Morbid March

So this is going to be a bit of a hard and personal post but I feel I need to stay honest with myself and get it out there so I can work through everything. I don’t feel like I should have to issue a warning but I guess everyone can find things upsetting or triggering. So this could be triggering with mentions of suicide, self-harm and miscarriage. 

I didn’t think this month would be quite as hard as it has been. Let alone take me a year to feel comfortable to fully discuss what I am about too. But on the days I have been alone in the office I have had to have my music playing so I didn’t just focus on everything. The month didn’t start off all too well with my transition from support to admin (due to social anxieties) as I needed to go onto light duties due to health and safety with being pregnant. Unfortunately I felt like I had to fight my case for that but they didn’t drag it out so all is good.

I was casually minding my own business listening to a random mix on YouTube and out of nowhere on came Good Charlotte now I LOVE them and remind me of some amazing times with my friends when we were teenagers, especially my little Kit Kat. But the main issue was it was “Hold On” and if you have ever heard that song you will understand instantly. I used to listen to it a lot when I was younger and severely depressed from living with Ulcerative Colitis (people dont seem to realise what IBD can do to a person’s mental health) amongst other reasons and yeah I used to self-harm, but that song and Linkin Park’s “Numb” used to help. Although I bet one or both songs helped a lot of teenagers back in the early 00’s and probably still do.

So in the video they have a couple of survivors and people that were “left behind”; and when they talked I just broke down and cried because it was around this time last year that I had serious thoughts of committing suicide. If I’m honest I am crying right now just thinking about it. I nearly left behind my friends and family, just because I was in agony that I knew was going to get hopefully sorted the month after. But at the time that didn’t matter. What’s worse is I know how it feels to be one of the ones left behind as I have lost a few good friends to suicide.

I spent that night crawling round my front room floor then pacing, getting frustrated and just wanting to self-harm or smoke or punch a wall. 00Steve just sat there quiet I don’t think he had seen me like that before where I couldn’t calm down. I kept saying how I was going to drink my bottle of morphine then go out for a walk and just hope that I collapsed and died. I remember 00Steve saying I could go for a walk but I couldn’t have my morphine. If you know me personally you will know I don’t do well with people making my decisions for me or telling me what to do; call it lingering teenage angst or whatever but I remember sitting there clenching and unclenching my fists, rubbing my feet together (I seem to do those when extremely anxious) and my legs and chest fizzed.

I remember being in that much pain that I felt like I was slipping in and out of consciousness for a couple of seconds at a time. I went to the bathroom and then to bed, somehow I managed to force myself to sleep without my morphine as I had gotten into a routine of only being able to sleep after taking that. 00Steve slept downstairs because he hadn’t realised I had gone to bed before he passed out himself.

The next day I got up and made the decision to go admit myself into hospital, I was quite lucky that I could go to my local A&E and they would just get the on call doctor and he just recognised my name and admit me. I rang my on call at work and explained I was going to the hospital and was hoping to be admitted, luckily he didn’t feel the need to ask tons of questions just told me he hoped I felt better soon. I went to the local tattoo shop first to see Jeki so she could relax a bit because I had sent her some cryptic messages the night before (sorry snow) then Fat Boi came with me to make sure I stayed at the hospital because he was also friends with the guys who died and struggled with that hard.

I was admitted and spent a week desperately tried to tell people I needed to be helped mentally because this wasn’t good enough. One F1 actually gave me so much shit over the week that she actually told me “she had had enough of this” and walked out of the room slamming the door. Fat Boi nearly gave her what for but got staff to ring my dad to come and help calm me down. Another member of staff managed to get a member of mental health to come up and see me but apparently I was completely rational and it was just down to pain, frustration and opiates. Now Fat Boi actually is the first one to make jokes of his own mental health and he takes other people’s mental health serious and literally turned to me and said “fuck man you really need help”. Which knowing like I do scared the shit out of me. But because of a bed shortage I was just sent home. 00Steve refused to not come see me after we told him what happened even though I told him my brain was really quite fragile and that I was going to stay at my parents. He just responded with “I will take you there, I am coming to see you”.

So bra-fucking-vo NHS cuts caused by the government I could have easily been another statistic of someone with mental health issues slipping through the net and committing suicide. Obviously between my parents and 00Steve I wasn’t left alone.

So that brings me to my next thing I am struggling with, but part of me feels like I haven’t got a right to be struggling. This week is when our baby I lost last year would have been born. Now they probably would have been early but it would still be this month. I feel like because I managed to conceive so quickly let alone at all that I shouldn’t complain because at least I am having another baby. When there are so many women who can’t conceive either at all, have difficulty or lose them. I am terribly grateful for the opportunity to have baby button but it doesn’t stop my little bean from being in my thoughts often.

I like other couples in my position have all the what if’s and what would they be like. The fact that that is a child we will never hold is horrific. I refuse to forget about them or be quiet about loss of an infant at any stage in their life because society thinks I should and neither should any other couple, in the same position. Whenever I get changed I am reminded about the short time we were together from a tattoo that Jeki gave me to help me try and heal emotionally. I can’t talk to 00Steve about it as I can tell he finds it quite upsetting and does what he does best…clams up.

So unfortunately dear readers you were the ones I have opened up too to try and find a way to cope through the feeling of loss that I feel guilty about having and the part shame part nothingness that I feel about the fact I nearly left my daughter without a mum and my husband without his wife. Let alone the rest of my family and friends.