Angel in a Taxi

• October
• 28

2:31 pm God-incidences, Mental Illness, Relationships, The Friday Files

The Friday Files - A couple of months ago I found out that my Mum had passed away – four and a half years ago!

Obviously ours was not a “normal”  mother / daughter relationship. Mum had bipolar disorder and I am certain she also had borderline personality disorder although I don’t know if this was every formally diagnosed. It didn’t even become a clinical diagnosis until it was included in DSM-III (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. Don’t be fooled by the name – there is nothing borderline about borderline. It is in fact very full-on!

As I process my mother’s life and death, I thought I might share some snapshots of my life with a mentally ill parent, here on this blog. It’s therapy for me, and hopefully it will help others who may be struggling to deal with a loved one with a mental illness, or are estranged from a family member … whatever. Who knows, maybe one day I will put my recollections together in book form. Or not …

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Every now and then Mum would come to me with a smile on her face and a spring in her step.  “I’m feeling so good!” she would declare. “I’m weaning myself off my medication!”  She hated taking medication, the side-effects, and feeling dependent upon it.  Naively I would rejoice alongside her . . . now I know that this is the worst possible thing that she could have done, yet from my reading I know that this is quite a common scenario for people with a mental illness like my mum.  

I was about fourteen the evening I walked into my mother’s bedroom to find her sprawled across the bed. Nothing strange about that; sometimes she would hide under the covers in her darkened room for days at a time. However this particular evening she was giggling like a schoolgirl. At first I was happy, glad to see my mother smiling for once but I soon became concerned as although she was talking to me, she wasn’t making a lot of sense. In fact, she seemed very docile and child-like when suddenly she confessed that she had taken “a lot of pills”.

Straight away I realised that she’d taken an overdose and had attempted suicide again, so I called for an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, they wanted somebody to accompany her. What could I do?  What about my brothers and sisters, aged all of 12, 9 and 6?  We had nobody to turn to advice, there was nobody that could help. So I climbed into the back of the ambulance after my mother’s stretcher was wheeled in, and left my younger siblings in the care of my 12 year old sister, assuring them that everything would be alright and that they should just go to bed like normal. Hopefully, they would hardly even notice we were gone.

Mum clutched my hand on the trip to the hospital, but once she’d been settled into a hospital bed and seen by a doctor she began acting like a spoilt child. The doctors decided that this time she didn’t need her stomach pumped, but they did want her to drink several glasses of a horrible, charcoal-like liquid to absorb the poison.  Right or wrong, Mum did not want to drink that vile stuff and it was left to me to try and get her to swallow it. Every now and then she would have a clumsy sip, and black liquid trickled from the corner of her mouth onto the white paper bib they’d already put on her (just like at the dentist). I tried to mop her up as best as I could, but the stains remained and eventually I gave up on trying to keep her respectable and concentrated instead on bribing her to drink.

It felt like the medical staff were treating her as the lowest possible life-form, as if she wasn’t worth of their time or attention because she’d brought this all on herself.  And so she was left to me.

Eventually, Mum downed most of the liquid and fell asleep, even snoring peacefully. The hospital staff told me I was free to go home. Yeah right! I had arrived in an ambulance hours before, which had long since left on other business. By now it was 3 o’clock in the morning, so there was no public transport available. I was only 14, and had just $7 in my pocket. We lived over 20 kilometres from the hospital, a very long walk, and certainly not safe for a young girl in the middle of the night.  Desperate to return to my sleeping family I climbed into a cab at the taxi rank, and asked the driver to take me as close to my home as $7 would take me. He insisted on driving me all the way home; and when we got there, refused to accept any payment.

It is only as an adult that I realize how blessed I was that night. Anything could have happened to me, but instead I came across a man who cared. Perhaps he was an angel sent by God Himself.

It is my prayer that God will richly bless him and his family for his act of kindness to a girl in great need – thirty odd years ago.