moonlight put him in the spotlight, and what he said pierced through the hard exterior of the disease and whispered to the me that was drowning deep inside.

"If you don't do this, they will take the decision away from you"

Take the decision away from me. Take the decision away? Take the decision away! Take my son away. Drug me. Put me on an acute ward. Stop me seeing them. 

The threat of being sectioned hung over me like a dangling highwayman. The vision of what could be if I didn't get into the Mother and Baby unit as an informal patient was shockingly real and truly painfully possible. Throughout this whole ordeal my son sits stoically in his little bear snowsuit that swamps his minute frame. Due to my sickness he is losing weight rapidly and needs food and care. All the time I soothe him and tell him not to take any notice of Mummy's silly voices, while I sob within. Desperate to protect and nurture this new human being that needs me. I fight every second to keep us together. To keep my son.

Love and cheese sandwiches,
Mutha Courage x