as small as a world and as large as alone

8:01pm March 29, 2015

Meeting me Halfway to Reality

When I first came home from the hospital, I had no idea what was going on.  None.  I apparently pissed all over my friend’s couch without even noticing (and that was before I crapped all over it with full awareness and humiliation).  But even getting up to her apartment was a challenge, I kept hallucinating things in the windows, I thought everyone was looking at me pityingly, like “There’s the patient who never really goes home, they just drive her around in circles for awhile and drop her off at a replica of her friend’s home for a couple days to make her feel like she might come home, then they’ll take her right back because she can’t survive outside a hospital, been in there, what, fifty years now?!”

Have I mentioned I hate delirium?

Anyway I was hallucinating demons and thinking that my best staff, the most wonderful ones, were demons, and that my friend’s legs were going to fall off and that if we touched, it would kill both of us, and other fun things like that.  

So my friend and I collect Harry Potter wands.

And she’d gotten a holly wand, because Harry’s was made from holly.  And she knew that a lot of my hallucinations and delusions were centered around death because my dad just died, and that the symbolism of holly was all about life.  She’d accidentally gotten two instead of one, so she handed me one of them, and explained the symbolism, and told me to use it to protect myself if I saw anything weird going on.

And to my surprise later on, it worked!  It may not have been exactly what a psychiatrist would have you do, but giving me a means to fight back was exactly what I needed, in addition to (not just instead of) reminders that I was hallucinating things that weren’t real.

And having a means to fight back meant everything.  It gave me control when I had no control or rationality to fall back on.  I was so out of it for awhile that I literally don’t know what happened and what didn’t, for days at a time.  Like I can’t even piece together “This is the grain of truth, these are the hallucinations and delusions that formed around that grain of truth.”  It was all too realistic, in all five or six or seven or however many senses human beings are said to have these days.

I’m glad I’m home.

I’m glad I still have the wand. Plus my own two wands.  (One that may be ebony, another that is definitely madrone, both fit me extremely well.)

And…thanks to everyone’s determination to get me the wrong clamp, my tube just popped out a bit again and I had to do something painful and bloody to get it back in place.  Time to go back to my old ways of doing things – not the full dressing, but definitely a lot more tape.  Fuck.  If this lands me in the hospital I’m going to be mad, especially since they always blame me for things like this.  When it’s really the fact they won’t give me the right kind of clamp, and I need the right kind in order to function (too complicated to explain).

Anyway, if you ever have a friend who’s dealing with this kind of hallucinations or delusions, whether through delirium or psychosis or whatever else, you could do worse than using a combination of “This isn’t real, BUT…” and “…here’s how you can take action to protect yourself from the stuff that isn’t real.”  Wands aren’t a bad start.

26 notes