Tag: depression

ICU

A Familiar Kind of New – ICU Ordeal Part 7 – Final

theotherkeighin

When we pulled up to the house, I couldn’t stop the tears. It hadn’t even fully sunk in yet how bad my condition had been, just that I’d been gone for longer than I knew – and had felt like I was missing home in my very bones (if that makes any sense). 

Jason had spent the weekend going back and forth from working to making the house better accessible to me and what I’d need for the next few weeks. To say he’d busted his ass to make sure I had everything I needed to come home was an understatement. We’d found out with my sleep apnea, the style of mattress we had was actually the worst thing for me until I’d gotten a CPAP and was wearing it regularly, so I was only released from the hospital with strict instructions that I absolutely had to sleep in a recliner for the first few weeks. He’d gotten that and a walker since I still wasn’t 100% steady on my feet and we weren’t sure how the dogs and cats were going to be around me yet. 

He’d completely rearranged the bedroom so that I could sleep in our bedroom, albeit in a recliner. He helped me out of the car and into the house before letting Bella out of the bedroom to come see me. 

If you’ve seen videos of soldiers returning from being stationed overseas or something, to dogs they’ve left behind – that’s basically what it was like when she realized it was me sitting on the sofa. Bella had been codependent on me before all this, but she’d also had the last two and a half years of me working remote so I was home with her 24/7 – to then suddenly I was gone for 3 whole weeks and she didn’t understand. To say she was emotional doesn’t do it justice. Our other dog, Cowboy, still kind of a puppy, had only been with us for a few months when I’d gone to the hospital, and while I’m not sure if it was excitement from Bella he was feeding off of or not, he was also very happy to have me home. 

We had lunch and then I set up my laptop at the table in our great room, refusing to even go into my office yet – and I worked on the application process that I couldn’t do while in the hospital. Once that was done, I started to feel the twinge of anxiety over what was next… I wanted everything to just go back to normal now that I was home, and even though I knew that wasn’t about to happen, again with the whole goal thing – I needed a baseline. Since Jason and Trysha were otherwise occupied – giving me some space to get the application done – I started researching the terminology on my release papers I didn’t understand and started putting together a timeline in my head of when I would have some semblance of normal back. I didn’t like anything I read, which was basically that there was no real timeline to follow. If you went just based on the length of time I was intubated – I was looking at close to a year and a half at least. Not to mention, I’d been through a severe physical trauma, there was no way of saying I would ever get back to what I’d considered normal. 

That first night home was a welcomed relief. To be home with my family, to shower and sleep in my own room – these are things I clearly took for granted and drank them up like fine wine that first night. However, that feeling was short-lived. I needed something to do, something to focus on – I couldn’t just sit and be idle.

I also had to start the process of healing the emotional trauma and damage it had caused not only me, but my family. Trysha camped out in the living room for the first month I was home – paranoid that if she didn’t that something would happen and I wouldn’t be able to get her attention if she was all the way upstairs. When I finally put my foot down and made her sleep upstairs that first night, I know there were tears involved, and I’m sure she didn’t sleep well for checking her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a call or message from me downstairs that I needed something. 

It was very hard to get her out of caregiver mode and back to being my kid. 

For me, it was a series of countdowns. Counting down to being back at work for half days… check. Then counting down to being back to work full time… check. Countdown to an overnight sleep study… check.

The sleep study was awful. 

I was still so paranoid about being intubated again, that it was making me almost physically ill the closer we got to the study. I was just terrified that the CPAP wouldn’t work, or something would happen and they would decide they’d have to intubate me against my will again and I’d get no say in the matter again. Luckily enough, the sleep study went beautifully, and I was given a CPAP and mask in no time. This is where the real problem began for me with healing though…

My pulmonologist is useless and doesn’t really listen – from support groups I’ve found online, this whole process is a lot of trial and error, and since I live in a rural town, my options are limited on how many doctors I can go to… that being said, because my apnea is so severe and the pressure settings on my CPAP have to be so high – it also limits the style of masks I can have. Factor in that I’m typically a VERY sound sleeper, I end up taking off my mask within just a few hours, unaware I’ve even done so, so I’m not getting the full benefits of it yet. 

I believe that the benefits are there – that’s the problem. I am about to duct tape the damn thing to my head because the nights that I manage to keep it on for at least 6 hours, I wake up feeling phenomenal!

Oh well, we will get there I’m sure. 

So here we are – 7 months after getting released from the hospital – and I’m sure you’re curious what life looks like now…

I got the internal spot at the client company! That took a huge weight off my shoulders, and I could do a whole post about how bad the vendor company screwed me over with my whole hospital stay and my salary for the next few months until I was able to leave them – but on this side of things it’s just not worth it. They’re scumbags – let ‘em be scumbags. 

I learned that the Lord will bring you to the places you hate most just to bring you closer to Him. He will humble you in ways you have zero capacity to understand until you’re standing on the other side of things and realize that everything is a lesson. For me, part of that lesson was being able to let go of my pride, even about some of the silliest things like hair.

Yea, you read that right… hair.

Did you have ANY idea that if you go through a physical trauma like an ICU stay – your hair falls out? I didn’t. Problem is, it didn’t happen at the hospital while I was going through the trauma, it started about 2 weeks after I got home, when I was feeling better than I had in months, was getting around on my own just fine, showering and dressing on my own, etc. – THAT’S when my hair started falling out. And I’m not just talking about a little extra strands in the brush – I’m talking baseball-sized handfuls when you wash your hair. 

I have always had extremely thick, silky hair. Even when I used to bleach my hair, people would comment about how thick and healthy my hair still felt. I couldn’t wear any simple hair band, I had to use the thick ponytail holders to get all my hair up, and cute styles like loose buns have never been an option for how heavy my hair was… by 2 months post ICU, I could use loom band rubber bands to do a full ponytail because of how much hair I’d lost, and it was so thin you could see my scalp. 

Five months after the worst of it, it’s only just now starting to grow back, but seriously – you want to talk about having to come to terms with vanity you didn’t think you possessed – start losing your hair. 

The dry skin hasn’t gone away either… I could sit in a vat of diabetic lotion and still come out looking like a snake shedding its skin. Nothing seems to help and from what I’ve learned it’s something that will just eventually work itself out.  My voice came back almost 100% – it still breaks occasionally, and I’m more likely to get hoarse faster if I start to get run down, but I’ll take it, considering they weren’t sure I would ever get it back to normal after having been intubated for two weeks.  

All in all – things are close to being back to normal – I’ve been seeing a therapist for a couple months which has helped immensely to process some of the things I still feel about the whole ordeal, as well as come to terms with the reasons why I let things get as bad as they did to get me into the hospital in the first place. I’ve been slowly making changes, and reprogramming my brain to handle certain situations without just isolating and bottling my feelings. 

As I close out this series about my ICU stay, I did want to thank the people in my life who went above and beyond anything I thought they ever would for me and my family. From coming to the hospital to stay with my daughters, providing meals or gift cards so they could get meals while at the hospital, to all who donated to the gofundme that was started, to the friends and family that simply came and prayed with them and over me, to the friends we’ve got around the country that couldn’t physically be here – the way you rallied around my family, checked in on them (Trysha especially) and were just an ear for them to cry/vent to if needed, to the friends I have at my work who went completely above and beyond to make sure that I had a job to come back to and helped my daughter navigate getting updates to people who needed them, to my regular doctor who pushed just enough but respected my needs to do things my way, and the entire staff at the hospital on the critical care floor (even the one nurse my sister and oldest daughter didn’t like hahaha)… Saying thank you isn’t even remotely enough…

The amount of peace that you brought can never be repaid. I have a hard time putting it into words how much your kindness and charity to me and my family means to me without getting completely emotional about it. Just know that it is not lost on me and means more than I can ever express. 

ICU

If Anxiety Burned Calories I’d Be Dead – ICU Ordeal Part 6

theotherkeighin

The anxiety I felt during my last two days in the hospital was probably the worst I’ve experienced. Every few hours it seemed that some nurse or specialist was coming in and telling me about a new test that Dr. Abbineni had ordered before she’d fully sign off on releasing me come Monday. When you’re a planner, someone who prepares for absolutely everything, to have tests done you have zero way to “study” for is a whole new nightmare. 

The worst of these tests was an overnight pulse ox monitor, to be done without the CPAP, only on oxygen. See, when I was awake, I knew how to control my breathing to get my oxygen saturation to be well within what they considered “normal”. When you are asleep, you have no control over it, and even sleeping in an elevated state with a nasal cannula, I was terrified it would drop to a point that then they’d make me stay longer.

And in hindsight – it probably wouldn’t have been the worst thing for me to stay a little longer – but they didn’t fully appreciate that I absolutely had to get home Monday, or at least be somewhere with better wifi. 

Here is where I sidebar, and I tell you the long-winded rant about my career. If you don’t care to read this debacle – just know it all worked out in the end HAHAHA.

I fell into the IT field by accident, over 15 years ago. All because of a typing test and an analytical personality assessment done by a temp agency in order to place me in a clerical pool for a major company. I could type over 100 wpm, and I tested so high on the analytics part that they made me retake it because they thought the test malfunctioned. While I thought I was being sent to this company to be a run-of-the-mill billing clerk, their IT Director got a hold of my test results and snatched me up. This started my career. 

However, I’m generally pretty blunt, and I don’t always work well on a team. Not to mention, all the previous self-worth stuff left a huge chip on my shoulder, and I’ve not always been the easiest employee to deal with. I spent 8 years with that company, doing a ton of work and making a name for myself because I was great at my job, I was just a total pain in the ass to deal with if things didn’t go the way I thought they should. I was so good at the job I did, but was so bad at the interpersonal stuff, that it left me passed over for promotions and things I should have been handed, which added to my growing pain in the ass behavior. 

From there, I’d spent the next 4 years jumping around as a contractor from company to company never being more than a seat filler for a contract. Gone was the security of an internal position, at any time the companies I was placed with could choose to go with a different vendor or do away with my position and I’d just be out of a job.

In 2018, I was approached by a vendor who said they weren’t staff augmentation, they were consulting – it was supposed to be completely different. If the client I’d be placed with didn’t have work for me, I was still employed and drawing a salary, they would just have me be in the consulting office either doing trainings or shadowing leadership etc. – the job seemed like my entire career goal on a platter. The only downfall, the client who they wanted me to be at was over an hour drive away. When I told them I wouldn’t be interested – they pushed harder. I was told that if I came in and did a good job, in 6 months they could move me to office space closer to home that this client had, and even if not – in those 6 months they would work on getting me several certifications that they’d then be able to just move me to a client that was closer. They sweetened the deal with added paid time off over the holidays, bonuses, etc. – so I’d agreed. 

Long story short – that had all been a lie. 

Most of the “benefits” and added time off went away within the first 6 months, and they regularly lied about the client’s feedback on performance reviews. 

Thank God this client was unlike any other company I’d worked for though, and the team I’d been placed in had several genuinely great people or I would likely still be bouncing from vendor to vendor. Their people took an interest in helping me excel, and lived by their belief that we all win together so if they help me succeed, it helps the company succeed. 

However, much like most of corporate America, the team on the ground doing the work isn’t always the one making the decisions that affect them the most – and higher ups decided that they were changing the organization of our division – which would put me out of a job because they were not going to continue utilizing my vendor.

I brought this up in a previous part of these posts, that they were trying to get a position posted for an internal spot for me to apply to – as luck would have it – that position posted the morning after I went into my coma. Now a lot of times, due to the amount of lawsuits it can open a company up to, you can only keep a post open for so long, especially if you get any applicants for it – otherwise it can be seen as impropriety. The position was supposed to only be open for two weeks, and they’d had no interest in it at that time, so thankfully, they were able to extend the listing – but due to the company’s policy they could only do an extension once, and only for a week. 

In order to even be considered for the role, I had to go through the application process first, and the wifi at the hospital wasn’t fast enough for me to even load the sign on page to do so. The listing was due to close at 11:59pm that Monday. So in my mind – I absolutely HAD to be released – even if for a few hours to go home and use my high-speed internet to apply. 

Yes, I wanted to be home to sleep in my own home, to be in my own space and to see my damned dog I was missing dearly, and above all else – to FINALLY be able to take a shower… but I absolutely had to apply for this position, otherwise, the future of my career was going to be the same roller coaster that was running me into the ground. 

Friday night – the same day that Dr. Abbineni had said I would probably be going home on Monday – the manager for my vendor started drunk texting me. I say drunk texting me because of the amount of typos in his messages, and also because anyone who knows this guy knows that he has the highest expense account at this vendor because he lives for happy hours. He’s been reprimanded for drunk texting employees before, but is still employed as a senior manager. 

He starts telling me that unless I come up with close to a thousand dollars within a week – a check payable to my vendor – that they’re going to have to let my insurance lapse, even though the way our salary is done it shouldn’t lapse unless I’m out of work longer than 3 months. Of course when I question why this is – the truth of it comes out in his drunken stupor. They don’t really do insurance the way that they’re supposed to, so larger payment we make during enrollment month every year doesn’t really buffer shit – and because I don’t have billable hours to the client, the client won’t be paying them for me, so they do not have a safety net in place to cover my insurance costs – but that even if they did they wouldn’t because if they made that exception for me, they’d have to make it for everyone. 

I was only 5 days post 24/7 fentanyl drip at this point – to say my brain was still fuzzy would be an understatement. I didn’t have the mental capacity to look at the situation logically at 9pm on a Friday night when I’m still hooked up to 3 monitors and two IV lines in a critical care wing of the local hospital. So I ignored the texts – no sense in arguing with a drunk moron – I would deal with it when I was home. 

But all I thought about from then on was I had to get home – because if I didn’t get home and get back to work, there wasn’t going to be any way to cover the medical bills for all the aftercare and follow up that was going to have to happen. 

Saturday night – they did the overnight pulse ox, a loud, obnoxious gray box that they glue a monitor to your finger, but the connection of it sucks, so it goes off if you move too much, or bend your finger the wrong way. It also has a VERY loud beep every 20 seconds to let you know that it’s actually working – how in the world they ever expected me to sleep with this thing on was beyond me. Not only because you have to lay almost perfectly still, and you get just about asleep and it’ll start siren beeping that it’s lost connection – but it also didn’t read accurately. The regular pulse ox that I had on that was connected to the heart monitors, showed my pulse ox stayed right around 96 most of the time. Under 94 it would start beeping. But this device for overnight monitoring that the pulmonology team brought it, never did register that I had a pulse ox higher than 92 at any given time. 

Needless to say, aside from a few 20 minute power naps throughout the night, I didn’t sleep. 

Sundays are a ghost town at the hospital. The normal rounds aren’t done, and the access to support services is apparently only a Monday through Friday thing. It gave me time to catch up on sleep through the day Sunday, but I was completely wound up about going home. I’m sure I made the nurses’ lives a living hell by bugging them with questions from the pulse ox test, to what time did they think I’d get discharged, etc. – oh well. I was ready to go!

Sunday night was more of the same – I tried to sleep – didn’t do much more than doze for 20 minutes here or there, and by this point I was in so much physical discomfort and pain it wasn’t funny. Everything hurt, my skin hurt, it hurt to sit, it hurt to lay down. Just the feeling of laying perfectly still on their harsh, bleached bed sheets, was enough to make me almost cry. 

The upside to the weekend was seeing a lot of the nursing staff that had been on during my coma, and hearing stories about Trysha and the things that had happened while I’d been out. Particularly, one male nurse that sang while he was in the room – I remembered him because of the singing! – and another who I’d been especially combative with and had even flipped off while in a coma. It was giving hugs to the ones that were our favorites, crying with them when they’d get emotional talking about being on my case since the beginning – let me tell you – the gravity of how severe it was is not lost on me, and the way the nursing staff who dealt with the worst through pandemic, to get to see the joy on their faces that they knew I was going to get out and had made a near miracle recovery is something I will never forget. 

MONDAY MORNING!!!!!!!!

I believe I woke up Trysha before the cafeteria was even open. I wanted to start planning to leave, I wanted to put together a game plan and we were going to follow that game plan because I was about to be back in charge. 

She’d already gotten me going home clothes, some stuff from home, and we’d already kind of packed up most of everything in the room. But by 7am, I was ready to go!

Rounds happened, the doctors came in, and Dr. Abbineni gave me the magical words – Oxygen had been ordered – I was going home. She urged me to continue with the progress I’d made, and warned me that I wasn’t 100% yet, and to try to remember that. 

Now with all the discharge stuff – had to wait for nursing to come in and unhook me, had to do one last pulse ox test while walking to confirm I would only need oxygen while sleeping – I passed obviously – and then I was told I could get out of the hospital garb and get dressed in normal clothes!

So here is where I tell you – I wasn’t about to admit weakness now – but the lack of sleep over the weekend, that had followed 3 weeks of literal physical hell on my body – I should have let them help me. The amount of energy it took to even maneuver getting dressed on my own made me cry in the bathroom. To go from being the person who was used to doing everything on her own to being someone who could barely get dressed on her own and realizing that I was going to have to completely depend on people for a while was humbling. 

But I powered through – even managed to put contacts in for the first time in 3 weeks!

Signed the final papers and I let them wheel me out of the critical care unit to the car and Trysha waiting to take me home. 

Sigh of relief once I was inside the car and on the way home, but it’s almost like this weird feeling because everything is the same – the city we were in, the road we took home, etc – but everything had changed too – the summer heat was gone, the Fall chill was in the air, fields that had still been up and only just turning, all harvested, the trees had already done their bright color change and were now growing bare as the majority of the leaves had fallen. 

I tried not to be too upset that I’d missed my favorite parts of my favorite season – and I tried to focus on the fact that I was finally going home.

ICU

When The Worst Wasn’t The Coma – ICU Ordeal Part 5

theotherkeighin

*Disclaimer* Some of the things in this post can be upsetting to those that are medically squeamish, or have a weak stomach when it comes to stuff related to the human body.

Extubated, Sprite and ice acquired, and given the all clear to eat the first solid food I’d had in two weeks was equivalent to winning the lottery for me. Jason was going to be coming to the hospital the next day and I told him all I wanted was popsicles.

Here’s the thing: I have an unhealthy obsession with freezer pops.

I’m a texture person, meaning that I can love the flavor of something and be completely repulsed by the texture of it and won’t eat it…. Most fish, watermelon, bananas… the list goes on. But, there are a brand of freezer pop popsicles that our local stores ONLY carry in the summer that have the best popsicle texture and flavor of any I’ve had… and when I tell you I stockpile them for the off-season, and have paid higher prices to order them off of Amazon, it’s no joke. With my job, and the amount of meetings I run during the day – these popsicles have saved my voice more times than I can tell you – I love them. 

So imagine my surprise to find that due to intubation, and two weeks of being in the hospital, being on oxygen, etc., had completely changed my taste buds. I no longer liked the taste of Mountain Dew (which I’d lived on), and could only really finish half of one popsicle when Jason brought them because the flavor was just off. 

That was the first of many differences. Everything just felt wrong. My skin hurt, dry to the point of having rough patches, I had an oily build up in my ears, and even worse on my scalp and face. It was the equivalent of the scalp flake stuff that infants get called cradle cap… it was awful. And being in the ICU – no showers. They’d bathe you, but it wasn’t the same, not even close. Again with the texture stuff, I could barely put my hands in my hair without feeling like I wanted to cry. I would learn the patches of dry skin was due to the amount of diuretics I was given to clear my lungs, and I would learn something I didn’t think biologically possible.

Within two weeks time, they’d drained enough fluid from me that I had lost 60 pounds. I noticed it most in my calves and feet – and until that point I hadn’t realized how much of my swelling wasn’t just weight gain from living a sedentary life. From the doctors notes on my chart, I would learn that for the first 12 days I was in the hospital, I was expelling 3-5 times the amount of fluid that I was being given per day.

Physical Therapy came in and the 20 minutes they worked with me to even stand at a sink and wash my face or brush my teeth that first day was exhausting and I quickly grew frustrated at what I took as my body completely betraying me. I had never been good at asking others to do things for me – let alone letting anyone help me with things or even remotely THINK I might need help with anything, so to become a toddler basically who needed to depend on someone for basic, simple things was heartbreaking to me. 

The doctors were still doing their “wait-and-see” routine when I would ask for next steps and how the future looked as far as my care and regaining any sense of normalcy to my life. I hadn’t even brought up going home in the first 24 hours because I knew there was zero way I could function at home, in my home, with the limited mobility I had. And while I was ecstatic to be awake and extubated, the fear and depression in me was almost suffocating because I didn’t know how to move forward from this, nor did I really understand just how serious things had been yet. 

I was moved out of ICU after being extubated, moved across the floor to the Critical Care Center, which was a surreal experience. Nurses who’d been with me for the two weeks I’d been in a coma, but had been off for a day or two had come back to work and I’d just up and vanished from ICU… so they’d come by just to see me. All of them knew Trysha – she’d established really great relationships with them throughout my time there, but what struck me the most was the constant thing they all said – “We were so worried about you.”

They would all talk about how serious my case was, a few even mentioned that it was rare to see someone rebound like I did because I’d been intubated for two weeks and they normally don’t get a good outcome after something like that. I chalked it up to the fact that we were still technically going through the pandemic, and that they were used to seeing extremes. I also downplayed it because in my head – it was pneumonia! The only people who I knew that ever died from pneumonia were babies and the elderly! It wasn’t until my new Critical Care treating physician showed up the next morning that I started getting the first glimpses of how bad my case was. 

Dr. Abbineni started off like the other doctors before her – we’ll wait and see – but I stopped her. I explained that this gray-area prognosis didn’t work for me and I would never make progress if I didn’t have a goal or a mark to hit. I needed something to work for that I could see clear movement forward and if I didn’t have that I would likely get apathetic and never progress much from where I was at that point. She did what the rest of them wouldn’t do – she finally explained a bit about the uphill battle I was facing, not only because of how bad I had been when I came in, but also because of how long I had been intubated. She further explained that cases like mine were extreme, and it would likely be months before I was anywhere near back to what would be considered normal.

Trysha tried to interject and further explain that my ambition and drive to achieve something is next to none, so just to give me goals and between the both of us, we would get me wherever Dr. Abbineni thought I needed to be. 

She explained to us that it was a slow process of getting better, as I was going to need extended care to be able to support myself at home. She laid it out like this: It would be at least 2-3 weeks before I could be discharged from the hospital and even after that happened, it would be an additional 2-4 weeks in a long-term rehab facility that would focus on physical therapy and getting me back to being able to do basic daily functions like bathing myself or walking from one room to another. She explained that it was suspected I had severe obstructive sleep apnea, and that I would need a sleep study or CPAP machine to be at home, things that couldn’t be done while I was in the hospital. She explained that even after I got out of the hospital and the rehab center, that I would need home health care on top of that to come daily for a few weeks and taper off just to make sure I could function around my own home. 

I’m not going to lie – it was devastating to think of not being able to go home for at least another month or two. I felt like I’d already missed too much – I’d missed most of my favorite season in our hometown, Fall leaves changing, being able to have windows open instead of the AC running, not to mention my severely codependent dog had probably forgotten who I was. As the days went on, it was becoming more anxiety-inducing to be stuck in a hospital too. Once the initial upset cleared, I asked for a checklist. What things did I need to be able to do to be released from the hospital? Then what would I need to do to be released from the rehab facility? Etc. 

First on her list – I was presently on 6 liters of oxygen 24/7 – she couldn’t release me while I required that much oxygen. I would have to be at 2 liters or less. Second, I would have to be able to reasonably stand on my own and with at most the aid of a walker, be able to navigate around a room without de-statting my oxygen levels. She explained that pulmonary would come in and advise me of breathing exercises I could do, and that I should be up walking as I could with the nurses as much as possible. I assured her that I would make it happen. 

It was exhausting, but I had goals. 

I walked, I sat upright in a chair as much as I could and maintained gradually lowering my oxygen intake during the day, keeping my stats up in what the staff considered normal range. Physical therapy increased seeing me from once a day to twice a day, and I forced myself to eat high-protein foods to be able to build the energy I would need to get my strength enough to keep pushing forward. 

And I also started plotting my escape plan which was that I was not ready, under any circumstances, to go to a rehab facility and deal with the wait and see game with a place like that…

Here’s the thing – I do not take well to being told I can’t do something. I’m typically the person who will do it out of spite just to shut you up. I’m smug about it too, not going to lie, I know it’s a toxic trait – but I published a trilogy because of it, just saying. So when they all told me that I couldn’t go home any time soon… it became a mission to prove them wrong. I thank God daily for the drive He gave me to be this way – I do not back down easy. I know it is because of that – and also because of the amount of prayer that was still being held for me – that I managed to accomplish what I did going forward. 

Day 2 post extubation was more frustrating because I was just about done with being told I couldn’t do stuff. I was tired of being stuck in a bed, of not being able to use the restroom…. THIS was the biggest driver. Guys, you have it so freakin’ easy when it comes to using the bathroom from a hospital bed. If you have use of your hands – they can hand you a jug and leave the room, you never have to move. Us women however, do not have it so easy… they either make you sit on the most uncomfortable bedpan possible, and you’re already unsteady so if you’re heavier set (like I am) you’re wobbling on the damned thing, or they give you this thing that looks like a sponge in a banana boat device that almost like suction seals to your lady bits which isn’t much better. After two days of doing this, I’d had my fill of it, and finally convinced one of the patient care staff to help walk me to the bathroom and let me use the toilet. One time was all it took and I wouldn’t hear of doing anything else, I’d already be sitting up and on the edge of the bed by the time they came in so there was no other option… I know, I was a terrible patient. But damn it – I had to be to an extent. 

Day 3 post extubation:

There was more walking, more fighting with Dr. Abbineni to set goals. I argued that I couldn’t get off the oxygen, or get it to reasonable, dischargable levels, if they weren’t willing to back off how much I was getting during the day. I was tired of lying in a bed, but it hurt to move because I’d been lucky enough to be blessed with two large bed sores. Then on day three, they switched the blood thinners they were giving me and I had an allergic reaction to it, broke out in a large rash all over my torso. It was terrible and painful so they gave me benadryl which made me sleepy and limited my time of being up and functioning. It was a frustrating setback. 

Day 4 post extubation – This was the turning point… the moment that the doctors and staff realized I wasn’t screwing around – I wanted out, I would get out, and I would NOT take anything less than going straight home from the hospital. I’d successfully gotten my oxygen level down to 2 liters during the day while walking, and not at all while just sitting upright. A lot of coaxing went into them tapering that off, and talking with the nurses instead of waiting for pulmonology to listen to me. Physical therapy came in and I could stand out of bed, walk with a walker, use the restroom for the most part by myself, etc., but Dr. Abbineni said it wasn’t enough because I still needed the CPAP machine at night, and because she felt that if I was up walking around and exerting myself without higher oxygen, I would de-stat. 

Challenge accepted!

I explained that I was on the CPAP at night because I was forced to – that they should at least let me try to sleep without it, sleep with only the nasal cannula oxygen at night and if I maintained my oxygen stats – well then, there you go! She agreed, and scheduled a test of me walking without oxygen while monitoring my stats. 

That afternoon PT came by and we walked the whole floor, no de-stats. I explained to them that I did not want to go to a rehab facility. I explained that I didn’t think I would need it (here’s where the plotting came into play). I told them that I maintained my oxygen stats while being upright, and while laying down at a slight head-elevated state, just on oxygen if I started to dose off. I explained that the way the house was laid out, everything I needed was on the first floor, and that with Trysha and Jason’s schedules – someone would ALWAYS be home with me. I advised them that Jason had already gotten a walker and a recliner for me to sleep in until we could get a different bed (more on that in a bit). I had a support system, I pleaded. 

Then it was pointed out (or I remembered, I don’t quite recall) that the only steps I would have to climb were the three or four to get into the house from the garage or the front porch. So PT brought out the moveable stairs they had, and we worked on stairs. I climbed up and down those stairs for a solid 20 minutes, without oxygen and without my stats dropping. Not gonna lie though – I could feel the burn in every muscle of my body, and could have likely slept for 12 hours after if I’d let myself – but I’d done it and done it so well that they officially signed off on the recommendation that I needed no further PT and would not need rehab!!!

Also – that night – no CPAP. I maintained my stats through the night on oxygen alone, reiterating my point – do not ever tell me I can’t do something. 

Day 5 post extubation – Dr. Abbineni did the rounds in the morning, saw that I’d passed all of the markers she’d set, and for the first time in dealing with her, actually saw/heard her laugh about it. She then dropped the sad news… she couldn’t get me home that day because it was a Friday, I’d have to stay the weekend. By the time they would get everything processed to get me home oxygen for me to sleep, the home healthcare delivery service wouldn’t be able to get it delivered until Monday. She was still tentative about it though, she wanted to see that I maintained improvement over the weekend, but if all went well, she said she would be willing to discharge me to go home – NO REHAB!!!!!

My next two days were spent prepping for my release, as well as growing more and more anxious that I wasn’t going to be able to get out of the hospital, and all of the real-life stuff I was avoiding thinking about while I was in the hospital, mainly because there wasn’t much I could do about it from a hospital bed. But I wouldn’t focus on that, I would focus on the fact that I only had to get through the weekend, and then I would get to go home!

ICU

Charades Aren’t as Fun When You’re Intubated – ICU Ordeal Part 4

theotherkeighin

Think back to every movie or TV show you’ve watched where someone has been in a coma. They start moving their fingers or fluttering their eyes, the family shouts for a doctor because the patient is awake and within moments all the tubes are gone and the patient is upright and talking…

I’m here to tell you that is all a lie. 

Now I know that my case is extreme, and 14 days is a long time to be in coma and intubated, but still. You know, if you’ve ever had even minor surgery, that you can have a scratchy or sore throat after intubation, and that’s only after a few hours. So after 2 weeks of intubation, you can only imagine. Like I said in the previous post, being intubated and awake was a nightmare. 

I couldn’t talk, I could barely communicate through broken hand gestures that I wanted the tube out, I wasn’t sedated as deeply, and I was in restraints because every time they tried to let me have free use of my hands, I’d start pulling at the tube. 

The doctors and nurses weren’t giving me anything to work with either – their answer was always “We’ll just have to wait and see.” So every vitals check or anything, that was what I would gesture for – to the point of literal frustration. Add in the confusion of not really understanding what had led me to this point because of the medication they give you to wipe your short term memory, it can be so mentally damaging to be in that state. All I wanted was a drink. I dreamed of having a sip of Sprite…. That was it. Ice cold, fizzy, Sprite. And no one would help me – to the point I was getting almost irate with my kids… for not being able to force the issue and get me extubated.

Every check I would fight about being intubated still, get poked and prodded and turned and checked, have all my dignity go out the window because I woke up to find out I had bed sores and had lost significant muscle tone to even move myself at all… and to be completely dependent on someone else has NEVER been something I’ve been okay with… so then I’d fall asleep and think I’d slept through whole days even though it was only an hour or two.

Thank God my girls know me well enough and that we have the relationship we do, because they were the only thing that helped me make it through that. They made me start a list, to help set goals or things to look forward too because I think even they knew I was on the verge of completely losing my shit. So I tried to communicate with them by writing letters one at a time in their hands. 

This did not go well for many reasons… First being I was still heavily medicated. Even though they weren’t giving me high dose sedatives, I’d been on them for two weeks so the brain fog I had as they moved out of my system was insane. So trying to spell things out, when I’d mess up a letter and they wouldn’t understand would be terribly frustrating. Then there was one moment where we were attempting to do this, and both the girls were just in a fit of giggles and I couldn’t get out what I was trying to say so I just gave up. They’re laughing so hard they’re crying, and what I didn’t know is how bad they’d needed that laugh after spending the last two weeks the way they had, but all it did was frustrate me further. I gave up trying and just stewed in my frustration. 

I would doze on and off, thinking I was sleeping literally days at a time still, but it was only hours really, for the accumulation of a day. 

Then, the morning of October 9th, a nurse came in to do her morning check and give me meds, and I of course pushed to be extubated and while it’s likely I took her matter-of-factness as hostility and the medication makes me not remember things clearly – I just remember thinking she had the bedside manner of a wet noodle. 

She said that most patients stay sedated while intubated so they don’t have such a hard time dealing with it while they need to be and she could give me something to sleep. I remember nodding in agreement because at this point if they weren’t going to extubate me, I didn’t want to be awake. 

Now this next part is graphic and not for the squeamish… consider yourself warned…

My bloodwork had shown low potassium for the majority of my hospital stay, so they’d give me potassium through my IVs. However, this can lead to painful burning and clogged lines if it doesn’t get flushed right after it’s given. This was a problem and one that happened every time they gave it to me that first day I woke up. So this nurse had changed it to be the oral version they could give me through my NG tube. Problem with this is, it’s known to cause nausea and vomiting so you have to stagger the dose. I don’t know if she didn’t flush it through slow enough or what, but when she got done fussing with me and left the room, it wasn’t much later and I started profusely vomiting.

Now, up to this point my head injury was the most terrifying thing I’d lived through, but this quickly made that seem like a stubbed toe. When you’re intubated and vomiting, you’re suffocating, period. You can’t breathe through your nose or throat, you can’t take a huge deep breath in between waves of vomiting because you’re on a ventilator that is controlling the pace of your breaths and does not realize you’re expelling with more force than you’re taking in. What’s worse, I was in restraints, so I couldn’t move or reach a call light, nothing. I was there, laying in the dark of the hospital room and firmly believed I was about to suffocate to death. 

Finally, it subsided. After I’d managed to breathe for a moment or two and calm myself down, watching my heart monitors go back to normal range, another wave hit and I was suffocating again. I started hitting my fist against the guard rail on the bed, trying to be loud enough to wake one of my daughters, but to no avail. Finally, as the second wave subsided, in one final slam of my fist, the rail fell off, and the noise of it hitting the floor woke up Kaylee. 

Now I’m sure that it was my own frustration, and her lack of being fully awake that led to the attitude she gave me when I tried to explain I’d just thrown up all over myself, and in the dim light of the monitors, you couldn’t see I was completely drenched. I am sure she took it as another effort to get extubated, but she called the nurse anyway. When the nurse came in, she started to explain that I said I’d thrown up. The same nurse who’d given me the potassium, didn’t turn on a light to see anything, but basically started to say that I was likely nauseous but couldn’t throw up because of being intubated etc., when I started profusely vomiting again. That’s when the color drained from her face and I finally felt someone was going to listen to me. 

Kaylee went back to the side of the room where her and Trysha had cots set up while the nurse started working on me, and several other medical staff came in trying to assess me. They had me cleaned up in no time, and I never saw that nurse again for the remainder of my stay. I don’t know if it was the exhaustion of the whole ordeal, or if they ended up giving me something to sleep, but I went back to sleep for a while, getting woken up by a team of therapists. The lead explained that she was there to assess how much physical therapy I’d need going forward, and to get me into an upright position, to see if I tolerated being upright after two weeks of laying down.

Let me tell you – I had no idea how quickly your core muscles can deteriorate from being in a coma, when she started talking about how they were going to help me stand, had I not had the tube down my throat, I would have laughed at her. In no realm of my mind did I think that I would have any problem swinging my legs over the side of the bed and sitting up on my own. When I tell you how completely humbling it is to realize you can’t even pull yourself up in bed after that, that it took 3 people to get me standing on my feet, and the tears that started coming from that realization… there just aren’t words. 

I am one of those people where I don’t wait for someone to help me with stuff, I usually just tell them to get out of my way because I’ll do it myself. So to be unable to maneuver to sit up on my own was soul-crushing. At that point, I was about to give up all over again, and then the therapist said the magic words. She told me if I would work with her, and get to standing (or better let them help me stand) if my oxygen stats stayed normal, I could be extubated. 

There it was – a goal post. A magical line in the sand I had to get to, and if you know me, you best believe I’ll hit the mark or die trying.

Even through tears, pain, and crushing fear, I cooperated and they got me to my feet. I did the 15 minutes of therapy exercises with them while standing, and even let her brush my hair and help me put it up, all without pulling at the tube. True to her words, she pushed for extubation and a few hours later the pulmonary fairy (aka Jeffrey) came to extubate me. 

Sprite… that was the goal. Now I was extubated, I wanted a drink. Unfortunately, because I’d been intubated so long, they had to have another medical team sign off on the fact that I could still swallow correctly etc, and that didn’t happen until the following day. However, the nurses were phenomenal and let Trysha get a sprite, and use these oral sponge things so I could wet my mouth with something cold as long as I promised not to try to swallow it or take a drink. It was enough for me to have that, not full drinks, but fractional sips if you will. It was enough of a relief I didn’t immediately focus on the fact that I had no voice. I could whisper, but not loudly. You had to have your ear practically up to my mouth to be able to hear me, but speech therapy said that I had to use it – whisper or not – I’d lose it even more if I didn’t use it. 

That 24 hours was the worst and best for multiple reasons – but the hardest parts would follow, as I started the process of getting better enough to go home, and all the work that had to go into making that happen. 

ICU

Critically Grave Distress – ICU Ordeal Part 3

theotherkeighin

Here is where the story gets a bit tricky, and I will try to be as clear as possible… I “slept” through the majority of the worst of my ICU ordeal, so this part is mainly stuff I was told by my family and medical staff, or has been pieced together based on the notes from my medical file. 

Friday, September 23rd, I got up for work, and as I had started doing around this time, turned on Facebook videos to listen to sermons from a pastor I follow. The one this particular day was from Isaiah 41, and while I don’t remember all the specifics, I remember the overall message was about making God audition to handle your burdens. He talked about how a lot of times we act like we’re having faith in God, but we only give Him our little burdens and act like it’s a test – if God handles this the way I want, then I’ll give Him the big stuff. 

This hit me hard. 

I’m so guilty of this – of saying I’ve given things over to God that then still continue to take up space in my life because I never fully put my trust in Him. 

This hit me so much that day, that by the end of the day when the stress of work had taken its toll, when I was fighting with Jason and all of the issues in our relationship, when I believe I’d pissed off Trysha, and had even snapped at Xander too – I found myself talking with my work best friend and telling her I was officially giving up and giving it to God. It was the first time I’d really fully talked about the weight of stuff on my shoulders at the time, and how depressed I was (even if I still downplayed, I’d opened up to her more than I had to almost anyone else). I remember telling her near the end of that conversation that something had to give or I was going to end up dead like my mother and I couldn’t live like this anymore. I told her that I was officially throwing in the towel because my way of handling things wasn’t working. I remember clearly telling her,  “God is going to have to handle it in a way that takes it COMPLETELY out of my hands or I’ll keep trying to control things.” (Remember this, because it’s important that I was stupid enough to utter these words aloud and not expect something to happen hahaha)

We both laughed – told each other to have a good weekend – and that was the end of it. Saturday was a non-day, I felt poor, but that wasn’t anything new. 

I woke up Sunday morning, feeling far worse than I had. I couldn’t hardly walk the short distance from the bedroom to my office without feeling like I needed to curl up and rest. I just wanted to sleep – that was all I felt. Complete exhaustion, like even the exertion of breathing was tiring – that level of exhaustion. Jason and Trysha were at work, Xander was out with his brother and grandparents I think, it was just me and the dogs at home and I couldn’t hardly make the walk to let them outside without wanting to cry. It wasn’t pain, it was just exhaustion. 

I sat down at my desk and pulled out the pulse oximeter. 74% was the reading. I’d promised at anything less than 85, I’d go to the hospital, so I waited a bit – tried to wake up and take some deep breaths, and I tested again. 71%.

I knew with how I currently felt, there was no way I should be driving, but I still didn’t feel like it was an emergency – I just knew that I was done fighting it. If pneumonia was making me this tired, I’d suck it up and deal with 2-3 days in the hospital to get some energy back. I started messaging Trysha, to find out when she would be home, and still I downplayed the severity, didn’t want to scare her, or burden anyone… just wanted to sleep – that was all.

Trysha got off work, came home and we headed to the hospital – the one closer to Dr. Bankston’s office because I refuse to step back in the one closer to my house ever again after what they’d done about the chest x-ray. 

ER does another chest x-ray, another Covid test, more blood work, and they agree, yes it’s pneumonia, not heart. They put me on oxygen, and start the process of admitting me, for what is going to be 2-3 days best guess, for IV meds and whatnot. I email my boss and tell him that I’ll be online throughout my hospital stay, but not attending meetings, and my workaholic nature convinces me this is a great thing because I can finally catch up on everything I need to in email and documentation which will be great! Remember the thing I told my work best friend – about taking things completely out of my hands? Yea… that was about to completely bite me in the ass.

Trysha had wanted to stay the night but I pushed her to go home, told her I’d need a list of stuff when she came back the next day so to call me before she headed into town so we could go over the list. I’d talked to Jason, fought with him and hung up on him, and sent Trysha home so I could finally go to sleep – completely missing that the floor they’d admitted me to was the critical care unit on one side (where I was) and ICU on the other side. They put high risk and critical patients here that way if they need ICU support, it’s all right there. 

Trysha left and the poor night nurse, Sarah, tried to make me as comfortable as possible, but I was the absolute worst patient that night. I didn’t like the idea of not being able to use the restroom because of all the IVs, wires and monitors, and the state I was in, I’m sure I was completely belligerent with her. Finally, I shut off the lights and went to sleep, but it didn’t take long before Sarah was back in with pulmonology telling me that they were going to put a CPAP on me because my oxygen stats kept dropping.

If you’ve never been on a CPAP machine before, it can be VERY hard to first use it. I was blissfully unaware that I had been breathing so shallow for so long that it’d become a habit – because of how bad my lungs were – that when the force of air flow from the CPAP was trying to keep me breathing at what’s considered normal – it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. Not to mention, any sinus pressure (because of the head injury I mentioned) kicks me into migraines, so the tightness and pressure of the mask wasn’t fun either. 

They’d get it on and leave the room, and in no time I’d be unhooking the mask to where it’s just blowing the oxygen in my face, but not helping the issue they were trying to fix. I was so unaware of time at this point because in my mind, I fought them on this mask for several hours, but it was only closer to about 90 minutes. I was aware enough to watch Sarah head back to the nurse’s desk from re-securing the CPAP on me, and wait for her to get a call light she had to go into another room for… And then I unhooked the machine and turned onto my side and went to sleep. This is the absolute last thing I remember clearly from this whole ordeal before waking up almost two weeks later.

To put things into a timeframe perspective for you – Trysha left the hospital at 11:30pm to head home and the hospital called her shortly after 1am to tell her that the family was needed at the hospital because I’d taken a turn for the worse. 

What they didn’t tell her over the phone, and what I would learn much later from Trysha and from the notes in my medical chart, is that when I’d unhooked the CPAP that last time, Sarah hadn’t been able to immediately come back in, which allowed me enough time to fall into a deep enough sleep that I started to have apneas, and because of how bad my lungs were at this point, my oxygen saturation dropped below 55%. When you aren’t getting oxygen, you lose a lot of your cognitive function, so even though they tried to wake me, and to put the CPAP back in place, I became completely belligerent and was talking incoherently. From talking with the nurses who were there that night, it wasn’t incoherent to me or anyone who really knew me – it is all rooted in traumas from my childhood, but I fought them hard. They had no choice but to sedate me.

The problem being, any medical sedation relaxes you to the point of slowing your heart rate which can slow your breathing, and that will make your saturation levels drop too – since they were already having that issue with me, they were left with no choice but to intubate me. 

So for those of you that have never had a family member be intubated for anything more than a minor surgery, or just have no clue about this type of thing outside of what’s shown on TV, I’m going to fill you in because I had absolutely no idea what goes into intubating someone. 

Your body and mind will try to fight anything foreign in your system – and what’s more foreign than a plastic tube being forced down your throat into your lungs? In order to make your body not fight against intubation so that it can do its job, you’re typically given a paralytic drug that makes you incapable of fighting/moving/pulling at the tube with normal force. While it doesn’t completely paralyze you, it stops your gag reflex, and makes every movemnt require huge amounts of effort.

You’re then given a high-dose sedative so you “sleep” through the experience – but because even though you’re asleep, your brain is still fully aware, they also give you a drug that basically wipes your short term memory of the event. I get it because if you are medically stuck inside yourself and unable to communicate or tell people you’re in pain, or pull away, etc., the damage to your psyche could be severe. However, I was in no way aware of this going into it. 

Your brain then goes into damage control and tries to fill in gaps in your memory that the medicine has made – thus why people talk about “coma dreams”. My experience was no different. It makes perfect sense the coma dreams I had, and how interactions with people played out when the medication tried to keep me from retaining memories, so my mind filled in gaps with its own insecurities.

There are a lot of things about my life I don’t share – a lot of the anxiety I deal with daily, I bottle. I do this because I was taught from a young age that any anxieties or fears would be exploited by my father for the sake of keeping me compliant to him. It is no secret that when it comes to blind anger – Jason’s temper bears some striking resemblances to my father. Now, Jason is not cruel the way my Dad was, he doesn’t ever attack my worth the way my Dad did, but he (like most men) can get very loud when he’s angry which immediately triggers me into fight mode like I am a child fighting with Dad again. Jason will be the first person to tell you how much I’ve doted on him in our relationship – and I will be the first to admit that I KNOW it’s partially a trauma response I have – that I dote and fuss on those around me to keep them calm and happy and that way there is nothing they can be mad at me for. When my dreams started, what I remember of them, they were all from a terrifyingly panicked place of trying to keep people around me calm. They were also all situations that I had absolutely ZERO control over how my actions were being perceived so it was hopeless to fight against them. 

For example – One I remember vividly was that I was drugged on a bed, and felt exposed and vulnerable fighting against a guy that was taking pictures of me while he’s on the bed with me. I vividly remember fighting and struggling trying to get away from him because I felt like I was being blackmailed in a compromised position for the sake of threatening my marriage. I remember clearly hearing the guy say he’d finally gotten the last photo saved, and that it was all over now and I remember giving up because there was no way I could ever convince Jason I had not been unfaithful to him. 

This isn’t because Jason or I have ever had any infidelity in our relationship – but that’s because we keep our interactions with people outside of our marriage above reproach. We do not put ourselves in situations away from the other where someone would ever be able to skew the facts to raise doubts about the other in our marriage because we both know it’s a cancer to a relationship.

I know now, with the coma dream I had, that this was an event where my IV line kept getting blocked, so they had to do a central line in my arm. In order to do this, they use an ultrasound machine to get a clearer look at the veins deeper in your body to make sure they’re getting the line in correctly. You have to hold still for this, and since I am (and was) so combative about being touched by the medical staff, this was not easy for them to do. However, in my coma-state, I didn’t understand this was what was going on and my brain filled in the gap with a fear that anyone would ever be able to skew my actions and threaten my marriage.

For days even with a central line, I didn’t show improvement. My family was told this, and told that intubation wasn’t likely to work, especially the longer it went on, my lungs simply were not healing. What I hadn’t realized when I went in, and what I only discovered later was that poor diet, immobility, and terrible posture led to a lot of edema. What I took as just weight gain, and what I terribly put my body through by working the way I did and training myself not to take 5 minutes between meetings to walk or use the restroom, led to fluid building up and having absolutely nowhere left to go so it started filling my lungs. Since I was a smoker and overweight, and had always had asthma-like issues, I never looked past that to see that I was basically drowning. When I got admitted, one of my lungs was almost 100% full of fluid, my other was about 70% full. The other abnormality was that I never had a fever, I never really had out-of-the-norm body aches or anything else that typically presents with pneumonia. 

So even though they’d loaded me up with antibiotics, I didn’t seem to improve. Intubation helped keep my oxygen saturation up, but I still had spells where I’d drop again, and when they’d try to wean me off the vent and pull me out of sedation, I’d decline again. This went on for days, to the point that my family was told that they were going to have to do a tracheostomy if I didn’t start recovering.

They explained to the family that intubation in cases like mine is typically only needed for a few days, but the longer it lasted without improvement presented risks that would only add to my poor prognosis. They gave them a timeline of two weeks – if after 14 days of being intubated, I was unable to be weaned off of sedation and breathe on my own without declining, they would be forced to do a tracheostomy. The responsibility for making this decision fell mostly on Trysha, as she was the one who stayed in the hospital with me (something I’ll discuss later), and given that none of us really knew anything about tracheostomies other than what we’d seen on TV, Trysha was adamant that it wasn’t something I’d ever want. She wasn’t wrong. If I had been able to advocate for myself I would have fought that to the death. 

There were some improvements by the end of week one, but then I “stagnated” according to the doctors, got a high fever, and just kind of hovered in a no worse but no better phase for a few days. 

So here is where I tell you what faith can do…and about the amazing grace of God. 

In reading through my medical chart, and the daily notes from the medical staff, I know that the family wasn’t being told everything. I understand the psychology behind this because if my brain is fully aware while in the coma, and the family around me is told I do not have a good chance of walking away from this, the patient can then pick up on that energy and can just give up. They tempered everything with optimism, but their medical notes said otherwise. 

I was intubated by 1AM on September 26, and by October 5th, they had classed me as still being in “critically grave distress”. I only had about a 15% probability of surviving at this point because I wasn’t improving despite all their best efforts. They’d started talking amongst themselves (not sharing with the family of course) that it was likely if I didn’t decline further, but just stayed in this grave condition, that long-term care would be needed or that I could be transferred to another facility like a hospice center until I succumbed to everything.

They had a meeting scheduled for October 8th, day 13 of my coma, with the medical staff and the family. They were going to try to pull me out of sedation and test my oxygen levels and how I responded. Following this test, they were going to meet with the family and let them know the recommendation. What they didn’t tell my family was that they’d already noted in my file that they were going to have to do a tracheostomy, and didn’t believe I’d handle the weaning off sedation well. They’d already put in the soft order for the trach to be done, scheduling it for a few hours after the meeting with the family was scheduled. Now, from all the research I’ve done since, I likely would have rebounded a lot faster if they would have done the tracheostomy around day 5, but again, it’s not something I would have ever wanted done, and I thank the Lord daily that Trysha specifically had the wherewithal to fight for me. 

The medical notes all say the same leading up to October 5th – they were being guarded with the family, but they’d already determined I wasn’t going to get better. I was going to be basically sedated until however long it took my otherwise healthy heart to finally give out. The tracheostomy wasn’t even going to be a fix per their notes at this point, it was solely so they could transfer me off to a long-term care facility.

What they hadn’t counted on was the fact that God’s grace alone is sufficient…

Here’s where I sidebar a bit and tell you that my Uncle Jim’s wife, Aunt Cindy, is by far one of my favorite people in this world. She grew up with my Mom, and then they married brothers. She is the gatekeeper to all the things about my Mom I have forgotten, or missed out on knowing because I lost her so young. They have been the rocks in my life when nothing else makes sense, and when I question my faith the most, or have questions about God that no one else can seem to answer for me – Aunt Cindy is who I go to. However, given the childhood I had, I am of the firm belief – I am no one. I know I am loved, but at the end of the day I feel a lot of times that I could disappear and no one would really notice, because I feel I am the one that no one shows up for – nor should they. This is what childhood trauma has left in me – a genuine feeling of worthlessness that no amount of love and support from those around me can resolve. I know logically – which is to say my brain knows at some level – this is all fabricated BS that trauma has created and are lies that my depression tells me – doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

Aunt Cindy lives in Texas, it’s about a 12 hour drive to get to where I live, and aside from Uncle Jim’s funeral, I hadn’t physically seen her in many, many years. When things didn’t seem to get any better with me, even though my girls were keeping everyone updated and for the most part, were remaining fairly optimistic, I’m not exactly sure what it was – but Aunt Cindy made the decision to drive up here. She told me the story after I woke up that the drive up she spent in prayer and basically after losing her dad, and then Uncle Jim a year later, she told me she basically told God that He couldn’t have me too. 

She arrived at the hospital on October 6th, and began to sit with me and pray over me, and it is surreal to read the notes on my medical chart that lines up with this because without any medical reason – I started to improve. Now, the doctors still thought it was minor enough, I was likely to stagnate again quickly, and they were not as optimistic. They were still planning for long-term hospice type care, and the tracheostomy.

I was seen an hour before the test to pull me out of sedation, and the doctor’s notes clearly state it was likely to be a wasted test. Much to their surprise, I came out of sedation without issue. My oxygen stats stayed normal, even if I was extremely pissed about being intubated, and being given no word on when I could be extubated – I still maintained it well. 

But now is when the hard part of the story started for me – being awake and intubated isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy. And when you’ve been sedated for two weeks, your concept of time is severely altered as the meds used to sedate you work their way out of your system. It felt like a week that I was awake and intubated, but it was only about 36 hours. Although, knowing what I know now, I would’ve much rather been sedated the whole time, because the real work didn’t start until then.

ICU

And The Hits Just Keep Coming – ICU Ordeal Part 2

theotherkeighin

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. 

ICU

Not Wanting to Live Isn’t the Same as Being Suicidal – ICU Ordeal Part 1

theotherkeighin

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. 

Memoir - Childhood Traumas

Which Side of the Story Do I Tell?

theotherkeighin

Remember back in grade school when you used to have to do contrast and compare assignments? Being homeschooled was no different, I had to do them the same as anyone else and I always hated them, but mainly because Mom would put a word count or page limit on the assignments and I typically balked at having my creativity fenced into someone else’s rules. When I started actually laying the groundwork to actually begin writing a non-fiction book about my childhood, those contrast and compare scenarios started firing off in my brain almost immediately, and I’m not going to lie, I kind of hated her in those moments.

See, the problem I have is that there is a lot about my Mom that is held on a pedestal to me, things I cherish about her. In comparison, my Dad is the villain in the majority of my story. There isn’t an easy way in my mind to tell a story that encompasses both of them without it just being a run-on of memories, and I desperately want to find a point here – that’s why I’m writing this after all. To find out what it all means – what lesson do I take away from here?

When I talk about Mom, the majority of it is told in a state of longing. I have a lot of deeply rooted grief for the things about Mom I never learned, that in the fifteen years I had with her I never thought to ask her about before she was gone and I couldn’t. I think back to the song Red by Taylor Swift more often than anything as it relates to writing and capturing the look and feel of a moment.  If I was going to talk about memories of my Mom, it would be delicate pastels – shades of lilac and mint – sweet like buttercream frosting – cozy like a knitted blanket and hot chocolate on a rainy day… comfort. That’s what I dearly miss most about her – comfort. If you think back to the single thing that made everything better when you felt bad as a child, my guess is it’s a maternal figure of some sort… Their hugs are biologically proven to make everything better. 

But back to the color of a story – in contrast to the warm comfort I feel about Mom, when I think of Dad, everything is harsh. It’s the swirling of storm clouds, that ominous green that’s almost black right before everything goes to shit all around you. It’s hot coals, so dark red that they’re black, burning everything in their wake. It’s the TV channel that was always a static mess of black and white lines, screeching in a high enough pitch you couldn’t change it fast enough before you were sure your eardrums were going to burst.

Dad was a land mine, in human form. 

Even writing that now, all I feel is guilt. That little voice in the back of my head (the one that sounds surprisingly like my great-grandmother) starts scolding me the minute I say or think anything negative about him. It’s with my mother’s grace that I worry the most about misunderstanding people, or not having empathy to understand what caused them to be the way they are. But is it really her grace that gave me that, or is it the years of manipulation from Dad that has left me questioning which reality is in fact, real?

Do you get it now, why I never seem to get far when I attempt to write this? Because it’s a constant battle of contrast and comparison – and there is no right or wrong answer. Maybe that’s why I hated it so much as a kid – because it’s a gray area… a matter of opinion which is never wrong or right – it just is. And for a recovering scapegoat, you need the constant reassurance that something is right because your whole life is built on you being wrong at a cellular level. 

Uncategorized

And So It Begins…

theotherkeighin

Note – this was written in August 2022 and was meant to be the opening to the memoir I have wanted to write for sometime now. It is worth mentioning that this is actually the beginning of my ICU story, because this gives you a small glimpse into my mindset only a short month before I would be on life support in the ICU.

I had a plan. 

It’s a joke between me and my younger sister. Me, the one who plans for absolutely everything, pencils into her schedule how many minutes she’s allowed to have a meltdown, basically. Okay, so maybe that’s a tad dramatic, but you know the type. They’ve made more rom-com movies about my type than almost any other stereotype, and it never looks further at the female lead than to say that she is a control freak. I would like the world to really know that the ones who are typically planners and have everything scheduled are typically the ones who likely have some deep-seated trauma where they felt completely blindsided and unprepared. That trauma, when not dealt with, turns into a kind of incessant need to plan for everything so you never experience that kind of pain again.

Damn it! Here I go again – giving away the plot within the first paragraph. Allow me to start over.

My name is Samantha, and I’m a control-freak.

Except that I’m not, not really. 

Yes, my day job is rooted in being an exceptionally good planner (i.e. control freak), and handling things calmly enough in a crisis that whole teams of employees actually believe I know what I’m talking about enough to blindly follow my lead. Some call it herding cats, others call it project management, but I digress. This isn’t about my day job (see first paragraph). 

My plan was to get back into writing and also to write a memoir of sorts about my father… you might say kill two birds with one stone. I won’t, because I’m a writer and writers aren’t supposed to use cliches. However, I started writing a memoir about my father and found out that I used cliches more than any other descriptors. Then it became almost a game that I decided to keep up with so I was sure to only get rejections when I tried to publish the aforementioned memoir. 

See what I did there? 

That’s called self-deprecation and I tend to do it a lot. This can also be a trauma response. 

I promise not to keep up like this throughout the whole thing. I have a point, somewhere in this tangled mess, I just have to find it.

Right! I had a plan…

That plan was to process unresolved issues with my estranged father… but I found that to be too, um, painful… not something I was ready to do so I switched gears and decided to write a memoir about my mother and about being a mother… a Mom-oir if you will. As luck would have it (or God’s dark sense of humor, whichever you believe), in the midst of struggling to write a mom-oir, my estranged father decided to die, yet again screwing up my plans and now all bets are off. 

Damn it – no more cliches – bad writer!

If I can find a way to get through this process (with minimal cliche use), my hope would be that you can find some humor here, a small distraction from your day perhaps, or an understanding about things you didn’t realize were happening in your own family. I think that’s my biggest push behind writing this all out… being my family’s scapegoat has led me to believe that I am nobody… and if I can break family cycles that have produced one emotionally damaged child after another, then why can’t everyone? I know it’s not easy, and sometimes that might be all you need…someone else who tells you how they did it.