Welcome to My Bumpy Ride.......

Before you all read on, I guess it is best to introduce myself to you and let you know a bit about myself. I am Susan, and first and foremost, I am a mother to a wonderful young man. Though he is grown, he will always be that three year old little boy, that asked all those questions and expected answers to them all. Though I will tell you much about myself in this blog there is no one or nothing that is as important to me as him, even if I don't discuss him much, because he kina likes to remain private.

For years I was actively trying to find myself, but that was a big waste of time, since by doing so I was not living. All my life I have always known that I was "different", but was unable to know why that was. I first thought that perhaps it was because I was adopted, but that was not the case. Turns out, I am bipolar and pretty much have been all my life. This was explained to me about nine years ago when I had a major melt down. I tend to be more on the depressive side, but have on occasion been quite manic. My last episode was early thru mid 2008, with full blown depression. For five months, I bearly left my house, let alone my bed. Why am I telling you this? I just want it out in the open and let you understand that I discuss my illness from time to time.

Present day, I am currently a full time student, studying social work. At the end of 2011 I was approached by a mentor of mine, who mentioned a new program that was going to launch here in Rhode Island. This new program called the Peer Wellness Coaching, was something that I had always wished would become a reality and to add even more excitement was the fact that this mentor was inviting me to train for a position as one of the Peer Wellness Coaches.

So currently (spring 2012) I am part of the three phases of training and should be employed by the fall of 2012. What is even more excellent about this program is that they are aware of my education goals and are willing to work with me on maintaining those goals.

Also you might hear me mention NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), because I am actively involved with them. I am a facilitator and state trainer for the NAMI Connection groups (peer run support group) here in Rhode Island, and I also help teach high school and college students about mental illness through NAMI RI's Inside Mental Illness program.

So with all that being said...I hope you read on to my daily activities and thoughts and such.




Thursday, November 11, 2010

Entry for November 11, 2010 Loved Ones with Medical Problems

Just got back from Denny’s this morning, after spending the night with him.  His mother is pretty sick and in the hospital.  Apparently, she has fluid around her heart.  This is not good.  We went last night to get his train ticket and then looked to see if there was a movie playing at the mall.  He wanted to do something to keep his mind off of what is going on with his mother.  I can’t blame him at all.  Sometimes I avoid calling my mom or dad because it is really hard for me to know that they are both sick.  It makes it even harder that I can’t be with them and both of them don’t want me to visit them, because they want me in school.  Both, mom and dad have told me that it would make them very angry if I went to them and took a semester off.
Dad had colon cancer and is in remission but he is having some serious memory problems and is also showing major signs of depression.  I think he is scaring me more than mom, because he does not want to do anything which is causing him to have problems walking and such.  It is almost like he is giving up and just waiting for the end to come.
Mom has lung cancer, but she is more active in her treatment.  Not to say that her illness will have a better outcome then dad, but at least she is more active about it.  Mom lost her sister and father to the same cancer, so I am not looking for that special miracle and neither is she.  She started the chemo this past Monday and thankfully she only had a bit of sickness from it.  I hope that is how it goes for the next twelve weeks.
It is hard to go to school each day with them being sick and I feel like I am being selfish, but what am I going to do, neither one of them want me to hold back in my education.  So I have been taking the approach of trying to do my best for myself and them.  I know that when I share with them a good grade that I received, it brightens up their day in one way or another.  Mom and dad have both told me that out of the three of us, they always believed that I was the one with the good learning skills.  It feels good to hear that, but I know that my brother is very smart, it is just that he really hated school and was ADHD before they knew what to call it.  They used to call it hyper activity back in the day.

Well I guess that is all for now.  So what picture is this and why did I post it? Well since I talked about my family a bit here, I decided that it would be nice to post something that we had in our house when I was growing up, so this is a bumper pool table and we had one in our basement.  There was a cover that you could put two ways, as a table or a card table.  The regular table part was kina messed up because we did arts and crafts on it (dad was not too pleased with it but didn’t complain much) so that is why I posted this picture today. TTFN

1 comment:

  1. Hugs to you, your family and Denny's mum. Hope your dad finds something to move him, to get him active and hopeful again.

    ReplyDelete