The Worst Day

I've had some bad days in my life.  The day I said "I love you" to my Dad for the first time in ever (and the last time) and he just looked at me and walked out the door without a word.  The day my fiancé broke up with me and I found out he'd been cheating on me.  The day I crashed an airplane, fortunate to survive it, and the weeks/months that followed when people called me "Crash Queen".  The day my husband was arrested at midnight and led out of our home in handcuffs and I couldn't talk about it with anyone.  The day my son was diagnosed with a terminal illness and I got to spend the next year watching him die.  The day my second son was diagnosed with SMA too, and I lost him.  The day my son died in my arms.  These are some of the memorable bad days I've had.  I have a new one to add to the list, and it was a whopper.  The day I visited my 20 year old daughter in a loony bin, with a nurse guarding the room, perched on furniture deceptively designed to be too heavy to pick up and throw, sitting next to a young mental patient pacing and muttering and sniffing water and Capri Sun packets straight up her nostrils because the air was "too dry".  Not gonna forget this one any time soon.

I don't really have anyone to talk about this with. I can't talk about it with Kaylee, because she has enough on her plate.  Steve and I talk some about it, but he too has enough on his plate.  I'm not going to talk about it with the "Mom" group I'm in, even though they do, because I don't want to give these people ammo or information against Kaylee.  I don't want to tell my Mom, or any of my friends, for the same reason. I don't want them to look at her any differently, I don't want their perception of her to change. I want to protect her.  But it's leaving me with a lot of shit that I can't talk about.  I've always been good at compartmentalizing, but this is a tough one.  At least with SMA I had other SMA moms.  Here, I'm really, really alone, and I'm scared.

Kaylee had an idyllic high school experience. She accomplished everything she set out to do. She was popular, she was beautiful, she was smart. She had good friends, was in Marching Band and Drama Club and the top choral singing/dancing group in the school, and First Chair on Saxophone in the band, and National Honor Society, and class officer.  She did it all.  She went off and did Mission trips. She went to Thailand and China.  And sometime after she got back from that, it all went downhill. Less than a year later, she came to me and said she'd been diagnosed with an Eating Disorder, and that she'd had it off and on for years, with various severity. She ended up throwing up so hard she broke blood vessels in her eyes.  So we sent her to a nutritionist and a therapist.  Now, less than a year later, she has been diagnosed with the eating disorder, severe anxiety, depression, and manic/depressive/bipolar disorder type two, and she's on six different types of medications.  This is what we were most afraid of.  See, it started with anxiety and some depression so they put her on Prozac.  The Prozac helped with that, but made her go manic.  The mania turned into paranoia.  She took illegal Xanax to bring her "down", which turned into major depression.  And started a cycle. She had a reaction to the mood stabilizing drug.  A bad rash.  She had another reaction to the other mood stabilizing drug; it made her feel groggy and sluggish.  So she went off of it and ended up in the ER.  She got turned in by a former friend for using illegal substances, and she got called in front of a school committee to defend herself or be kicked out of school. She was not kicked out of school, fortunately.  All the king's horses and all the king's men can't get her drugs right, so now she's on 6 of them total, to try to manage her original anxiety and depression, and then to manage the side effects of the drugs used to manage those, like the mania and paranoia, and she's still depressed and anxious, only now she's on SIX PSYCHOTIC DRUGS while she's depressed and anxious.

I have the ability to see her phone location on mine.  It's a soothing little thing I can pull up now and then. I saw her over there in Thailand, or could pull her up and see where she was.  One day, before I knew any of the above, I pulled her up, and her phone was showing her near a hospital.  I texted her.  No answer.  I checked on her over and over throughout the day. The phone still showed her near a hospital.  She didn't answer.  I told Steve. He laughed at me for checking and said I was over-reacting, that the phone probably had the wrong location. I said that hadn't happened before.  I thought maybe she'd lost her phone and it was sitting on the ground somewhere out there.  I went to bed trying not to worry about it.  When I woke up the next morning, her phone still said there, by a hospital. I couldn't stand it, I had a terrible feeling. I started thinking maybe she was hurt, had been in an accident, hell, maybe she was in the morgue and they hadn't identified her or found us yet.  So I called the hospital and asked if she was there.  They checked the ER and the main hospital, and said she was not there.  I still didn't know about the morgue.   Steve called her roommates and they claimed to not know anything about it.

Meanwhile, I had to fly to Wisconsin and do T-6 training with a woman I'd never met before, in a plane I'd never flown before.  Neither the woman nor the plane had flown it in two years or more.  So the woman was rusty, and planes that sit for a long time don't usually go well.  I really needed to focus on this job.  So I went up there, and tried not to worry about my missing daughter who was not answering texts, calls, and whose phone wasn't moving.  I flew all morning, and we broke for lunch.  I'm in the car on my way back to the airport, with the student, and my phone rings with a phone number from Marion.  I don't answer numbers I don't know, but something told me...it was Kaylee.  And she said "Mom, I'm okay, I'm at Crossroads", which is a mental health place you check yourself into.  Her meds got so messed up she checked herself into this place to try to get stabilized.  I couldn't talk right then, not in front of my student, and I still needed to focus on the rest of my flights with her.  It was a high risk flight, and it was my responsibility to not let us get ourselves killed.  I needed to compartmentalize.  I hung up from Kaylee, flew the last flight with the woman, got in my plane, took off to head home.  When I got over Lake Michigan, turned on my autopilot, stayed VFR so I didn't have to talk to ATC, and then I burst into tears, and I cried all the way home.  I cried big fat heavy gasping my entire face wet, deep sobbing.  I cried like I haven't cried in decades.  I cried my guts out, all the way home.

I felt stupid.  I had no idea she had been diagnosed with all this stuff. I had no idea she was on all those meds. She'd pretended like everything was okay, and I didn't know.  I felt like a fool, like every other parent who calls a roommate and all the friends know what's going on and the parents are just stupid and in the dark. Get the roommies to lie to your parents who are scared to death about you, like you're irrelevant and stupid in their life.  I'd never felt like that with her before. I'd always felt like we were partners, close, friends. And now I knew...she was hiding and lying by omission and didn't trust me enough to talk to me, and had secrets, and I was just...The Fool.  Even typing this now my eyes are filling with tears, because that HURTS, it hurts worse than about anything I can remember psychologically in the past.  She scared me when she disappeared, and she hurt me when she treated me like...a fool.  I understand she was in a bad place herself, even that she wasn't herself, that she didn't want to drag me into it, but she'd talk to me and crack jokes or send joking posts or connect most days, and she was showing me a fake face, she was lying on her floor for days at a time and responding to me like everything was fine.  I Felt So Stupid.  I felt betrayed, too.  Hurt.  Angry.  I couldn't even think about talking to her without crying again.  We finally did talk, but it's not over.  I find myself distancing myself from her, because I don't want to feel like a fool any more.  I don't want to get hurt again.  I can't trust her any more.  This weekend she was here, she acted fine, she left, and when she called me, she said she wasn't doing well, couldn't "do this", was going to fail school, that life was all bad.  I'm in a war zone. One day I'm fine, she's fine, she sends amusing things, the next day she's calling me and I'm afraid she's going to kill herself.  When she calls me, it's almost always in tears and on the edge.  But sometimes she just calls to say hi.  I can't really do this. Every time I answer the phone I wonder which Kaylee I get--distraught, hysterical and mentally unstable, or amused and happy or bored and just wanting to connect. If I don't answer the phone I'm afraid she'll do something bad. If I do, I about lose my own mind half the time.  I've about got PTSD over this.  If we're not careful, I'M going to need therapy and drugs, and I've made it this far without that, so I'd sure hate to start now.  But Fuck Me, seriously??  My kid is on the verge of another psychotic break, on a bunch of meds, about to drop out of school during the end of her Junior year, very expensive school that she's only in because of scholarships she may not be able to keep, and possibly willing to self-harm. About to potentially lose her future.  She'll definitely never get her pilot's license, or be able to buy a firearm, or hold a Government job or many others, and if she loses the scholarships and can't go back to this school, her degree is in jeopardy too.  And what can I do about any of this??  We're going to hope she can get through this semester, which is a big fat question mark right now, and then we're going to put her in a 30 day program that costs $30,000 that we don't have, to try to get her meds sorted out and stabilized and reduced to something reasonable. And hope that it "fixes" things, without any actual hope that it can, at least not for good.  And then what?  I really don't know.

And that's how I ended up visiting my daughter in a loony bin, with a nurse guarding the room, perched on furniture deceptively designed to be too heavy to pick up and throw, sitting next to a young mental patient pacing and muttering and hard sniffing water and Capri Sun packets straight up her nostrils because the air was "too dry", during one of the worst days of my life.