Wazzapedia.

If you haven’t already, please read this post first.

One week ago, Tan and I were still trying to decide what we’d name our baby. We couldn’t agree on a name. We’d decided to find out the gender, if possible, during the ultrasound we were so eagerly anticipating. The cot we’d been given was standing against the wall in pieces awaiting the decision about whose room it would end up in.

All of that changed in an instant last Tuesday. The days that followed the ultrasound were full of appointments and conversations with doctors and specialists; as much as I wanted someone to take the decision out of our hands, there was no one. The decision was ours alone to make. The doctors and specialists expanded the information we’d been able to gather on our own, but there wasn’t much more to find out.

Acrania is fatal. Our daughter will not survive. To add to our grief, we were advised that if Tan chose to carry to full term, there are additional health risks for her in this situation.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had bad days in my life. Depression will do that to you. I can catastrophize with the best of them.

This was not one of those days.

One of the things that I knew about my wife from before the time we got married was that she wanted four children. I, on the other hand, wanted two. I’m the eldest of three, and I know how that plays out. We had ‘J’ 15 months after we got married, ‘E’ came along a bit over three years after that. Eventually, I changed my mind, and our daughter ‘B’ was born just before Christmas in 2003.

As far as I was concerned, three was it. We moved to Melbourne in 2005, I bought a Commodore sedan (“Big Red” as the kids call it) which seats a total of five people, and we settled into our new life here. Tan still wanted four kids, but I stonewalled. Between dealing with the depression, and our aspie kid(s)… No way. No how. No room in the car for another one.

A few months ago, I changed my mind. Several reasons behind it, but the summary is that I did change my mind, and we decided that for us, four would be a magic number. My depression is largely under control. We’ve worked out (mostly) how to manage the ASD stuff. The kids were all very excited, and Tan was over the moon. We started preparing emotionally, and Tan started taking folic acid tablets. Doctors recommend taking folic acid to reduce the instances of neural tube defects. After Tan fell pregnant, we saw our doctor, and she discussed having an amniocentesis test for birth defects. Tan and I had already had the discussion, several times over the past fifteen years, and we still feel the same way. If our child was born with any of the defects they can detect with an amnio, such as Downs Syndrome, we’d find a way to make it work.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this post hesitantly, because I’m about to assert something I don’t yet know to be sure.

Seems like the clouds are lifting. Right now, I feel a lot like you do after a bout of hiccups, where they’ve stopped but you’re still anticipating the next one.

The thing is, even at this point, I’m not sure what anyone could have done to help me get out of the darkness.

I kept going, putting one foot in front of the other, but very little could lift my mood more than temporarily. Life felt dark.

I awoke each day feeling like there was literally a weight on my chest, and everything seemed completely and utterly pointless. I couldn’t trust anyone. The brighter spots appear to have been dinner with a friend, and a movie with another friend, but I can’t expect my friends to be constantly there every waking moment to hold my head up.

This bout seems to have been about six weeks long.

I don’t know what triggered it, and I don’t know what caused it to stop.

The only other analogy I have for it, is that it’s almost like a bout of the flu. You might start to see a few symptoms of the flu developing, and you think you have a cold, then suddenly you’re flat on your back, and it feels like you’re dying, and it will never end. Then after a couple of weeks you start to feel a little better, then it’s just a sniffle, and then you’re OK again.

You can’t tell someone with the flu, “Just stop having the flu. Get up, and get back to the gym, or go for a run.” The flu doesn’t work like that, but depression doesn’t give you the option of lying in bed and getting better. There doesn’t feel like there’s anything to take that crushing weight off your chest, except time.

My family deserve better than this. They deserve better than this dessicated husk of a person I’ve become.

There’s a deep bitterness to being diagnosed with something that can’t be tested for with a blood test or a brain scan; something that sucks all of the colour and joy out of life, but is quite literally “all in my head”. There’s a deep burning anger at myself knowing that I live in one of the most privileged societies on the planet, and have a life that people long for, and yet have to fight myself to just keep going.

Maybe it is “just” depression again. They doctor tried to convince me to go on different anti-depressants. They have worse side-effects than the last ones I was on. People report that they’re harder to get off as well. Another doctor once described anti-depressants as a crutch to use to get well. But after the prescription is filled and the tablets are taken, there’s no process of getting well beyond that. Not that I can afford, anyway.

Besides, call it cynical, but it’s not in the best interests of the pharmaceutical companies for someone on anti-depressants TO get well; then they’ll stop buying the product.

So I’m resistant to the ideas of the meds. Even moreso than the last time I was convinced to take them.

What’s my alternative? I refuse to give in to the darkest impulses. I won’t do that to the people who love me.

I’m not living right now, I’m just existing. Anxieties piled on top of anxieties. A literal headache that I’ve been unable to shake for five weeks.

I’m not supposed to think like this; to write like this. I, who call myself a follower of Jesus? I’m supposed to speak of joy and peace… of hope. But… this is also the truth of who I am right now. Should I only speak the truth when it’s nice and friendly and happy?

I’ve lost hope that things will get better. The good people are taken away too soon. The wicked prosper, destroying people’s lives for the sake of profit or power. The voices of the idealogues grow increasingly strident demanding that they get their way, and damn the rest of you.

Perhaps I should abandon my faith and try to find meaning in dogmatically tearing apart and ridiculing those who disagree with me. Somehow, I don’t think that will work for me any better than my teenage fundamentalism.

My current reality is that I can’t trust my own brain. Maybe I’m seeing the world as it truly is, or maybe the chemical soup in my head is missing some vital ingedients. I don’t want to be like this. Who would choose this over the alternative of actually living? It drives away the people who care for me, and earns the kind of attention people pay to chewing gum stuck to their shoe.

Whatever the answer is, it’s beyond me to find out right now, and beyond my ability to hope for an answer to come.

Tomorrow I’ll do the same as I do every day. I’ll drag myself out of bed and take weary step after weary step across the parched desert of my current existence until darkness falls once again, and another night of dreamless sleep returns me to the start of the cycle.

Maybe, for me, this is as good as it gets.