I have had way too much excitement for one person to take.  On the other hand I know that three fireman, two EMT’s and four police officers can stand in my living room.  It’s crowded, but it can be done.  I also know that a fire truck, an ambulance, and two squad cars will fill the parking lot from the drive to my building. 

    A is a cutter.  When he gets too frustrated he cuts scratches into his arm.  He says the only way that he can get rid of his pain inside is to cause pain outside.  Last night was the culmination of four days of showers, washing bedding, one frustration after another, lack of sleep and food and short fuses. 

    In the midst of an argument about what was setting him off he grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen and I could see that it was going to cut through his arm like butter.  I tried to stop him from using it by telling him not to use that one, it was too dangerous.  He shouted over me and I threatened to call 911.  He slashed his arm harder than he intended to and cut it to the bone causing me to call 911 and have my own little panic attack..  The instant the knife slid across his skin he realized he’d make a terrible mistake and between the two of us we got a tourniquet on and he pressed a towel into it while I called for help, which took forever to arrive.  When they did they’d sent the cavalry, four officers were joined by three firemen and two EMT’s, all asking questions he couldn’t answer but they didn’t want me to.

    After what felt like a lifetime we all left at once.  I followed the ambulance down unfamiliar streets to a hospital I didn’t know in a neighborhood I wasn’t familiar with..  At one point it got ahead of me thanks to a red light that I swear never turned yellow.  They made it through and I didn’t.  Until then my eyes never left my son through the window of the back doors of the ambulance.  The light changed and I broke speed records down the hill and up again and saw the ambulance again as it turned a corner.  By the time it reached the hospital I was back on it’s tail.  No place to park.  Down the block I turned around and found a tiny parking spot directly across the street from the ambulance doors.  I can’t parallel park.  Never could.  I put that car in the smallest spot I’ve ever seen in my life like I did it ten times a day every day. 

    I couldn’t get in though the ambulance doors.  I had to walk around the corner to the door of the emergency department.  He wasn’t checked in yet, but they would call me.  It seemed like two minutes.  I didn’t even find a magazine.  By the time I got to his room he was already undressed, had an IV in, they’d taken blood and wrapped the cut.  Five hours of waiting...waiting for x-rays ... waiting for him to go to the bathroom...waiting for social workers...waiting for the girl in the next “room” to stop hallucinating...waiting for stitches.  Waiting...waiting...waiting...hoping he’s learned his lesson and stops cutting.  They asked for insurance information.  I pulled out three different cards before I found out his insurance is inactive.  What am I going to do now?  My son is hurt.  I have no money and no insurance.  But he is safe and I am ok for one more day.  The cut will heal and hopefully he will leave the knives alone.

   

Ha!  I remembered this time!  This post comes before the letter in the post before it. It's about what came before A's hospital stay and leading up to it.

    I have seen some pretty horrifying things in my life, but there is nothing more horrifying than having your child try to kill himself in front of you other than that he was successful.  Mine has tried it twice.  Both times I was close enough to see it coming, but too far away to stop it.  The second time was not intended to go the way it did so I suppose it doesn’t really count, but the first time, though it had no chance at success, was every bit intentional.  I was on the phone arguing with the school to leave us alone while I worked to get him into a mental hospital. I was trying to get him admitted for a week long evaluation that was recommended by his counselor. They were insisting he had to be in school while we waited to hear if there was a bed ready.  They thought I could just pick him up when I got the word.  By that time discomfort at being in an environment as dirty as a school, surrounded by people he didn’t know had evolved into pure terror at the very idea.  While I was talking he heard me say something about someone from the school coming to pick him up and take him in.  He grabbed a belt that was nearby and wrapped it around his neck and tried to attach it to a plant hook.  The last thing I said to them was he’s trying to hang himself and I hung up and got him down.  Instead of a trip to school he got a trip to the hospital and an expedited entry to the mental hospital for evaluation.

    Our battle with the school started in October.  He started feeling sick and missed several days with what seemed like the flu.  Then he started telling me about the things he was afraid of.  We were seeing a counselor regularly.  He had trouble with his homework and they started keeping him after school.  The night before the crisis he had stayed from 2:30 when school got out until 6:30 when I went to pick him up.  The principal wanted to keep him another half hour to do something the class hadn’t even done yet.  A could take no more and I couldn’t blame him.  The school was just not equipped to handle someone with his problems and the state law was too rigid for us to operate safely for A.       

    We had already come to the conclusion from his behavior that one problem was OCD.  We had arrangements for a bed for him the day before he went, but the situation was such a shock for his father, who did not live with us, that he wanted to talk about it first because he didn’t see that it “was necessary.”  He’d never seen any odd behavior so therefore it didn’t exist.  The two hour delay lost A his room and we had to start over,  meaning he had to go to school.  Through the hospital evaluation, during which he was hospitalized for a week, we became acquainted with PTSD and the other members of the mental unhealth alphabet that inhabits my beautiful boy.

    He went back to school after winter break armed with the report from the hospital and a request for an Individual Education Plan (IEP).  During his hospital stay the school was supposed to be sending his homework to the hospital.  Instead they just let it pile up so he started out behind anyway and went back to the cycle of punishment instead of encouragement.  I kept asking for the IEP and finally in February the school told me they “didn’t have time” to work out an IEP for him, something that is required by the same laws they were using against us to charge us with truancy and contributing to truancy.  Finally one day the police liaison - fancy talk for truant officer - showed up at my door to give me a ticket for contributing.  I drove the 60 miles to the state capital that day to sign a form to home school and A hasn’t set foot in a school since then.  That was eighth grade.  He was 13 years old.

    I didn’t want to home school him.  I knew he wouldn’t do any work I gave him.  We tried online academies.  Same thing.  He never even logged on.  I basically let him study up on whatever tickled his brain and he gave himself a good education in history, social studies, English grammar, pretty much every subject except math.  He was ready to take his GED a year ahead of time, though the agoraphobia keeps him out of a classroom to prepare for the test.  In our state the class is required so he has to work up to it.  He has been talking about doing it though so there is hope.  He’s been going into places more, though only if they aren’t crowded.  I sincerely feel that if he is allowed to work at his own pace he will find his way to a more normal lifestyle.  I get a lot of people telling me to “quit babying him”, but I don’t feel it’s babying him to let him find his own way at his own pace.  Forcing him is what got him into the shape he’s in now and as long as he keeps testing his limits it’s progress.

    The doctors and counselors tried giving him medication, but he never took it long enough to make a difference and he was comfortable with his various “things.”  I managed to keep him going until he was 15, but he never talked.  The only answers he gave to any question was “I don’t know.”  When he was told that as of the age of 14 he could reuse treatment that was exactly what he did.  Another thing his dad can’t wrap his head around.  He keeps giving me choices and ultimatums to get A into treatment.  A has agreed to have another evaluation, but that is as far as he’s willing to go.  He’s comfortable with his life the way it is.  I’m not okay with it, but the state has taken it out of my hands.  I want my boy to be happy and live a prosperous life, but the prospect scares the hell out of him.

I was looking through some of my old files and I found this letter I wrote to A's father in 2008.   This was three months after A tried to kill himself because he could not stand to set foot in his school one more time.  I have another post written about the incident so I won't tell the whole thing here.  At this time his father had a job in another state from where we were living.  We had been separated for just over a year and he'd been out of work until just shortly before this letter.  He lived in a one bedroom studio apartment and wanted us to move there and live with him because I was having financial trouble and I had just pulled A out of school to homeschool him because the school district just wasn't getting it.  A was 13 at the time...

Dear,

I understand your frustration and anger with me right now.  I did not plan to get into trouble again or plan to hurt you or A..  In fact the trouble escalated by trying not to hurt A.  The honest truth is that neither you nor I can survive the way things are now.  I don’t have enough to pay rent, buy food, gas for the car and pay bills and neither do you.  I see the wisdom in us moving there, but the air of hostility coming from you does not help me to make that decision.  There are things you need to understand before any move is made for us to join you.  Our building has been sold and I’ve told my landlord that we may or may not be moving at the end of March.

Right now A is protesting.  Before you go off and start thinking he doesn’t want to be with you or doesn’t love you stop it right now.  That is not true.  But you need to realize that he has serious problems and it has nothing to do with discipline.  He spent a lot of energy trying to hide his problems from you, but they have been accumulating since he was seven years old.  He is afraid you will not understand his problems or respect them.  He’s also afraid you will yell at him all the time and that he will find it impossible to live in a one bedroom apartment because he needs some space of his own.  Yes, he has problems with depression, but that is minor to the other things.  I’m sending a recent photo of him.  He looks like that most of the time unless he tells a joke.  Once in awhile he’s in a lighter mood and more like his old self.  That is happening more and more lately.  He has definitely been diagnosed with OCD and other anxiety disorders.  Taking him out of school to home school him was not a choice I made lightly.  His anxiety about school had reached a height I could no longer deal with and his daily threats of suicide were more than I could bear.  He was going all day without going to the bathroom because he can’t use a public rest room.  He would go directly to take a shower, not even hugging me or saying hello, as soon as he walked in the door.  His comfort zone is very small.  There is no rational thought to what he does.  Some days he takes three showers, depending on if we’ve left the house or not.  If his arm or clothing touches a door or other surface he may have a meltdown.  There are times he is trapped in the bathroom for a half hour washing his hands because he has touched something or something has touched him.  He went through six bars of soap in a little under two weeks.  He has three bars of soap in the shower, one for me, one for his top half, and one for his bottom half.  There is an extra one on the sink for washing his feet.  He insists on doing the laundry and screams if I touch the basement door, even if it has been sprayed with Lysol, but he washes everything twice and only small loads because he can only use one hand to move things from the washer to the dryer.  He is afraid I will contaminate the clean laundry by touching it with “dirty” hands that have touched the door, railing, or machines, or dirty clothes taking them down to be washed.  I can not reconcile this with the fact that he wants the space around his couch to be dirty, with trash mixed in with his belongings.  He does not understand the consequences of this or understand that when something is ruined it is because of the mess.  It is totally irrational and rational people can not figure it out or reason him out of it.  You will have to think of him as Monk in that he thinks everybody feels as he does and he can’t relate to anyone else’s feelings right now.  You and I are Stottlemeyer and Sharona and will be frustrated as hell sometimes, but anger isn’t going to do anything but make it worse.  We will need to find help as soon as possible and the whole family will need to be involved.  I will see if I can get a referral. At least we will have a few more weeks with Erin.  Hopefully some progress will be made and Ethan will be less anxious.

Because of his anxieties he can NOT be enrolled in a normal school setting.  They don’t understand and are not equiped to deal with him.  At this point he would probably end up in a school that is teaching where he should have been and he will be lost.  He has had no world history past the Renaissance, no U.S. history or State history at all.  Three different middle schools in three different grades have taught the same things. If we can get the depression under control to a point where he is motivated again and excited he could work at his own pace and graduate from High School early.  Your support and help can make a big difference.  At his age it is mostly self taught with guidance and assignments.  We could find tons of great stuff to do around there that would be interesting and teach him many important things.  The first thing we need is library cards. 

He has become such a picky eater he makes you look easy to feed.  Somehow he manages to eat nutritiously though.  He favorites are salads and thank God he still likes baby carrots.  We eat quite a bit of chicken and not much beef besides hamburger.

Now, about me.  I can cook and do dishes with help, especially chopping stuff.  I always liked it when we did dishes together. It would be fun to make soup together again.  My back will never be better than it is now and anything that puts pressure or torque on my lower back is very, very bad.  I can only lift about five pounds without problems. The joints in my thumbs have worn away and a cyst that was on one of my tendons in my right hand calcified into an extra bone that rubs against where the two bones meet near my wrist.  I still have Vicodin and Percocet, but I don’t use it unless I do something stupid and I’m in more pain than I can bear.  If it is bad enough I can’t walk straight because my balance is affected.  Then I take the pain pill and sit it out.  Again, your help will make the difference.

If you can read all of this and at least pretend that you would be happy to have us come up there then I have no objections.  It would be better for all of us.



This was just a year after I'd had two back surgeries and I had permanent nerve damage in my lower back.  A's father has never been able to accept that I am disabled and ha never accepted any responsibility for the causes of A's anxiety problems, though I believe his PTSD comes from watching his father trying to drink himself to death for three years before we finally had enough and left him.  He has never been helpful or supportive.  As an alcoholic he lives in a constant state of denial and can not see any point but his own and shows no respect for A or his debilities.   A saw through his father at the time and insisted we move back to my boyfriend's house ten months after we'd left it because he felt safer there than with his father.  A's father insists there is something I can do to suddenly make A well enough to live his life normally.  A is now 18 and after three years of paying only child support and no spousal support he now wants to cut us off.  We've been separated for six years and I never asked for anything for myself all that time because I knew he couldn't afford it.  Now I'll only have my $300 SSI for income and they may want to take that away because A is technically an adult and can make his own way.  What do I do now?