I keep getting asked how pneumonia got so bad it put me in a coma and yet no one around me really noticed I was that sick – and I’ve tried writing out the whole ICU ordeal numerous times, and just keep procrastinating and making excuses to either not finish the post or not to post what is finished.
The answer isn’t as simple as I just got pneumonia and it took a turn for the worse – it was an accumulation of other things that when I got pneumonia, it was just the tip of the iceberg.
The shortest and simplest explanation is that depression put me on life support. Case closed.
Yes, pneumonia made me go to the hospital, but it was depression that created the powder keg of issues that led me to being in such a physical mess that I couldn’t fight off pneumonia. Depression about things I thought I’d resolved or worked through, about things that I saw as failures in my marriage, grief over losing my favorite uncle, and finding out my job was being outsourced to a different vendor company and I could be unemployed soon. A lot happened in 2022 to say the least.
One of my biggest flaws is that I downplay most of my troubles, if I even talk about them at all. There are many reasons for this, most of which are from the childhood I had. I will delve more into the dynamic of my immediate family when I was younger at a later date, but for the most part, I was raised to believe I was the problem in all situations of my life. Times when I was a child and would have an upset of some sort would usually be spun as being my own fault – my own creation. I was too dramatic, too selfish, too hyper, too loud. If you mix in also that when Dad was on the warpath about something, I was typically the one he was mad at, you will get an adult who does everything in her power to make herself very small, unnoticed, and less of a burden to those around her.
Now, as an adult, when I get upset about things or get into a depression cycle, the voice in the back of my head is usually scolding me for causing the issue I’m upset about. The crushing loneliness that comes with depression, that feeling of grief that you just want to share with someone in that moment to be able to relieve just a bit of the pressure off yourself – I typically stop myself from sharing with anyone that I’m that low because I immediately feel like I’ll get scolded for being selfish or spoiled because how can I possibly be depressed when I have a life others are praying to have?
Perfectionism.
In a word, that’s all it is… and a refusal to need anyone’s help with anything because I learned as a child that any help comes with strings attached. The worse I started to feel, the deeper into the depression I’d go – it became a waiting game basically…waiting to die.
However, being the eternal planner and stressed to the max with navigating a busy career and an even busier home, there wasn’t even time for that!
I am the keeper of all the family schedules, meals, who’s where and doing what, the doctors/dentists/etc appointments, when the cat needs to go to the Vet, what day Xander works late so I can make Trysha’s favorite meal she’s been asking for which he doesn’t like, or that Trysha’s car needs to be in the shop on June 14th and it’s an all day thing so I need to follow her to drop off the car, but then she has to work later and the car won’t likely be ready so she’ll have to take my car to work and figuring out if I have everything I need to make it through her work shift without a car. The list of these kinds of things are endless.
It’s also playing referee between the son who’s trying to stand up and be a man to his dad but also helping facilitate the communication between the two of them so it’s not a rift that they can’t move past later. It’s making myself available to the kids when they want to have a heart to heart while I’m in the middle of 90 million things, or dropping everything because Jason wants to spend time together and feeling too guilty to say I need a break.
You add on top of all of this that I felt my relationship with Jason was falling apart and none of my normal ability to fix it was working. I won’t get into specifics in this post, but I know that even before 2022 I’d practically given up on the hope of things getting better between us. I had come to the realization that I either needed to quit letting the things that bothered me impact my entire being, or I would need to leave… a decision I wasn’t even sure how to make.
2022 started off with me seeking a deeper relationship with God because I had all of these huge things on my plate that I didn’t know how to cope with – along with coming to terms that Trysha turned 18 in February 2022 and that in all of my planning to make sure my girls were going to be okay if something happened to me before they were adults, I’d completely forgotten to plan for surviving them becoming adults and how my life might look after.
I kept coming across passages in my bible, or snippets of sermons from my favorite ministers, that all talked about giving your battles to God and how that’s half the battle itself. I’d pray for His guidance on how to handle things, but I’d never really turn over control, even though I know I felt called to do so. So the more I felt called to “Let Go and Let God” the more I pushed back on this and tried to do it all by myself, leading me into even deeper depression because I still felt like I was failing and I felt like I was just ready to be done living.
The girls were adults, I had decent life insurance so they and Jason would be taken care of, I’d planned EVERYTHING down to the last detail so that it wasn’t going to be a burden on anyone. I could simply just disappear and things would be fine and I’d quit feeling like every day was yet another failure for me.
Now, you should know, I didn’t consider myself suicidal. I still don’t. There is a HUGE difference in my mind between actively seeking out a way to end your life and what I did. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I didn’t want to live anymore either. I cannot tell you how many times within the last year before my coma that I would go to sleep and pray that God would not let me wake up in the morning, and how heavy it was waking up the next day and just feeling exhausted to my very core over having to go through the motions for another day.
THAT is the level of depression I buried myself in leading up to the few months before I got put on life support. I was barely surviving then, but the hits that came starting in April 2022 would push every limit I had and make my depression even worse.
Mustard Seed Mama 