Me & My 6th Baby
I was admitted to hospital 5 weeks before my 6th baby was due; I was suffering with hydronephrosis of the kidney, exhaustion and dehydration. In truth I was in a right bloody mess. I was also hearing, seeing and smelling things that nobody else could. Recently diagnosed with bipolar after a flurry of mixed feelings and various never ending appointments I was at breaking point, my body had had enough. I was heading for a mental breakdown, again.
While my medical notes may as well have had a huge red cross,” beware of this crazed women” written across the front, I was placed on a ward with 7 other women and the fun times began.
I was already seeing people, dark shadows mainly haunted my waking days and it was terrifying to see people when nobody else could.
Stop them coming near me
Why can’t you see them?
What do they want?
Are they going to hurt me?
“Go away, go away” I would beg “I can’t take this anymore”
I was sinking and sinking fast, when the voices which were becoming more regular starting talking to me I was convinced I had people living inside of my head. There was a horrid person in amongst them all that would tell me to kill myself and I was starting to befriend him more than the others.
The evil voice seemed to understand me, spoke those words that I was afraid to admit yet felt. I would bang my head against the walls and doors, pull a pillow over my head, shake my head yet nothing would stop the constant chatter in my head, it was excruciating at times and so frustrating, a never ending constant buzzing that hurt.
I was left alone on the hospital ward, other than a few blood pressure checks and my drip being replaced when it ran out, I didn’t see any midwives. I was hallucinating in the hospital and pacing the hospital corridors at night with all kinds of thoughts running around in my head.
Knowing that the thing that grew inside of me would die very soon because I was not good enough to be a mother to it, that evil voice told me that in the next room were other babies already born, to go and take one of those. That’s when I started to talking back to them, it was as if I was talking to myself to others, yet to me it was the only way I could keep sense of what reality I had left.
I lay in absolute agony, throwing myself around on the hospital bed, I could no longer take the excrutiating pain, it felt like someone had stabbed my side with a knife and was turning it. I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted the voices to stop and I wanted the strange men that kept coming to visit me in secret to stop too.
“Please I begged” the midwife one night “Just get me a knife, I can’t do this anymore”
One voice had convinced me that if I cut an inch by an inch out of my side and pull out the kink in kidney tubes, then the pain would stop. I wanted a knife.
The midwife kept calm and as she walked away, I felt a sigh of releief, this would soon be over.
I don’t know how much time passed but a man appeared at the end of my bed.
“I have told you stop coming, you’re not real” I told him angrily.
“Emma, I am one of the hospitals psychiatrists and the midwife is worried about you.
Worried about me? Why was she worried about me I thought? To me this was all very normal, they were the mad ones.
You can read more of my life story living with bipolar.
