The long way down

I was starting to slip down that deep, dark hole of emptiness recently. I didn't go all the way down, thank God, but I could have. Easily.

I lived there once, years ago, in that very dark place in the psyche where everything is bleak and hopeless and lonely. I was there for a whole year, unable to pull myself out, unable to help myself, praying that the darkness would lift or, in the worst moments, hoping it would just take me.

Depression is a horrible thing. There was a time in my life when I would get angry with my mother because she wouldn't "cheer up" and stop being depressed all the time. That was, of course, before my eyes were opened, very suddenly and clearly, to what true depression really felt like.

I suffered badly from post-partum depression after both my kids were born. The first time, I didn't recognize it for what it was. I thought I was just overtired. But I remember clearly feeling the urge to throw a chair through a window one night. And I remember the day I thought fleetingly about dying. That;s a mighty frightening thing for a person who loves life.

When my second daughter arrived, the swiftness of the emotional crash following the joy of her birth almost knocked the wind out of me. It arrived with a vengeance, ten times worse than after my first daughter was born. I hit the bottom of that downward spiral so hard that no one around me could recognize me. I couldn't recognize me.

I was desperate, and angry, and confused and sad and irrational. I pushed away my husband and my family. I cried all the time, I almost ruined my marriage, and my husband finally begged me to get help. So I did get help.

For the last six weeks or so, I've experienced pain that ranges at any given moment from barely tolerable to excruciating. The bulging disk that I've had for 20 years has shifted and now presses against a nerve that runs down my right leg, from butt to toes. I have tingling, burning and numbness at any given time of day or night. And I haven't slept right in a month.

And for a time, I stood at the edge of that dark nothing again, looking down. Doctors' appointments and spinal injections and nerve blocks and decompression treatments and cold laser therapy and narcotics all became a blur in a pain-filled haze.

But now I see hope again on the horizon. I saw the surgeon again yesterday. I was prepared to try to convince him to operate. I'd hardly slept the night before, going over my argument for him to operate, ready to beg him if it came to that.

I didn't need to. After a brief exam and a look at my MRI, he told me I'd need surgery. It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Finally....finally...I'll be fixed. I'll be me again.

I can't wait to be me again.