Saying that I had “a case of the Mondays” this week is the understatement of the century. There will be no positivity in this post. The SUCK is far too great, and I’m not going to sugar-coat it.
I went to the general practitioner (assigned to me by the state, since we’re on Medicaid right now) about my worsening anxiety issues. The office was small and smelly. The doctor spent three or four minutes with me before declaring that I couldn’t get any treatment for my anxiety if I insisted on continuing to breastfeed. That was that.
Oh Jesus. Please do not send me 64,892 links to Dr. Hale’s work with the Infant Risk Center. I know all about it. I know there are meds safe for breastfeeding, and I know this doctor was wrong. But that doesn’t help me. I can’t prescribe myself medication. And I’m a little too busy to mess around with filing complaints or going back to argue with her.
I left the office with nothing more than directions to the county health clinic, and numb arms from the 45-minute-long panic attack I had sitting in the smelly office. I didn’t even have so much as a referral.
I came home crying, feeling defeated. Feeling despondent. The husband wanted to hug me and talk about it, but I told him I just wanted to be left alone. It took me years to work up the courage to get help, and the doctor took only five minutes to show me she didn’t care.
As I sat there fighting back tears, HH gets a call from the school district where he was set to start his new teaching job next week. The one he got hired for a month ago. He was waiting for the call from HR to have him go in to sign all his paperwork and get set up in his new classroom, so we assumed that’s what the call was about.
Instead, the woman on the other end of the line starts the call with, “John, I’m sorry, I have terrible news.” She then goes on to tell him that something went wrong — they didn’t understand it, but the District Bilingual Director would not approve him for the position. Her reason? He had gone to too many colleges early in his academic career (even though he graduated WITH HONORS and TWO certificates – a Type 09 (Secondary Ed, History) and a Type 29 (Bilingual Teaching.) The principal of the school fought for John, but the District Director wouldn’t budge. They were told that him attending a few different colleges 10 years ago made the director “uncomfortable.” That’s it. No other explanation. It didn’t even make sense to the school administration, but their hands were tied.
I was in the living room crying over the shitty doctor appointment when I heard John downstairs starting to hyperventilate on the phone, saying “Oh my god, this can’t be happening, please say this isn’t happening” to the hiring manager. I ran downstairs to find him white as a ghost with tears welling up in his eyes. I mouthed “They took back the job?!?!?” and he shook his head Yes.
I crumpled onto the stairs and just sobbed. He has – WE HAVE – been counting on this job for a month. There’s pretty much NIL chance of getting hired by another district now that school has already started. He probably won’t be able to find a full-time position until at least August now, so we don’t know how to pay rent for the next eight months. He’s set up with a district to sub, but the pay is crap (minimum wage) and there’s no guarantee he’ll even get called.
There really aren’t words for how much this sucks. My anxiety went from “Maybe I can cope if I try real hard” to “I’m falling apart at the seams and may not make it through the day alive.”
I called my mother-in-law and asked her to come over. I had to go to school and HH needed to start job hunting, so I needed someone to pay attention to the kids. Then I called my dad and asked him to come help, too. I needed my family to be here. I needed people who understood how much this sucked to be here in my house. They understood. They hugged us. They helped us survive the shared nuclear meltdown HH and I were having. Without them, I don’t know how my kids would have been spared watching the two of us lay in bed and cry.
When HH got in the shower, I called the county health department – the place the ignorant doctor had given me directions to. I thought I would be okay to talk to them, but I couldn’t stop crying, and ended up sobbing “I’m sorry” over and over to the person on the other end of the line before I could even say my name. They transferred me to a doctor who listened to some more of my unintelligible sobbing, and then began the interview process. He was amazing to me. At first he asked some really difficult questions, like “Are you going to hurt your baby? Are you going to hurt yourself?” to which the answers were “Absolutely not – nothing like that.” I’m not a danger to anyone – I just feel like I’m going to have a stroke and die every five minutes. When the doctor realized things weren’t emergent or dangerous, he started setting up an appointment for me to be seen Tuesday morning. He talked to me for 45 MINUTES. He made me feel cared for. He made me feel like I had a shot of getting help.
After that, I had to hang up and rush off to start my first night of my last semester of school. If I can survive the next 17 weeks, I will graduate Summa Cum Laude on May 12th.
I don’t know what’s next for Hyphenated Husband. He’s searching high and low for work. We’ll see if we can keep our house, but that doesn’t look good.
In the meantime, I am going to keep on truckin’. I’m taking my GRE this week, launching the new Resource Guide that I’ve been WORKING MY ASS OFF ON next week (details to come) and finishing my MPH applications.
And I’ll keep blogging about my mental breakdown – just in case it might make someone else feel less alone.
I'm just catching up with my blog reading, and I have to say I'm so, so sorry you're going through this.
I'm glad you found a doctor who can help you. I'm sending lots of good thoughts. And I hope that this turns out to be the hard stuff before the good stuff starts coming your way.
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