Who Wants to Play... Emotional Ping Pong

It's Wednesday, so it must be... Accident and Emergency.  I could do the journey in my sleep.  I am so tired, I practically do do the journey in my sleep.

It is probably just bad luck that it has been Wednesday two weeks running.  There seems to be no correlation with anything in particular.  Six days of reasonably normal life, with no obvious tensions or drama.  Six days that are so humdrum that there is little to record.   I work a bit during the day, while Julie watches TV and knits.  I stop work every hour or so - we drink coffee, or we go for a walk.  In the afternoons her tutors visit and she studies while I prepare dinner.  We while away the evenings knitting, watching more TV, listening to music, chatting, laughing.  We make plans, we visit friends, we try some new nail varnish. Julie seems perfectly relaxed, untroubled.  She has an engagingly wacky sense of humour and we spend one whole evening doing silly dances to music.

On the seventh day the roof falls in.  Without warning.  I make our morning coffee, we share a laugh and a cuddle on the sofa, then I sigh and go back to work. Ten minutes later Julie takes an overdose, and she tells me half an hour later when she starts to feel shaky.  It is completely impossible to explain why this has happened.  She shuts down like a limpet, with a grip so firm that elephants could not dislodge it.  She eyes me warily from behind her shell: nothing gets in or out.  There is no way of knowing what she might do next.

She did no immediate harm to herself, thank goodness.  She is young and strong and metabolizes the paracetomol easily.  Her worst symptoms - a racing heart beat - were probably just a reaction to the large amount of caffeine she took inadvertently (having grabbed a box of Paracetomol Extra from the cupboard).  I find this quite funny but remember not to try and share this joke with the staff who treat her.  Most of our day is quite dull, waiting around for tests to confirm that she has cleared it from her system.  The staff are incredibly kind and attentive to us.

The biggest harm she has done is to put herself back in hospital.  Our luck finally ran out - despite my usual pleas, today's on-call psych was having none of it.  It proved hard to be convincingly in control when I had to admit that I was not prepared for this overdose.  I would never have been able to predict it, and I had honestly believed that the key to the medicine cabinet was safely hidden away.  I even offer to stop working and spend every minute with her for a bit, but it is clear this cannot be sustained for terribly long.  I felt, and probably looked, quite tired.  There was no bed for tonight, but I am to take her back to her old CAMHS unit tomorrow. 

Do I feel defeated, having fought for so long?  Yes to be honest, I do.  But perhaps we all need a break from this cycle.