Stages
Monday, November 20, 2006
Stages
Four years ago this time, “the year of the cyst” was just beginning. I was suddenly thrown into this crazy world where everything was so overwhelming, the only way to cope was to pretend it wasn’t happening.
Once everything with all the shunt revisions died down, I was still on various medications that caused me to be numb. I suppose my first stage in dealing with this traumatic situation was the: “Everything is fine” stage. With the help of dilaudid, flexeril, baclofen and various concoctions I created to kill my physical pain, everything was fine!
People left and right constantly bad mouthed my neurosurgeon, told me I had every right to sue him, told me my hospital truly fucked things up badly, etc. But I would always defend the hospital saying, “I’m alive, so everything is just fine.” [Meanwhile thinking to myself, "who are all these people and if they care so much where were they when I was in the hospital???] Hmmmm…
So you are aware, there are two halves that make the “traumatic situation” a whole. The first is obviously the medical side of things: long stays in the hospital, physical illness, doubting doctors, surgeries, etc. The second half is what happened when I was not in the hospital, the university which discriminated against me, the people who suddenly disappeared from my life and the emotional pain associated with my body not working as well as it used to.
From the beginning of 2005 to a couple of months ago, I was going through the “what the fuck happened, I am so depressed now…” stage. I was haunted by memories of being in the hospital, conversations I had during 2003, abandonment issues, the fact that my condition was constantly being downplayed by my neurosurgeon[If I had a dime for every time he said,"well some people on this floor are dying of brain cancer, at least you don't have that" I would be a wealthy woman.], etc. Everything I thought about was making me painfully sad.
I was suddenly realizing a lot of what really was behind certain people’s actions towards me, surgeries that never went ahead ["the doctors in the UK aren't sophisticated enough to deal with programmable shunts."], the tests that happened for no concrete reason, etc. And it all made me cry.
[Meanwhile I was and am still dealing with health problems which was only making things worse.]
October 2006 arrives and suddenly I am angry and very disappointed with the way things were handled during 2003. I have tried looking at events from every angle, every point of view, but I am still dumbfounded at how things unfolded. I am currently in the “Angry and a little hurt” stage.
As my phone conversation about my book came to an end, I explained that writing during this stage would not be completely fair to some of the people involved in that year of my life. So, I will wait until the anger passes, and when I am ready I will continue writing my book.
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