It's Like Riding a Bike

I haven't written so much recently - I have been too busy doing stuff with Julie. Or rather, as you'll see in a moment, trying not to really do stuff with Julie..!

For the last six to eight weeks, Julie has been making steady progress; it's the longest period of recovery yet, and we're trying to get some momentum going by gradually exploring outwards.  Every week sees her doing something she wasn't doing before: visiting a new place, trying to do something on her own without us, spending a little longer concentrating (on reading for example).

As parents, Joe and I are trying to back away by inches.  It's just like teaching someone to ride a bike when you finally take the stabilizers off.  You run along behind her, hanging onto the back of the saddle, making a lot of encouraging sounds.  The trick is to gradually let go and fall behind, but raise your voice, so the person learning to ride thinks you are still safely there.  The magic bit is when they stop and turn round and realise that you are actually still at the bottom of the street, and that they have cycled there all by themselves.

Things that are difficult to do after two years spent mostly in hospital, and not in school:

1. Make decisions.  Almost every moment of every day there is a decision to be made, even if it is to just switch off the TV and do something else.
2. Talk to people of your own age.  Julie is great at talking to adults now, but rubbish at teen talk.
3. Trust yourself, and be trusted.  We have just spent two years being taught not to trust her.
4. Have spontaneous fun.  In fact, just be spontaneous at all.

Julie is coping fairly well with a life of constant challenge: in fact, most of the time she bounces around like Tigger.  There are one - sometimes two - days a week when she feels overwhelmed and is more like Eeyore.  These are the days when we are so grateful that she is still a regular day-patient at the hospital.  On Eeyore days, they put a bit of time into talking to her, adjust her timetable on the ward a little, and sometimes give her the antipsychotics early to help her handle the symptoms.  So far this seems to have done the trick: in the past, bad days often snowballed into worse weeks, and then into a series of emergency admissions; at the moment we seem to be able to turn them around, and a day or two later sees Julie back in high spirits.  Whenever Joe grumbles about the long commute to the hospital each day, I remind him what the alternative was.

The next two weeks see Julie's biggest challenge: work experience in a shop.  The school organizes work experience every year for pupils who are half way through their GCSE's.  Most of them will have a full two weeks' work, but Julie has gone for shortened weeks of three days because of her illness.  It is going to be enough of a challenge for her, coping with a full eight hour day, new people, the noise of the shop, and  uncertainty about what to do.  I expect she will be exhausted each night, but I hope she will feel a real sense of achievement if she sees it through.  This time last year there was an abortive attempt to place her in a charity shop for a few days, while still based in the hospital, and it was a disaster, with her having to be rescued after a few hours and hurried to A&E.  The failure, and the psychotic episode that followed it, haunted her for a long time.  This year she seems so much more capable, and I hope that a success will lay this particular ghost to rest.