Things started to go wrong on Saturday the 13th of June. I had worked the Friday and every Monday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday since I returned from my 3 month vacation in Europe in the August of last year.
However, this Saturday was different. I started to get a headache around 16:30 thinking it was diet related since I hadn’t eaten since breakfast (Another bad habit). I was craving a nice meal, but since the cook (my mum) had the day off, toast was on the menu.
I waited for my break at 17:30 but became nauseous. Suddenly these voices appeared shouting in the back of my head “They’re coming to get you” and “They are after you”.
At this stage I had no visual hallucinations and I was lucid enough to recognise I could no longer fulfill my working duties in a responsible capacity.
Promptly I spoke to the Nurse-In-Charge; Mary and voiced my concerns that I should go home since “I had just had an epileptic seizure”. Only my Nurse-Unit-Manager knows of my condition and as it was the week-end she was not around. Neither was my colleague, another Nurse-In-Charge who I had confided in. I chose to keep my disorder a bit on the quiet side as I had encountered discrimination from my previous job making working conditions stressful and unbearable.
After speaking to my Mum about my hallucinations at work, we decided that I drive home as I only live 10 minutes away. Terrified, I drove slowly and got home to a frantic mother who wanted to call the Crisis Intervention or CAT team. Stupidly, I took extra Largactil (Chlorpromazine) 200mg which my Psychiatrist had advised me to use under my discression. Fortunately I fell asleep until 04:00 the following morning aggitated and still hallucinating of which many cigarettes and cups of coffee (other bad habits), did nothing for. Clearly I was psychotic.
It wasn’t until the evening that the visual hallucinations started. Hearing repetativly and loud “They’re coming to get you”, “They will kill you”, and “They are after you”, I also had to contend with seeing dark shadows roaming around my room with knives weaving in and out of my doors and windows and around my bed. I was glad when mum offered to sleep with me to try and calm me. I was even more happier when I spoke to my Psychiatrist who felt that the 500mg of Largactil (Chlorpromazine) in addition to my other medication would have some relief on this terrifying nightmare I was experiencing. Whilst my psychiatrst could not admit me that night due to bed capacity, I was admitted the following day. Still hallucinating as severely as the previous night, the nursing staff decided to put me into high dependancy where I would not be in any danger to anyone including myself.
The next couple of days in hospital are a blur. I was so doped up on 300mg Chlorpromazine, 1400mg Quetiapine (Seroquel), 4000mg Sodium Valporate (Epilim), and 40mg Paroxetine that I slept most of the day. I only ventured out to have cigarettes and dinner. The paranoia was still high as I sat alone for dinner thinking everyone was talking about me or plotting to attack and even kill me. I took no action on these thoughts due to my limited but present insight.
Each day I saw my Psychiatrist and expressed my difficulties. By day 4 we decided to change anti-psychotics as I was on the maximum dose of the Quetiapine (Seroquel).
I was devistated. This was going to be the 7th anti-psychotic I had changed to. Whilst the Chlorpromazine works well as a supplement, the high doses I would required would cause the side-effects to be totally debilitating. I had no choice.
My Psychiatrist felt it best that we change the Quetiapine (Seroquel) for Ziprasidone (Zeldox) in one hit rather than weaning and stop/starting dosages. So, I stopped the Quetiapine (Seroquel) straight away and went straight onto the maximum dose of Ziprasidone (Zeldox) which is 160mg which I now take all at night although it recommends you split the dose.
Within 3 days I was feeling my old self again. I had day leave with my Mum and went and saw the Salvador Dali exhibition. The following day I went home.
All was going well until the hallucinations began to reappear in the evenings. Mum was at work and my Nanna has no idea of what is wrong with me so we argue.
Around 4pm every evening since being home my auditory hallucinations flare up again and I am always up and about between 04:00 and 06:00 much to my mother’s disgust.
Hearing repetativly and loud “They’re coming to get you”, “They will kill you”, and “They are after you” I cannot go out anywhere unaccompanied. I cannot drive my car. And I am even scared to walk my dog as I am frightened to leave the house.
These symptoms have all but gone now since seeing my Psychiatrist again last Thursday. She added an extra 40mg of Ziprasidone (Zeldox) to take at 16:00 to stop the hallucinations and started me on som Clonazepam to help with the anxiety and insomnia. Yesterday and today have been the quietest days in a very long time.
Posts Tagged ‘voices’
Well.. as hard as this may be to talk about.. my mother has schizophrenia. She has been diagnosed with this disease since i was about 5 years old. I am now 19 almost 20 years old, and I am still dealing with this.
I do remember one of the first times she started having these voices in her head. When I was about 6 years old she asked me to come to her because she thought someone had put a recorder in my ear.. crazy I know..
Another incident was when we went to visit my nana and grandad and she left me there because she was having another one of her episodes and noone knew where she was for about a week or two.
My moms voice in her head is named Linda.. kinda creepy i know.. but after awhile I just accepted it.. She went to the mental hospital so many times when I was growing up I can’t even tell you how many times its been. She would go into outbreaks of just bawling her eyes out and claiming that people on the tv or the neighbors next door were out to get her and i of course would have to fight her for the keys to the car so that way she wouldn’t kill herself or anyone else. She would think that people from our own family were teaming up with this voice in her head to “get” her.
She would always claim that something bad was going to happen or that “linda” was controlling all of our heads and making us into different people. It was so wild.. and during all of this madness I was trying to be a teenager with friends. But, I hid it all. I held in the pain and the hurt and put on a big smile when i went to school because i didn’t want anyone to know that there was something wrong. I was even a very popular girl in school. I was a cheerleader all throughout high school. I ran track my freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. I was very good at it too. I had many many friends, but none of them knew the secret i held deep inside.
Everytime my friends would ask to come over I would lie and say that they couldn’t because my mom said no or that someone was visiting and they couldnt’ come over. My mom was always an emotional wreck. I would come home and she would be crying on the couch or yelling at her voice. I would escape by sitting in my room with the music loud and the tv up. I can honestly say it made me very depressed because all i wanted was a normal mother like everyone else had. I remember looking up into the stands wishing that my mom could come and be normal to watch me run or cheer. It broke my heart. I remember many nights just clinging to my pillow wishing that things would be different. I did get a boyfriend my sophomore year and i eventually told him, the first person, about my moms disorder. He was of course in shock because yes i looked like the type of girl who was “perfect”. But i wanted to seem that way to people because i didn’t want anyone to look at me differently or feel sorry for me.
Anyways, i remember on several occasions my mom telling me she hated me. However, i knew it was because of her voice.. but for some reason those 3 words hurt. I needed someone to love and care about me. I had a stepdad and my dad lived in dallas. My stepdad didn’t know he would be signing up for this. He really just wanted out and he mainly took it out on me. We never really talked.
As of now I am trying my best to get through college. And not but 3 months ago I got a call from my uncle saying that my mom tried to commit suicide by overdosing on her medication. My stepdads brother however had walked in just as the medication was all hitting her and he called for an ambulance. My stepdad was out of town and I was in another town for college. She did live but as of right now is still not doing well. She likes to call peopel all the time like almost 20 times a day for each person in my family. It gets on their nerves as well as mine because all she wants to talk about is her voice and of course none of us want to her about it or listen to the person she has become. I dont’ know what to do anymore. I feel like she is my responsibility. Noone is my family seems to want to deal with her or care about her, and my stepdad wants to get out of it. I feel since she is my mother that i should help her, but i don’t know how and i don’t think i am emotionally stable enought
to help. THe only thing that has been keeping me going is my friends. But thats it.
So if you have a mother, father, brother or sister that have this horrible disorder i feel your pain and your not the only one. I know how it feels and it hurts.. but you have to keep strong and don’t let that person get you down.. you have to surround yourself with happy people and other family members to get through it.
Hi! My name is Julia and I’m 20 and I have been struggling with schizophrenia for about a year now. I tripped on Coricidin Cough and Cold last year in February (08) and kept taking it for three days, I didn’t get over it for a week and had been dropped on the street on my head, I didn’t come out all that well, I thought my boyfriend was a serial killer and was going to kill me so I hid knives through out the house. I broke up with him when I thought he was being overbearing and went home to live with my mom. Through out the summer I was doing fine until I felt like people were watching me and talking about me in coded messages in front of me. At first I called them the papanazi’s as a joke, but then it got serious and then I thought I was on some kind of hidden camera show and no one was going to tell me, I thought they hid cameras in my shower and everything and wouldn’t go to the bathroom or take showers for days at a time. Then I went on a vacation with a group of friends
and was listening to people “talk” about me. It seemed like they could hear my thoughts. It was at that moment I knew I was totally screwed, people were going to know every little bad thing I had ever done in my life. When I got home from the trip my mom put me in the hospital, I didn’t want to go. I thought everyone was just lying and they were going to hide my gift under mental illness and treat me like dirt. I fought tooth and nail. They put me on drugs. Then I found out it was my right to go off the drugs, as soon as I did I started hearing voices, the voices of everyone around me so I thought I could communicate with everyone around me. Then one day God spoke to me and told me he hated me and to kill myself. He said God wouldn’t say that to you would he, then he said “Must be the Devil” Then he said I was going to die the next day of a heartattack. They put me back in the hospital and back on the pills. They diagnosed me with Drug Induced Psychosis. This was in
like November (08). Now it’s May (09) and I’ve been living out of the hospital and on meds since, my stays were only about a week long. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 2 weeks ago and it finally shocked me awake. I now think it’s … possible… that people might not be able to hear my thoughts. But I don’t know how to adjust how I think to fully accommodate this new revelation. Last night I wasn’t able to sleep and I started hearing voices. I decided to listen to the voices, because listening to them helps me to fall asleep faster. My fiance talks in his sleep. While I was listening to the voices one said I love you and then another said I love you more and at the same time my fiance said in his sleep I love you more. So I still think that if you’re reading you know exactly who I am and all the world hears my thoughts. But I’m trying to disbelieve that. My goal right now is to get stable enough to someday go off the meds and have a baby, which brings on a whole
slew of new problems. Like it everyone can hear my thoughts I’m never going to be able to have sex, or my kids will know how crazy I am, or when I’m scared too… just a whole slew of things you wouldn’t want your kids knowing. I really hope people can’t hear my thoughts… Thanks for listening, God Bless!
My life ended and began on the day my brother attempted suicide.
I was sixteen, he was nineteen. He had been on medication for Bi-polar for a few months. For the next few months, I barely ate, slept, spoke, or moved. I began to feel split up, uhwhole and raw. As though there were two people inside me.
I first saw Lucy when I was cleaning out my closet one afternoon in August. She was in the spare room next door to mine, and though I did not see her face, I saw her feet beneath the closet door. She was standing inside it, scratching on the door. She wanted out. I ran.
It was around then that the trees began to move eerily, to catch my eye and make contact with me. They whispered to me in ways that nothing ever had. They wanted me to come with them when they died that fall, to find them on the “other side.” They spoke to my heart, to my soul. I believed them and promised to go along when they did. I began to slip into worlds that were far different from our own. Cosmic, gorgeous worlds that one can hardly imagine. The trees called me to be their own, to be their child. To be one with them.
The people inside me began to multiply rapidly. There was Lucy, who I saw regularly in the mirror. We fought and argued all the time. She poked me and pinched me and screamed at me. Then there was Liam, who was actually a real person. My friend. He could feel my feelings, hear my thoughts, see what I was doing. I had no privacy left. Our minds were connected. There were the sisters: Charlotte, Penelope, and Victoria. They needed my help, they wanted me to save them. There was the scarecrow and his alias, Lord Effiddian. He wanted to kill me, to drink my blood and eat my soul. He wanted my hair, my violin, my life. He would eat away my music and murder what was left. He was a brute.
I went on medication two months ago. My father finally realized something was wrong. I hadn’t been eating, sleeping, doing my school work, or even speaking. I COULDN’T speak. I couldn’t move! It was impossible for me to do either of those without the greatest of pain in my soul, in my mind. Colors were either grey or too intense. My thoughts were so loud that I could hear them and sometimes see them. The worlds were so gorgeous–and so terrifying. There was nothing I could do. I felt nothing. My sister cried and I was repulsed. My mother asked me to talk to her and I couldn’t. I was a monster.
Since going on medication, I have begun to recollect my abilities as a violinist, to remember that I am a human being and that my thoughts are my own. I sometimes feel that I have no privacy of thought, that there are too many people talking inside me…but it’s quieter for the most part. Things aren’t so painful anymore.
I don’t know whats going on.
Theres a voice in my head
His name is john
He tells me to commit henious crimes.
I robbed my grandmothers house yesterday and stole all her panties.
John said he needed them to continue living.
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy john WHY
Whyyyyyyyy are you doing this to me john?!
