The phone call to say mum had a poorly brain

(See previous post first)

Conversations on the phone & email messages got more & more bizarre. Mum had always been a little bit of a feisty one,had a strong opinion & had always analysed things a bit too much. But this was different, this was more intense, more kinda verging on the side of obsessive. I put it down to the fact that we had left France & she was incredibly  lonely without me but mostly without her two year old grandson. It was heartbreaking to say the least but we had only left France because work was so scarce & things were getting tense. Of course I now know that was because already mum had started to get a poorly brain, coupled with the lack of work for us, the decision was made to return to the UK.

It was on a Saturday night. We had a very rare night out booked with our friends, my son was with my sister & I was two vodkas in whilst getting my face on when the phone rang. It was my dad. This was odd, he never ever called, a man of very few words who didn’t like talking on the phone at the best of times. I called often & would speak to mum & I’d ask her to put my dad on & as lovely as he is, he never had much to say. Tonight was different, tonight he had something to say, in fact he had three words to say. Mum is missing.

Of course I didn’t understand at first. I could comprehend what he could possible mean. What the hell did he mean she was missing? My mum? My beautiful, very intelligent, strong, gentle caring mum was missing?! He told me she had been acting ‘off’ for a while, which I knew, I had felt myself. He said she had told him she had found a tracking device under her car & she was being watched, followed, someone was out to get her. I think maybe there were conversions going back & forth as to why this was such a crazy idea but my mum was adamant. I’ll never know in what exact order it all happened but I do know that my mum left the house to head into town (the local village which was a good 20 minute drive) and she hadn’t returned.

So in a nutshell this is where it all started. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought this kind of thing would happen to our family. To my mum. But it did & it is. So what is a poorly brain?? What makes it poorly & why can’t we control it? It’s our brain afterall & we use it to think so why can’t we change the way it thinks? I have asked myself these kind of questions way too many times over the years. Everyone has their own individual illness. There will be no two people who have the exact same poorly brain. Of course there could be many similarities & lots of people can share certain traits of an illness. For example, it is a well known fact (if you are in the know of mental health symptoms/traits) that lots of people become obsessive about religion, particularly the devil 👿 ‘Satan’ when they become ill. Religion for some reason often plays a key role in some people’s illness even when they have never practised any type of religion in their life! Weird eh?! I remember visiting my mum in the hospital, she had been sectioned. There was a lady in there who was very very unwell, clearly Physcotic & was holding up her fingers to form the shape of the cross whilst screaming at my mum to get away. Over the years I found several people I had got to know also had these deep dark thoughts about Satan & his work. I haven’t ever really got to the bottom of why but I’m wondering if it because they are being so tortured with evil thoughts that their only logical answer is that it must be the work of the devil. I know that in my mums case her brain played very Satan like tricks on her, things I never thought possible but they were & they were scary!

What do we all think of when we think of someone who has been labled with the mental health tag? I know that before it had happened to my mum, I had quite a picture in my head of what i thought it looked like & im ashamed to say it wasn’t a pretty picture. I had known people who had issues & I remembered them all being pretty similar in the fact that they didn’t take care of themselves, didn’t look clean, had an unkempt look about them and walked in a certain way. Of course this isn’t the case all the time, if ever. In fact i would later learn that so many medications used to treat conditions such as psychosis, schizophrenia, bibolar etc actually make you walk differently. Did you know that? So when you see someone in the street that looks obviously ill & has that kind walk where they may stoop, limp or maybe rock when they walk, it’s because of the medication a lot of the time. Some of the medication make your toes curl! True story. In fact I saw it for my own eyes when my mum was put on Depixol, a very powerful antipsychotic drug with the worst side effects! All of a sudden my mum had that walk! Her toes were rigid with no feeling except pain, her back was agony, she went mute and eventually even had to have heart surgery because of the side effects from this drug. Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone reacts differently to drugs, this doesn’t mean that if you were to be put on this drug that it will happen to you but it gives you real food for thought. When you next see someone standing from one foot to the other in quick succession or maybe hunched over when they walk, there is a very good chance it is the medications side effects. It’s when you learn things like this, it changes your whole attitude about being so quick to judge. Us humans love to judge don’t we? We make our minds up about someone the first tome we meet them, without even consciously doing so. If you say you haven’t judged someone by the way they look then you’re lying. One thing I have learnt (& I have learnt a whole ton of things on this journey) is that my judgement of people has dramitcally changed, for the good. You simple can not tell what someone is going though by looking at them. There are many disguises  of a poorly brain.