In Praise Of.... Fruit!

My amazing daughter! Not just content with jumping in at the deep end to attend the whole of the first week of term at her mainstream school, now is up for repeating the experiment next week. There is even talk about her trying home leave during the week too, something that has always taken the wheels off the bus in the past. Gentle readers, you will just have to grit your teeth in the face of my flying metaphors...

Very few people are going to understand the significance of this to us. It is only two months past that it was a struggle to hold a conversation with Julie. Psychosis is a cruel experience for families - the person you love seems to retreat out of sight, leaving you with the shell, the husk of themselves. The easiest way to relate to it is to think of what most parents experience at some point with most teenagers - there are not many teenagers who have not banged out of a room at some point yelling that they hate their parent, and there are not many parents who have not wondered what they have done wrong, or where their sweet child went to. Imagine this experience intensified a hundred times and you will come closer to the experience of living through a psychotic episode. Your loved one may be abusive, they may accuse you of terrible things, they may threaten you with violence. Occasionally - not nearly as often as other people imagine in fact - there is actual violence. More often there is relentless and exhausting drama - tears, accusations, sleepless nights, fits, self-harm, suicide attempts, trips to A&E. It is the unpredictability that is wearing - and because their personality is temporarily in eclipse you do sometimes feel as if anything that you thought you knew about your child was wrong.

Which is why the recovery stage is so fantastic. When you can have a conversation, laugh at a TV show together, or they make spontaneously make you a cup of tea, life is very very good. The comparison with the normal ups and downs of teenage breaks down at this point - for while all you can do is wait for your teenager to grow up, at least psychosis passes relatively quickly. Anti-psychotic drugs can help and for Julie at the moment at least there is an army of professionals reassuring, coaching and counselling. After all the chaos, the child you knew peeks out again, and knocks the breath out of you by declaring that they're going to attempt to go back to their schooling as if nothing had happened.

So why in praise of fruit? Well the side-effect of the anti-psychotic olanzapine (sometimes marketed as Zyprexa) is that it makes a normal healthy teenage appetite somewhat larger. Basically Julie is hungry all the time. We are going to have a go at beating this with fruit and veg - which involves shopping and preparation on an industrial scale! Celery and carrot sticks, punnets of strawberries and grapes, plums and nectarines (of course at this time of year), bags of ice-berg lettuce pieces to be crunched like crisps, dried fruit for emergency handbag supplies, bunches of bananas. After this job I plan to go and work in a zoo!