4. Wedding Anniversary (Hospital and Me and BPD)

***Trigger warning: explicit references to self harm***

What better way to spend your first wedding anniversary than on a psychiatric ward where your husband can only visit for a little while in the evening and the staff check on you every hour?

Three days after I was admitted was one year since our wedding day. I don’t think I’ve ever felt lower. That morning, in my ward room on my own, I used a sharpened pencil crayon to cut my arm and thigh repeatedly. I screamed and I cried. It was just so fucking unfair. A year before had been the happiest day of my life, and now here I was being the worst wife in the world, having trapped Tom into a marriage with a mad woman. Or at least that was what my very poorly brain was telling me. It wasn’t an amazing start to the day. I remember one of the scariest nurses telling me off (fair enough) and telling me that I needed to see my marriage as a reason to keep going, not a sign that I had failed. She was scary, but she was right.

On the ward we had a team of staff who organised occupational therapy sessions for us (more on these sessions in a later post), and on one of the first few days I was there we were making cards. Yes, the cliché is true – arts and crafts were deployed freely for us as a way of de-stressing and helping us be creative. Wait until you see the bowl I made in pottery… but I digress. 

I decided to face the fact that I was spending our anniversary apart from Tom, and made him a card. I drew, glued and bejazzled the shit out of it, with tears pouring down my face the whole time. It is possibly the tackiest thing I have ever made, and yet when I gave it to him he was thrilled, and that evening he sent me a photo of it in situ in our lounge. Bless his heart. He brought me a card into the ward (NOT homemade, what a slacker) and I put it up on top of my wardrobe so that I’d see it every day.

I’ve written previously about how supportive Tom is, and how he made sure I was as okay as possibly in hospital. He never made me feel guilty about being away from him, and a few days after our anniversary he picked me up from the ward and took me out on leave for the evening, to one of our favourite Sheffield restaurants.

As first anniversaries go, it wasn’t a conventional one, but it was ours, and it reflected what was going on in our marriage at the time. 

Tonight we’re going out for a meal to celebrate our second anniversary, and I won’t have a nurse checking me every hour. At least I hope I won’t, because that’d be weird.

Sarah x