#25 An Admission

I admitted my mother into hospital today.

It broke my heart looking into her eyes - sensing the sense of fear, disappointment and betrayal as she looked silently at me. Maybe she knew it was inevitable. Maybe she hoped we wouldn’t do it. Maybe she trusted that we wouldn’t. But we did. We walked her down the long corridor, up the stairs and into the psychiatric ward – a place she vowed she never ever wanted to come to again.

It can be very hard caring for a mother with schizophrenia. Mental illness is not something most people readily understand like diabetes, cancer or heart diseases. It is an invisible illness that shadows the sufferer and their family at all times. Even when medication is taken and all is normal, the effects of the illness is ever present. The sufferer and their family are acutely aware of it at all times. Side effects from the medication manifest – twitching, restlessness, involuntary movements, inability to concentrate, dullness, inattentiveness – all oddities of behavior to the untrained eyed. But to the sufferer and their families, it is an ever reminder that psychiatric drugs are at work.

My mother was admitted today because she went into a relapse. She had not bathed herself for days. She had not been sleeping well, eating properly or talking normally. She couldn’t hold a proper conversation, had unexplained and erratic mood swings and had severe flight of thoughts. We tried giving her the medication in the doses the doctor recommended, but she started fighting it. At our wits end, we brought her to the doctors. Admission was the most expected outcome.

Driving from the hospital, I said a prayer to God. I prayed that God would protect her, heal her and soften her heart. I understood my mother. I understood why she had been secretly skipping on the medication. She wanted to be well. She believed that she was well. Taking medication and having to deal with the side effects is hard for her, both personally and publicly. Gazes from strangers – even those from church  - can be surprisingly harsh. She believes that she doesn’t really need the doses that the doctor prescribes. If she could only see the state she was in at this moment.

I hope she will forgive me and my brother for what we did today. Though we know and believe what we did was right, and ultimately for her own good, she will probably not feel the same. She would probably be very hurt by what we did, thinking this was our way of just trying to ‘get rid of the problem’ and doing what was most convenient to us. Hopefully one day she would know just how difficult it was for us, or how much it hurt us too. No child enjoys the thought of their mother sitting alone in a hospital bed, surrounded by even more mentally ill patients.

Come home soon ma. Please believe me when I say – we love you.