When John and I got married, we went to Colorado for our honeymoon. I remember enjoying all of the planned activities we did, but having sex was painful and scary. I was not mentally ready for sex, but I didn’t want to tell John no, as I knew he had been waiting for this (we decided to wait until marriage for sex). As the first weeks of our marriage went on, I became more vocal about my wants and needs. Thankfully, I was met with a very understanding spouse. However, while John was understanding, he was no therapist. We didn’t know what to do, except communicate extremely well and take things slow. This did help some, but sex still remained a scary thing for me for quite some time.
As mentioned in my previous post, Getting Married, sometimes my legs would become paralyzed. It took many tests and appointments for doctors to label the reasoning behind this phenomenon. This all started in 2021, when I was finally officially given the diagnosis of Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). Just a few months after John and I got married, I went to the ER due to my legs being paralyzed for a couple days. The attending physician in the ER told me that I had FND at the time; this was after a long series of tests done previous to my ER visit. During these series of tests, I also discovered that I have mild sleep apnea.
To set things straight, I got married in June 2021, passed my NCLEX (state exam for nursing license) that summer, started having pieces of a repressed memory pop up, then went to the ER in September and got diagnosed with FND (and mild sleep apnea). I also started seeing a counselor before I got married. After being diagnosed with FND, I was placed on a waiting list to see a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. I waited for over a year, but never got an appointment with a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist.
In October 2021, my legs were paralyzed one day, and I couldn’t see how I could accomplish all that I had dreamed or all that God had for me with my crushing depression and my paralyzed legs. I had grabbed a gun, thought about doing stuff with it, and ended up in a mental health hospital for five days (per my counselor’s request). After that hospitalization, I was placed on some medication for depression, although I was also having hallucinations (no one knew about that yet).
My meds helped some. My counselor and I had done everything we could with my repressed memories. We tried piecing things together as things popped up, and came to the conclusion that I was raped around the age of seven, though I don’t remember chunks of it. After a while of meeting with my counselor, I felt like I had the ability to let my sadness be without becoming utterly overwhelmed and enveloped by it. This is when my counselor and I stopped meeting, and were on a “call me when you need me” basis. By the time we went to a “call me when you need me” basis, it was the end of 2022. At this point, I had accepted not getting to see a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist from that waitlist, but the problem of my legs becoming paralyzed had seemed to resolve by spring of 2022. In July of 2022, I got a job as a home health nurse.
This job was fulfilling, but also difficult to do with depression (as any job would be). I was still nervous about my legs randomly becoming paralyzed, especially since I hadn’t really had any treatment for FND, just the diagnosis. However, my legs didn’t give out on me for over a year. During this first year of work as a nurse, I struggled heavily with depression and hallucinations, trying not to let them affect my work. I believe I never let on that I had any mental health issues to any of my co-workers or the family members of my patient(s). However, I was always exhausted when it was time to come home, and sometimes I was scared, often of my hallucinations.
In August of 2022, I found out I was pregnant. I’m sure pregnancy had some contribution to the overwhelming amount of emotions during this first year or so of work. I called my counselor to meet a few times during pregnancy, but by the third trimester, I couldn’t take the hallucinations and the shame anymore. I told my counselor, then I requested a meeting with a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and told her about the hallucinations and the depression and shame I was dealing with. She helped me find the right meds (and the right amount of meds) to take to help the depression and hallucinations without making me too tired and/or zombie-like. This took some time, but it was worth the effort.
After George was born, my hormones took some time to level out, but eventually they did, and with the medication I was taking, I could tell a big difference in my mood compared to before I had a baby. I was happier, less scared. But I still felt the sadness linger sometimes, and hallucinations would occasionally still pop up. Medications are helpful, but they can’t fix everything. I decided to do something about it around March of 2024.
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