Chilling

“it was the same dynamic that had vexed his family and  'service providers for years'. It was the challenge of a ‘person’ who does not want to be seen as having challenges, who manipulates for advantage, who suffers severe discomforts yet seeks to create discomfort in others, who deals with distress  and disintegration by reaching for ever more forceful means of control, and who harbors, beneath all these attempts at coping and containment, a chilling rage that erupts when they fail.

 This is a quote from a book I am currently reading that is a biography of a young man who ended up killing a young woman because of his mental illness. It is a chillingly close representation of Cheyann's profile. Chilling...

Georgia

And so the decision was made and Cheyann is now in a new facility in Georgia. It was a grueling few weeks as the team continued to meet and search for the logical next step. There was no right answer. In the process, Cheyann's birth father popped back onto the scene attempting to play knight-in-shining armor coming to the rescue, accusing us of not having her best interests at heart. I mostly ignored him but it hurt a little.  We went back and forth as to whether or not we would transport Cheyann down south or have at least familiar people do so, but in the end, her behavior was sliding so much that it was deemed a severe safety risk to even attempt it and a secure transport was hired. Cheyann refused to talk to me after our one uncomfortable visit at the Retreat, and then the day she was told what the decision was she finally called me so she throw some F bombs at me and let me know that when she finally was successful at killing herself it would be my fault. As hard as it was to hear that, in some ways the anger was easier to deal with than the sadness and despair. And now that the transport has successfully delivered her, we wait to hear from this new team, and start yet another leg of this journey.

 

The Tomato Plant

When Cheyann visited with us in May she gave us a tomato plant that she had been growing in the greenhouse of her residential facility. It was small, but green and healthy and showed the results of many months of hard work and caring. As the plant grew through the summer I noted that it was beginning to wither. I tried to move it to a new location to see if that might help. It might have, a little. Some new growth was noted but by mid August when many other plants were distributing fruit, the Cheyann plant was just starting to flower. I continued to nurture the plant the best I could - making sure it had water and light and moving it around as it showed need, and it helped....some. It is now mid September and the Cheyann plant has one very small green tomato just beginning and one other flower. The problem is - we will soon get a frost here in the North Country. And so.. the only thing left to do to save the plant is to move it to a greenhouse - and the only greenhouse that can reallyl accommodate this particular tomato plant is thousands of miles away......

Good News?

The email message was titled Good News. Really?  Given this roller coaster world we have been living in for the past I don't know how many years - I don't actually know if it is or isn't. The slide Cheyanne was in (that I last posted about in March) continued, and last month the residential facility where she had been making some decent progress decided they can no longer keep her safe. That isn't untrue. Her last suicide attempt was a major one involving rope, a closet bar and even an accompanying letter.  And there was yet another run- away attempt including a stolen and then broken bottle of wine and a joy ride in the car of an unknown driver - but it is still disheartening. I don't know why I had let my hopes rise again, but of course I did. And now... now she sits at the Retreat for the third time in 2 years waiting for her ticket to the next stop on this incredibly difficult journey. The hardest part is, she doesn't qualify for many of the offered locales. She is either too acute,  or not acute enough for any available treatment facility in New England (or her insurance won't cover it).  And so, unbelievably right now we are looking at a choice of either Florida, Georgia or Tennessee!! My heart hurts to think about it. Yes, she has been away from home for more than two years now, but she has always been close enough that I knew I could get to her with a relatively quick 4-5 hour drive - never fun, but do-able. To realize that she now needs to be thousands of miles away and relatively inaccessible is really hard to swallow. I can actually feel the fingers of depression pulling me down again! I really did want her to get a place where she could be closer to home, come visit more regularly and really be part of her family again - not send her farther away for fewer visits and no real chance of more regular connections. And so the email.  Good News! Cheyann has been accepted at the ________ facility in Savannah Georgia. Is it good news? Do we punch that ticket??