Hospital – The Fishbowl. (Trigger Warning)

Following on from the introductory post on my experiences in hospital, I want to share where I spent most of my time.

 

(Image Source)

At the front of the ward is a locked section, well, a locked section within an already locked secure ward! This section has it’s own little common area with three single bedrooms, a seclusion room, shower and toilet. This area is where the most acutely ill patients are kept. Often they are extremely violent. This is where I ended up for many of my admissions, after earning myself a reputation of a serial absconder, and of being unmanageable due to  purging, exercising, hoarding food, self harming and overdoses, etc.

All this is enclosed by shatter proof, soundproof glass. It’s called the HDU (High Dependancy Unit) but I call it the Goldfish Bowl. Because you are on show to the whole world, every undignified played out soundlessly for the whole ward to see. And you can bang on the glass and yell for hours if you care to – nobody will take any notice of you. In there, you cease to be a human being. You become the worst of the worst, not even fit to mix with the rest of the patients in a psych ward.

Often these other patients are scary. They get loud and violent. They will come into your room. Sometimes the nurses will lock you in your own room to make sure you are safe. They are often psychotic, and will scream and rant and rage and throw the heavy foam furniture about like bits of paper. Because they are terminally short staffed, these patients cease to be dangerous at exactly 11pm each night, often before, and don’t become dangerous again until 7am the next morning. You are all locked up by yourselves for those hours – a very scary prospect for me, and strictly against rules but what can they do, three staff, often on their second and sometimes third consecutive shift, to look after 25 patients overnight – it’s impossible. For this reason, being constantly on Constant Obs in later years was a relief – it meant a staff member sat with me 24 hours a day and I felt safer in that way, at least, even though it wasn’t nice being constantly watched.

It was not a nice place to be. In there, you lose everything. The protocol is you can’t have any of your belongings, you wear hospital pyjamas only, to prevent hiding any weapons or having anything that can be used to hurt yourself in anyway.

You can’t have anything to help you pass the time. Books might be thrown, might be used to light a fire. Ditto writing paper. Pens and pencils are out. You can’t have anything to brush your hair or clean your teeth. You can’t use soap to wash your hands, and the water in the toilet is often turned off. It’s locked anyway. You can’t have a cup or water bottle of any kind, there is no tap to drink from anyway.

Your room is stripped bare except for your bed and you aren’t allowed many bedclothes in case they are used to hide things. There is always a nurse in there with you, and hourly you and your belongings are searched.

At meal times, you eat off polystyrene plates, off your lap. Food goes cold quickly, and just doesn’t taste good off polystyrene. You eat with a single soup spoon that’s carefully guarded. It’s messy, especially if it’s something needing to be cut. They tried plastic cutlery, but that’s too dangerous.

For an eating disorders patient, meals are already fraught. Once you get yourself locked up in the HDU, you will wish you were out there again, on table. Your meals will never arrive as they were ordered by the dietician leading to anxiety attacks and attacks from staff who think you somehow caused the wrong meal to come up, or accusations of being a nusicance because you asked for the correct meal because you are TRYING. And then, you will find yourself at meal and snack times, being forgotten, because your nurse has taken the rest of the ED patients to the table and again forgotten that one of hers is in the HDU. You will fight with yourself over whether to let it go – and chance being accused of not trying – or to remind them and be accused of being selfish, because everyone is busy. If you decide to remind them, the process with take at least half an hour, as nothing can be done without consultation from YOUR nurse who is now out of comission for at least the next hour and a half (meal and supervision afterwards) so this necessitates a lot of back and forth and negotiation and mostly a feeling of  ”why do I even bother”.

The toilet is locked, of course, as is the shower. If you want to go, you have to ask permission. This is a process that also takes a lot of time and getting permission from your always hard to find nurse. Then,  you’ll have the nurse watch you, with the door so wide open that the whole ward can often see you do your stuff. Because of how unwell the other patients are, it will often be smeared with stuff. The toilet itself is a stainless steel, seat-less, jail-issue thing that will always be filthy, even though the cleaner comes in several times a day.

You can’t keep this place clean, because the patients are just that unwell and have utterly zero cares about hygiene. In later years, it ceased to matter so much, because I was often restrained in my bed to stop me pulling out the picc line through which I was fed, and being spoon fed and  toileted there (also such a loss of dignity). I was so unable to cease my purging that I was, for months at a time over several admissions, purging from that restrained state – vomiting on myself, the bed and the floor, to the disgust of everyone, and I stank, my room stank. Life stank.

During the months I was locked in the HDU at a time, I felt I became less and less of anything at all. My life was reduced to bare white walls, nothing out the window but the bare walls of the next building and the sky, if you were lucky, I bit of the huge tree that was outside. (I stared at that tree constantly, as if I could somehow wish myself out of there and into it’s branches.)

I forgot what made Fiona who she was. Forgot what she liked, forgot what she didn’t like. Forgot what it was like to be passionate or have interests. Forgot that there was indeed a life beyond all this. More than forgot – stopped believing in it. And if this was what my life was, then I wasn’t interested in fighting for it. All I wanted was to be free from this prison – both the hospital prison, and the prison of my mind and body. When I was on restraints, I’d dissociate a lot, just to ‘not be there’. I began to believe that I’d never left, that I’d been there for one long, never ending period of time, and that the ‘world out there’ was actually just a dream that I kept waking up from.

I had to earn my way out of the HDU and back on the program and apart from the last two admissions when I offered to put on weight and voluntary went in – I never made it out. I would try my hardest, I’d even achieve every goal they set for me (they used to come out of ward rounds and say to me, “If you achieve x, y and z, we will take you out of the HDU onto the general ward.” I would MORE than achieve x, y and z, only to have them then say “you are doing SO WELL that we think it would be risky to shake anything up – we want to keep things just the same, so we are NOT going to let you out of the HDU at all. ” It happened every time and in the end I became so discouraged I didn’t care any more. Being in there just made me feel like a caged animal and confirmed to me that I wasn’t worthy as a human being. It was punishment and I felt I deserved it.

I fought them so hard. I always found it such a war in hospital, between me, the ED and them. I always hoped that just being in there would allow me to let go of the ED and work with them – but it was always a huge battle to get to that place. I’m not proud of the ways I found to sabotage myself, which led to me being locked in the HDU as a matter of the norm.. I wish that I was just able to let go and let them help me. But the ED  got angrier – like a savage beast prodded and poked, and life followed, leading to a classic catch 22 situation – they wanted me to act like a human being but treated me like a caged beast; I wanted to be treated like a human being but acted like the beast.

A huge part of my motivation when I was finally able to fight for myself was just to get out of there. I didn’t feel any different about myself, and I didn’t have any less of the ED screaming at me that I deserved to die. I just couldn’t bear it in that hell. It truly was, to me, like I had been jailed for comitting a crime, was being punished for already punishing myself. So I’d finally realise I couldn’t fight them – and just do it long enough to get the hell out of there as early as possible. As I was a long term patient, I never had any maitenance phrase. I would get to my weight, and bang, out the door same day. I’d hit the big wide world with still no idea or practice on how to keep myself safe and well. I’d also be manic, coming cold turkey off the sedatives they kept me quiet with, and overwhelmed because the world would hit me like the volume was suddenly turned up full bore after silence for so long. I look back and wish they’d actually made me slow down during those times and properly transition between complete imprisonment and the wide open world.

Just thinking of that place gives me the horrors. I never want to go back again. It’s good motivation to stay out (not that it helped me all those years I was in and out of there). I just wonder – if there was more understanding of eating disorders and the power they have over people, would this have happened to me? I wasn’t  doing anything that I did/didn’t do to be ‘bad’, and I already hated myself  that much – punishment on top of the punishment I already put myself through was the last thing I needed. Having this sort of treatment reinforced that there was no hope for me of ever being a decent member of society.

It also exacerbated the PTSD. Having to gain weight would bring my sleeping mind back to life, and I’d be engulfed in the flashbacks and nightmares I’d been trying to block out. I’d wake up in this little prison, finding myself trapped – tied to the bed in my reality now, feeling powerless and alone. I always emerged from these admissions more broken than I went in.

It’s not only myself or others with eating disorders that this post is about – it’s the other people locked in HDUs like this one. Where did people with a mental illness cease to be human beings who are sick, and become less-than beings to be locked away and submitted to such a horrible experience? It really isn’t right at all.

Hospital – General Introduction Trigger Warning

I have wanted to write about my experiences in the hospital system for a while now.  I think it’s very important for people to read about them – because there’s a lot that could be improved, a lot that should never have happened. There have also been a lot of ‘gifts’ – people I’ve met, experiences and insights gained, and the not-at-all-little-fact that I’m alive – here and now. With all that’s happened, I should not be alive. I owe my life to the hospital and the people who work there, and I will be forever grateful to them for this.

There is no way I could ever write about all of it without writing a huge thick novel, because so  much has happened over so many years. I thought it might be helpful to write an introduction post so that all the boring details are gotten out there in the beginning and when I post about my experiences, I don’t have to keep explaining those details quite as much. It also might help to just set the scene a bit, and so this post is really just an overview. There will be more posts in the near future on topics such as – what is an average day like? What are meal times like? What happens in ward rounds? etc – also I will write about experiences that I personally had, that stayed with me. I will endeavor to keep the hospital and the people involved anonymous, although if you live locally to me, you will probably recognize places and even people.

Over a period of approximately fifteen years, I had over 150 hospital admissions – as documented in my hospital files – at what I’ll just call ‘the hospital’ for my eating disorder. (I am sure there must be errors, because that is too high a number even for those years, despite the continual admissions). Most of these were on their eating disorders unit, which is comprised of four to five beds within a 25-bed psychiatric unit that also houses the Geriatrics and the overflow patients  from the other psych wards. It’s a locked ward, meaning bars on windows, very strict security, body and belongings searches, confiscation of items that might be used as a weapon (you would be surprised what could be made into a weapon – desperate people become very resourceful) and the  majority of the patients are there against their will.

I also had admissions to the medical wards for eating disorder complications – including general wards, ICU, CCU, and the infectious diseases ward (as a result of having dangerously low white cell counts). Mostly, the ED  unit kept me there when I was medically unwell. When I was having TPN, all of the nurses learnt how to manage it specifically so they could keep me there instead of sending me to a medical ward. I think it’s because they have decided there is a huge danger of an ED patient on a medical ward being able to engage in ‘tricks’ that might ultimately end their own life, and I’m grateful that they went to all that trouble for me and those who might need TPN in the future.

The ED ward at this hospital treats more acutely ill patients since there are so few beds to go around – those beds are to cater for the entire state, with a population of now approximately 4.6 million people. In our state, there is one other ED unit – a very small private hospital a few suburbs away with approximately 12 beds. They don’t cater for patients who are medically too ill, and they require you to be ‘ready’ to recover – if you aren’t, you are kicked out. I have never been inpatient at that hospital as I can’t afford insurance, I wouldn’t have been able to stay there anyway as I’ve always been too medically ill and too non-compliant up until about 2 years ago.

I always have, and still do, carry a lot of guilt for how much I needed these scant resources. My being there meant that someone else missed out, and it’s part of what motivates me to stay out now – so as not to ruin any more people’s chances of getting help.

These resources however are far too rare, especially for the population they are meant to support. There are states in Australia where this ratio of ED hospital beds to population is even worse. We also have issues like patients not being accepted as they fall outside a catchment area of a certain hospital – you can’t pick and choose which hospital you will go to unless you are going to a private one, and many people just can’t afford that, even public health isn’t free here any more.  WE NEED MORE TREATMENT OPTIONS for people with eating disorders. Desperately so.

I’ve no idea what the average length of stay for patients here is – but they are usually at least a few weeks to months. I know patients who have had over a year’s continuous admission there. My longest was approximately 10 months, my shortest, two weeks. My usual length of admission was 3 months. Many times, I didn’t even have an entire week at home before being readmitted for weight loss. I was on an involuntary treatment order for almost ten years continuously, so I had no choice about being hospitalized, and no choice about my treatment. At one point I tried to take out a Do Not Resuscitate order in the fear that like a friend of mine, I would be resuscitated after a heart attack resulting in badly crushed chest and agony for whatever lifetime I had left, to be told that because I was a mental patient, I wasn’t even permitted that dignity.

This hospital, to it’s credit, has tried it’s best to develop it’s eating disorders program over the years, and since I’ve been there over that time, I’ve noticed the changes. When I first started to be admitted, it was a very lax program.  There was a lot more freedom and not many rules. Groups were pretty non-existant, but there was a more ‘family’-like feel, with the ED unit becoming a safe haven from the world where patients came for support even after discharge, with an unofficial day/drop in program. We were given a lot more responsibility for helping ourselves, even down to prepping and setting up our own nasogastric feeds and putting down our own tubes every night. (Of course this led to sabotage.)

Things these days are far more strict. Nowadays you are strictly controlled for every minute of your day. You eat what they make you eat, you can’t have any special requests. You eat when they make you, for a set amount of time, and you can’t eat at all outside those times.  You sit with the staff or are in group for an hour after every meal, and they do their best to have groups – even if most of them become just watching old Glee DVDs because while the program is great on paper, there isn’t the staffing to carry it out.

You can’t get out of the weight gain either – if you even eat all but just one bite of a meal, you are supplemented for the entire meal. They do force – there is simply no way out. There is a large and well trained security force at this hospital and the staff will call them up to the ward regularly to restrain people.

They’ve become more knowledgeable about the various tricks and ways to sabotage and every loophole possible has been closed off.  In terms of identifying it’s weaknesses and doing it’s best to rectify them, this hospital has come a long way.

After years of continual admissions, I was allocated a case manager at our mental health clinic, separate from the hospital campus. Instead of going to the weekly ED clinics to be weighed and see the dietician etc – I would see my case manager/s (sometimes I had two of them) and a consultant psychiatrist. I preferred this. The focus was now on trying to give me a better quality of life with the time I had left – and to treat me in the community rather than always inpatient. I still spent as much time inpatient, but had more support in between – all week instead of once weekly.

As my health deteriorated I really needed the continual support as I became unable to care for myself a lot of the time. I did come very close to needing to be institutionalized in a  nursing home or similar and I’m so glad that didn’t happen. I’m especially grateful to  the home and community care team in my city who for years have helped me be able to stay at home by helping me with self care, shopping, cleaning, etc. If I’d been institutionalized I probably would only have gotten sicker and inevitably died.

Two years ago, I finally was able to put on a bit more weight and to keep myself there, enough to stay out. I am now still a community patient with the same team as I’ve had for admissions – I just don’t need to be admitted any more. Hopefully over time, I will need this team less too. In fact, I wish to be independent and responsible for myself some day.  I never want to go back there again.

However, if I do – you know what to get for me: (and you would win the internets and my heart if it was Shalimar in there!)

(Image Source)

I hope this hasn’t been too boring – please let me know if there is anything I can improve. There will be more – hopefully less boring – soon.

More than I can chew..

Just to say I haven’t gone AWOL, and I am working on my hospital post/s. How do you fit fifteen years of pretty much living at the hospital more than in your own home, into a blog? How do you condense all that down so that it’s not boring, not overly long, not too hard to take? Where do you even start?

I’m writing – I’ve written heaps already, but it’s going to be a LOT to read, even broken up into installments. These are the hardest years of my life – harder than the abuse that broke me in that hell hole I called ‘home’ as a child – because I was trapped in that hospital with my demons, and my worst nightmares coming true. Fighting both myself, and those who fought me. Fighting mostly to die, and begging them to just let me do so, just let me die and stop tormenting me.

I’m very grateful they never gave up on me, I owe them my life today. Some of them have said to me they still aren’t sure it was the right thing to do – keeping me alive even when it seemed often that it was crueller than the dying would have been – but I’m here, and I’ve been giving another chance to live. That’s a gift very few would ever have. But I am traumatised from my experiences, and often it seemed that I came out of there a much more broken person than I went in.

I won’t be publishing these accounts tonight, or even tomorrow most likely, but they are definitely on their way – thank you for your patience.

In the meantime, Icanhascheezburger is more your bet for pics like the one below

Update: Escaping, Spiralling, Opting Out Of Life – And Choosing To Opt Back In Again.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a serious update, or a really serious post. There’s a reason for that – I’ve been not out of action, but hunkered down, holding on for dear life. As you do when things get stormy!

(Image Source)

Sometimes, that’s all we can do – hang on tight. And that’s okay.

My biggest ‘storms’,  as usual, have been the PTSD most, and the depression and anxiety. I had my monthly appointment with the consultant psych on Monday (the head of my treatment team) hoping that he could help in some way that would ease the worst period of both anxiety and depression in my life – and that’s including all the years of abuse and bullying. Instead, he complimented me again on how far I’ve come, and how well I’m doing.

I’m still far more functional than I was for over a decade, and for them, that is more important than the level of depression and anxiety I’m feeling. I do worry that these will make me lose function – avoiding doing things and hermiting, being too lethargic and miserable to move most days – doesn’t make functioning very easy! The PTSD, I’m hardly even asking for help with that any more – trying instead to keep using my strategies and wait for the new psych appointment – finally – next week! It seems like I am haunted by the nightmares and the sense of horror  every waking, and not waking minute. There is no easy cure to any this, I wish there was. There is only really bearing it.  But I guess I have to just suck it up and hang on tight.

I’m feeling worse now, because I’m not running away any more. I ran so far, for so many years.  In the past, when the depression was this bad, I used to go out stomping across the city, counting everything I could possibly count – calories, steps, kilos lost, kilos to lose, grams of this and that to two decimal places, to block out everything else. Later, I would cut myself to bits. Or I would take an overdose and hope that this was it, it was all over now. Or I’d  purge until I was sure my stomach itself was going to come up. A lot of the time, I did all of the above, and still hadn’t escaped far enough from myself.

When I became bulimarexic, I would spin out of control – rushing around at top speed, in and out of shops, amassing as much food and other odds and ends (clothing, housewares, bits and bobs, most often gifts for other people) as I could afford and hold.  Stuff them all in the back of a taxi or struggle onto a bus,  and charge on home to binge and purge, binge and purge, collapse for a few hours of exhausted slumber, wake up and survey the mess and the things I’d bought that I neither needed or could afford. Taking them back to the shops was a good excuse to buy more food and repeat the whole thing again. And again, until the money was gone, or more likely, I collapsed in a heap.

Then, came depression so deep that I couldn’t move. I’d spend days in bed, blocking it all out.  Opening my eyes was painful and took too much energy. Life had too many problems to face and I just couldn’t cope with them – so I didn’t. I pretended I wasn’t there instead. I fell deeply into that dream world, the one that I wished dearly I could stay in. This lethargy was heightened because when I came down from whatever frantic phrase, I would always have lost all the weight I’d gained last hospital stay, plus interest, so I’d hit rock bottom like a lead bomb. In later years, I was still too sick on being discharged to even be able to go on that frantic spree, so I went straight home and to bed most times.  This would go on until one or both case managers came round to shovel me out of bed like one might shovel roadkill off a road – and ship me back for hospital admission number whatever.

It wasn’t a life. And I’m not surprised I wasn’t able to function at all. It shocks me how much pain I put myself through in order to avoid pain – even writing this sentence – it’s crazy! It’s like chopping off your whole arm because of a little scratch on your finger. (I know paper cuts can hurt like hell, but really?)

Thinking about this more – I’m sure this overreaction was because of FEAR of the pain – I find that the fear of things is often far worse than those things I feared.

Anyway – I’m now feeling things. Staying with it. The sky still hasn’t fallen, despite that ever-present feeling of doom approaching. I do still struggle with bingeing and purging, and with restricting – and this makes me feel like I haven’t made progress at all. That my weight maintenance and great bloods (this is a big deal for me) and actual ability to do things, are  flukes.  That at any moment it’s all going to come crashing down around me. I’m not just letting it happen – I’m trying to approach each meal as it comes. Trying to have meals, and then at night, trying  not to binge on anything I didn’t eat during the day that I was meant to. How I hate that word, “trying“. Every time I write it I wince.

It makes me think “not enough” immediately – another of the myriad problems all tangled up in this web of disorder. I’ve never been good enough, I’ve always felt like an imposter. My best efforts always fall short, I’m not trying hard enough, I’m just not enough. Except when it comes to my body and then I’m too much.

I never wanted to be slim, beautiful and vogue. I did want my dancer’s body back at one point – but that was more about my belief that weight gain had ruined my dancing rather than being sick from chaotic eating habits, and was aimed more at function than form. I never understood how people cared about “thinspiration”. I didn’t want to look like anyone else. I didn’t want to look like anyone at all – including myself.

I wanted to be gone. Nothing. Zero. Not size zero. ZERO. Not there. Not taking up ANY space. Not seen, not heard, not felt. GONE.

Because it wasn’t my body I couldn’t cope with. It was LIFE. And I was trying to opt out of life and all that I had to feel to be there, in any way possible.

These days, I am coming round to the fact that I can’t be ‘gone’ and still be alive. Rationally, it’s an easy thing to realise – if you aren’t here, you are dead, right? In my brain, despite the rational knowledge, the irrational ‘can be both’ line of thinking persists. As does most of the ED screwed-up-irrational-thinking. See Missy’s post for a good explanation of how her ED brain screws things up too. We know it ain’t true. It’s like always having to argue with a whinging, stubborn child who knows the rules, but wants his own way regardless. It’s another kind of ‘storm’ we must weather – and then wade through the lies to pick up and keep hold of the truths.

I now have a lot more wisdom and insight than I had back in those days. The dialogue (accusations and threats is more appropriate!) from my ED brain is still the same as the worst years – but now, I am able to tell the difference between ED brain thoughts and rationality. Not just that – but I’m getting closer to being strong enough to change what’s not right. One step at a time.

(Image from Facebook)

When it comes to life – I have to stay here. Take all that comes my way. Accept it. Tolerate it. Hang on tight. And trust that this too, will pass, and I can survive it.  Cause let’s face it, it hasn’t killed me yet, right?

So that’s it. For me, right now, it’s about -

• Weathering the storms. They will pass.
• Trusting my team, life, my body, the process.
• Not backing down when anxiety fights my ability to get out and engage in activities and socialisation.
• Using my strategies – mindfulness, acceptance, being in the present moment, distracting myself.
• Not fretting over the small things – keeping in mind the bigger picture, but
• Not trying to leap huge bounds instead of taking one small step at a time.
• Refuting lies – hanging on to the truth.
• Challenging myself constantly, and
• Remembering there is no failure – only the failure to try. 

In future blogs, I’m thinking of writing about my experiences as a long term patient of the public hospital system in Australia, specifically going through a psych ward ED unit. I’m wondering if there is anything in particular you might like me to write about in this context, or any other subject. Thank you

Finally, I just had to share this with you. I was google-image searching for pictures and came across this hilarious thing! Enjoy

(Image Source)

(Featured Image Source)

 

Be ready for a change

Reblogged from truethresholds:

A story of everyone's life.
If we fail to get into a medical university having pursued a dream of our parents of becoming a doctor, we become hopeless to the core.
If we fail to sing the way our parents think we could, we think we're a complete failure.
At times we apply in just one university for the fact that we've wanted to go there since childhood and actually fail to get admitted, knowing that we cannot apply else where for all the admission dates are past us, we just want to kill ourselves at such times..

Read more… 53 more words

I agree with this so much.

We can't ever make life go to a plan that we might have - life has a way of choosing it's own path for us!

The most important message for me, is that we are NOT failures when life doesn't go to plan. Nobody is ever a failure for having gotten up and had a go.

Living with a mental illness means that I have lost the life I once planned for myself. I had dreams, dreams I worked hard for, that were pretty much guaranteed. And they fell flat in the face of depression and anorexia and bulimia. They deserted me when all was bleak and I was battling in the aftermath.

It was very hard for me to pick myself up again at all, because all I had once lived for was gone.

Now I'm able to see that there is so much more out there, for us all. That if our plans don't eventuate, there will always be something else we can do or hope for. I'm never going to be a ballerina, but I'm still able to dance and I thank God for that. I'm never going to be a biochemist, but I'm certainly not stopped from observing and learning about life!

My priorities have changed because of all I have been through. Before, my dreams were all about me. Now they are all about, how can I make sure that I leave this world a better place in some small way for my having been here? Because that's truly what makes ME the happiest now. It makes me wealthy in something far more precious than anything tangible.

Never give up. It's hard to trust sometimes that things will be okay. But they do have a way of working out in the end.

How have your dreams changed, according to what surprises your life has brought you?

Random Happy Dancing Reblogged – Depression.

Emma from Is My Bum Big In This posted a really good blog post about depression and exercise yesterday – well worth seeing, it’s rare that reading an article on depression can be so uplifting!

Random Happy Dancing Is Good For Depression

Depression is something that Emma and I both battle with – and believe me, it can be a BATTLE.  It is all the harder when you are surrounded by people who are ignorant, just don’t get it and worse, think you are wallowing or weak or self indulgent. Stigma makes living with a mental illness all the more a challenge, and also contributes to people feeling unable to ask for help.

She’s written a really good overview about what it’s like living with depression, how exercise can help, and about how it can be hard to help ourselves when we feel so awful – but it’s worth it!

Lately depression has really given me a good kicking, it’s made me just too fatigued, miserable, and in pain to live (and yet, like millions of people around the world, I still do it anyway.) The one thing that’s really shone through this for me has been going back to ballet recently. It’s even been difficult to get out and to ballet – so fearful am I, and so unable to cope with life – and yet, for that hour a week that I’m there and dancing – I’m on cloud nine. The contrast is incredible – shining hope and blissfulness surrounded by a pea soup of misery. Wow.

It’s very true that exercise is a great way to help yourself – it’s a natural mood enhancer, and part of why ballet helps me would be this. The other part is that it’s been my lifelong passion and something that has always been as crucial to me as the oxygen I breathe – to have been robbed of it for all those years was like being suffocated. I know that never again shall I bear to live without ballet in my life.

Whatever YOU like to do to get moving – is sure to be a great boost to your mood. Walking, running, dancing, kicking a footy in the yard – something that gets you MOVING. And even better? Something that gets you laughing!

Last night, Emma’s post inspired me to remember something I stumbled across in a random park years ago. A circle of people sat, clutching shaking bellies, roaring with laughter. I thought they must be bonkers!! And yet, I too started to laugh – I just couldn’t help it. I’d stumbled across a Laughter Yoga Club. Last night I googled Laughter Yoga, and trying to find a funny video of it being done (or happening, sounds better!) I ended up on a tangent that led to tears of mirth and random public dancing.

Would you break into dance in your grocery store?

And a call out to Missy – we need to see that video of you and your mates jamming in the grocery store!

Enjoy – hope it gets you dancing, too.

Denver.

My heart goes out to all who have been affected by the shootings in Denver.

Such a tragedy should never, ever happen.

My deepest sympathy and prayers to all.

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When I Knew My Mother Did Not Love Me – Letting Go and Moving On.

There have been times throughout these years  when I’ve come to know something without a doubt. Whether it’s a reality of my situation or about myself that I’ve until that moment denied, or it’s a reality of someone else in my world that affects me, or it’s a reality of LIFE – it’s been a defining moment that I’ve never forgotten.

Unfortunately the path to insight and enlightenment never runs smoothly – I found most of these occasions oh-so-painful. Because why do we hide the truth from ourselves in the first place? Mostly because it hurts too much? For me, that’s definitely so.

After I left home, I still held on to some fantasy that my mother did, deep down, love me as a mother. That the imaginary mother I’d spent my life hoping would emerge would come out and show her ‘real self’. It’s hard for someone who never existed except in my dreams, to show their ‘real self’.

 

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I hung on to anorexia for many years in the hope that “my mother will love me, and then I’ll be okay, and I’ll be able to get better.” I don’t know what it was that I actually expected from her. Maybe it was just for her to acknowledge the pain that she’d caused me for so many years. Maybe it was for her to just care. I saw other patient’s parents and loved ones come into the hospital all the time, always hugging them, supporting them.  Going into ward rounds with them (ward rounds being the most emotional and terrifying part of our week!). Wanting to be a part of whatever it took to help their loved ones. In comparison, I was very alone. My case workers went into ward rounds if they had the time, and I really appreciated that. They came to visit me. Friends sometimes came too, as long as they weren’t the friends I’d made on that very ward – because there is a ‘no past patient’ visitors policy for good reason. But there wasn’t anyone to hold me and tell me it was all going to be okay and remind me that there was more to life than this. Not that, in hindsight, having that happen would have ‘set me free’ like I imagined it would.

There are LOTS of people who don’t have anybody, and lots of people who might have families but struggle with them immensely so I know I’m far from alone. But it’s very hard to avoid feeling abandoned and uncared for when you are locked up in hospital against your will,  trapped and frightened.

The bottom line is that even had I had the most supportive family from the start, even had my mother come in and apologised for the hurt and abuse, hugged me tight, promised me she wouldn’t hurt me ever again, told me she cared, whatever – even had that happened, it wouldn’t have helped me eating disorder wise. That is something that I’ve slowly had to accept comes down to me alone.

 

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It’s been very, very hard to let go of this imaginary loving, supporting mother. Very hard. I had to admit to myself that she’d never really loved me and that she didn’t love me now, at all. That she would never love me. She wasn’t capable or willing to love me. That all she knew was how to cause harm and she wasn’t going to start changing in her 60′s (as she was then, she’s now in her 70′s) from the person she had been all her life long. She doesn’t even want to change. She’s happy being a malignant narcissist. And yet, I always held tight to the hope that somehow she would change, and the erroneous belief that this would be the key needed to unlock my illness and allow me to heal.

My moment of truth came about five or more years ago. (It’s hard to keep track of when things happened, the fifteen years of continual  hospitalizations are a long blur to me. I even have had quite a number of people come up to me and say hello, start reminiscing  about “this time when we..” and I cannot  remember ever having set eyes on them in my life!)

I had been transferred from the ED unit with heart problems to the emergency department for safety’s sake, later to be transferred to cardiac care. It was there that I was told that they were not expecting at this stage that I would live through this night. The constant purging had dropped my potassium so low that my heart was struggling, and several days of IV’s hadn’t brought it up at all either. My other organs were also starting to fail and in tandem with being emaciated and weak, I was in huge trouble.

At that stage, I still had my mother as my next of kin. (I now no longer have any family next of kin – two special friends have that honour, and they not only would be prepared to be there if needed, they volunteered for this.) My mother was called by the emergency department staff and asked to please come in right away, as her daughter was in a critical condition and not expected to survive the night.

My mother lives an easy 5 minute drive from the hospital. She also, at that time, was driving everywhere all the time, long distances, short distances, daytime, night time, everywhere. There  wasn’t any need for her to even go through the city area as she was on the same side of the city from the hospital.

But this evening (it was about 6pm I remember) her response was something along the lines of “I can’t come in. I couldn’t possibly drive there at night”.

The nurse who called her didn’t give up with that – and she was actually furious when she told me of this response. Not just that, but the nurse who had come down with me from the ED unit and who sat by my side for the next 12 hours, indicated to bring the phone to her and started telling my mother off. It didn’t work.

It was at this moment, that I realised without a doubt, that my mother did not love me, never had, never would. I could no longer deny that.

She didn’t even care if she never saw me alive again.

I made it through that night – it was one of many expectations of me not living that I defied. But the part of me that had hoped my mother could love me, that died.

It still has been years between that revelation, and me being able to totally cut her loose. I remained in touch, kept taking her calls and holding on through the inevitable screaming fits. (We never saw eye to eye, and our conversations would always degenerate into her offending me, or me offending her.) I don’t know why I bothered, but some part of me couldn’t stop trying.

 

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Despite all the abuse – physical and emotional, the neglect, the craziness with food, turning a blind eye to and enabling the abuse from others – I kept forgiving her. I used to be endlessly forgiving. Maybe too forgiving. I gave every excuse in the book for her actions. At some stage, I had to wake up and realise I was flogging a dead horse here.

This all has had a huge effect on me in eating disorder terms. I had to face up to the fact that it really didn’t matter whether my mother loved me or hated me, I still had this disorder, I still had to deal with my problems, I still had to choose ultimately whether I wanted to live or die. I also came to the conclusion over time, that even had my mother been different, the most loving, caring woman on earth – I would still have this eating disorder and still be unable to heal from it just for having her support.

This has been one of the scariest revelations over the years for me – that there is nothing outside of myself, that can change this. Take away every single reason, influence, everything – and I would still have this. This includes being scared of weight gain, wanting to lose weight, being scared of eating, feeling unloved and unsupported, hating myself, being scared to either live or die, dealing with my past, getting anything from the eating disorder at all – I would still have my eating disorder.

It truly has a life of its own, and I truly believe I was born with it lying dormant in me, just biding it’s time for the right conditions and triggers to be present. Take them all away and it’s still part of me that I’m going to have in me forever. I wish I could rip it out, but I can’t – I can only do my best to manage it, like a diabetic must manage their diabetes for life.

Don’t get me wrong - I do believe complete recovery from an eating disorder is possible. I’ve personally witnessed a number of friends achieve this. I just don’t think that it’s possible for everyone, and most likely not myself. There are things I just can’t undo – how can I unlearn how to purge at will, for example, which has been the biggest stumbling block to maintaining my weight for years – because even eating my meal plan, I have that outlet in which I can undo all that good work in just one split second’s weakness. And how can I oust the ED voice from my head, when it’s been there all my life? I can live with it, grow stronger than it, refute it, but I can’t see it not ever being there. Even more, I have a feeling that the C-PTSD and the haunting remnants of my past will never give me much peace either, and all that is very much tied up together.

Even lately, when I’m still maintaining my weight, I’ve started ballet, still working on getting a job (and still hopeful), am doing art classes, more social, more active than in all the more than a decade previously – I haven’t been coping. Every day is a battle – the social anxiety in particular is a huge problem. It often takes me several attempts to get to classes or appointments because I’ll start out, chicken out and come back home, only to turn around again and head out again. I just don’t understand the level of absolute FEAR that keeps popping up for simple everyday things.

The C-PTSD problems, especially the constant dissociating and the abundance of triggers for this everywhere I go, also haunt me big time. It frustrates me because I want to move on, I’ve left my past behind. I do get pangs about just ‘cutting off’ my entire family like I did – but I’m able to see that it was my only choice and that they only will ever keep hurting me if I keep giving them the chance too. So usually when I think of them, I shake my  head and say “Pfffft”. And yet they still follow me everywhere like shadows that only I can see.

Life itself is overwhelming and most days, I’m just not coping with it at all. It is extremely tempting to go crawling back to the disorder because I know it will kill me if I relapse – and that would at least mean it was finally all over with. Because I am SO TIRED.

There still is that ever-present urge to keep living though. To keep fighting, and so I do. That belief that everything that happens is for a reason, and the knowledge that even though I still have so far to go, I’ve come further than I thought possible, and that I already have had people say they have been given hope or inspired by something I’ve written or done or said. That really is an important one for me – my priorities have changed so much over the years – from everything being about me being successful and the best I can be, to wanting to do the best that I can do with what I have. If I can just live a functional life, be happy and content, give Shalimar as happy a life as she could have, and most of all, leave this world in some way a better place for my having been here – that’s all I want now.

The only chance I have of achieving this comes with continuing to fight – but also in letting go. Letting go of past dreams, letting go of past hurts, letting go of people who I used to not be able to imagine living life without. It means grieving all that I’ve lost or will never have. And it means growing up.

I’ve come to realise that there is a part of having an eating disorder that is very childish. Someone once mentioned in a blog – (I cannot remember who, or I’d link you – if it was you, please let me know!) that to have an eating disorder is a bit like throwing a childish tantrum. I’m not happy with the world and with my life and with myself? Time to throw myself down on the floor and kick and scream and hold my breath till I turn blue. Or refuse to eat, throw it up, throw the dishes at those trying to make me eat, throw it in their faces. It’s still a tantrum, whether it’s someone or something else I’m rejecting or my very self.

But not only do I need to grow up and take responsibility for being alive, but I also needed to do a lot of growing up in order to leave my mum behind. True, she never mothered me – but in my imagination, she did. That, at least, was something I clung on to, and I had to give that up like finally parting with a security blanket or favourite teddy bear.

Most of all, I had to learn to start parenting myself. I don’t have much of a clue how to do this, but I’ve started with being kinder to myself, practising self acceptance, and being firm with myself, too. I’ve read a lot of information online to educate myself as to why my mother is the way she is and why, particularly sites like Daughters Of Narcissistic Mothers, which have made me realise how far I am from being alone.  I guess it’s a start – the main thing is that I’m not even relying on the fantasy of having a mother to soothe myself any more.  Neither am I letting my absent ‘mother’ torment me as she did for all that time. I don’t have a mother. I never really did.

 

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I know that whether a family is supportive or unsupportive varies widely among all of us. Eating disorders are not caused by parents/family. They might contribute in some, sure. But they don’t cause it. And for all of us, in the end it comes down to us alone against the eating disorder – only we can fight our own battle.  But support and being loved do make a difference, as does feeling alone, feeling unloved, unsupported, and being constantly in battle with our family.

How has your family relationship affected you in terms of your eating disorder? Have you ever had to cut someone close to you off completely? How did you get through this? 

A huge thank you to everyone for yet again reading through such a long winded post, and for all your comments – your contributions are always so thought-provoking to read!

 

Why Do We Get Sucked In?

It’s something that has puzzled me for years now.

Greta has been writing some really good stuff lately – and her latest talked about how her friend was dieting, and Greta was trying to dissuade her from looking for ‘solutions’ to her problems in all the wrong places.

By the time you are old enough to realise that much importance is placed on weight and appearance in our society, you are also old enough to have figured out how to diet. Old enough to have seen ads on TV and in the paper for diets and all the promises they make. Old enough to have friends or peers at school discuss their own eating and attempts to whittle themselves down to as small as they could possibly (and impossibly) become.  Tragically, kids are getting caught up in this at younger and younger ages these days.

What puzzles me is – why do we keep going back to dieting? Why do we fall, hook line and sinker, again and again for the SAME OLD THING that didn’t work last time? And no, it didn’t.

Anyone who says to me that they are back on the X diet plan, because the X diet plan totally worked for them last time – gets a serious eye roll from me. Honey, it worked SO WELL you need to do it all over again? That’s  not success. That’s failure. Success would be not just losing that weight – but it never coming back again.

Did the X diet teach that person how to eat properly? Obviously not. But it’s not just the X diet. It’s the South Beach. The Atkins. Slim Forever. The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. The Low Fat diet. Eat your weight in eggs only diet. Super cleanses that promise to eradicate all toxins and take half your liver and intestines with it. Calorie counting. Low GI. Sweating buckets with wraps and muds. Getting it all sucked out of you. Jiggling your wobbly bits. Chopping up your tummy…

Sheesh. If diets and cleanses and the zillions of diet aids worked, wouldn’t we just have one or two tried and tested regimes that were passed down from generation to generation? We wouldn’t need to come up with an amazing new diet for every issue of the latest magazine! Weight Watchers would have changed their program every few years. Why? Why change something that is working? Because it doesn’t work!

You can go and do one program on Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig et al, then regain your lost weight with interest just in time to try their next brand new plan!  At least you will never be bored.

We all know this. We have to. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again, hoping for a different result. The first time any of us went on a diet, we would have had complete proof with the regaining of the weight – that it didn’t work. So why didn’t we leave them alone after that?

Are we suckers for punishment?

Maybe. But what we ARE suckers for – are promises.

Most people who go on a diet, don’t go on it just for the weight loss alone. Even if they think that’s all there is to it. I mean – why lose weight at all? Sure, some people are overweight or obese and feel they need to. But that’s just a small proportion of people who are actually dieting.  And – why don’t those people do what IS tried, tested, proven to be true – which is a lifestyle change. Balanced eating, no restricting, no gimmicks. Slow weight loss, but overall health for the long term?

Because it’s boring. And you have to work hard for it. It doesn’t provide any instant gratification.

And it doesn’t promise to fix your whole life.

Because weight loss can’t fix our whole lives. All it can fix is your weight. And that is only if your weight actually  needed fixing in the first place.

Losing weight will not make you happy.

Losing weight will not make you popular.

Losing weight will not make other people treat you better.

Losing weight will not get you a job or a pay rise.

Losing weight will not make you smarter, kinder, funnier, more fashionable, etc etc etc.

Losing weight will only mean you have lost weight. And all the things you are  now, all the problems you have now, will still be there.

Come on, people – stop buying into the lies over and over. Show some brains. Show some self respect! Realise you have value that goes far deeper than what you look like. Realise that those who truly love you will never make it contingent on what you weigh or what you look like. Remember that healthy doesn’t always look the same for everyone, healthy is dependant on our behaviors and attitudes in every single area of our lives, and it’s totally just as possible to be overweight and healthy as it is to be underweight and terribly unhealthy.

I don’t want to be a vacuous idiot who thinks that because she’s able to wear certain clothes and look a certain way, she’s all that. I don’t want to be that shallow, that stupid, that useless. I value my ability to think properly. I value my ability to love and be loved. To keep friends, because I am a good friend.

As Judge Judy has said – looks fade. Dumb is forever.

Dare to reject society’s pressure to make yourself fit into their little boxes. Dare to be different, unique, to be YOU. That’s true courage.

Being the same? – that’s just lame.

I’ll leave you with something more pleasant – most diet foods offer us little to no nutritional benefits from eating them. You may as well eat the box. Or give it to your cat

Thank you to Memecenter.com for all images and film. 

Fear

Last Thursday, I didn’t make it to what would have been my third ballet class. I had legitimate reason – I was feeling crappy with a bad head cold, and on top of that, the chronic pain levels really kicked up in this past two weeks. I am also very scared about my legs. The worst thing to happen to my legs, apart from the  peripheral neuropathy –  which was the most painful thing I’ve experienced EVER (imagine even the AIR touching your skin being excruciating!) – was when both of my femurs – the longest strongest bones in our bodies – thinned to the point of cracking. Stress fractures.

I’ve been working on getting my nutrition better, doing physio, doing gentle weight bearing exercise like walking daily, hydrotherapy. I’ve been under the care of an endocrinologist and I took hormones until the side effects made me too unwell.  My weight being a bit better helps – I’m not quite as starved as I was, although I worry because I know that until my body is a healthy weight it IS still in a state of starvation and therefore it is unable to do things like rebuild my bones – it has to direct everything towards keeping me alive. Also, I still don’t get periods – and that’s so important. I have learnt that our hormonal status is just as important as our nutritional status in preventing osteoporosis. I worry about that, too.

This last week, my legs have been having the same pains as they did when I first got the stress fractures in my femurs (I actually had them for 3 years before they found them – it took them that long to take me seriously and take MRIs). I’ve been free or with very little pain there for months now, so I’m quite scared.

I know what I have to do. It’s up to me to do it. Only I can do it.

But this isn’t what this post is about. It’s about FEAR.

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Fear is something I feel all the time. Sometimes I don’t think I need a reason to be scared – it’s there. Or perhaps, it’s a combination of feelings that don’t feel good like anxiety and sadness. I identify it as fear.

Lately I’ve been terrified again because so much has been going better for me. Sound crazy? I’m sure it must. But before, when my life had reached it’s lowest point, I had nothing to really fear any more. I’d lost everything but my life, and that didn’t seem much worth being sad about losing now.

Now, I have so much to lose. And I’m so grateful for that – but terrified of doing something to lose it all. I  know, this too, is in my control. And now I have to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes as I did in the past.

I remember back when I was getting unwell but didn’t yet realise, still in high school. I started really struggling to think properly and what used to be easy academically suddenly felt like literally squeezing what I’d known out of my brain from where it had gone hiding. I remember beginning year 11, the first day in Maths 1, the teacher asked us all to start by drawing a circle on our page. Just a simple circle. I picked up my biro and froze. I couldn’t remember what a circle WAS. It just wouldn’t compute. The teacher became extremely frustrated at me and jabbed at my page. In the end I managed a very wonky shape that didn’t look anything like a circle in hindsight. That was the beginning of me really being aware that something was wrong, it was more subtle before that.

Unbeknownst to me, the effects of major depression and malnutrition were making themselves known through my cognitive ability, or lack of it.

The last couple of years of school I struggled with my schoolwork. I got some really good marks as usual, but it was like pulling teeth to achieve them. Other subjects I just let go of. I stopped doing assignments – I’d try, and just panic more and more the closer it got to being due. I’d had constant nightmares about being chased by angry teachers demanding their unfinished work, and not being able to come up with it, and it was starting to be  a waking nightmare too!

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The school employed a tutor to help me with one of my subjects, the one I was struggling with most – Physics, something I had adored previously. Because I was at the dance school and we danced for most of the day 6 days a week, we did our senior high school subjects in a few hours each afternoon – the same amount of work but in half the time of regular students.  We were limited to set subjects because of this – but I chose to do physics by correspondence instead of art – and it was tough. It was basically do-it-yourself classes with exams and assignments to be sent in along the way.  (And all by snail mail – we didn’t use the internet then!) The tutor helped, but I was clueless. I don’t know how I scraped through.

At the end of year 12, we all sat a couple of days of huge exams known as the Core Skills Test. These exams aren’t so much to test our knowledge, but our capacity. I remember some multiple choice exams on language and maths and science, and another language one which involved writing an essay over the course of a couple of hours on some obscure subject. I got A+ across the board. This would have been awesome, except that suddenly my teachers realised that my struggle academically had NOT been because I was dumb as they must have thought. They decided I just could not have been bothered – and were very disappointed in me indeed.

I still regret this. I still have nightmares sometimes about being chased for work that I just couldn’t complete despite hours of pulling my hair out. Of exams that I’m panicking in because none of the questions make sense to me. Of knowing that I haven’t done my best and wondering what was happening to my BRAIN. Why I was suddenly so dumb. I know now, but then, it was frightening. At least near the end of those years I was again formally diagnosed with major clinical depression again which gave us some answers, but I was a perfectionist who couldn’t accept anything less than perfect, not only had I grown up with my mother asking me where was the 1% if I only got 99%, I’d been asking myself those questions too. Nothing was good enough for me if it wasn’t perfect, and I’d fallen the hardest way possible.

I let everyone down – including myself. 

Fast forward a bit, and my ballet began to fail too. I became more sick physically and was lethargic, giddy, dizzy. I started missing classes because I was just too unwell to go, and when I did, I knew I was nowhere near my former standard. I was panicking about that, too. I had graduated the dance school with such acclaim, had been formally introduced to the university staff by the dance school teachers – one to watch – and here I was letting everyone down again. 

So now, these days, when I miss a class or a date or an appointment, the feeling of guilt and fear of letting everyone down is overwhelming.

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When I missed that ballet class on Thursday, I panicked. I was dressed and ready to go, but I was too unwell, and I knew it would be silly to go in this state. I texted a friend for advice, who backed me up. I texted my home and community care worker who also said, you shouldn’t go. But I still felt bad. Would they be disappointed? Many people have been so involved in helping me get to be able to go to ballet again, and each of them was someone I felt I was personally letting down. The burden weighed heavily on my shoulders.

I feel this way about everything, not just ballet.

I’m scared of letting people down when I get a job, because I’m not reliable enough being unwell or simply unable to do it. When I was volunteering, I was offered a wage a few times, but each time I turned it down, because I couldn’t accept it without a major panic. Being unpaid, I knew I was putting my all into my work, and that it was enough. It was adequate. If they paid me to do exactly the same job, suddenly I couldn’t feel that I’d done a good enough job to earn that payment. Even after turning down the wages, I stepped up my efforts in the fear of being unable to do my very best for them.

I’m scared of letting people down by flunking out with ballet – skipping classes, not being able to do the classes. Not being able to juggle the extra nutrition that my body needs to do the class well enough to enable me to keep going.

I’m scared of letting down society by never being a productive and useful member again. Of always being a disability pensioner who needs help to just live, and just takes but never gives back.

I’m scared of letting down the people who read this blog, because you have been so supportive and lovely. Many people have said that I’ve inspired them – that is amazing, but I have never seen myself as inspiring, and I’m scared that I will prove myself to be not inspiring at all by falling flat in my face. For example, if I were to relapse – how would someone who has previously felt that turning their own ED around was impossible and gained hope from reading about my progress feel? Would their faith in possible recovery be dashed too?

I’m most terrified of relapsing with the eating disorder – because I would let down all the people who have saved my life then helped me get to this point. Not only that – but to have come so far, been able to taste what life could actually be like and realise that I COULD live life, really LIVE – and then lose it all again – that would be devastating. I know that I couldn’t summon up the energy physically or emotionally to start from scratch again – this is it. 

As I said before – I know what I need to do. All of this, it’s up to me. In my control. All these fears can only come true if I allow them to stop me hanging on and always pushing forwards.

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So in the short term, I’m again going back to my meal plan, every meal is a new start, even if I’ve failed at breakfast, morning tea is a fresh beginning. I’m keeping all appointments unless I’m dead (I’ve actually cancelled a doctors appointment because I’m too sick to go, how ironic is that!) and I am being firm with myself about going to Art and to Ballet unless it’s something dire. It’s not been that I haven’t been going to things that I have missed without good reason – the fear of it being harder to go the next time gets to me too. It’s very easy for me to withdraw when I’ve missed a few appointments here or there – I still have strong social anxiety. I just shove it down every day and get out regardless. If I miss a day, it’s not as easy to shove it down again. (Hope that makes sense!)

What fears do you have (or have had)? Why do you think you have these fears? Have they ever been real, or do you think they are mostly mind over matter? How have you overcome fears, and how do you continue to overcome fears on a daily basis? 

Big hugs to all of you – thank you again for being such supportive and encouraging people. I know I have said I have a lot of fear of letting readers down, but it’s been a hugely positive thing for me to be able to write about my own experiences and know that people out there take something good or hopeful from this. Never stop hoping!!! While there’s life, there’s hope.

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