Munday

Beep, beep, beep...the common noise in the hum drum recovery room. The clock is moving slower than honey from the freezer. We arrived here at 6:30am and they finally took Mom back at 9am. The lights here are so bright that it would feel like day in the middle of the night. This makes it impossible for me to close my eyes for longer than a few seconds. CNN is on the tube reminding me that I should not complain because I had to get up early...a damn bridge collapsed ya know?! Don't you dare be angry, it subliminally says to me, I'll give you something to be angry about. So, silently I sit and wait for my mom to have her ECT. The sessions she had ten years ago seems to have worn off and now I am here for her since the prescription her doctor wrote for her transportation was not filled.





The last time I had to bring Mom in for this she had hit bottom. Her spirit was deflated and hurt. She kept trying to hurt herself. She didn't care about anything in this world but I was always there for her. And, the last time, I happen to be the only one left. For once she had no husband, her mom had moved away, her father was not well and I am only child so I got the job by default. I get to take her to her brain zapping sessions so that she will stop over dramatizing little things and begin to see life past depression, anger and loss. I don't lock in a lot of the memories from way back but I keep just enought of them to remind myself of how different of a mother I am going to be. Unfortunately this action I am doing now, writing, is one of the best ways to concentrate on my feeling about her troubles.





One lucky aspect is that I am not like that. I have a lot of my mother's traits but I am not a depressed, anxious rollercoaster of an individual. I have feet firmly on the ground. I have been fighting something though. I guess I am not letting out enough emotion because for over a year I have had chronic pain. The pain moves from my shoulders to my neck, my back, my hands, and the list goes on and on. I felt my shoulders tense up this moring. It was a reminder that there is some emotion here and if I don't let it out, my body will push it out. It's called TMS and I am not overcome with it all the time. Just when I need to be the strongest, I feel the pain and my body is expressing emotion because I won't.





Just like many women, my emotions run the gamet. I have no lack of cries, laughs and the in between. I just have a little more stress than my body can take. So, the way I understand it is my brain is reacting by cutting off oxygen to whatever it feels like that day. It's really annoying and it does make me want to cry. The problem is I haven't quite figured out the outlet I should be using to get this extra stress out.





I used to run until my kness were weak. That did get me through some hard times. It also got me into some flattering clothes. So lately I have been trying to get back out there and "run/walk/jog" as I call it. But, darned if the stress doesn't take me down first.





When my mom came out of her session, she was red-faced and said, "Hi angel...where's Bella?"


Bella had not come with us but she didn't remember that, she didn't even remember what hospital we were in. She thought for a minute that she had done something stupid again to land herself in the hospital. I just smiled rubbed her shoulder and caught her up so she could conjur up her own memory. She cried a little thinking about why she had to have this ECT again. Even though nothing dangerous had happened she still felt broken... and zapped.