There’s this trick that your depression likes to play on you, where it keeps convincing you what a waste of life you are, how worthless you are, how pointless everything in life is – simply to keep you there, wrapped up in it so you never leave. Some people have the capability to talk themselves out of that darkness, to walk away from its toxic hold on them, but there are others that aren’t so lucky. For some, it requires medication, and then there are those that the burden of the side effects far outweigh the good of the medication so they suffer, often in silence.
I have been on both ends of the spectrum, but the majority of the time I fall on the latter. I power through my lows and normally come out the other side thankful that by the grace of God, I’ve survived another storm.
Going into April 2022, I was already at a fairly low point – but April is always a weird month for me: it’s Kaylee’s birth month, but it’s also the anniversary of my Mom dying. As the years have gone on, I don’t completely shut down on the anniversary, although some years are harder than others, but April always has that kind of anxiety for me because it’s a month I never know how I’m really going to feel one day to the next.
My boss called me late one Friday afternoon, a week after the anniversary date of Mom, to tell me my job had been outsourced. I managed to stay pretty numb to it because I just couldn’t handle the stress of it. He had assured me that the middle management team (my direct boss and his colleagues) were all very upset about it and had let it be known that they needed to find me a different role to move into because they would be the ones at a loss if I was to leave the company. Now I’ve worked for companies who pay lip service to the whole “we’re fighting for you” nonsense while behind the scenes they’re doing everything they can to cut you loose. The minute I heard what was happening, it was like dejavu to the company that I’d worked for previously.
Long story short – previous company was going to re-organize and layoff a ton of a people. I was told for months before that my job was safe, my job was safe, budget had already been approved to keep me on, etc., so I had passed on several opportunities out of loyalty to my team, only to be told after those other positions had been filled that there were no jobs for me to roll into and that they were not keeping me on. So here I was going through it all again… and I’m not going to lie, this only added to the feelings of failure. I’d always had this chip on my shoulder in my career about not being good enough to be fought for or treated as anything more than a hired work horse. Managers that will pile on the workload regardless, because they know I’ll bust my ass for them and the company I work for but that loyalty and drive is rarely rewarded.
So when he’d called to tell me this, and told me they were working to find me a spot to roll into, this caused tension between Jason and I because I had been blindly trusting with my previous company in his eyes, and against his many objections this left me unemployed. Now here I was, about to do the same all over again. I also worked as a contractor, so when my vendor got word that they were about to lose the contract that employed me and a few others, they wanted to pull me to a different account immediately and not give the client a chance to determine what they were going to do. The truth was, the vendor was making bank off of me and they were afraid that the role my client boss was trying to find for me would hire me internal and then they’re no longer making money off me. I get it – it’s business – but I had to do what was best for me, and this particular client was the absolute best company I’d ever worked with in my 16 years of working in the IT field.
Then, even before I had a chance to fully accept everything going on in my career, under 24 hours after that news, I got a call that my favorite uncle had passed away.
I will do a separate post about my Uncle Jim at a later date, because a few paragraphs will never do him justice, but this man has been one of the only male role models in my father’s family to ever stand up against my dad for me. He was the closest thing to a father figure I had growing up, so to lose him (in April no less) just brought up a ton of unresolved issues about Mom’s passing, as well as issues with my Dad.
The following month – Trysha graduated High School and the gravity of that hit me harder than I expected it to, for various reasons – the biggest being that I didn’t think I’d live long enough to see it. But depression would steal the joy from the moment from me almost immediately as I looked through the photos of the night and really saw how much weight I’d gained. I didn’t recognize myself.
Shortly before Trysha’s graduation though, I’d stopped being able to sleep through the night, even with taking over the counter sleeping pills. I used to be the person that could fall asleep in under 15 minutes and sleep through almost anything. I’ve slept through tornado sirens, bats in the house, landlords coming into the house to do repairs when I’d been napping, etc., so to go from that to not sleeping for more than an hour or two without waking up was a nightmare.
Jason and I have been incompatible when it comes to our sleeping habits for the entirety of the time we’ve been together. I’m a sound sleeper who tosses and turns, fights and kicks, and gets brutally mean if you wake me up. He is a very light sleeper and cannot handle the idea of sleeping with your feet uncovered, let alone letting his wife sleep with hers uncovered. I cannot tell you the amount of arguments we’ve had about him covering up my feet while I’m sleeping and it’s woken me up. So by May, it was almost like I was becoming a light sleeper in anticipation of him “attempting” to cover me up. I chalked this up to childhood traumas and issues with “being told what to do” festering up because Uncle Jim had died and it brought up subconscious stuff about Dad – in my mind, that’s how I rationalized what was going on.
In June, I fell asleep at my desk one morning for over an hour though, with a lit cigarette in my hand. My desk pad had a dime-sized melted hole in it when I woke up. What I’d hoped was a one-time thing, started happening regularly, almost any time I sat at my desk for longer than about a half hour. Jason had started noticing, and because as I’ve mentioned, we weren’t communicating the best and our relationship was spiralling, it just became another fight, another thing I was messing up that he was having to bitch at me for. The more it happened, the more I denied it was happening. I wouldn’t go to the doctor about it, wouldn’t really admit it was an issue because I didn’t have time for it to be an issue. I was trying to work harder/better because my job was still in flux, and the more I pushed myself, the worse it got. I also started having other issues that to be honest, I worried were the beginning signs of something more fatal, but again – my depression didn’t see it as something to be scared of – it was a light at the end of a tunnel for me.
This went on, and then in July, a week after his 68th birthday, my father passed away.
For 6 years, I hadn’t talked to him or my stepmother. I’d only called my stepmother to tell her about my uncle passing and that conversation hadn’t gone well at all. I’d cut ties with him in 2016 and would never admit to looking back because the father I needed him to be didn’t exist and the person he was did severe and lasting damage to everyone around him. I went through a lot of therapy and spent a lot of time in prayer coming to terms with letting go of him – and I had felt the whole time that when this moment would come, I’d be somewhat indifferent to it. It was quite shocking to me to feel anger that he died, but more that I felt sad for what a waste it was that he couldn’t ever get his demons in check enough to be a decent human being. I am sure I will write more at length about this time and the emotions I had about it – now isn’t the time though.
My only driving thought through it was to get some of my mother’s belongings back now that he was gone, specifically her rings and the custom, handmade ceramic nativity scene her aunt had painted her when I was a child.
This nativity scene was a HUGE fight between Dad and us kids for almost the entire time Mom had been gone. My maternal grandmother died of cancer when my Mom was 11. My mom then went to stay with my grandmother’s sister for a couple years, and it bonded them. My Aunt Alice was a surrogate mom to her, and my mom’s favorite aunt. Aunt Alice did ceramics, like poured the molds, fired them in her own kiln, hand painted them, the whole nine. My mother loved nativity scenes, specifically one my aunt had made for herself, so one year for Christmas, Aunt Alice made Mom her very own. This was like a 30 piece set that she spent months working on and gave to her for Christmas, it was one of my mom’s single-most treasured belongings. It was a personal want of mine not only because of what it had meant to Mom, but because I spent a lot of time with Aunt Alice as a child and I’d helped her make the set and kept it secret the whole time.
For Dad it was a status symbol that he could display at holidays because EVERYONE commented on how beautiful it was and no one else had one like it. When he finally gave us some of Mom’s stuff after all of us kids had grown, we’d all balked that none of the “important” stuff was given to us – Mom’s Bible, her Beatles memorabilia, her collection of Merry Moos cow figurines, the mother’s ring that Becky and I bought her, her pearl watch, and her nativity scene. What we got were our drawings or things from school she’d kept, and random Chicago Bulls stuff (what pieces he hadn’t been able to sell). He’d said ever since then that when he died we could all have it – but that he wasn’t going to give it to one of us and have the other three pissed off, and because it was still all HIS because he was still living.
Because my stepmother was dealing with health issues when my dad passed, I didn’t want to bombard her with asking about the stuff of mom’s, and I didn’t want to be heartless to her grief because she had been married to him for 23 years, but I didn’t care about funeral or burial, didn’t even need details about what had transpired that he’d died from, didn’t want anything that belonged to him really – just wanted my mom’s stuff. So I played cordial, helped with details how I could for the obituary, tried to let the family and extended family know, offered to drive out of state to help her… but all I really wanted was that nativity scene.
Amid all of this though – my sleeping was getting worse, my dozing off and losing time during the day was getting worse, and it was starting to affect my job. I’d be talking with someone – on the phone or in IM, didn’t matter – and it would turn to gibberish. I’d doze off on the phone mid-sentence. I’d fall asleep at my desk and completely sleep through meetings I was supposed to run. I was worried that this was worsening symptoms from a near-fatal head injury I’d had over a decade previous that had left me with an odd seizure-like disorder, and given how much Jason fussed over me about that, I wasn’t about to admit that I thought anything with my cognitive health was declining.
Even with all that going on – in August a manager on a different team contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in applying for a role in his team. It was an answer to all the prayers I’d been saying about my career – it would keep me with the client I loved, get me out from under the vendor I despised, would allow me to maintain working remote, and allow me to finally start financially planning for a future where I wasn’t just a working mother.
By the time August was over, I didn’t feel as mentally depressed anymore – I felt hopeful. Problem was, my physical health was becoming a disaster I couldn’t hide. I was waking up in the middle of the night and having to physically stand up to catch my breath because I’d wake up feeling like I was drowning. I couldn’t sleep a whole night and was, a lot of times, only sleeping for 2-3 hours and then I was up. Couldn’t take naps on weekends either, if I went and laid down I’d only sleep for 20-40 minutes and be right back up, but I did find out that I could sleep for hours in the recliner in the living room.
What I realize now, and probably would have if I would have put any of my natural research tactics to work, was that these are all textbook signs of obstructive sleep apnea.
In September, I started getting worse if that’s even imaginable, and I started to get the warning signs of a cold – the same one I get every Fall as harvest starts. I have dust allergies, and when the local farmers start pulling down the fields for the year, the corn and bean dust plays havoc on my system. I typically end up with a really bad bronchial infection and will lose my voice for about a week every September or October. 2022 seemed to be no exception, but because I was already doing so poorly, it didn’t seem to make me feel as bad as it normally did – probably because I was already feeling so bad.
By Mid-September though, the newest of my ailments was that my feet and legs were starting to swell, to the point of numbness in my toes. To me, this meant something was wrong with my heart. I don’t know if it was the potential new job and outlook on my future, or maybe it was just because I wanted confirmation that what had killed my mother was coming after me too, but I finally called my doctor and made an appointment.
Her diagnosis: Pneumonia.
She sent me for a chest x-ray to confirm, which I was okay with because that would also rule out heart issues. She called in meds, antibiotics and steroids, along with an inhaler – all the norm for me for the time of year it was.
Now, I’m not sure if she had actually sat me down and explained the severity of how bad my lungs sounded at that point if it would have changed my mind about what happened next and made me take it more seriously, I honestly don’t know. I know I initially thought the over-the-top fussing was just what doctors were supposed to do, scare you enough that you throw everything at it so they don’t get sued for malpractice… legit that’s what I thought.
She was adamant that I go straight to the ER after leaving her office, but I protested. I didn’t want to be stuck in the town her office was in (30 minutes from home), I’d rather go home and fill in Jason and go to the hospital closer to my house. Trysha was also due to be off work, and if I went to the closer hospital, she could meet me there, and then I wouldn’t have the stress of Jason going with me because Trysha could be there which would appease him. Two birds, one stone.
Dr. Bankston agreed, but did say that it was serious, and she’d be calling the ER within the next 2 hours and if I hadn’t made it there she would be calling the local police for a welfare check. She wasn’t sure it was pneumonia, and if it was my heart, time was critical – I got it, but still took it kind of like overkill at the time.
I went home, waited for Jason to get home to explain what was going on, and then off I went to the ER, meeting Trysha there when she got off work. Because I tend to downplay, and because I didn’t want to scare Trysha, I continued to downplay how bad the dozing off and not sleeping was, played it off that Dr. Bankston was just being cautious. The ER staff wasted no time in getting all sorts of testing started, and it was clear almost immediately, I didn’t look or act like it was pneumonia and they were all operating off the mindset I was in heart failure.
1.5 hours later – bloodwork and chest X-ray came back and confirmed it was pneumonia, not my heart. Problem solved!
The ER doctors wanted to admit me for how bad it was – again I thought they were being dramatic – and I wasn’t about to stay overnight when I already had meds waiting for me and I could be at home in my own space. They fought me about it, and it was by far the WORST experience I’ve ever had medically with any facility. They proceeded to tell Trysha that if I left the ER, I wouldn’t live to see morning and she needed to convince me to stay – however – they weren’t telling me why, and weren’t giving me anything other than the fact that it was pneumonia for me to gauge how severe it was.
I left against medical advice – picked up my meds, went home. I lived through the night, woke up still feeling shitty, but nothing seemed worse, AND I had the relief of knowing my heart wasn’t the issue. I’ll admit to feeling cocky when I had the follow up with Dr Bankston the next day, but she wasn’t as impressed. She agreed to let me continue to treat at home – with the promise that I would get a pulse oximeter and if my oxygen saturation dropped below 85, I would go back to the ER, which I agreed to.
Two days later, I learned that all of my mother’s belongings I’d cared about were gone, some BS excuse about a fire in a storage unit which I still don’t fully believe, but anything of my mom’s I cared about getting – all gone. When I sit and look at the timeline of things and how it all ties together – I believe this was the moment that the last little bit of fight in me shattered. It wasn’t a tangible moment when it happened, but all I know is that in under a week from this point – I would be on life support.
Mustard Seed Mama 