Let me just start by saying no, I have not relapsed. This isn't completely about cancer, but it's definitely related, and I think it's an important story that needs to be told, especially if people are still reading this blog.
There's been a big movement recently to end the stigma that surrounds mental illness, and I wholeheartedly support it, but I feel like I've been a bit of a hypocrite. I wrote an entire book about my battle with cancer, yet I barely allude to the fact that I've been struggling with depression for almost seven years. So you know what? If I'm gonna talk the talk, I better walk the walk. As always, it's time to get real with you all.
I was in therapy BEFORE I was diagnosed with cancer, so as you can probably imagine, the whole leukemia ordeal didn't help with the depression. And I've actually been really open and honest about how that's affected me emotionally; I've harbored a lot of survivor's guilt, I have certain post-traumatic stress triggers, like getting my hair cut, and every now and then, I wonder how and why I'm alive. Don't get me wrong, the experience affected me in many positive ways as well; it truly opened my eyes to how caring and generous people can be, and that was a huge part of my healing process and my ability to stay optimistic during my intense treatments and seemingly never-ending hospital stays.
Unfortunately, I recently lost almost all of that positivity. I went through a lot of stressful events in the past few months - graduating, moving twice, starting a new job, a breakup - and the stress just kept piling on. I felt like I was drowning, so I tried to be proactive; I started eating better, I started running, and I scheduled a follow-up appointment with my psychologist, who I hadn't been to in about seven months. I felt better for a while, but earlier last week, I went into a downward spiral and got stuck in a negative thought loop for almost four days, and I didn't think I'd ever get out.
This is where my being a cancer survivor actually provided some good insight. I've had pretty bad depressive episodes in the past, and any time I had brief, fleeting thoughts about suicide, I had enough sense to say to myself, "Allison, you have come too far and put too much effort into surviving to back out now. You will get through this." If any of you remember the video I made when I took my last dose of chemo pills, I said that when I was diagnosed, all I could think about was all the things I didn't get to do with my life, like graduating college, getting a PhD, starting a family, etc. I felt that I had so much more life to live, and those were among the things that gave me the strength and motivation to keep fighting. Last Wednesday, at an emergency visit to my psychologist's office, I told her that none of that mattered anymore. I felt like I wasn't meant to ever be happy, and I didn't care about all of those things I wanted to do with my life because if I was going to feel this miserable, it wasn't worth being alive for them. She said to me, "I know you feel that way right now, but you need to understand that you are not in a good mental state to decide whether or not you want to be alive. You're at rock bottom. You are very, very depressed, and you need help." And she was right. There was still a small part of me that remembered everything that I've been through, and the fact that I was losing my grasp on that made me realize how badly I needed help. At that point, I didn't feel I could keep myself safe anymore, and she insisted that I go to the hospital.
After hours of waiting, a bunch of evaluations, answering the same questions over and over again, and a 45-minute ambulance transport at 1 AM, I was eventually admitted to the inpatient mental health unit at Newark-Wayne Community Hospital. Now, I'm no stranger to the hospital, but compared to the pediatric floor of Sloan Kettering, this experience was absolutely surreal. They took all of my belongings except for my clothes, everything on the unit was gray and white, the rooms had nothing but a bed and a small dresser, and they had to personally check on every patient every 15 minutes. They even confiscated my doughnut because they "only allow healthy snacks on the unit." THEY TOOK MY DOUGHNUT.
I woke up Thursday morning and was greeted with more questions and evaluations and a prescription of Zoloft. Since they took my phone, I had to call a coworker from the hospital phone to let him know that I wouldn't be in for the next two days, and I learned that I was only allowed four phone calls a day for ten minutes each. I was worried I would start to go stir-crazy, but at lunch, I realized they had a whole shelf of games and puzzles, so I pulled out a 500-piece puzzle and worked on it for about five hours straight until it was finished. A bunch of people on the unit asked me how I had so much patience, and I told them that it was meditative. After the breakdown I had the day before, I needed this time to completely check out from life and keep my mind off everything that was stressing me out. I've described depressive episodes like a broken ankle; you have to keep the weight off of it until it heals, otherwise it'll just get worse. That's what I needed to do - clear my head and not worry about anything until I regained some emotional stability.
I slept terribly Thursday night, but I was given the good news that I would be discharged that afternoon. While waiting for them to sort out the paperwork and followup appointments, I did another 500-piece puzzle (yes, two in 24 hours). My friend came to pick me up around 1 PM, and I was on my merry way.
So, why am I telling you all of this? Because the goal of this blog has always been to be honest and informative, and if people are still looking to it for support or even just a new perspective, then I better stick to it. Additionally, I think it's important for people to know that mental illness, in this case, major depressive disorder, is a very real thing that can affect anyone, even people who seem to have everything together. I just graduated college with a double-degree, I leased a car, I got an apartment, and I got a job, but I was so far gone last week that none of that mattered to me. I was really moved by the article ESPN wrote about Madison Holleran, the UPenn track star who jumped to her death in January 2014. It talked a lot about how her life on social media appeared happy and fun, but in reality, she was having a really difficult time navigating her freshman year of college and was obviously severely depressed. When someone like that commits suicide, people tend to focus on everything she had going for her. They can't believe someone so smart, beautiful, and successful would take her own life when she had so much to live for. That's what so scary about depression. It distorts your view of the world so drastically that you don't want to live in that world anymore. Madison Holleran was too mentally ill to appreciate all the wonderful things in her life, and she therefore lacked the ability to believe that things were going to improve. Sadly, I can resonate with that feeling now. I had given up, I was done trying to be happy, and I was in so much pain, I would have rather been dead than continue trudging through my day-to-day life. The truth is, I felt much closer to death that night than I ever did while I had cancer.
I REALLY don't want people to take this as a cry for attention or start to freak out and worry that I could be pushed over the edge any day now. That is not the goal here. I have two take-home messages for you:
1) Don't be judgmental of people who are struggling with mental illness. I am not a "crazy person" or "insane" or anything like that. The chemical imbalances in my brain make me extremely depressed, and say what you want, but that Zoloft is doing just as much to keep me alive as all that chemo did. Plus, you don't know what's going on in people's minds. A nurse on the inpatient unit called my depression "a real depression" because I had so many awful things happen to me in the last couple years, which really bothered me. Depression doesn't need to be justified by what some outside person considers a stressful event. For me, it took a rough transition and a life-threatening illness to drive me to the brink of suicide. If you have a predisposition for a mood disorder, it might only take a bad test grade. It doesn't make that person weak or crazy; it makes them clinically depressed, and there is real medical treatment for it. And this leads nicely into my second point...
2) If you're depressed, GET HELP. It's so easy to get stuck in the mindset of trying to work through it yourself, but sometimes it's just not enough, and I learned that the hard way. I wasn't just "in a bad mood," I couldn't function. I was so consumed by thoughts of suicide that I couldn't focus on what people were saying to me at work. That is not normal, that is not okay, but it IS fixable. You just have to stop being stubborn and allow it to be fixed. There is no shame in talking to a therapist or getting a psychiatric evaluation. A small change might make all the difference, and in some cases, it might save your life.
If you're wondering, I do feel much better now. This experience was the wake-up call I needed to make me realize that I needed more help. My medication is making me very drowsy, but I'll take drowsy over how I felt last week every time. I'm back at work, I'm singing with my band, and I feel generally happier and at peace with the stressors in my life. I'm able to be alone with my thoughts and simply enjoy life without worrying that I might fall back into a crippling depression. But if I do, I know exactly what to do and who to talk to to get out of it. In a nutshell, there's nowhere to go from here but up. =)
