Ouch, that hurts

My wife calls me from her office and says her co worker  Sally has a problem can you help her, she says she will pay. I get quite a few referrals from a mental health advocacy group, so my wife has already determined that this one is right up my alley, even though I do not tell my wife the details of my cases.

Ok.  Couple of things wrong with this off the bat.  Wife is dumping stress buckets on me. Cause if I can't help then the co worker Sally will be running around wife's office telling all of wife's co workers that I am a special kind of idiot. 

So that it is the starting point.

Next wrong thing is like uh, how do I diplomatically tell wife --NO!!!, Ten Foot Pole NO !!!!. 
I can't because if I do wife will be running around her office telling her co workers that she is married to a special kind of idiot.

Third thing wrong is the line, she says she will pay.  Implicit in that is the expectatin that there will be an expected break because she is a friend to my wife.  Also, right up front is the idea that I have not yet been paid, but I will be working against the promise of payment.  Any Lawyer can tell you how that works out and any lawyer can tell you that many people think that they should not have to pay for "talk".

Ok, I am all in by the time three minutes roll by, the lady tells me the story, it is bad, it involves her child, it involved jail and a mental breakdown at college two months back, disappearance and drugs and alcohol and potential suicide prevention and the need to get him released so he could get treatment so he would not kill himself, it also involved another state.  It also involves my waving my magic wand and getting the ponderous legal system  to pay attention to one child out of all the children  it deals with.

I have heard this story before from others and it is never pleasant.  Kid leaves home, kid goes to college, kid binge drinks, kid has alcoholic tendencies, kid does drugs, kid has psychotic episode and goes off deep end.  What a leap of faith parents make when they send their children to college for the college experience.  Maybe parents would be wise to look at the local community college.  Just saying, the copllege experience is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Armed with a telephone and not much else,I kniow the drill, it means dropping everything and working on this one crisis  with immediacy and with no let up. There is a certain intensity to it , because a life is literally unraveling  in a jail cell.  I spent the next 6 hours of my life negotiating release and treatment and promises to appear in court and dealing with prisoner transport companies, jailers, district attorneys and sheriffs and police officers, and in the midst of same with Mom who was frantically trying to hold it together telling me things like she is going to lose her child.

Toward the end of the day I got to call her and let her know to go pick up her child , he was being released. Take him to hospital for evaluation and treatment.  I was able to get the Judge and the DA to allow for release.  Mom was thrilled, but also muted for she knew the long row had yet to be plowed, treatment that pulls someone back from the edge is frequently years in delivery.

I felt that I had for once done something worthwhile and was about to take time to sigh relief. But suddenly there was a stabbing pain in my head, neck and shoulder.  I thought I was having a stroke, but I collected my thoughts and realized that the muscle in the area between my neck and shoulder, just down on my back had knotted into a mass of rock consistency..  It is a stress reactor, and I have not had this for several years and it was never as bad as this. The nerve tunning up the back of my head was screaming  in inflamed agony, I could not move my head lest the pain blinded me.  I have never ever been laid low so quickly before.

Two days of heat packs and all manner of analgesics have dropped the ache into tolerable levels, and I believe I will live.  The knot of muscle is starting to loosen, though an ache is still there.  I thought about it later and realized that during my stressful day trying to help someone in distress I was internalizing the stress and it was not until it was over that I was aware of the effect.

So tonight when I go home, I will put my feet up, lean back, put some soft music on and take time to smell the roses. and I will be grateful that it was a knot in a muscle in my shoulder and not a vein in my brain or in my heart.We should all try and do the same some time, take a break.

  .  I guess I want to make sure I  am ready next time an anxious parent calls.  And that was what it was about, I was trying to save another parent from a parents worst nightmare and I as a parent was feeling the pressure as if it were my own child.  I wonder today, am I getting too old for this, can I still summon up all that is needed to act quickly and properly when there is a young person at risk. Will I still be able to care as if it were my own.  Doubts are creaping in , and I hope it is just the pain talking and not the spirit.

 Would it be that in this country we relied upon mental health facilities rather than jails for our mental health treatment.