This Year's Biggest Turkey...

Hail,
Apologies for the delay, and I will reply to comments tomorrow. A great deal has gone on, and some of this will have to be done in point form.

Right. I am released. This is a good thing, an unalloyedly good thing. I have a fairly aggressive followup programme - I am being seen twice in the coming week, and as I left Clearwater no fewer than three people grasped my hand and told me that if I felt in any way that I needed to, I should contact them, day or night.

It's good to be wanted, even if you are paying two hundred or so dollars a day to be wanted.

And it's good to be back home again, to see Sarah and to stare at the chickens (the slim, skittle-shaped turklets have grown in my absence into full-grown turkeys, deepy strange-looking but also somehow beautiful birds), to smack my punching bag around or look at my books and to lounge in front of the telly or in the bed and read.

All unalloyed good. But I would be lying if I said there wasn't some difficult stuff ahead.

For a start, there is the social side of it. Some of my family and friends know nothing about recent events. Others know only that I have been depressed, they may or may not know about the hospitalisation. A smaller (I presume) group know of the overdose, the detention under the mental health act, the less savoury parts of the admission. A very few people - I doubt there would be five - know the full details of my state of mind on the Saturday that I did what I did.

This complicates things socially - before I go out, for example, I have to work out who knows what, who is likely to ask what, what I feel comportable telling them. And the thing is, there is
the fallout that comes from that, in direct proportion to the closeness of those concerned - the hurt, the anger, the fear.

Most of this I "solve" in the short term by avoiding. So if we've met or spoken or emailed or anything in the last few days, it's been against the considerable force of my own moral cowardice.

The decision on whether or not to avoid is not entirely up to me, of course. I got a phone call the other night from a fellow emergency registrar who had "heard a rumour" about one of the registrars taking tricyclics, and finally worked out who the rumour was about. We are meeting Monday for, in her words, "a cup of coffee. Then a jab and a hook and a cross to the head, and kicking you when you're down".

We don't mess with words, us emergency registrars. Kill you, resuscitate you and kill you again.

The thing is, a lot of this I didn't have plans for. And it is embarrassing how much of this stuff I had basically accepted I would never do again that I have been enjoying. I say my sons today, each now as tall as me (not very tall), each of whom has sworn some solemn oath not to cut their hair for the entirety of the summer holidays while they work in the sun picking apricots and plums. My youngest looks like a Dragonball Z character, my oldest like a strange flowering plant. There is some deep, deep pleasure in this.

But in the interim there is the usual stuff. The cabinet full of medications. The counselly talky stuff, some of which is actually quite useful. The slow, jolting, uneaven repair of the damaged relationships. I suspect I have already lost one friendship over this.

Anyway.

Another unintended flow-on from this whold being unexpectedly alive is I have no real job to go to this season. I don't mean "no job", my current employer (name recently changed to the substances of addiction department (SAD)) would have me full time at a moment's notice. But no hospital job, no emergency type job. I may speak later on about exactly why that is important.

But in the meantime, I will say that Florey looks to be out, the Princess is a very long shot, and the front runners are Lazarus ED and the local Sexually Transmissible Diseases Clinic. Which is good hours and good pay but quite possibly not recommended for the recently suicidally depressed.

Anyway, will post more soon,
John