Continuation

Sorry for the delay. Busy week.

So, we are up to last Wednesday evening. We all had a good time. Apparently.

Our guests left, and I did a little cleaning up. I was so tired, I lay down for a short nap. Now I get a little fuzzy on the timeframe here.

Around seven, L. woke me up and said he was taking Toots back to Children's Hospital. She was anxious to go.

A short time later (7:30?) he woke me up again and said that Toots had just told him she went into his bathroom and took 22 Wellbutrin. (Remember what I said in the previous post, and don't be judgmental that we left meds in the medicine cabinet.)

Quiet panic ensues.

Toots is sitting in the front seat of L's car, not too responsive but awake, with clammy skin. I sit with her while L. calls Children's Hospital, and is told to take her immediately to Big Hospital ER. We determine that, since he has to work in the morning, I'll be the one to stay at the ER with her overnight. He and Toots take off for Big Hospital. I throw a few things in my tote bag,make sure The Ninja is all right (good thing he's old enough to stay by himself), and head out to Big Hospital.

When I get into the ER, Toots has had blood drawn and been given activated charcoal to absorb the medication. She has already thrown up and defecated all over the room, and the smell is something else. The staff are cleaning up her and the room. After they finish, L. leaves and I take over. Because it's a suicide attempt, Toots is also on one-to-one staffing. The aide and I sit with her, and she throws up three more times and uses the bedpan twice, with accidents. I'm glad it's not my job to clean things up here. They are also repeating EKGs periodically, as her first EKG showed QT prolongation (an abnormal heart rhythm).

Toots isn't talkative, but she does say a few things over the course of the evening. She tells me and L. that she took the pills because, during the water fight, her brother aimed the hose at her private parts and it made her recollect being raped at the age of four. She also tells me later that she didn't take Wellbutrin, she took some round tan pills, that were in a white bottle with a white cap with a white and blue label. When I convey this to L., he looks in his medicine cabinet and finds two supplements that meet that description. The next day, when he comes back to the hospital,he brings the supplement bottles, and she says they're not the right ones. Later, we find another bottle, his blood pressure medication, that meets her description but the pills are reddish-tan and long caplets rather than round. She says those aren't it either. So, we still don't know and probably will never know what she took.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Around one a.m., they take her up to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. From there, it's a bit of a blur. The nurses get her into bed, re-hook up the hydrating IV and the monitors, caution me that she's to have nothing by mouth. We spend the rest of the night with the one-to-one aide, watching TV, having EKGs done periodically, having her vitals taken, etc. Toots doesn't vomit anymore, hallelujah, but she does have more bedpan accidents. Toots finally gets a few hours of sleep. I lie down on the pull-out chair, but don't fall asleep.

Around 6 a.m, I go down to the Starbucks in the lobby for a large coffee. At some point, I meet with the attending doctor and the residents, who all look about Toots' age, and tell them about her extensive psychiatric history, self-harming, current inpatient status at Children's Hospital, etc. etc. They are sympathetic. I am told that, because of the circumstances, we are going to have a psychiatric consult and a social work consult. Not that they're really necessary, since she is an inpatient receiving psychiatric and therapeutic care.

L. goes into work, but around noon he takes the rest of the day off, and comes back to the hospital. I go home exhausted and sleep for hours. L. stays, and meets with a child psychiatrist and social worker. We had kept in contact with the nursing supervisors at Children's Hospital, and the Big Hospital staff talk to them also. The doctors decide that they will keep her for observation until the evening, and arrange ambulance transportation for her back to Children's Hospital (needs to be an ambulance, since it's a hospital-to-hospital transfer). And that's what happens, around 7:30 p.m., just about 24 hours after the incident.

Although L. spoke with Toots' psychiatrist at Children's, we didn't hear from Toots for about 48 hours. Turns out she was sleeping most of that time.

Since then, she hasn't wanted to talk much with us about what happened. Can't say I blame her. I know she is discussing things with her therapist.

When I went to visit her on Sunday afternoon, she said, "Mommy, I want to come home." I ventured to remind her that on her last visit home, we'd had a significant problem. She said, "Oh, yeah, right."

I guess we are never going to be able to think that she's really doing "better."

After I typed that line, The Ninja came into the room and said that he was going over to his friend's house in the next block. I told him to put on sunscreen before he left. I got all kinds of BS about how he was only going to be outside for two minutes. When I told him to just do it, I got more flak about how I didn't tell him to put on sunscreen on July 4th. I said I wasn't perfect and not always perfectly consistent in my behavior. I got more flak.

I wasn't like this as an adolescent. I'm sure I wasn't. I'm so tired of it. And he's only fourteen.

By the way

We have started The Ninja back seeing the therapist he worked with last year.

Later

I heard The Ninja on the phone with Friend (aka partner in crime) from last week. You'll remember that our families made different choices. The friend is undergoing restrictions, but apparently nowhere near as severe as the ones we have imposed.

After his call ended, Ninja complained that Friend stole more stuff than he did, but had a lesser punishment. I reminded Ninja that, before the shopping spree, he had already ripped us off for a substantial amount of money buying songs on iTunes. He turned away to go back to his room, and all I heard was "Unfair".

Undifferentiated

I have just been seething with undifferentiated anger since Sunday morning. Don't want to go into what set it off. I'm upset about certain things I've never received help with, that I've done all by myself for many years, to the point where I've felt pretty much like a single parent.

I know that falls under the heading of "problems of the middle class". I'm sitting at a computer in my home, writing this. We have a decent house in a decent neighborhood. We have money in the bank and food in the refrigerator. I know I have an easier life than a large percentage of the world. And it's not that I'm not grateful for these blessings. I'm just mad at certain people who have been perfectly happy to let someone else take the lead and do all the work on certain issues.

Quiet

We haven't spoken to Toots since my shortened visit on Friday. Very unusual for her not to call us. I spoke with the social worker at the hospital yesterday, and SW told me she wasn't interested in talking to us. Maybe we'll call her this evening.

Short visit

Toots didn't like the Aveeno skin lotion I brought her last weekend, and she requested baby lotion. She didn't like the smell of the Aveeno. Why did I accede to her request? Because she gets very dry skin in winter, and needs to be using lotion. Now that she's decided against the Aveeno, she'd rather eat nails than use it. So I brought her baby lotion. After that, my visit this afternoon didn't go well. You see, when Lew was on the phone with her the other night, and she was talking about having assaulted a staff person, he said (as we have done before), "Toots, I can't continue this conversation when you're talking about having beaten someone up. Love ya, honey, good night." And hung up. Note that he did not slam the phone down abruptly. Today, Toots started in on how she feels very insulted and disrespected by that action of his. I tried to explain to her that we cannot accept her assaulting staff, and that it is in no way OK. She said that it wasn't her fault (it never is), she got mad when they tried to get into her room, and "I just blacked out and didn't know what I was doing. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped." It was further excused by the fact that she hasn't done anything like that in years. I corrected her memory; it's been just over a year since she assaulted a police officer. She said, "Well, many months." In the discussion somewhere was, "I'm not stupid, I'm not a little kid, don't you think I know better, I apologized." Sorry, Toots, I don't buy that. Up till now, you've gotten a bye because you're a psychiatric patient. In the outside world, if you assault someone, you will be arrested and go to jail. Her reaction, of course? "Well, I won't do that!" Famous last words. How many times has she said "I know how to behave, I'll just do it", and then gone blithely on to do exactly the opposite. Anyway, to make a long story short, I left 25 minutes into an hour-long visiting period.

Leaves me speechless

Visited Toots today at the hospital. It was a pretty quiet visit because she'd just gotten out of bed (at 3 pm). We were sitting in the unit dining room, and she mentioned that another girl had flipped all the tables and chairs in the room last night. Toots went on to describe how throwing furniture is "fun" because you get to express your feelings and "you get lots of attention from the staff". I said, "Toots, don't forget that, if you get a job, you wouldn't be able to do that if you got upset". She laid into me about how I "always hassle her". "I KNOW I wouldn't be able to throw furniture! Why do you always have to say the same things!" Etc., etc.

Again, nothing I haven't heard a thousand times before.

She's supposed to be in eleventh grade. We should be looking into colleges and shopping for a prom dress. Instead, she's settled into an institutionalized life of sleeping, eating, and watching TV. I fear she will never go back to school at this point. If she doesn't want to, the law says we can't force her.

I know that she is who she is, but it still makes me very sad.

What passes for normal

Just got off the phone with Toots. She said that she went to "school" at the hospital today, for the first time since she's been there this round. She didn't do her work in the classroom for some reason; she went back to her room on the unit and did it there. The teacher did not award her the points she was supposed to have earned.

"So", she said matter-of-factly, "I threw furniture."

Keeping Fingers Crossed

Yesterday afternoon, Toots called up complaining that she didn't have a backpack to start school with. I was not about to run out, buy a new one, and take it to the residence. After phone calls back and forth, my husband decided he would lend her his bag for the day; he stopped at the residence after work and dropped it off. Last evening, I found her pink backpack from last spring, reasonably in sight in her room. It looks almost new. Lew took it with him this morning, and will drop it off to her tonight.

The kicker is that, for some unknown reason, Toots became angry with her staff and housemates last night, and would barely speak when Lew stopped at the house. She did say that she was thinking about whether she would cooperate in going to school this morning, and she hadn't decided if she would or not.

Well, it's 10 am, and I haven't heard from anyone at the house. I HOPE that means she got up, got dressed, and got on the bus. And I HOPE she makes it through the day. I'm not a 12-stepper, but the "one day at a time" principle really applies here.