Thanks, Chumbawamba. (I tell you, some of the names of these 90’s bands…!) And one simply cannot think about that song without mentally finishing the phrase, of course. BUT I GET UP AGAIN. That’s what we do, right? Get knocked down and then get up again? And again, and again, and again….
It’s probably good that I waited until today to write this update, because yesterday I was an emotional wreck. Overwhelmed. Brain shutting down. So many tears. (I honestly didn’t know it was possible for someone to cry as much, or as hard, as I have in the past seven months.)
To begin with, we woke up on Tuesday morning to discover flooding in my basement. AGAIN. At least this time it wasn’t raw sewage, but still…. It’s not like this has been a chronic problem with this house either, at least not while Kendall was alive. This is now our third major flood since he died. We never once in the eight years we’ve lived here had flooding down in that lower basement. And no flooding in our previous house we owned for seven years. Lucky me to get to handle yet another crisis. Except this time it looked like there was an actual crack in my foundation. Oh boy.
What a mess. The initial flooding happened in my food storage room down there (so many boxes, bags, cans, and bottles of food to move!), but the damage did extend into my clinic and the (brand-new) carpet and pad there and in my client observation room/playroom. Which meant my ability to earn income was now threatened as well.
Once again, thank you to the helping hands who dropped what they were doing and rushed to my rescue to help me remove and salvage things, interact with the restoration company, and figure out next steps. I was even able to leave everything in their hands and step away for an hour to do an EMDR session.
Because this girl has been struggling. A lot, to be honest, over the past month. I appeared to be doing so much better for a while, until I simply wasn’t. And things didn’t seem to improve no matter what I tried. After so many months of doing grueling EMDR work, I had thought I was in a good enough place to stop. Turns out I was wrong.
The kids and I have continued to do semi-regular grief counseling, and two Saturdays ago I decided to do a session without my kids. I know it’s understandable that I would be experiencing grief, that’s to be expected. And I’ve never encountered this kind of loss before, so it’s difficult to know what to predict and what is “normal.” I wanted to know if what I was feeling and reactions I was having to certain situations were typical, or were actual depression since things weren’t getting better, week after week. While certainly grief, and maybe even some depression, are there, the counselor said that really this looked like trauma and trauma responses, which are treated very differently. Hence, the EMDR session yesterday.
I know that those sessions help with healing, but they are so emotionally exhausting (and the cause of most of my tears yesterday). Before in EMDR sessions I mainly focused on the trauma associated with Kendall’s last hospitalization/ICU stay, and then his death. I had never before acknowledged things that happened a year ago, particularly during his third hospitalization. Things I had never before shared out loud, and certainly did not on Meal Train. Only I’m finding that I can’t just leave them unprocessed or try and “push past” it through sheer force of will.
Despite my determination to be OK, to be grateful even, to keep functioning day by day, I’ve been reliving those times when it looked like Kendall was going to die. That first time it felt like a real possibility, and how terrifying it was to think of losing him at that time. Remembering when his symptoms were so severe that the doctors had never seen anything like it and were baffled as to how to help him. Watching medical personnel take a step back when they first came to the door because some sights in that room were so gruesome (and are now stuck in my head). The times I had to fully gown up, not for Kendall’s protection but for mine, because they thought that surely he must have some kind of horrible disease that was causing such extreme symptoms instead of the rare and horrific reactions to all three of the neurotoxic chemos they had given him that ended up being the real culprits. When he was literally starving to death, and I had to fight and fight to be allowed to be there during the day (despite the current COVID restrictions) to spoon-feed, really force-feed, food I brought from home. Hours and hours spent trying to get some calories in him that would hopefully stay down. (And often did not.)
Not to mention my realization, in hind sight, that my husband didn’t really ever come home from that hospitalization. He was never the same. I of course did not know at the time that there wouldn’t ever be another time that he was fully with us, or out of pain, or able to interact normally with us as a family. And that hurts to think about. A lot.
Then on top of all of that my second daughter received a new medical diagnosis yesterday that involves a lot of dietary changes, among other things. About a month ago we started my oldest daughter on a gluten free diet (even though we know she does not have celiac disease) in the hopes that it might help with some of her symptoms and constant abdominal pain. Which it has. But now between the two of them we can’t do gluten, dairy, tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, fruit juice, amongst other things. Receiving that news on top of everything else felt so overwhelming. What in the world could I feed my family? (Cross off Mexican, Italian, most Chinese food…) Not to mention that I haven’t exactly been on top of my meal planning and preparing game even before those restrictions. (Were grocery stores always this overwhelming?)
I know that in the grand scheme of things each of these problems are temporary, and not that significant in and of themselves. But it has felt like a lot. It’s hard to feel like I can ever switch out of survival mode when new things keep coming at me. Again and again and again…..
I so desperately want to heal, to be self reliant, to be able to provide in all ways for my family. That’s a real core fear I have, after last year, that I won’t be able to provide stability for my family. That I can’t take care of them. Because during the last year there have been so many times I just couldn’t, despite my best efforts.
So, how does the song go? You’re never gonna keep me down. Certainly things won’t be like this forever. I trust that I WILL heal from the trauma. That we’ll find answers or at least next steps for house or health problems or other things that come up. But I think I might need to accept some more help, as much as I hate admitting that. Maybe I could ask some people to help me prep some meals that everyone in my family could eat? There’s someone in my ward who is helping me with the restoration process in my basement. Or the couple from my self reliance group who offered to let me use their unoccupied basement apartment, with an exterior door, for doing therapy for the next few weeks until I’m back up and running in my own clinic. I’m grateful to the people in my life who have offered help, or who sometimes have ideas that my struggling (but healing!) brain does not. And I will try to be humble enough to accept it.
