Batsh*@ Crazy

Somedays I think I am crazy.  Somedays after reading my blog, you may think I am crazy.  And guess what?  I am a little.

But let me tell you a thing or two about crazy.  There's oh "I'm depressed and in a funk crazy" and then there's "I will never laugh again crazy" which I am a card carrying member to both those groups.  But the thing is I do laugh again, usually the day (or hour) after I make the bold "never again" statement.  And those funks?  I am keenly aware of them and do something immediately to climb my way out...be it therapist visits, exercising, sleep, self-help books you name it.

Hell we are all a little crazy.  Watching 24 hours of news can make a person feel bi-polar.  One minute we are in a fiscal depression because of Europe and those evil banks.  The next minute we are having the best holiday cyber shopping season ever in history.  What god damn roller coaster.

But there are other types of crazy.  The "I need to take drugs to quiet the voices crazy" and "I need to make everyone miserable because I don't make sense and don't you dare f$&#ing tell me to change crazy."  These categories I thankfully have not visited.   I like to call them the totally batshit crazy categories.  These are the categories my mother carries membership cards in her 500 purses she bought from QVC (the chosen shopping network for crazy people).

The thing about these last two categories is that they are not recognized by medical professionals.  Doctors, nurses, physical therapists, surgeons, medical receptionists see my mother coming and their first instinct is to shut the door.  If they do let her in, they regret it and do everything they can to get rid of her.  That's right, not help her.  Get rid of her.

Batshit crazy isn't a medical term (you thought it was right?).  You see, no one really knows what is wrong with people in this category.  Are they simply severely suffering from a life-crippling addiction to opiates, aka a drug addict?  Or are they suffering from mental disorders that wreak havoc on personal relationships aka end all of them?  What came first?  


How do you treat someone that loves drugs and doing what they want (spend every penny of savings on QVC) more than making healthy choices?  And when I say healthy choices, I mean not falling asleep from too much morphine while smoking a cigarette only to wake up and find you've burned holes in yet another shirt.

I have mentioned that we live in a land full of protected personal freedoms and I appreciate them so much.  But we also live in a land full of overworked medical professionals that are afraid of lawsuits and messes.  I am not blaming doctors completely for the way my mother is now.  Quite frankly, it validates a lot of my frustrations.  I spoke with the director of the nursing home she spent only a few short days in after taxing their limited resources so badly they were basically throwing my mother a good-bye party.  I told him  I was exhausted from dealing with my mother for the past 25 years.  "We are exhausted by her too," he told me.  Really, sir?  Really?  It's been four days.

Everytime she goes to the hospital or the psych ward, I let myself get hopeful.  Hopeful there will be someone with an impressive title that will give us some guidance on how to help her.  Help her at least get the right mix of drugs and her driver's license suspended (yup, she is still on the road) so she can live in a nice fog without hurting anyone, or herself more.

But they know there is no cure or even temporary fix for batshit crazy people.  "People make bad choices."  "You can't force people to change."  Um, okay.  I have heard these statements over and over the last couple of years.  

So yet again, my mother is returning to her home (much to the chagrin of her neighbors who have given me quite a disturbing picture of what it's been like to live next door to her the past five years).  And we wait.  Wait for the next extreme batshit crazy thing she does.  There is no nice ending, lesson learned, story of closure or redemption in this blog post.  


I know how this story goes...I wait and wonder is she ok?  And she is fine smoking her her brains out, getting doped up at the emergency room and settling in on her couch to do some more QVC shopping.  Until she's not fine.  And then we will once again try to help her.


Do you see why I am such a recurring storyline?  Ugh.
No worries, I am not sad (that's what Christmas is for right?), just frustrated and tired.


To be continued...