Fear, Depression, and Recovery Part I

For the last few weeks, I have lived almost every moment in fear.  No, there isn't anything abusive going on in my home or with friends.  I worry and am constantly fearful that the chiari-fibromyalgia-arthritis pain will come on so strong that I will end up back in bed or in the hospital and I won't be able to accomplish the goals I have placed before me.
It is incredibly difficult to explain to someone who has never been chronically ill or severely sick for a prolonged time what it is like to live in bed while the world continues on without you.  I would never want my family and friends to all stop their lives and sit in bed with me (that would be a rather crowded bed) but I need them to remember that I am in bed and perhaps stop by for a chat or a cup of tea.  This past January and February that is exactly what happened and I am immensely grateful for those who popped over to see me or came to the hospital to visit.  However, even with their wonderful love and support, I still had to stop doing the things that were important to me and allow my body to just exist until I could push it along and get it going again.
I have not been handling living in fear well.  It causes me to do much more than I probably should at a given moment because there is that voice in my head reminding me that I could lose it all again and be back in bed.
I have great plans for myself for this year.  I have commitments to various volunteering activities that I find to be extremely important.  I have to be healthy.  I have to be okay.  What if the next time I end up in bed with a bad flair of pain the people that I work with decide that it isn't worth working with me because there are times I cannot be there?  What if they decide that it would be easier to replace me than to work around this ridiculous body of mine that can shut down without notice?  These are the fears playing constantly in my mind.

For weeks now I have been dealing with this, mentioning it here and there but never really talking about it.  Then a series of things happened in my life that caused the fear to increase and sent me into a total emotional tailspin.  First, our car died.  I realize that this seems relatively innocuous but it was the first in a string of events that eventually became too much to handle.  The car only has 87K miles on it and the engine froze.  It was paid off.  Finding a new engine and trying to get the work done has been stressful.  Not to mention the financial burden but hey, this kind of crap happens to everyone at some point so I was able to let that go relatively easily.

Then, there was last week or what I will call the 'week from hell'.  First, let me explain something: I think I am super strong.  I think that there is nothing I cannot handle.  For the record, I was wrong.
I had decided to write the book that so many have encouraged over the years and to do so, I wanted to have the legal documents from my childhood regarding the indictments, plea bargains, sentencing etc. so that I would have the facts absolutely indisputable.  I know them as I have lived them but I wanted to make sure that my dates were correct etc.  On Wednesday, I phoned the courthouse in Wood County Ohio and inquired about getting those records.  According to the information I had, I believed I would have to go in person and get these materials so I was planning on going to Ohio with my Mom and retrieving them.  As it turned out, they were able to be emailed to me.  I thought, "Great!  Now I won't have to make a trip just to go get those".  So I asked the court to email them to me.

I proceeded to open them and the first document was the grand jury indictment.  Let's just say without all the gory details that it went downhill from there.  Every document showing my childhood in black and white was suddenly appearing on my computer screen.  The words that I knew and had heard spoken became real again and along with that, intense emotional pain.  Crushing my heart and inability to breathe pain.  What I thought were just words was actually my horrific childhood staring me in the face. I saw the 14 year old me having to deal with all of this.  I felt her pain and anxiety.  I felt and saw the words with a different perspective than ever before: the perspective of time.  The appreciation of what it took to be a kid going through that, the knowledge that those papers (though ending in 1991) caused issues that I still deal with, the understanding of the bravery it took, and the part of my soul that I have never been able to retrieve from that horrible childhood.   Time does not, in fact, heal all wounds.  It allows us to move forward but some wounds never heal, they just scab over.  Receiving those documents forced the scab off and the searing pain to erupt from me.
The breakdown that I had been cautiously avoiding (from fear of illness) hit me as though I had driven 100 miles an hour into a brick wall...leaving me to pick up the pieces, sew them back together and become whole once again.