74,000 Miles, going nowhere fast

The silence has continued, punctuated by a case of vertigo.  Last Tuesday I was eating lunch and felt myself becoming more and more dizzy and nauseous as the meal went on.  I began to suspect food poisoning, and left the office early to hopefully sleep it off.  When I awoke I wasn't nauseous any longer but the dizzyness persisted.  I forced myself to go to a work-related meeting, but I couldn't concentrate and felt more and more out of sorts.  Again, I figured I would sleep it off and all would be well.  On Wednesday morning I forced myself to go to work, but my head was buzzing all morning.  I finally went to the urgent care clinic around lunchtime, where I was swiftly diagnosed with vertigo.  The doctor's instructions were to drink lots of fluids and move as little as possible until I felt better.

For the next two days that's just what I did.  I stayed home, in a quiet house all by myself, as my wife and stepdaughter were away.  I slept a lot.  When I did have to get up I moved very slowly.  And, of course, I had far too much time to think about my job, my life, my kids, and my future.  The more I thought, the worse I felt; the worse I felt, the more I thought, and so on.  I forced myself to go to work on Friday morning just to be out of the house, but I was still too dizzy to be of any use, so I left around noon.  I got home, took a nap and, mercifully, woke up to find that I was no longer dizzy.  And that's when things really took a bad turn. 

In my moment of clarity the silence, loneliness, and isolation, piled on top of my career frustrations, my anger about my situation with my kids, my emptiness at losing my dad, and my general feelings of disappointment with my life, all came crashing down on me.  I sat on the couch in the dark and just felt the weight of my circumstances.  How in the world could I ever put the pieces of my life back together?  Where would I even begin?  I just didn't see any possible way forward for myself.  Though I didn't contemplate ending my life I did find myself wondering how I could go on living.

My wife called to talk to me, but I was too upset and angry to carry on a decent conversation with her, and I lashed out at her attempts to try to offer me any suggestions.  She told me that I should go to the hospital and check into the ER for an evaluation.  I decided to go to sleep and see if one more sunrise would cure my problems.  Sadly, it didn't, and I woke up this morning feeling every bit as freaked out as I did last night.  I finally decided that I need to find out just how bad off I was, so I drove to the local ER.

After waiting more than two hours (what if I had actually been suicidal?) I got a chance to talk to a counselor, who went over my options with me and told me that, if I so desired, I could be admitted to a locked psych ward, but that I would be surrounded by low functioning people, many of whom were psychotic, most of whom had tried to kill themselves in recent days, and all of whom (including me) would be monitored 24-7.  My other options would be a referral to a partial hospitalization program (PHP), which would consist of several consecutive all-day therapy sessions and an appointment with a psychiatrist, or to just ramp up visits with my current therapist and try to get an appointment with a psychiatrist, which could take a month.

I spent the rest of the day in a reverie of sorts, not speaking to or seeing other humans, with the exception of a brief phone call to my kids. Sitting around like this made me increasingly more depressed, but I simply lacked the motivation or self-confidence to do anything else. I have lost faith in my ability to be of any good to anybody, which is what brought me to the ER this morning in the first place. I had decided that I was going to proceed with the PHP.

After more consideration I then came to the conclusion that wallowing in my troubles for seven hours a day for several consecutive days with other miserable--and possibly unstable--people is not what I need.  I'm instead ramping up my therapy sessions and making a new commitment to staying as busy as possible so I can't get stuck in the morass of bad feelings again.  I suppose I've come to grudgingly accept that "fake it till you make it" is the only thing that's going to work for me.