Bright like a diamond

Today I had the chance to meet your therapist and take part in your therapy. It was such a great meeting! I learned so much!

After so many treatments didn’t work out for you, they assigned you to a therapist who doesn’t follow the book. He looked at what lies underneath your depression. And today he explained to me (and us) how his approach works and how I can support you.

We also addressed some issues between us. Such as problems talking about feelings.

Then you worked on a time schedule for your next steps. You might be coming home soon. It will be scary and you will need a lot of support. But it is an important step for you. You need to take this step to move on and out of the clinic.

I had all kinds of worries and questions for your therapist that were related to my worries. They were all blown away as soon as we started talking. And tonight I feel a big relief. We haven’t reached the finish line yet, but we are close.

In the end your therapist and his student (who also joined the session) did something really neat. They let us listen to their de-briefing in which they talked about us as a couple. I’m not sure how much of it was for therapeutic reasons, but they mentioned how close we were as a couple, how gentle. At one point the therapist called me “a diamond“. It felt so good to hear that, after spending the last days and weeks contemplating about how I feel so alone in supporting you with our families being so far away. And he wondered how we’d be doing once your depression has passed. How much energy we’ll have at our hands, energy that right now is going into fighting your depression. And this thought just made me so very hopeful! It made me see light at the end of the tunnel. FINALLY! I even forgot how that feels!

So, today I will spend the rest of the evening thinking of our future together. A bright future. I will be hopeful for the first time in a very long while. And my smile will just be bright, like a diamond. Maybe even brighter ☺

Happy Birthday

Today is your birthday. I visited you at the clinic, brought you flowers and gifts from me and my parents. You really liked the gifts and my visit but it was hard for me to celebrate your birthday at the clinic. One and a half years and you are still in there. When does this nightmare ever stop?

You were very close to coming back home again. Lately, you were home on weekends and I felt you are doing fine. When you are able to leave the clinic it is so much easier for me. I can just do my usual errands without scheduling my trips to the clinic. And it’s great to have you home. A little bit of normality.

However, your condition got worse and now you are not allowed to leave your station and you have to check the nurses’ office every hour. You call it suicide watch.

I’m totally lost in what to think about it. In a way you made great progress in opening up to the doctors before you were in actual danger. I’m so glad that you did because the doctors wanted to send you home and we both got more and more worried about you. But at the same time I cannot understand how you are still so badly in danger. On top of that, I thought I learned from your last attempt. I thought I can read the signs. Last week taught me that I cannot. I was relieved to hear that you can stay at the clinic longer, I didn’t know that you have to be on suicide watch.

I sometimes worry whether you will ever be ok again. I know you want to feel better again. You work so hard. And we have so many plans. And there is progress. I can tell that there is. But then again, these steps are so tiny. And then I hear stories of depressed patients for whom no therapy worked out. Like this case in Belgium that everyone is discussing right now.

Tonight I worried so much about you that I called you again and we talked a little. It felt very good. You explained more about how you are feeling right now. And that you told exactly that to the doctors last week. I hope they can work with you on it.

Today

After being in shock for two days we both finally felt better. I visited you and we talked, talked, talked. It was good to see you! We remembered happy days. Very happy days, like a vacation trip two years ago. When you say you want to be that happy again, I know you can do it. You want to keep fighting!

You also had a chance to see a doctor today. Apparently, your suicidal thoughts didn’t go from 0 to 100 within minutes. Your worries about adjusting to life outside the clinic may have piled up over the last weeks and resulted in a suicide attempt as soon as something must have triggered it. This is good news. In a way. This means you can work on identifying the warning signs and react to them. Just another step towards recovery. It’s not a small step. But it can be done.

On suicide, part I

You learn quite some crazy stuff when you have a depressive husband. Stuff that you never even wanted to learn. For example, the three phases of suicidal tendencies: (1) consideration, (2) assessing, and (3) the decision to actually do it.

This week I learned that the husband can go straight to phase 3, the decision. With no time to assess or use any of the other strategies he learned during therapy to prevent his suicide. In the last minute he snapped out and called for help. This is why he is back at that clinic. After just being released. After months of hard work to learn how to deal with his depression and the constant voice in his head telling him he and his life are worthless.

I was traveling when it happened. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I was there. The morning he told me about the attempt, he also told me that he almost did it again while I was still sleeping in the other room. We cried, we talked a lot about it, and we called the clinic and told them he needs to come back. Then we had breakfast. We took extra long time for it, talked about the past week, laughed together. Some normality, before life in the clinic and frequent hospital visits started again.