Part 1. Fleeing the city to live with mice
My time away in the country just got worse and worse by the minute. I couldn’t get rid of the mice in the caravan which would keep me awake all night. My friend and I carried a mattress down from her house one night and I slept in the annex, a room adjoining the caravan, but the little shits were in there as well. They kept running through the room all night. I was so exhausted I couldn’t even get up. Continue reading “Reality makes you mad”
I was discharged from PAPU, the four-bed, short stay psychiatric unit in the public hospital, two days ago. In total they gave me six days there, which is a lot longer than they usually give me, though still not enough. I was terrified I would be set up for more rejection when the private hospital sent me back to the public system. Usually the public hospitals just keep me overnight in the emergency department and send me home the next day, or give me a maximum of 48 hours.
During my fifth day there, I saw Dr Michael. He told me that management was putting pressure on them to discharge me.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I would tell the doctors. “I didn’t even want to be here. I wanted to stay at Delmont.” But Delmont wouldn’t take me back.
Michael told me that not talking made it hard for me to participate in the groups in private hospitals, which was total bullshit as there is not much interaction in the groups anyway.
“People need to stop discriminating against me,” I told him. “You don’t tell someone who doesn’t hear they can’t have a hospital stay. I’m fucking sick of it. Both public and private. There is ways around it like people who are deaf or blind.”
Continue reading “Self-esteem and standing on the edge of loss, again”
“You build me up, you break me down. My heart it pounds, yeah you got me. With my hands up, you got me now, you got that sound, yeah you got me.” Ke$ha – TiK ToK
It is the first time I’ve been able to blog since my last post a week or so ago. It’s felt like the longest week of my life. I feel like I could write a whole book on this week alone. The disturbing saga continues, without resolution, like a piano with endless keys which just get lower and lower.
The psych ward only gave me two nights, even though I asked for longer. They wanted to dump me in a facility called PARC, a non-clinical mental health facility, which people stay in for a week as a “step down” from hospital, or a “step up” from home to prevent a hospital admission. But there were questions about my medical stability. I was barely eating and the hospital wanted to do a blood sugar level test which involves pricking your finger but I was scared of the test so refused it. The nurses said they’d come back in half an hour. I then got in the shower when they came to the door to avoid getting the test done. I was so traumatised in general- by life, by the way they just wanted me out when I was acutely unwell- that I became mute. I am still speculating on what is causing my muteness, which I will discuss later, but whatever it was, I just couldn’t will myself to speak. The day of my discharge one of the doctors came in and told me PARC wouldn’t take me if I wouldn’t speak. I felt like she thought I was being manipulative and could blackmail me into talking. I brought up The Shutdown Dissociation Scale research paper on my phone and showed it to her. One of the symptoms is muteness. There is some more great information about the different responses to trauma on this page.
“We don’t follow that here,” the doctor said.
She said if I didn’t go to PARC they’d just be sending me home. I couldn’t believe it.
“So you’re just going to send me home in this state?” I wrote to her, with gestures of disbelief. “This is discrimination against people with disabilities.”
Becoming non-verbal is common in autism when we become overwhelmed, as is shown in the series Heartbreak High, with one of the autistic characters, Quinni, becoming mute for a while after her horrible girlfriend put her through hell.
“I’ll get your discharge papers ready,” the doctor told me. “Have a good day!” Continue reading “Negligent hospitals, mute, trauma, autistic burn out and the fight for freedom”
So I begin the next chapter of my disturbing saga. I’ve been thinking lately I just cannot get better in this city. I stopped having all those trippy experiences at night, but I still felt like rubbish the next day. I was depressed, I had no motivation to do anything and I felt like I was being crushed by this heavy cloud which wanted to release rain but couldn’t. I wondered whether 5G was impacting my sleep and health. I wanted to get as far away from civilisation as I could get, so I started looking for houses to rent in the country, and thought about going back to the farm I did a working holiday at a few years ago. I stayed in a church, a beautiful piece of architecture, which the owners had build at the bottom of their property. Other people would book it for functions, though, such as the ayahuasca ceremony I wrote about here. There is no where else on the property I can stay while other people are using the church. I thought about just booking the church permanently and living there (it’s only $25 a night, and $50 weekends and is completely self-contained), but I didn’t want to “hog” the church and prevent the ayahuasca group from having ceremonies there. So I went to message the leader on Facebook to ask if he was still running ceremonies at the farm. I then noticed he hadn’t posted anything for a while and I wasn’t sure if he was still using Facebook. I then searched his organisation on Google to find a contact number. Their website had disappeared, but what I did find was this article. I was shocked to learn a man, who I think I actually knew, had died at one of the ceremonies. The leader is now facing criminal charges for negligent manslaughter because they didn’t call an ambulance when he became extremely unwell. Continue reading “A shocking discovery”
It’s been another week from hell. My period finally came, which was a relief as I get terrible PMS. I was getting migraines all the time, felt breathless and weak, and had to cancel things I had on. There was one night I kept having shitty, fucked up dreams as well. In one I was being raped. Then in the dream I was left with stroke-like symptoms, slurred speech, a drooped face, and inability to walk. My dad called an ambulance in the dream but the healthcare system was so bloody negligent they wouldn’t send one, which is something I have sadly experienced in my waking life. No one would see how bad I was. In my dream my glasses came off and disintegrated and my mouth was full of metal bits. I tried to spit them out but I swallowed some. I woke up. Then when I finally managed to fall back to sleep again I had another nightmare. This time I dreamt that someone knocked on my front door at night. My dad went to open it but I told him not to. Continue reading “Back in the psych ward: trigger warning, animal cruelty”
In the autistic community we congratulate people when they get their diagnosis. Autism is now seen as a neurodivergence, a difference in the way our brains work, rather than a pathology. But there are many times I wish I was not autistic. There are times when it really does feel like a curse, far from something to be celebrated. There are times when, if I could take it away, I would. It is no fun being this severely autistic in this world. Continue reading “Sleeping beauty: overdose”
hsphaven 