Leif Gregersen - Inching Back to Sane: A Memoir of Mental Illness

A SEQUEL TO:

THROUGH THE WITHERING STORM

By

Copyright 2014 by Leif Gregersen

All Rights Reserved.

This ebook is sold for the readers personalenjoyment and is not to be reproduced or resold in any format.

This is a work of fiction. All characters andevents portrayed herein are fictitious and are not based on anyreal persons living or dead.

Through the Withering Storm: A Brief Historyof a Mental Illness

Green Mountain Road and SelectedStories

Poems From Inside Me

First White of Winter Poems

The Base Jumpers and Selected Stories

Check out my website at http://www.edmontonwriter.com

Or my blog at: http://www.valhalla2014.wordpress.com

Or feel free to write to me at:

Writing this book took no small amount oftime and effort. I had been wanting to sit down and encapsulate theyears after I left Vancouver and my dreams of completing flightschool, but for some time I just didnt see the point. When Ifinally sat down and tried to do in this book what I had tried toin my first, I found that with a renewed sense of honesty andmaturity it wasnt at all as difficult as I thought it would be. Ihave many people to thank for this book getting to print,especially my mentor and friend, Richard Van Camp, an incredibleauthor who, in a spiritual sense sits over my shoulder and watchesme write each day. Sometimes when I talk about my past I get alittle bitter, or at least I used to. I have been known to say myDad was too strict and some have been known to tell me that he wasthe cause of my problems. The raw fact is that there were manytimes in my young life that I was incredibly proud of my Dad. Hehad been a fireman in the Danish National Service, he had been ahuge supporter of such things as the Air Cadets and the CanadianNational Institute for the blind. Moving away from home was one ofthe most difficult things I had to do, but I think if my Dad hadntput his foot down and forced me that my life would not be nearly asgood as it is today. As I write these lines my last hospital visit,now 12 years in the past is barely on my mind and I am preparing totake the trip of a lifetime to The Big Island of Hawaii. To thosewho read this book, I hope it touches you, I hope it reaches you.For those who have Bipolar, I hope it comforts you and that it saysnothing more than that sick people need Psychiatrists, they needmedication compliance, and they, as I did, need to take life inbaby steps. Thank you, dear reader, for making my writing dreamscome true.

Leif Gregersen II

When I think back to the day I packed up allmy stuff, gave away what I couldnt carry, and left Vancouver forgood, even though it was 20 years ago, sometimes I think that Iwould have been better off staying there. The reality was, though,that I was so ill that I wouldnt have been able to take care ofmyself in a short amount of time. I had recently returned from aharrowing trip to California and I had been through quite a bit. Mysister later told me I came back skinny as a cat, and I must havebeen, because for the first time in my young life my stomach was asflat as though I were an athlete.

I had left the Lions Gate Hospital inVancouver with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia and enough delusions inmy head to believe it was true. As a parting gift I was given asmall amount of pills that were to be used to counteract thetime-release medication, which had been administered by injectionand would leave me a drooling mess for the next 30 days with verylittle effect on my illness. There was no wonder this happened, Iwas not a schizophrenic, I was in fact a sufferer of manicdepression or bipolar disorder. When they had released me from thehospital, I went back to the hostel where I had lived just beforebeing admitted to Lions Gate to wait out whatever time I couldgrasp before I would be sent back to a psychiatric ward again. Itseemed as though it would be a short time before this happened, Iwas in an awful state of delusion and confusion. After paying alarge portion of my monthly social services income to cover thecosts of me not living there, but the staff not knowing I was gone,I paid what little I had left for a couple more weeks and hopedthat I could somehow make it through to some type of improvedstate.

All the while I was in the hospital inVancouver, I was getting worse and worse in the delusional aspectof my illness. The medication I had been given was simply notworking. I remember when I was admitted to that hospital, I was socombative and paranoid I demanded to see the credentials of thedoctor who was going to admit me. I ended up being wrestled downand given a powerful sedative. I woke up in a peaceful psychiatricward, dressed in pajamas some hours later in the morning.

After I had gotten out of the hospital andhad returned to where I had chosen to make my home, one day I wasalone in my room and for some reason I believed the room had beenbugged and all kinds of levels of authority were listening in. Istarted yelling out that I was to be taken aboard a spaceship andgiven a special tattoo signifying I was a pilot. I could hearpeople laughing at me and making jokes in the next room. One ofthem came to the door and asked me if I was okay and I answered,Oh, Im just trying to get some records transferred. I wonder ifhe thought I was nuts or perhaps thought I had a cellular phone. Itwas funny because I could often come up with believable lies whenpeople caught me hallucinating. I would say I thought someone hadslipped me some drugs or that I was talking into a voice recorderin my pocket, things that at times were true but not at that time.It was hard not to be a liar when that sort of stuff is circlingaround in your head, so many unbelievable things seem to be sologically true. One of my big delusions was that a friend I hadknown in my apartment building was in reality Tom Cruise and thathe wanted to adopt me as his brother like something out of one ofhis movies. When I think back to that time, I feel incrediblyashamed about the whole thing. Who can trust someone who does andsays such things? Thanks to television, the general belief of thepublic is that people who are mentally ill are out to murder them,and their illnesses can be contagious. The funny thing is that theperson suffering from the delusions knows in part of his head thatthey are false and is very confused and locked in a death struggleto find something to fix the jabberwocky in his or her head. Ioften believe it is no less than a miracle that no matter how fardown I got, no matter how much I defied my doctors and the nursingstaff they could somehow make me whole again and one day I couldleave the hospital. This time out on the coast though, I feared myproblems would not only take me back to the horrors of the mentalhospital back home, but that it would leave me there forever.

While I was staying in that room, I had apretty cool roommate who worked construction and he would talk tome and talk about his brother and soon I was hallucinating that hewas my own brother come out to Vancouver to rescue me. Of course,riches and fame awaited me if I would just do some small thing.What really got to me once was being in my room and shouting ortalking to myself and some guy came into my room and unplugged myclock radio, resetting it and walked out and then made jokes aboutme through those damn paper-thin walls.

I was to find out a number of years laterthat a very special female friend of mine who I had thought wasgoing to try and help me through my problems and had cared aboutme, had in reality at that time considered me a psychopath, whichis a condition that I was in no way even close to being. Apsychopath is someone who is completely lacking in a conscience,someone who will murder people, purposely destroy their self-esteemand literally do things that most normal people would findhorrendous, like jokingly start fires that cause extreme danger toothers (though even for psychopaths this is rare) and wont evenfeel bad about it. What I had was a psychotic delusion. A psychoticdelusion is when a persons mind is chemically altered and falseideas and delusions of grandeur and such occur. What gets me iswhen people find out Im mentally ill and think Im a psychopathwhen in reality, a person who is mentally ill is not only notnecessarily a psychopath, but also much more likely to be a victimof violence rather than a perpetrator. Just the other day I was ona bus and saw a helpless older gent who talked to himself gettingpicked on by others and being terrified to the point where hebegged the bus driver to call the police. Being mentally ill isstill scary but far from being dangerous to those around theafflicted person.