As I said in the last post, my dad came to relieve me of all family and household responsibilities and I was taken to see a psychiatrist several times each week as a substitute for in patient treatment. My Dad stayed 4-5 months and during that time the visits to the psychiatrist became less frequent. My husband would rage at my father but he did not resort to physical blows with him. It made me furious and I was quick to jump to my father’s defense, but it did little or no good.

When the baby was about 14 months old we moved.  Husband was fired from his position in this church too, as he had been from the first church he pastored; and he blamed my depression. At the point we moved he still had no job but we moved where we would be close to family and where husband had the most/best job prospects, which was in a Northern Midwest state. We discovered upon arrival that the house we had planned to rent was not safe to house young children in, so a church member let us all sleep on his floor for the first 5 months. Husband and the wife of our host family were both prone to angry outbursts, which made life tense for everyone.

I had to get connected up with psychological services in order to keep on my medications, so I continued to get counseling. I don’t remember much about it. We moved to a town about 30 miles away from our host family when husband got a job with social services. Previously it was somewhat common for me to become disoriented while driving, but at this new location was the first time it happened when I was walking. I took the dog on long walks, and quite frequently I would suddenly realize I didn’t recognize anything in my surroundings. I would go to the next cross street to read the names of the streets and neither one would sound familiar at all. Then I started a mental inventory, realizing I didn’t know what city I was in, or what state, or what year it was, or what my house looked like. The dog we had at that time was very sensitive to me and would pick up on the fact that I didn’t know how to get home, and she would take me home. More than once I didn’t even recognize my house when we got to our lawn. She was such a good dog – I don’t know what I would have done without her.

The abuse accelerated again once we lived on our own again – both emotional and physical abuse. I reached a point where I couldn’t connect words to make a sentence again, and for the first time I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. It was a week before I came to the realization that it was the abuse that caused the break down, which had been obvious to staff from the very beginning. I was in the hospital for about 5 weeks. While I was in there my medical doctor wanted to run some medical tests, and he discovered a bleeding ulcer, Gall stones, and I can’t remember what else. One of the tests done was an EEG, which was really confusing to the technician and diagnostic doctor because the brainwave pattern that changed was the part that is like a person’s fingerprint – everyone has their own pattern which never changes. I was put on an anti-seizure medication just in case it might help, but it was a shot in the dark.

The most significant thing about this hospitalization was that I had to confront my husband about his abuse and inform him that he had to sign an agreement to attend a series of classes on anger management that the state police ran and supervised, and he had to move out of our home before I would be released from the hospital. I was really afraid to do that, but the man who escorted us to a private room was a big, burly fellow who intentionally looked really tough. There was a small window in the door to the room, and the escort took us in and seated us so my husband was facing the window. Before he left us alone he told both of us that he would be right outside that door the whole time and if I so much as raised my voice to call for help he would be there immediately. Up until this time I believed my husband when he said he was unable to control his temper; but I watched him become more and more enraged as I continued to lay out the requirements for me to be released; and although he trembled and clenched his fists, he did not lose control. That was a huge eye opener for me. It made it clear that that he was choosing to abuse me – it was not something he couldn’t control. In many ways it was the beginning of the end of our marriage, because I was making requirements that I knew he was capable of meeting.

Just a couple weeks after I had been discharged the anti-seizure medication had done so much damage to my liver that I was literally bleeding to death from my liver. I thought I had a flu, but I just couldn’t get off the couch to take care of the children. I called husband to get girls to take them to school. When he saw me he insisted on putting me in the car and taking me to the emergency room. I waited for a room for hours,slumped over in a chair along a wall. Everyone there knew I would be admitted. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my eyes and skin were the color of a rotten pumpkin from the poisoning in my body. That night they did emergency surgery and I spent a week in intensive care. Once I was transferred to the surgical floor I had two nurses come to see me and said, “we were there that night you came on and were part of the team working to keep you alive. When we heard that you actually made it, we had to come see for ourselves.”

It takes a very long time to recover from severe liver damage, so when I went home from the hospital I was a long way from being able to take care of our large family. I had no alternative but to let husband move back in. All too soon after moving back in, he started up the abuse again.