Tantrums and Resolutions

On Monday, I awoke in complete combat mode.  Everything and everyone was wrong and against me.  For those who don't know, I have a diagnosis of severe depression and severe anxiety, due to childhood emotional abuse from my Vietnam Vet, PTSD suffering father, and I am currently disabled due to it.  Some mornings I wake up with almost no control over my emotions, but I can usually talk myself out of them.  On Monday, I couldn't.

I needed to get both kids to school.  Brendan wanted to go into the city to do lawyering stuff, which is vital to his career at this point; he needs to get all the practical experience he can.  I had to go to treatment.  That evening, the kids were performing in their school production.  For me, this is an anxiety-inducing day.  I didn't manage my anxiety well, so throwing a huge tantrum seemed like a great idea at the time.

After much bad behaviour on my part, I decided that I wasn't doing treatments anymore.  I deal with a lot on being there for Brendan and the kids.  I am not a busy mom by any stretch of the definition, but my illnesses make some normal, everyday activities extremely hard for me to deal with.  Now I have a new, scarier diagnosis to deal with on top of that.

The only thing I seemed to have any control over was my treatments.  Since I could control that, it was gone.  I even went so far as to do a search to see what would happen if I didn't do any treatments anymore.  Not good news -- if you treat my condition early, you can almost force a remission.  The later in the condition you treat it, the worse the prognosis.  Yeah, prognosis... it can lead to death.  I am still in the very early stages.  Treatment can and will make a real difference to my quality of life.  Now the question is: how do you eat crow with any sort of dignity?

The answer is you can't.  I didn't go to treatment on Monday because I was being petulant.  I picked the kids up from school and I had a long talk in the car with them.  I apologised to both of them and explained some things that I finally realised.  Thankfully, my kids are forgiving and loving because they both forgave me.  I even ended up at the school production and had a great time.

So what was behind all this.  Fear and nothing more.  I am freaking scared.  The more I read, the more scared I get.  I did a lot of research on Sunday night before bed.  I woke up after having processed all that new information.  My reaction was to freak the eff out and make sure everyone around me know that I wasn't happy with anything.

Advanced stages of this condition are scary and gross.  Tumours can erupt from the skin, and they can ulcerate.  Once you get MF, you have a 50% chance of it progressing to the later stages and all the scary stuff happens.  However, I have a 50% chance that it will not progress.  It will never be more than what it is now.  I like those odds.  I will take those odds, and I am betting that it won't progress.  On waking on Monday, I couldn't and didn't see the positive side, and I was terrified.

I went to my treatment on Wednesday, and I will go again on Friday.  I will go again next week too.  There are things worse than having a tantrum because you are scared.  Treatments can help keep those things at bay.