A damn cruel disease

"It must be remembered that for the person with severe mental illness who has no treatment, the most dreaded of confinements can be the imprisonment inflicted by his own mind, which shuts reality out and subjects him to the torment of voices and images beyond our powers to describe."

-Anthony M. Kennedy
U.S. supreme Court Justice


Here we are 11 months into treatment. Joseph has shifted from uncontrolled random outbursts and violence to controlled random outbursts and violence. I would rather the first of the two. At least I could forgive the actions. I know in my head he is still sick but I still have a hard time because on some level he is making calculated choices to do bad things.

I feel I may be slowly loosing my sanity in this whole process. The stress is killing me. I can't sleep and when I do I am plagued by nightmares that are difficult to differentiate from reality. What if Joey's disease make me insane? Not in the contagious disease type way but the there is only so much one person can take kind of way.

We are filing an extension for Joseph to stay in the facility for another 6 months. They are starting to say that there goal for discharge is June of next year. There is a part of me that is relieved and another part that is terrified. I am mostly terrified for my ability to get everything together by than. I just got the joyous news that the child support would be increased to nearly 600 a month to pay arrears owed. Than the cascade of  things that effects. Paying off Joey's medical bills, saving money for a house so we joey is discharged he has somewhere to call home, saving money so when he comes home we can afford what it costs to have a mentally ill child. And here comes the tears and panic attacks. I know everyone keeps telling me to take it one day at a time but when you have a chronically ill child you have to think forward. I'm 31 years old and this was not supposed to be my life. I worked hard to get through school and provide for my family and now I am working days on end and still not getting anywhere. Day in and out I think, this is it, this is my life.

In the midst of all of this Joey going forward and backward never really making progress for long. Will anything ever at least be ok? And will it be ok before I loose my grip?