Last time I left you, I was awaiting the letter from Guys. No, I won't start with that, there's been other stuff too.
I injured my shoulder, like properly buggered it up and was incredibly drugged up for quite some time. A full two and a bit weeks' blast of codeine and Naproxen to dull the pain. I barely left the house during that time and had some seriously big thinks. When I went to see the GP, I didn't just ask about my shoulder but also talked about how crappy I've been feeling. They had mentioned a while back about me going for counselling but I wasn't certain I really needed it. I mean losing pregnancies is shit. Seriously shit but there's tougher shit in the world, isn't there? Well, yes there is. A lot tougher shit but add in a pressure cooker job and a predisposition to self-criticism and well, you're a bit buggered! I'm not new by any stretch of the imagination to the world of mental health problems- if you're new to Sarah World, here's a brief run down:
- First panic attack aged 8- on going issues;
- Started having problems with eating from the age of 11;
- Started self harming about six months later;
- Went for counselling with a useless person aged 14;
- Through school's worries, I went to Bromley Y who were bloody amazing;
- Left school and went to Uni where I met Harry- my wonderful, blind CBT person who I named my corkscrew after;
- Had a pretty spectacular breakdown where I almost became a Catholic and killed myself;
- Stopped cutting in February 2005;
- Stopped taking laxatives 2009;
- I still binge occasionally but in the way of food, I'm doing ok. Things can get hard but I can quickly get my shit back together.
So yes, pretty illustrious! I wrote some dodgy poetry too but I'm putting that down to being a Manics fan!
A bit like infertility, I think mental health should be treated as the normal medical issue that it is. It should be treated as a normal malady to have and can just as big a killer as cancer. Food was a way of having some aspect of control over a life that I had very little. Cutting myself was my way of coping with the fact that I wasn't good enough and home was pretty mad when I was very young- very high pressure and that pressure now shows in lines across my tummy, my legs and my arms.
Recently, I've found myself having regular panic attacks- you know, the point where you feel like your eyes are going to pop out of your head and that your heart may explode if it beats any faster. I feel the panic rising on a daily basis- triggers can be anything. Mostly school or imagining that I find myself to be pregnant but anything. So I took some action: enough feeling shit. Time to get a life back! I went to the Greenwich Time to Talk service who has diagnosed me with severe Panic and Anxiety Disorder and severe Depression. When I got that diagnosis, I felt very weird as I hadn't realised that I had allowed it to become so bad again- I guess when you're down so often, you start to accept it as normality. There's a definite loss of fizz. Chronic tiredness as well.
The lady I spoke to was really nice. I clicked quite well with her but it is uncertain as to who I will have once my CBT starts. Right at the end she spoke to me about my attitude to my pregnancy loss and told me off for my clinical way of dealing with the losses by calling the processes by their medical terms and not by their emotional terms. She pointed out that I was totally awaiting constant failure in everything that I do and that my chromosomes had become my latest dartboard fodder. After all, they've not done too much right so far eh? It was a emotional punch that sent me reeling back into my 15 year old self with Janice at Bromley Y berating me for not loving myself and kick back to Harry's office where he would tell me to stop trying to disassociate from myself by getting lost in thought rather than being in tune with the physical.
Loss is a fucker. I've never really grieved for my babies or celebrated the brief time I've had with them as I don't think I have actually named them as being babies. I may had said it as being a sort of social nicety because that is what you should see them as being but I have never really associated them as being that as such. I've just floated around my loss not really engaging with it. Feeling sad, crying lots and being very angry but mostly at myself and those bloody translocations. After all if my mum gets two babies (albeit with more loss and more problems) and my step mum gets one with the same amount of loss and age as a factor, surely I should get bloody one without being jabbed, poked and prodded?
Christa, the Time to Talk lady, wanted me to engage with my body in the same sort of way that you do in mindfulness. She wanted me to start talking to my uterus and stop thinking of it in medical terms. The uterus that is the bitch who makes me hurt every month. Instead she wanted me to start viewing it as a cot, somewhere that has the possibility of nurturing life. Whilst my initial reaction was, what the fuck is this hippy dippy shit, I started to think that maybe she had a point. Maybe it's time to drop the "My Body is my Enemy" bullshit and start looking after it. Yeah the chromosomes are a bloody pain in the arse, but it's time to ditch all those years of waiting for this shit to go wrong, the shit going wrong and start to actually take a bit more care of myself.
She asked me what my hobbies were and I kind of sat there and felt like a kid in my class who had been asked a very hard question (don't worry kids, I will never ask you what you did at the weekend again!) Then I remembered, the night before, I had flicked through one of my mum's magazines and found a knitting pattern that wasn't too difficult to follow. I decided in that moment that rather than just talking about it (and eventually talking myself out of it, as after all, everyone is a better knitter than me!) that I was going to have a go and whilst I was in Eltham, I would pop into the tiny wool shop at the back of Sainsburys. So I did. I now have a new scarf that has some dodgy tension, a funny stitch and a weird bit on the pocket but I did it. I finished a knitting pattern. By myself. #teamSarahftw
As a part of the healing process, I've decided to learn how to crochet. I saw my wedding photographer's beautiful rainbow blanket on Facebook and whilst chatting to the other Sarah Jean at school (seriously as a Sarah born in the 80s, it is amazing to meet anyone who has the same funky middle name as you) I found out that she used a website called Craftsy to teach herself how to crochet. So my task is to make my own rainbow blanket, ready for my rainbow baby and in celebration of my babies who didn't make it into my arms.
I got the art job by the way! After Easter, I am escaping to North London to be an art teacher in a Primary school which was a bit of a confidence boost and a relief as I was considering quitting teaching all together. I was in so much shock that I forgot to say that I accepted it immediately and had to be prompted! I am looking forward to a slower pace, more money and more time to read books on my commute.
The final bit of news is what happened last Monday. I had a missed phone call from P with a text that said, "Call me" which instantly sends me into panic and meltdown. What has happened to the dog? Has he been attacked? Have we been broken into? Is there something wrong with the cats? Have the school changed their mind about offering me the job? (See? Freaking mental!) Last Monday, I cried on the bus into school. It was my year anniversary of my D&C- the loss of my fourth pregnancy- the one that almost felt like it might happen. To then get a message saying, "Call me" had me wobbling like a jelly on the San Andreas fault. So I rang and found out that the World's Sleepiest Man (otherwise known as my husband) had overslept and decided to work from home with our then still cone-head dog (from his snip). An A4 envelope had then come through the letterbox. The A4 envelope that we had been waiting for. The letter and medical forms to say that we can start PGD in about two months time.
It is time, Simba. It is time.
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