Hi Matt
I have not been around on the forum as much as usual for a while so I have not answered your posts recently - but it looks like you are getting lots of support
Don't worry about your appearance , I have a friend who sound like he has similar image to yours - he is 55, 6ft 2, has a totally bald head and a beard 12 inches long ZZ tops style - and he did not have a skin problem - he just Ike's the way he looks and chose it and I have pink hair and an eyebrow piecing - I do not think we judge on here by appearance ( which I suppose is just as well as we cant see you anyway LOL)
I suppose you could post a picture on our blog??
Ward rounds are horrible even if you are a close relative as you always feel like you have no right to contribute and are there on sufferance - well I felt like this anyway when I supported a friend through 3 months residential treatment in a psychiatric unit.
But it sounds like you are doing everything you can to help Lucy.
When I visited my friend and sat in on ward rounds I found the worse thing was coming home to an empty house well no adult to talk it through with anyway - I am married but my husband is a marine engineer often away at sea
- so I often found myself with no one to talk through what I had seen or experienced in the hospital. It must be worse for you because this was a friend and not a partner and yet I still felt very alone and I had no one who understood to talk through my day with.
So please use this forum as much as you like if it helps to offload and do not worry about supporting anyone els or replying to anyone else's posts...
at the moment you need to use it for yourself and I am sure that at some point you may feel you can support someone else but if not it does not matter as it is not a requirement.
As for what you said about coming close to hitting out at Lucy and others in the past or at least thinking about it .....
I totally know that you will not and indeed many of us feel like this but never will. I am a 53 year old disabled women but even I get that angry sometimes I those feelings but I have never acted on them and never would.
However I did want to say that the thoughts that we will hurt of kill our babies or others when we have PNI are often not like this at all.
I would say that when well - which I have been now for some years - I relate to what you describe and have got that angry with my teenager in that way but of course have never touched her. In fact she has never experienced any sort of physical chastisement from anyone.
However when I was ill I had horrendous and vivid thoughts that I would kill her but these thoughts were totally different . They were not triggered by anger or any real thing but came unwanted and un-bidden into my head at the most bizarre moments. I could be cuddling her and thinking how beautiful she was and how much I loved her and these horrible thoughts would flash through my head and I just could not stop them - they were as if they were not me yet it was me and I felt such guilt but nothing I could do would stop them.
I wanted to point this out to you because these types of thoughts many women do not admit to for many months into their illness and they are not so much thoughts as almost delusional and many of us describe them as 'visions' at times.
They do not have to be about harming anyone , they can range from anything from fear of harming or sexually abusing someone to fears of accidental harm or death to fears you or your child of partner are terminally ill or even fears of world disaster or terrorism
( As well as the thoughts I would kill my baby I had a fear that the world was ending due to climate change yet this was in 1990 many years before anyone thought this may be a reality)
but these thoughts are not like 'normal' thoughts, they are obsessive, very frightening often vivid like waking nightmares and could be described as visions
I found that having these thoughts would come out of the blue and often drive me into a full blown panic attack actually very much as you described Lucy having the other day.
You said:
Yes I totally relate to this as I would relate this to the symptoms I had when I had a severe panic attacks and while they would come on for other reasons quite often these panics would be triggered by these awful thoughts and visions that were happening in my head that I just could not tell anyone about.
As I am sure you know in such a severe panic attack you do get cold and shivery because of course your body shuts down into an acute flight or fight readiness - digestion stops, blood goes from regulating your temperature to your muscles and heart and lungs - see ....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_responseand
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_disorder but you have nothing you can actually flee or fight, so your muscles that are ready for action simply shake instead as this pent ups energy has to go somewhere
Panic attacks can be very physical - many thousands of people end up in A & e every year due to a panic attack
I am not suggesting that the cause of this for Lucy is scary thoughts she is not sharing, but something HAS to be triggering these attacks and it is a possibility that she has an idea but is not able to tell anyone what !
Has she told you what is happening for her when this happens i.e what she is thinking what she is feeling?
if she is not ready to talk about it I am not suggesting y9u push the issue and maybe she is not aware of what is triggering these episodes.
Anyway these are just some of my thoughts set off by relating to what you described of Lucy's recent 'attack'
As a self help mutual support site all we can do is relate and tell you about how it was/is for us
I hope it helps and i think you are doing everything you can do right now
VeriteeXX