Guess what - I cannot sleep again.
This time I've been trying for about two hours since I woke up after just a couple hours of sleep. It's 3:45 a.m. as I begin this post, and my boss is supposed to arrive in two hours to pick me up on the way to the airport for our division retreat/work intensive.
But that's not what this post is about.
Not being able to sleep, even after multiple attempts, listening to both sides of my sleepy music cassette (yes, I still have a cassette player!!!), as well as 30 minutes of calm Pandora music that usually helps .... and talking to my insomnia buddy for 30 minutes ... well, it all reminds me of my first night in the psychiatric institution back in Dec. 2018, when I didn't sleep a wink. (I also won a game of Yahtzee against another patient by getting THREE Yahtzees!!! :O That was fun!!)
But to back up ......
Saturday, Dec. 8th, 2018 will be another day that I always remember, even though I had to check the calendar for that month to verify which calendar date it was.
It started the Wednesday or so before.
But that's a story that I tell in another blog post - one I have already written (back in Jan. of 2021) but that will not actually see the publishing "light of day" for a few more weeks at least. Because to write about why I actually went into the mental hospital, and then especially to share that with the "whole world," takes a lot of courage. Courage that I haven't worked up to quite yet.
For now, let's just pick up the story where that blog post leaves it off. I wound up at the house of the pastor from my host mom's church in a southern suburb of Portland. [As I write this post, I haven't written the chapter for Nov. 2018 yet, but I am sure I will introduce Jeremy & Sarah Sanderson in that entry.]
Judith took me back to her house, where I took my morning medication - and then Sarah came and picked me up and we headed to the emergency room. No, I wasn't physically injured or sick, "just" mentally/emotionally/spiritually distraught.
Little did I know then that it would be more than 12 hours later before I would be able to crash [metaphorically] into what would be my bed for the next week at a recently opened mental institution.
It wasn't a bad day, really, once I made the decision to go in. As I said in the entry that I wrote out by hand for my team leaders to post on my Facebook profile/timeline to sorta explain why I wouldn't be posting for a few days, "My support team here is amazing."
Sarah stayed with me for the first long while at the room in the ER (during which I called my parents & clued them in), then Yevette (one of my team leaders) came for a little while, I was alone for maybe half an hour, and then Mandee (the other team leader) came and stayed with me until I was transferred and did initial check-in up at the relatively new facility in Vancouver, WA.
{A tangent by way of filling in the story a bit more ... Back in November, on a day when I was doing well emotionally and my leaders and I were talking about my chances of going to East Africa with them, I told them "If I end up in the psych ward, don't let me go with you." And both of them heartily agreed! So that is part of the reason why choosing to transfer from the emergency room to a psych ward was difficult. (And the choice was up to me - the ER nurse/doctor said I didn't have to go in, that I could go back home. But by then I was rather afraid of myself and what I might be capable of.) When Yevette arrived at the ER to hang out with me, I was like "Well, I guess I'm not going with you then." She was like "Oh, do you want to have that conversation now?" And my response was, "We already DID have it!" Praise God for the fact that Paraclete urged me to say that to them on a day when I was doing well. So, my decision made the other decision that I had been trying to make my own way. It would no longer be about 'trying to make it work' for me to go to East Africa with the team. That door was now closed; I wasn't going.}
Whenever I think back to that week in the mental institution, the greatest feeling that I have is one of thankfulness.
It's gratitude to God for providing that loving, caring support team who rallied around me so well during my time of need -- both those present in the greater Portland area, and those around the country who I called and talked to by the hour from the landline phones at the nurses' desk. [I'm still using the journal Yevette gave me, that has a *long* list of phone numbers inside the front cover from that experience!!]
[By the way, that in itself was a Godsend - because the journal Yevette gifted me for my birthday in Sept. 2018 is a unique one that has NO wires or staples. It's stitched by sections. Because of that "simple/accidental" fact, I was able to have my current journal - which I had started the previous month or so - without it having to be modified by the nurse staff. No metal was allowed in the psych ward!!! And usually I have journals with spiral binding or staples!!!]
This is going to be a long blog post - I'm probably not going to finish it tonight. {I know, I know, late warning!!}
Even though I didn't sleep a wink that first night (Sat.-Sun.) at the mental hospital, I was more at peace than I had been any of the three or four days before. Because there I knew I was safe -- maybe not completely safe yet mentally/emotionally, but I was in a safe place physically -- and I felt that quite tangibly.
A funny memory was meeting the doctor who oversaw patients' treatment on Sunday - and then "meeting" him again on Monday (I literally did not recognize him as the same man because I was so sleep-deprived on Sunday)!!!
Looking back to that experience almost three years ago, the things that stand out most to me are the people and God's faithfulness.
God was so gracious. He opened up a bed in a beautiful new facility right when I needed it, even though I thought I'd be better off at a different hospital where my Portland psych worked on the weekends.
He also drew me very near to Himself during that time. To be honest, I rather miss that dependence born out of desperation. {It's as I wrote that sentence that this post's second song started "randomly" playing on my playlist.}
There are still passages in my Bible (that I've had since I was 10) that are marked and dated in pen from that week in Rainier Springs. [I normally use pencil in my Bible - but the institution didn't allow any pencils, just safety/"bendy" pens.]
{Breaking here to try and sleep the last available hour!!}
Here I am again, almost three months later, to try and wrap up this blog entry so that it's ready for posting. There's so much I could say about that first time in the psychiatric ward. {"First" because, spoiler alert, I've now been in a second time since beginning to write this post!}
In addition to God's faithfulness, I was so very grateful for His Body who were also faithful to me. Almost every day of my stay there, I had some visitor or other make the trek from Portland to Vancouver to come see me! That was a huge encouragement, especially since I had only started building my community there a couple months previously. In the midst of my own need, I don't think I realized at the time what a sacrifice that was! But now I certainly do.
I also had the privilege of getting to know some people who were in similar boats to my own. I felt like I was able to meet them where they were and even love on them some, without expressing some of the strong judgments that I would have tended to internally place on them outside in the "real world". None of us kept in touch after dismissal; but I do have their names written in that same journal and I sometimes think of and pray for them.
After six days in the psych ward, I was released back into the care of my host mom and team leaders, and just a couple days later I flew back to Dallas for the Christmas holiday. I was in a much, much better place, both sleep-wise and emotions-wise. Not to say that all my problems were over ... far from it. But now I knew what it was like to be in-patient, and that no longer scared me the same way as before I'd had that experience.
At some point during that time, some group of 'we' {I don't remember who all was in that group!} decided that I would come back to Portland in January to finish the Portland portion of the Servant Teams with the gals I had been with, that I would see them off to East Africa, and that I would stay in Portland another week or two after that to finish the Genesis Process group that I'd been doing with another church there since sometime in October. So that was our plan!
No comments:
Post a Comment