Sub Prime Emotional Debt

I haven’t written anything in days about my own perceptions of Kay’s illness. The reason is that it’s really all too awful to attempt to describe. But at the same time I’m kind of getting so used to the awfulness that it’s beginning to seem like normality. Take Kay’s epileptic attack yesterday: when I saw the attack starting I surely felt the same rush of panic that had Marion bouncing off the walls, but it was gone in a second and left me able to think about what to do, so I stepped in to Kay’s side and started talking to her.


“Think” in this context is a relative term. My mind is operating at about 50% or less of its normal capacity. Don’t ask me to solve any complex problems at the moment or think about anything in any great level of detail. Most of my “thinking” is merely the execution of standard programs that have been running for a while. I’ll run into problems if (work) circumstances change and I have to be creative. A small example of this is that I have been writing my presentation for the Bits & Chips conference later this week and it’s an extremely difficult and slow process to string my thoughts together creatively to produce a story that runs consistently across 30 slides. That, and to ensure that the story is a sensible, presentable piece of work.

After the attack I’d expected to feel shock or some kind of recoil from a terrible incident. But I didn’t feel very much actually. Yes, it was frightening. Yes, it was a big shock. Yes, etc, etc. But I’d expected to feel tears or anger or relief or anything, really. I suppose I’m becoming inured to the whole experience.

As I mentioned before, my approach to dealing with the emotional content of this situation is to push the emotions to one side for later digestion, at a moment when I feel stronger and more able to cope with their intensity. In the beginning it was very hard to do this, all the difficult, meaningless questions kept thrusting themselves to the fore. But it’s been a while since I had to exercise maximum mental discipline to keep these things in their box. Now it seems that I have reached a state where I don’t have to work at all, all the nasty strong emotions now seem to automatically walk to the box and jump in and close the lid behind them. I almost feel resentful, there’s no sense of achievement, of having mastered the situation. And as a result I’m starting to wonder about my own, well, sanity. But “sanity” is not the right word, “desensitization” (gosh the spelling checker accepted that first time!) I suppose is a better word. But that’s not it either.

At the beginning of Kay’s sickness my first reaction, based on our experience last time, was that we/I needed professional mental help and support. But now another part of my mind feels pretty much like I’ve mastered the situation in a strange way and that I/we don’t really need mental support anymore. It was just a question of adjusting and the adjustment has been successfully made. High Five! All that stuff in the box will either stay there or will fade away with time, won’t it? It matters not.

But another part of my mind is waving its arms, trying to get my attention to tell me that that isn’t necessarily true, that desensitization is probably not a good thing on the long run and that I/we probably need mental support now more than ever. Well, maybe. But frankly I’m too busy worrying about Kay and trying to get everything else done as well to expend effort on the subject. And the “High Five” view is more constructive, convenient and useful in the current circumstances. It allows me to function better than otherwise. Still, as I write this I have a strange ‘vacuum’ feeling in my stomach, a sort of worry that I’m clocking up a massive invisible debt that will have to be paid back later, with interest. And as we have all learned in the last year, debt is a bad thing.

Hey, here’s an idea. Maybe I can package up all this debt and sell it to the bankers? They buy anything without asking questions so it should be easy to pass on to them a load of sub-prime emotional debt.