Insight

Insight comes in the strangest ways, like watching my son watch a movie I’ve heard hundreds of times, until I know the lines by heart, when, suddenly, BAM, I know exactly how I will feel if he turns out to be bipolar. And it’s the only way I can fathom how my parents have suffered with me.

My mother and I look just alike. I borrow her clothes. My father can’t tell us apart on the phone. I am her only daughter. As I’ve grown, so has our friendship (the love was always there) and we have gently nourished the struggling bond to deal with the way I am together. Note struggling.

One night this March my parents received a call from a hospital hours away. I was there. Would they come get me? It was one of many phone calls my mother had taken, at home, at work, in the middle of the night, right before Christmas. They arrived in the wee hours of the morning, and we didn’t speak much until I got home. They were terrified. Fear turned to anger. My son, upset with all the uproar, told my mother there was a better way. He told her he thought I was afraid, that she should ask me why I was afraid. Then he decided I must have forgotten to put in my contacts and I couldn’t read the street signs. That was why I got lost. Now it’s a joke. Did you remember to put your contacts in is akin to did you take your medicine, are you okay, did you make your doctor’s appointment?

Later that morning my mother sobbed to my doctor that she had lost her temper. In his infinite wisdom he told her the best thing anyone could have said. "You’re human."

Earlier, at Christmas, Jamie, my son, had received a fortune telling ball, just like the magic eight balls we had played with in the old TG & Y. His first question took my breath away like being punched in the stomach. Will my mom go back into the hospital? I waited, terrified for the reply. Time will tell. Sigh of relief.

And, just months after, time did tell. My doctor managed to get me into the best private unit in the area, even though I was uninsured. I was able to leave in less that a week. In the state system, I would still be in the evaluation stage.

Anger turned to hate. Hate for what this was doing to me. Hate for the side products of something we all struggled to understand. Hate not for me but for the lot I had been dealt, for the horrible way my brain had been wired. Hate for the idea that I would have to struggle.

Life was well. I was happy, work was going well. I was stable, but I’m sure my family held it’s collective breath.

Hate. Hate towards my body for rejecting the one medicine that worked. Forced to stop cold turkey, curled up in the spare bed at my parent’s house. Hate for the drug company who said I couldn’t take it again. Hate for the lack of information. Hate for the lack of a substitute. And hate for the constant struggle I inherited, the price I had to pay to live, the price my family had to pay for a daughter, a sister.

And hate led to struggle. One more call, my father took it, and luckily his brothers were there. A slit wrist. Blood everywhere. In the ambulance to the hospital.

They arrived right as the doctor was injecting the lidocane, the injury there in all of its lurid glory. They looked stunned, hurt, scared. But there was no anger left. No hate left. Just suffering. A suffering that only a parent can feel. The same suffering I felt when my infant son was in the hospital, fighting death.

My doctor told me he didn’t know what to do. It was the first time ever a doctor was so candid, so true. But he wasn’t giving up.

He called people, other doctors, and found out what it would take for me to rechallenge the medicine, off the label. The results were encouraging. Apparently the drug company's stand was based first on limiting liability. The liability I would waive in order to try again.

Yoda left off one more stage. Acceptance. Accepting that their daughter would always be this away. Accepting her need to be independent, despite the risks and the fears surrounding them. Accepting the human frailties that cause fear, anger, and hate in the first place. I’m not sure if I parents are there. I’ll never know. Just as I’ll never know how I’ll act if I start to get the midnight phone calls.

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