Friday December 21, 2012

Have you ever made the mistake of thinking you actually had a best friend, you thought they were being honest and sincere with you, you thought when they told you they loved you it was real, only to find out it wasn't.  Madea says it best "some people are like leaves, some like branches and very few are those roots that go down.  The leaves fall off when the wind blows hard or when they're season is over, the branches break off in bad weather or if there's too much weight.  But the roots go deep and give life to the tree.  Some friends are meant to stay only for a season, they're there to teach you something, the friends who are branches are good only for good times, they can't handle too much, but the roots stay forever.  The mistake comes when we try to make a leaf or branch into a root, some people are supposed to stay only for a season to teach us something, but we try to make them into a root, theyre just not meant for it. 

The thing is you only need to find one true love, not several, there's only one.  So it stands to reason, they would be difficult to find sometimes.  Meanwhile, I have alot of work to do and very little time to devote to leaves and branches of any kind.  Its the holiday season and this time last year my daughter was getting ready for 3 months of manic behavior that would turn the entire family upside down.  It included three trips to mental hospitals, two trips to the emergency room in the back of an ambulance escorted by police officers, missed work and multiple trips up to the mental hospital. 

When an individual goes to manic stages in schizophrenia life gets very interesting and it requires an immense amount of patience and diplomacy.  Patience dealing with your child and diplomacy dealing with the various agencies that are connected to mental health emergencies.  You would be very surprised to learn the lack of knowledge, awareness and skill professionals who deal with mental health patients actually have.  Our local emergency room has no patience for them, traveling nurses are the worst form of care in this community, they do not care and are consistently disrespectful to patients, patients families and doctors, yes doctors.  The ambulance service, who say they deal with schizophrenics all the time, are very inept when dealing with them in emergency situations.  They tend to exacerbate the situation and will actually engage in verbal combat with them.  Excuse me, there's only room for one mental health patient here please.  Mental health, themselves do not have an understanding of a person's state of well being, they don't understand the definition of a danger to oneself or someone else apparently.  If a patient is wandering through their parking lot in front of cars and sliding down walls, they are fine, can we make an appointment for you next month?  What the hell?  Psychiatrists who should have retired years ago who have not kept up with current trends prescribing older antipsychotic drugs that do more harm than good and police that try to tell me what I am dealing with.  Really????  You're kidding right?  Even if I was not working on my doctorate in the field, my daughter is experience enough.  Maybe they were under the impression that we just met. 

I'm very fortunate, my daughter tells me about the hallucinations she has, the people she sees, the voices she hears, the anger she feels.  One of the rides to a mental hospital included an overdose of Meliril, mind you this was the time the mental health department said she was not a danger to herself.  It's amazing how people keep jobs.  During this ride she talked to people who weren't there, told us not to hit the people walking down the freeway, asked us why we were leaving our friend at the rest stop, you know the one that walked with you into the bathroom that wasn't there.  The first time it happened it scared me.  And with each manic episode it intensifies but now I go through it knowing it'll be over pretty soon. 

Such is a day in the life of me.