Where did they go?

I sit here day after day,  wondering what happened to those people who cared when Darin had cancer.   Where are they now when I need the support?   Why do people care when it's cancer,  but not when it's a mental illness?   I hate feeling like my family doesn't fit in.   I know we don't.   We never will.   I miss the people who loved us anyway.   Where did they go?

Sick

Recently, we met a lot of resistance from Devin with taking her meds.  She has been having some uncomfortable side effects, and she doesn't want to have them again.  Twice, her jaw has locked up, and twice, she has had tremors.  One morning, she took her medicine after a lot of force, we got her in the bath, and just as she was getting out of the bath, she went straight to the toilet and threw them up.

I was a mess.  I didn't know what to do.  We were just 10 minutes away from taking J to school.  I obviously had to leave D home.  I put her to bed with a bowl.  I worried.  Should I give them to her again and risk a reaction?  They always scared her so much.  What if she was sick again?  What if she passed out, like she has before?  I prayed the whole hour there and back and texted her at a stop light.  She slept the whole time, thankfully.

I gave her just the most important medicine when I got home.  She slept some more.  I had a doctor appointment that I couldn't miss at 10 am.  While I was checking in, D called me to tell me she threw up in the bowl and had diarrhea.  Oh man. Luckily it was at a location just 10 minutes away, and this is a doctor that gets me in and out fast.   When I got home, I found I had misunderstood and she had not thrown up again.  A tender mercy, since I wasn't going to try this medicine again.  It has a short half-life, which means if I miss a dose, we'll have to start all over.

When people ask me how it's going, I say it's like a merry-go-round.  They don't know what I mean.  I mean there are ups and downs every single day, but mostly, we go around and around.  We switch one OCD thing for another.  Today she might wear clothes, but he might be clogging the toilet.  Or she might be pulling all the threads out of one of my towels.  Or she might be picking at her skin.  Usually it's all of the above.  Today, she has spent the day having me pour water over her head.  I don't know what's wrong.  I wonder if there's something medically wrong.  There are blotches on the back of her neck/head, but I'm not sure if that's because she's been wearing a towel on her head all day, pulling on her hair.  I have been trying for days to get her to wear her hair in a ponytail, like she did when she was little. She says sure, but when tomorrow comes, she probably won't.

Is the medication working?  Well, she's more pleasant.  We discovered that she was over-medicated with one of her medications, entirely by accident.  We discovered this when she threw up her pills.  Since then, we have reduced one, and she's been less "drugged."

But we haven't seen a lot of OCD symptoms improved.  We'll just have to keep praying.  I'm running out of toilet paper!