The Writing and Photography Blog of Kevin J Sabo

Well, after a week, I finally had the opportunity to see Dr. M again. He had been keeping tabs on me through staff, but hadn’t seen the need to actually meet with me every day, which I suppose is a good thing.

He confirmed this morning that my discharge is set for Friday. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m feeling stronger than I was when I came in at the start of this admission and the suicidal ideation has dropped back to just being fleeting thoughts instead of being overwhelming. I’m not sure I feel ready for discharge, however I also don’t know if I see any percentage in delaying it past the weekend. I have things I need to do, which aren’t getting done while sitting in here.

Dr. M did reiterate his plan to bring me back in six months for a couple weeks, and would like to see that plan continue for a few times so I have some consistency while I enter the next phase of my recovery.

To that end, Dr. M is touching base with h to see about getting me some more trauma-specialized therapy in the community. Apparently there are a couple of therapists in Stettler who specialize in trauma, so hopefully those connections can be made.

My work with both h and m going forward is going to entail figuring out my emotions again. As much forward progress as I have made, where I trip up is the emotions. I don’t deal with them. I suppress the emotions and spend too much time in the logical part of my brain.

An example of this came last night. A patient on constant split from his staff member, and wrecked the hose on my CPAP machine. I should be angry. I have a right to be angry over something like this. Yet, I can’t find the anger. Instead I look at the positives. I look at the fact that it was just the hose. I look at the fact that the patient who did this is quite ill. I look at the fact that will some red-neck engineering I got the hose put back together, and the hospital is picking up a replacement hose for me, which I should have tomorrow. Anger has never entered the equation, which leads me to some other questions.

Am I really angry, but I’m just stuffing the emotion the way I always do, or am I really this laid back?

Am I really chalking this up to “shit happens” or is it going to come flooding out when too much gets piled on again?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do know the more I think about things, the less sure I am that I actually do process emotions. Emotions are icky, uncomfortable, and generally unpleasant, and thanks to my previous life in emergency services, I got way too good at burying the emotions instead of dealing with them. I mastered compartmentalization. The problem is, instead of actually dealing with the emotions I buried them and walked away, resulting in an inability to let myself feel.

Like I said, I definitely have lots of work ahead me.

K