it’s all coming back to me and i’m about to cry.

Did you see the Oprah show yesterday on the seven year old girl with schizophrenia? Lisa, aka Chitown Girl, told me about it this morning and I just checked out the link. Oh my God. Reading that brief synopsis on the site brought back a rush of feelings — the violence that family experiences, the fact that they can’t have either of their two kids in the same room, the urge of the professionals to send their daughter to a residential facility, the multiple hospitalizations in the psych ward, the high doses of powerful medications. Oh my God. I’m about to cry.

The parents are depressed and looking for ways out. It’s strained their marriage and the parenting of their other child. It’s also  changed their lifestyle — no knives or sharp objects in the house.

I can remember all of it. To this day, there are vestiges of that former lifestyle. E-Niner still only has a bed and “crash pad” in his bedroom. We were using it as a “safe room” for violent tantrums. We have slowly allowed hard toys back in our home. For months there, we only had fabric toys in the house. It’s amazing how a toy truck or even a bag of pancake mix can become a dangerous projectile.

I used to be meticulous about putting away things that I had left out for the same reason — car keys, cell phones, pencils, all of the stuff you would normally find “out” would have to be put away immediately. You’d never know when a psychological break would occur.

Did that really happen to us, too? And how were we so lucky to have escaped that awful, dreadful life? It’s almost as if that time was a dream, and save for my blog entries, I’ve blocked out so much of that dark, depressing, anxiety laden, scabby time.

I can’t remember the last time E-Niner told me I wasn’t me but a character in his fantasy world or the last time he asked me to call him something other than his given name. Though I guess there was that episode a few weeks ago where the numeral “ones” were telling him to “be careful.” But that’s it. In six months, that’s been the extent of it. After nearly daily outbursts for roughly two years, only one minor episode.

I praise the Lord that we are no longer living that nightmare. And I wish peace and healing to the family on the Oprah show yesterday.