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.
