Friday, September 24, 2010

The More Things Change... PT II

A week goes by after the party. I go to work on Monday morning and am only there for an hour when the phone rings. It is eldest daughter, crying. Could I come pick her up from her work. I ask what happened and all I get is... I need to go and they don't want me to drive.

Fearing she has been fired, or who-knows-what, I leave my job and rush over to pick her up. She has been sobbing. Tells me that she quit taking her medication two weeks before and now is bottoming out.

Really? REALLY? WTF?

She says the doctor told her he would try her on a new medication in September as she didn't like the side effects of the one she was on... and she just decided to take matters into her own hands and go off the medication herself because "she wanted to see if she could be like everyone else". Oh.No.You.Didn't.

I tried to explain to her that just as I have to stay on medication and/or will always have to watch what I eat because of my body not making what it needs, causing diabetes, she will always have to be on something because her brain doesn't make enough of the chemicals it needs to keep her stable mentally. She admits this is probably true, but she did it anyway and then she got scared and took two doses of the old med.

We went to my house and tried to call her doctor. Several hours later we got a response and they got her into see him - the next evening. So, for the rest of that day, night, and all the next day I tried to keep her calm and took care of her as well as I could. We went to her place and got her things and she had calmed down enough she could drive so we picked up her car and took it to her apartment. We made arrangements for her son to stay with his dad and made the best of it.

The next day the doctor said he couldn't start her on the new medication because she'd taken those two doses. If she hadn't, then he could have. As it was, she'd have to be off the old one completely for two full weeks before starting the new one. He said she was safe to go home alone and then he gave her some Xanax to help her get by for those two weeks.

It didn't work.