Posted by zinya on June 14, 2003, at 11:38:15
In reply to Re: Zinya » zinya, posted by CherC68 on June 11, 2003, at 19:29:08
dear Cher,
Gosh, It seems this post of yours came in the very next one after i had last checked the posts here on Wed. and it was truly surprising to me last night when i checked again and got your latest post to realize that two days had gone by since i'd checked....I dont' quite know why, but in part i've been preoccupied with something here i had to deal with that was making me anxious, but other than that it may have been a good sign cuz (knock on wood) i've been side-effect-free for a few days now ... As I mentioned last night, i had taken up your suggestion and sent you an e-mail and so i was meanwhile a bit surprised i hadn't heard back from the e-mail yet and wondering how you were doing! ;))
But last night when i logged in I was already crashing and only now got to this post of yours about your grandmother and your mom and your wonderful and much appreciated comments, some of which i dare say feel like projection a bit cuz your own tremendous compassion and caring comes across loud and clear... or, maybe, soft and clear :))
Indeed, it does sound like your mom went through and reacted in much the same way I did ... as did you... It was such a complex set of circumstances at the end with the sudden belated discovery of cancer and having to repress at least some of anger i felt at all the doctors for failing so miserably to diagnose it much earlier because i knew i didn't want anger being part -- or much -- of what characterized my last days with her. It's still eerie, surreal, to believe that a year ago now, we still had no clue even 7 weeks before the end. I won't go through the saga here but it was wrenching...
What i realized with time afterwards -- and which was a realization that made me "put off" taking this anti-dep route because I thought maybe just time would heal, not sure what was mourning, what was depression of more than a 'natural response' -- I realized that there was also an overlay of, as a friend perceived it, a kind of post-traumatic stress ... There had been the inordinate stress of the entire last year when mom's pains had started to become a daily reality (and yet the alzheimer's kept her from being able to ever recall when a pain had started or how, and given that she was never one to speak up about pains as well until it was 'too late') and taking her to specialists, testing, etc... finally deciding to buy a home where she could live with me, moving myself and her in together, never really finishing get unboxed and settled into the house except in the rooms she frequented -- fortunately in retrospect just so exhausted from all the moving that i devoted our first month together to just being with her and it was a month of hiatus (turned out to be remission) in which her pains had lapsed, allowing to think that maybe indeed it had been the fact that the nurses at her retirement home had screwed up her daily medicines for some months until i'd discovered it, that they kept screwing up the dietary changes the md. had ordered because of the pains) and allowed me to think that indeed the pleasure of our mutual company was going to be blessed with a return to health for her... And then bang, six weeks after moving in the pains were back and within another month, back with a vengeance... So then kicked in the traumatic stress of the helplessness of desperately seeking yet another doctor (who finally performed the right test) and then of watching the person who loved me more than life itself fade away... The stress of having to make those awful decisions you know as well, after the initial massive increase in pain meds caused her to have some reactions so horrible she wound up for five days in the hospital -- the worst days of all really and also just in those days they too managed to let her get a bedsores on the heels of her feet and never ever getting the pain meds to her fast enough -- then back home and the wrenching decision to agree to the hospice conditions, the ones you had to override your mom to put into effect... And still she fought in her spirit like crazy to survive... One of the last things she said to me - more than a week before the end -- was that she was "gonna get well." A real trooper all her life. And it was both a harrowing and inspiring life lesson to watch such sheer will, in someone who'd already lived 93 totally loving but also many rough rough years, more than her share of life traumas, and yet such obvious desire not to give up ... the hospice nurses were amazed -- by that and by the fact she still looked more like 73 than 93, and that was in such a state of pain and dying ... There were the little things that were part of the process that had their inevitable guilt-inducing voices, but for the most part i kept them at bay and just focused on the moment ... on surrounding us both with transcendent music in her room and constant tenderness...
But then of course atop the stresses of the year of moving and desperate pain diagnosis plus that of witnessing the process itself was overlaid with the grief of loss that was not only losing my mom, my last immediate family member, but also i had become (as had your mom) "my mom's mom" for the alzheimer years and so it was also like losing a child in an odd way, cuz i had so happily filled my sense of identity and self with caring for her as you would a child, helping her with all the things an infant needs help with... My sense of loss of purpose, compounded unexpectedly by having resigned my job to care for her full-time, became at first gradually and then increasingly overwhelming such that i didn't foresee even after she was gone just how bad it was going to get...
What i realize now -- or at least i hope will prove to be borne out by this -- with the months of energyless stasis, almost a kind of paralysis (fortunately having a bereavement group to attend and especially a counselor there who remains a source of tremendous strength as well as my two best friends in particular), i managed somehow, almost miraculously to get through some very dark days of such a sense of loss of "raison d'etre" that the only thing at times that kept me going was remembering (rather guiltily) how hard mom had fought for just one more day. And how could I not fight at least as hard? ...
But I realize now that what this all may have done is to finally force me to face a depression which had been either just below the surface or in full consumption from time to time for years ... that had led to abortive anti-dep attempts over the last 15 yrs without relief or with too many side effects... and that this grief ... and no longer having mom literally here as a if not the raison d'etre that had eventually made me somehow rise to the need ... but this time it wasn't happening, and I do now think that i may always have been a matter which a biochemical component that finally just has refused to go unremedied any longer. It took a lot to reach such a level, to realize that there was more here going on in me than even the grief and the three layers of post-traumatic stress, but something that nine months later was telling me "This is healing with time; this needs something other than either time or mind over matter."
And so here i am.
So so appreciative of the compassion your post conveys and projects and reveals, Cher, and so appreciative of everyone here... whose tales even of horrendous negative reaction I think i required to read and process fully, which took me some extra months to absorb, before realizing with eyes wide open to the risks it represented that i had to take this risk. It was and is, or at least seems now, to be the specific form of 'being a trooper' that mom would have wanted for me, even though she herself needed no such 'supplement' to be the lifelong trooper she was. I actually realize increasingly that it was my dad who i think lived with an unacknowledged depression for essentially all his life (and had been alcoholic for some years that ended when i was 3 and my gentle mom took one of her most courageous stances of giving my dad an ultimatum, and he went cold turkey at the prospect of losing mom and me)... And I may have more of his biochemical predisposition in me than i'd ever fully admitted, seeing now in myself resorting to some of the withdrawal which i saw him go through so chronically...
So what i'm trying to say through all this babbling is that there's been new learning, about myself, about how confronting life and taking risks sometimes means very different decisions than one might expect. Of course, if the side effects from Effexor were (or still prove to be) "over the top" I probably would have to rethink this entire sense of silver lining yet again. But for now, taking this on as a new experience in surely the most "precautious" way any taker ever did ... turning a one-month intro to the drug into a two-month intro by taking only half the prescribed daily dose, aware of my history of bad reaction to others in the past - prozac, etc etc etc - But even though there's still not much improvement in energy, there's already a sense that maybe there's going to come out of all this grief, this trauma, this massive depression, a righting of some kind of imbalance or lack which has really been tugging at me for years, maybe all the way back to a horrid childhood auto accident that left me essentially parentless at age six for a year as mom and dad were nearly killed and laid up for months... a 'theme' of abandonment that has resurfaced and come to be 'understood' via therapy off and on for decades now, yet still maybe i'm finally finding that there was something more than understanding it which was required... and maybe there's going to be some basic 'repair job' here ... That's the sense i've got at this juncture, not "counting on it" cuz past experience lets me know that i could still have prohibitive side effects surface, but for now, i'm optimistic, more frankly than the depression itself had even allowed me to be when i started 3 weeks ago so guardedly...
Well, gee, could i have babbled any more? With my apologies for any tedium in this 'saga' but reaching out here in response to your heartfelt message, Cher, to convey just how magical this bridging via cyberspace feels, and to reciprocate your warm spirit of serendipitous new friendship here...
wishing to hear further that you are doing well, especially since your latest post conveyed your own sense of letdown ...
sending love and embracing warm good wishes,
zinya
poster:zinya
thread:13781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030614/msgs/233947.html