Hit a mental wall

Aug 26, 2015

My co-worker jinxed me two weeks ago. He said that I was mentally doing well as a WLS patient because the research he’s done has led him to believe that we all go nuts. This week, I proved him wrong.

A week and a half ago my sister told me she has been diagnosed with cancer. Although I do not know what stage she’s in, she has started doing end of life planning. I guess that news was just the straw that broke the camel’s back and all of the other things that have been getting to me, coupled with that, finally pushed me over the “I’m okay” edge. Long story short, the sexual harassment I’ve been experiencing, the self-consciousness about my loose skin, the general post WLS adjustment, and then my sister’s news finally got to me.

I was able to leave work early today so that I could make the emergency drop-in counselling clinic here in town. At first, the councillor’s suggestion that I was suffering from grief did not make sense to me. He then explained that I was experiencing both anticipatory grief and regular grief, and that make things click for me. With my sister, I was expecting how things will be changing during her illness and picturing what it will be like if she was to pass. The regular grief was basically me having not dealt with my mom’s passing 14 years ago. He then said that I was grieving for myself. I never thought of it like that before, but the old me is no longer here. My old habits, my old comforts, my old activities, my old me had died. It was really the light-bulb moment for me. Although it did not make me feel heaps better, now I can say to myself “you feel like this because you are mourning, and those feelings are okay” and that does bring me a bit of calm.

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