No more Oxyzepam?

I seem to have, more or less involuntarily, kicked-off from Oxyzepam, a fact that I can only see as another improvement in circumstances. I've been using Oxyzepam to fall asleep for a while now. It's pretty effective, seemingly without any of the nasty side effects that I had from the full blown sleeping tablets. A week last Thursday I noticed that I was almost through my supply so I put in a prescription renewal. However I forgot to pick up the new supply on Friday. On Friday night I thought "what the hell" and decided to cold-turkey it through the weekend.


The first night was unexpected hell. I had nasty nightmares the whole night long, the kind that it's not possible to shake off. I kept waking up and trying to distract myself, but when I fell asleep again I was right back into the nightmare, seemingly where I left off. I remember vividly in the dream fighting with someone, trying to shoot them. Eventually I put the gun in their mouth and pulled the trigger twice, but there was a cork (!) in the end of the gun and nothing happened. I managed to pull the cork out and pulled the trigger again, but this time there were no more bullets in the gun. So I ended up throwing the guy down a stairwell. From this you can conclude a) this was a horrible nightmare and b) it was bad enough that I have remembered it in some detail.


Saturday night was a little better, still nightmares but less intense - I don't remember any of them. Sunday was a bit better again, but I still woke up feeling less rested than if I'd taken the tablets. On Monday I picked the new supply up, but I decided that I'd got so far that it would be a shame to revert. So I pushed on with the cold turkey and slowly through last week I've got to the state that I'm sleeping about as well without the tablets as I was with them. That's not to say that I'm sleeping brilliantly. Without the tablets it takes me longer to get to sleep and I also seem to be waking up earlier - 6am on the nail every morning for the last week. But there's a sense of achievement of now being essentially drug-free. 


The benefits of EMDR continue to accumulate. I still feel the same sense of grief that I felt before, but now I don't seem to be suffering from it quite as much. The lightness of soul continues to develop (hopefully not into lightness of head!). I was supposed to have a 3rd session today but in the end we have been reviewing progress and planning the next session, next week. There are still issues to confront, for instance the imminent arrival of Kay's birthday, and still a lot of ground to cover. But I have the feeling that I've seen the worst of the pain of grief.


My biggest concern is now Marion. Of course, it would be incorrect of me to write about her, so there's little I can say. What I can say is that I'm worried because she's still losing weight and is skinnier than ever. But she remains a tough cookie and is fully operational - now outside mowing the grass in +30 degrees. And she's taking action to deal with her feeling, which is reassuring. I just hope that she gains some strength before holiday.

Lighter Soul

I'm struggling to know quite how to start this entry. What I want to say is that I think that the EMDR treatment is working, that I feel noticeably lighter of soul, still swimming but that I've managed to cast off the waterlogged clothes that were dragging me down. The reason that I'm struggling to know how to start is that I feel a strong need to qualify this optimism. And this puzzles me: why do I feel such a need to qualify a positive message? I guess I'll have to think about that some more. 

Back to the EMDR: the second treatment was hard, but not as hard as the first. After the first I had to lie down on the bed for a few hours, after the second I only needed a few beers and an evening sitting quietly in the garden. I got the beers but not the quiet evening as Marion's family turned up. In the days after, I started to notice a real difference in how I felt. It's difficult to describe, the best description is indeed "lighter of soul". The grief is still there but it's not as dominant as it was. This is very noticeable, so noticeable in fact that at the weekend I decided to try out just how far it goes. So I went into Kay's bedroom and nosed around a bit - something I couldn't have done a month ago. I lasted about five minutes and didn't feel pushed to my limit. An achievement.

But perhaps the biggest change that I've noticed is that I feel closer to Kay. We're on the edge of what I can say on the blog, but I now have a very strong feeling that Kay is here, with me. It's so difficult to describe, but it is a physical feeling. I think that I've mentioned it before, that I feel...  ...something in the rear right quarter of my head. It feels like someone's hand pressing very lightly on my skull above and behind my right ear. I've noticed that after the EMDR, as I have begun to feel lighter of soul, this feeling has become more...  ...focused, is the only word I can find. And it really does feel like the essence of Kay. And it really does feel like she's injecting comments into my head. Eg, this morning I forgot to lock up the house properly, after having been so instructed by Marion. I was just down the road when I remembered and I turned round and went back. After I'd corrected my mistake, I quite clearly 'heard' Kay say, "Silly Daddy", though the sense is not of hearing.    


Last Sunday was Father's Day and I have to admit that I didn't miss Kay. Why not? Because I had the feeling that she was there, right there with me/us. And when I was in her bedroom at the weekend I realized that Kay likes that fact that it's kept operational. Curtains open, curtains closed, etc. Today, when I was locking up the house for the second time I walked past her bedroom and had the sense that the reason why Kay likes her bedroom as it is, is that she likes her ties to our lives and that she's in a new situation and these ties with us and with her things give her stability and reassurance. 


So, either the EMDR is being successful and my lighter soul is more accessible to Kay, or EMDR has driven me completely nuts and I'm now certifiably barking-mad. Either way, I'm happier than I was.

Chicken

I have to own up to the fact that I chickened out of the 2nd EMDR treatment last week. I really didn't feel up it. I discussed my feeling with the psychologist who in the end agreed with me. She said that normally she'd push on, EMDR works best if it is applied in a regular, routine way. But it was clear to her that I hadn't yet recovered enough to begin a second treatment. 

I felt rather guilty. I hate admitting to this kind of weakness, but I also felt that I'd been pushed to the absolute limit in the first EMDR session and that I hadn't sufficiently recovered to do it again. I noticed in the week or so after the EMDR that I had less access to memories of Kay, like in the period after her death. This led me to thinking that my subconscious was putting up protective barriers again, which would be indicative of some kind of traumatic reaction to the EMDR. And I could well believe that, the experience was so incredibly intense.

Another consequence of this was that I couldn't think of a new seed memory with which to start the second EMDR. The idea of EMDR is that one picks a traumatic or painful memory and faces it down in various ways. Because my mind seemed to be closed to these kinds of memories of Kay, I couldn't think of anywhere to start.

Still, the session with the psychologist was a help of itself. However she said that we will continue with EMDR in the next session, which is tomorrow (!). This time I feel more ready and able to face it and I have a new seed memory in mind. So I guess that there's no way out this time. I'm dreading it.  

The 6 Billion Dollar Man

Some years ago a colleague accused me of being a perfectionist. I laughed. "Me?", I said, "I'm the least likely perfectionist on the planet", and thereby more or less automatically confirmed the allegation. And I guess that there is some truth to it. I recognize that I tend to set high standards at the office. I don't like work that is poorly presented or poorly finished. I don't like badly written text. Things should be ship-shape and Bristol fashion, as far as reasonably possible.

Elsewhere, I don't like things that don't work properly. If something is designed to do a job, then it should do that job properly. If it has features, then those features should work. I tend to get irritated with a thing even if features ancillary to its main purpose don't work properly. If something doesn't work, then throw it away and get one that does work. I hate messing around repairing things that are clearly never going to work again properly. Bodging a repair to get something partially working I find irritating, though sometimes necessary. On the other hand, if it's possible to repair that thing and restore it to fully working condition, that's fine. Satisfying, even.

This attitude extends even to my view of my own body. During my second year at University I had a knee operation. There was a suspicion that I had torn a cartilage. I must admit that I hated the idea that after the operation my knee would not be fully functional, that at the young age of 19 my skiing days would be over before they had even begun. In the event they couldn't find anything wrong with my knee. 

These were pre-endoscope days when a knee operation involved a three inch cut and 6 weeks in a plaster cast. When my leg came out of the cast it looked like it had spent 6 months in Ethiopia, my muscle tone had completely vanished. Bearing in mind that I was/am a cyclist and had/have well developed thigh muscles, this was a huge shock. I became determined to restore my muscle tone as fast as possible. I have to say that I became rather obsessed. The moment that I was allowed back on my bike I was off into the Pennines, hill climbing. With the help of the fantastic University physiotherapist I restored my muscle tone. But it came at the expense of my studies - I failed my 2nd year and had to re-sit my exams at the end of the summer holidays. Still, the next time that I saw the surgeon he remarked that he could see no difference between my left and right legs and that that was a remarkable achievement. 

I guess that I have more or less zero tolerance of imperfection when it comes to these kinds of things (but I'm not a perfectionist, right?). I like to think that all things can achieve a reasonable state of order or can be returned to that state with the right kind of effort and determination. I always reckoned that Steve Austin, The 6 Million Dollar Man, got a fair deal after his X-plane crashed. Sure, he lost two legs, an arm and an eye. But they were replaced with Bionic components that made him faster, stronger and just plain better than before. I think if I ever lost a leg or an eye or became disabled in some way I would find it extremely difficult to accept the resultant limits. I would hate the idea that I'd become... less.

And yet, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that that is actually exactly what has happened to me. I have lost a piece of my soul. My heart is broken. I am mentally scarred, a scar that is never, ever going to go away. There are things I will never do again, things that I can never do again even if I wanted to. I am broken and although I'm still functional, I will remain broken and irreparable forever. 

This is very very difficult to accept. I look at my life and wonder what has become of it. Ten years ago everything looked perfect, was perfect. I had a great family, money, prospects, ideas, energy. The future was an exciting, undiscovered country waiting to be explored from an established, solid base. Ten years later I feel battered and crushed. Amongst other things, my family has lost a child. We have been through hell and we don't know if we have come out the other side yet. In fact, we've lost the ability to distinguish between Hell and Life. Life, it seems, is Hell. And I'm afraid that I'm going to spend the rest of my life living in it.

When I look at myself I see some of the damage and scars that I carry and I know that there are some things that cannot be fixed, some kinds of order that cannot be restored, some things lost that can never be replaced. Not even if I was the 6 Billion Dollar Man. 
   

EMDR

Some weeks ago I went through (another) moment of mental crisis, but one that was a little different from the difficult moments of grief that I've had previously. The 'crisis' came to a head while I was out cycling, something which normally relaxes me. But during this ride, as my mind flicked from one problem to another, I started getting more and more wound up. I felt like circumstances were conspiring to box me in, giving me no room for maneuver. I started to feel emotionally claustrophobic. It seemed that the only decisions that were available to me were dramatic ones, decisions that would result in cataclysmic change. 

It was a hard moment and, in the days that followed, I realized that I really have no coping strategy for these circumstances. To return to an analogy, I felt that I was/am still lost at sea, struggling just to keep my nose above water. I realized that it was time that I learned to swim, that I did something to try and do more than merely survive the grief and it's consequences. I had in mind trying something like "Mindfulness" training. 

I discussed this with the Homeopath and she recommended going to see a local psychologist who also happens to do Mindfulness training. So in the last few weeks I have been to see this lady a couple of times. The first two sessions were "orientation", telling her Kay's story, etc. I have avoided going see 'new' people since Kay's death simply because the emotional cost of telling Kay's story to a stranger is so high. It took a huge amount of emotional energy to tell her about Kay and everything else and I came out of both of these sessions completely exhausted.


At the end of the second session the psychologist told me that she had concluded that I could benefit from Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) treatment. We then made a series of appointments for the treatment, the first of which was last Monday lunchtime. EMDR involves facing one's most painful memories of an event and, effectively, rubbing one's nose in it until it's not painful anymore. This is obviously merely my explanation of the experience of having EMDR, the link gives a more accurate description.

Before the first EMDR treatment I really had no idea what it would involve or how difficult/easy it would be. I tend to naturally take a cynical view of this kind of thing - I mean, how can simply listening to a "ticking" sound alternating between one's left and right ear have any effect on one's emotional balance? Thus I expected the treatment to be 'superficial', shall we say?

In the event it was anything but superficial. It was a very hard, harrowing experience that left me feeling emotionally bankrupt for days afterward. I confronted the hardest and most painful memory of Kay's last days and had to repeatedly describe how I felt and what I remembered. I had to follow where these thoughts took me and I every now and again I had to return to the root memory and repeat the process. And all the while listening to the ticking sound in my ears. I cannot begin to describe how extremely hard this was, words do not suffice. The treatment lasted 90 minutes, but it felt like no more than 15 of the worst minutes that you can imagine. I came out of it completely exhausted and disoriented, so much so that I simply went home, lay on the bed and fell asleep.

The effects of the treatment lasted for days. I felt flattened, unable to emotionally respond to people and events around me. I think that it took about 3 days before my feelings started to return to normal again. (And in these three days I had to make four presentations to Venture Capitalists, which added another dimension of challenge to the whole thing).

The effect of the treatment is difficult to determine. This particular memory of Kay no longer carries the emotional overload that it previously had, which is the primary goal of the exercise and a good thing. However, EMDR is supposed to also "create more emotional space" in one's mind and result one's head being a more peaceful place. I can't say that I have noticed this effect. But then I suspect that there are so many painful memories and there's so much going on in my head that it's premature to expect a broader improvement in my state of mind.

Tomorrow I have the second treatment and, to be honest, this time I'm scared stiff by the idea. I know what is coming and just how hard it is and just how much I'm going to suffer during the treatment and how bad I'm going to feel in the days after. I almost feel like begging the psychologist to do something else. I'd rather go back and repeat the cancer treatment that I had on my back a couple of months ago, where they burned away my skin. That would be preferable to the mental pain that EMDR evoked. But I also suppose that this is a prime example of "no pain, no gain".

Bring it on.