The Discharge

The duvet was the last thing to leave the hospital.  Julie lugged it in a carrier bag to the discharge CPA where we were all waiting in a circle for her.  She was the only one of us who seemed unmoved by the occasion.  There we were, a circle of adults, both family and professionals, who had discussed her case time and again, finally moving on to the momentous step of hospital discharge.  We had so nearly reached this point in the past, only to see our hopes dashed each time.  Now here at last we were, handing over a box of chocolates to the hospital team and talking to the outpatient team about the next step.

As we all sat round in our circle, it occurred to me that we were in the same position as a group of geologists would have been a few years ago discussing a volcano after an eruption.  Not one person there, including Julie herself, had the least idea what the future might hold for her.  You could take the statistical approach and say "Three out of four volcanoes that have erupted will erupt again at some time." but that is no use at all to the person standing on the slopes of a particular volcano on a particular day.  We could make plans for what to do in the event of an eruption, knowing full well that we ran the risk of looking silly if the volcano turned out to have finally become dormant and never erupted again.  On the other hand, we could decide planning was pointless anyway because no plan would stand up in the event of a really massive eruption.  Modern geologists do have some chance of predicting eruptions, and perhaps in a hundred years, psychologists will be able to make a serious prediction of what the future might hold for someone who has experienced a psychotic epsiode so serious that they have needed a year in hospital.

Now we are all back together again, the family motto is currently "keep it simple, keep it quiet".  Lots of plain cooking, country walks and trips to the public library.  Deathly dull for our son, who is a more conventional teenager than our daughter, and wants to live on the edge.  Julie, on the other hand, now wants nothing more than to curl up with a book and a cup of coffee.  She goes to bed early, is slowly navigating her way through reforming old school friendships, and keeps well away from any edge.  She is studying hard, making up for the year missed at school.  Tonight there will be no trips to the village fireworks, which are noisy and crowded.  Her biggest adventure in the last few weeks has been taking the bus to town, an experience that she found exhausting.  Even as we struggle to persuade her brother to take fewer risks and behave more sensibly ("wear a coat", "don't read in the dark", "you can't have a tattoo"), our challenge with Julie will be to persuade her to take a few calculated risks.  Risks like staying at home alone for half an hour while I take her brother to scouts, or walking to school.