Hello everyone,
my name is stuart and i cared for my mother with M.S from as far back as i can remember she had walked with an aid… my dad and her were divorced and as things started to progress around 1999-2000 i had to stop living with her as getting her dressed/bathed and showered before nursery/junior/infant school had become a bit much of a thing for me…
- I was a troublesome child even at infant school level being kicked out from school dinners and being sent home early excluded from classes for bad behavior…
after about a decade of really suffering with the locked in vegetative state she passed away in 2005… i kind of never really was given the space to grieve and kind of showed a stiff upper lip attitude and if like me you’ve anyone seen somebody in such advanced stages of Multiple Sclerosis her death was really a blessing as surely that is no way to live…
fast forward the clock to 2009 and i am now a struggling teenager, blessed by the kind of schooling(first private from age 8-9 to 13 then public till 16) that a wealthy father with ought much time to emotionally support his children had afforded but also sensing that i was missing somebody to turn to when it came to more sensetive issues especially females or girls…soo i started smoking cannabis…this lead me to be a very introspective and guarded mindset…i was working a dead end job behind a bar and surrounded by the kind of peers who thought they 'got’my situation but in reality in hindsight unless they had seen the hardship and suffering i saw at such an early age they really just couldnt ‘get’ it… this lead to my first sectionining in september 2014, i completely lost the plot…based around trying to give my mother what i deemed to be a ‘proper’burial (my father and uncle had been locked into a debate about how mum was to be buried which sadly means that even to this day nearly 14 years later she is still buried in an unmarked grave with a simple cross depicting her site) i filled the car up with things needed to build the grave (after school i took a bricklaying course, having always felt alienated amongst the posh types at them kinda schools, funnily enough, the ínner city’ college i took my bricklaying course at was the first one i went to where i was not bullied in some way shape or form…just goes to show…something…ay…) and filled up two trolleys at a local builders merchants and just as i got outside something said to me íll take the rest from here’call it a voice from god or as doctors may call it a psychotic episode… i just left the nearly 300-400 quids worth of gear i had bought to decorate/create mums grave
a few hours later of driving round under influence of these protective instinct’s call them voices (voices is not the correct term) as i more see them as instantaneous installations of data which co-incide with realtime changes in my actual/physical world view… i had a crash… the crash was not my fault and remember seeing the grinning face and blue eyes of the driver in the oncoming vehicle quite distinctly.
so the sectioning lasted beyond the initial 28 days and then a little further until i was released in november 2014, i then started smoking again and ended up back in hospital for about a month from november till december 2014… then came the third and most 'traumatic’sectioning… i had just returned from a short trip alone to amsterdam (being interested in bricklaying i can just go to a city such as that, not smoke much and walk round in awe of the beautiful architecture and super clean streets…came home, fell out with my brother and bam! like that i was back in, this time for a 5 month spell… i got out on a CTO which basically meant that i could come out as long as a met regularly to take medication which was inconvienient and saw me balloon in wight and self confidence pretty much disappeared (two of the most impressive side effects of the anti psychotic medication i was on were erectile dysfunktion and hair losss) great when you are at the perceivably peak of your 'mating’heights and all your friends at partys are wondering why you do not like socialising amongst them…
so i finally got off the CTO and got a a year off medication under my belt and found a job bricklaying things were going great up until january 2018 where i injured my foot playing football and working for a construction company on what is essentially a self employed basis they were not willing to give me the 6 weeks needed to heal so i pandered around doing odd jobs in my van just enough to get by (Barely) and then an almost dream job came up bricklayers needed in holland i was quick to apply and found out to my suprise they were willing to have me over even given my relatively short experience on site
things went great for a month, the work was good, immersing myself as a foreigner in a country where the lads would not all be talking english around me and pandering to my needs felt very emasculating or whatever the term is… thats when the wheels kinda fell off again and i find myself now talking to you from a dutch metal health institute, i am just about at my wits end… cannabis is just about the only thing that gives me some sort of spiritual connection to my mother and allows me to çry’ which is an emotion most anti psychotics leave you completely devoid of…
so i guess the long n short of it is…
has anyone else had to bring up a loved one with MS and in turn over time lead themselves into the murky worlds or ‘‘Mental health’’ …
if so it would be lovely to hear from you
Stuart