SchlegelRock

So when I sat down on Tuesday and wrote about Oli going to school I was a little lonely but totally in control of myself. That started to change when I picked him up from school and he was totally distraught. He looked like he had been tortured for 2 1/2 hours rather than playing with new friends. I asked him if he had fun and he said, “No.” We talked about going back to school on Tuesday and he said he didn’t want to go. He spent the rest of the day in between pouting and throwing fits. It totally threw me for a loop. Majorly catching me off guard. I felt like I had made a terrible mistake sending him to school. My poor baby!

Well, that set me up for panic attacks. I made it all the way until 7pm before the first one hit. Luckily (or unluckily), I have a lot of practice dealing with panic attacks. So I sat on my bed and let the waves of panic wash over me. I can deal with the physical symptoms of a panic attack pretty well. For me, that’s the easy part. The hard part is when Satan jumps in and tries to get me to hurt myself. What a jerk. Totally kicking me when I’m down. Telling me, “This will never end. You’re never going to get better. You’re going to feel like this for the rest of your life so you might as well end it now. Scott’s better off without you anyway. You just bring sorrow and pain to him. Someone else would treat him much better than you possibly can. They could take care of your kids better too. They wouldn’t have to deal with all of your episodes. etc, etc.” He just goes on and on until I feel like I’m losing my mind because there’s a really stupid, gullible part of me that believes him. Then on the other hand Scott has told me before that he would lose it if anything happened to me. And I think of my kids and what it would feel like to grow up with a mother who killed herself. How it would give them an opening I would never want them to consider. The icing on the panic cake is that I have flashbacks to my hospitalization when I have an attack. It makes me want to vomit how real it feels. In the end, I win. But not without suffering a great deal.

So I’m sitting in my bed having my third panic attack and I lose it and call my mom to come sit with me. I don’t know if it was just having her in the house, or what, but I didn’t have another panic attack after she got here. Thank goodness. I felt really fragile all day Wednesday but in control. I even made it out to the bakery to get myself a pick me up. There’s nothing like chocolaty baked goods to help ease the pain.

Now we made it to Thursday and Oli still didn’t want to go to school. He went though. I talked to his teacher when I picked him up and she said he had a great day and was shocked when I told her he was reluctant to go to school. That’s a huge relief. It makes me think that given a few more weeks Oli will be a pro at going to school. Then I wont have to feel guilty about sending him and enjoying my time to myself. And truth be told this is why we wanted to send him to school at 3 in the first place. We had a feeling he’d have a hard time with it. Which is silly because it totally caught me off guard when he did. I know, I’m ridiculous. But what would you do without me writing about my ludicrous experiences? Seriously, what would you do?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Bipolar, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.