Okay - this one is going to be hard to explain without a ton of background.....
After our fifth child was born, my wife got into some serious problems with post-partum depression related to lack of B-12 and having too many kids too quickly. The standard symptoms were depression, then followed with mania complete with rapid speech, runaway thought patterns, insane creativity, hyper-sexuality (nymphomania), wild hormonal fluctuations, lack of sleep because the brain will not shut down, dis-jointed thoughts, feelings of euphoria and grandiosity. A little known fact is that around half of the bridge jumpers out there (we have fences everywhere on the favorite jumping bridges here in Seattle) do not plunge to their deaths because they are depressed out of their minds; many jump because, in their grandiosity, they think they can fly; not kidding, its true..... A year before my wife got her symptoms, we had a single sister over for dinner who suffered from bi-polar. She said she did not want to get married (at 56 years of age) because she did not want to subject a man to what was going thru her mind. She seemed perfectly normal to me at the time and we had a delightful evening chatting about various things. I was uninitiated at that point - now I can usually pick 'em out of a crowd..... The ward split and we lost touch with her until I was coming home from work one day and saw the RS President in her ward coming in the opposite direction and bawling her eyes out as she drove past. I asked my wife if anything was going on and then we discovered what had happened. I believe the RS President was her Visiting Teacher and I am only guessing she was made aware of all of the details - possibly had to dress the body for burial, as I believe this "flying nun" was endowed. When she jumped, she was not depressed, she apparently thought she could fly - and was manic at the time her life ended on the West Seattle bridge. It is this story that motivates me to share my B-12 story with everyone I know and to not judge anyone who suffers from any form of mental illness - even if its self-induced (such as stress or natural consequences related to willful sin). A few years earlier with that endowment of knowledge - and I might have been able to have the ultimate positive effect on a life. I tear up every time thinking about it.
Guys, your wife's body needs to recover after each kid - counsel together using wisdom and order in all things. Even if we are medically challenged and don't know much about that stuff, the basic advice I would give is to give it at least 18 months before attempting to conceive after the last one is born. My wife and I were both on board with the timing of the last one, we just did not realize how badly numbers 3 and 4 had depleted her body - not including the stress of losing number 3.
Anyway, when we lost our third child to SIDS, I had a dream the night he died before we discovered him in his bed. In it, there were three distinct parts. After digesting his death, the first part made perfect sense, the second part was quite symbolic and I could not make heads nor tails of it; and then made perfect sense after he and my mother appeared to my dad a month after my mother's death and 8 months after my son's death. The third part had alot of random stuff that turned out to be quite literal in every detail. That one cocktail of a dream has me fascinated as to how dreams (of a prophetic nature) work out in delivering a message of warning/peace/knowledge. In the third part, I described a building in great detail and then described a cafeteria setting with an announcement made over an intercom that visiting hours were over. There was also a guy that I described to be like Peter Brady of Brady Bunch sitcom fame - black curly-haired, same facial structure.
Now to reality - the building was identical that my wife was in while she was medicated and recovered from lack of sleep and while getting her body chemistry under control (not necessarily by attacking the root of the problem, either....which was B-12). The exact phrase I had heard a few years earlier over the intercom in the cafeteria (in my dream) came over the speakers while I was visiting my wife on a Wednesday evening as we ate dessert together. I was pretty much freaked out of my mind about that one and raced home to listen to the tape we had made the night he died where I had said the same phrase in perfect detail.
The last part was interesting - and may have served as a warning that I may not have easily understood until I read Spencer's book and realized that there might be something to the whole West Coast being wiped out thing.... There was a curly-haired guy there in the mental ward that looked identical to Peter Brady and he took a particular interest in befriending my wife. I was introduced to him. He kept talking to her about an EQ on the West Coast that was coming. At the time, I just laughed about him - and was also a little concerned about him as the facility was co-ed and many patients were HEAVILY sedated most of the time with few segregation protocols in place. Anyway, one day a few years back after I was going off (yet one more time) about the massive west coast EQ, my wife said, somewhat derisively, that I sounded like that "Peter Brady" guy. That was before the Spencer book - I have not heard her mock me since.....
But, my point being that - sometimes the most truly sane ones out there are the ones who sound the craziest in the beginning (think of Noah raging about a flood coming and building a massive boat over a 200 year period; that qualifies for a stay in a white padded room). Maybe "Peter" knew something we didn't - and he got himself locked up in the padded Hilton for it..... Maybe he is somewhere in Montana above 3000' elevation waiting for the end to come..... I would love to share an hour with the guy asking him what he knows over a B-12/lithium cocktail. I could share what I now know about B-12 and brain chemistry health and it could be a win/win for the both of us.....
No comments:
Post a Comment