Tyler's Decline

I haven't written very much in the past year. The reason for that is not because things haven't been happening, but because I am in nursing school. Instead of trying to recall each adverse event, I will attempt to sum up the last year.

 

Tyler graduated high school and moved out of our house. He found a friend - Sean - to move out with. They rented a crappy little single-wide trailer about 12 miles or so from our house. It was about a mile off the paved road, back in the woods. It was a good gig for him and Sean, given their ways of making supplemental income. Tyler receives Social Security - which was very easy to get by the way....I think it's because he is SO schizophrenic and everything has been very well documented by Medicaid. Tyler was approved in less than 3 months, with no questions asked. Social Security is not near enough money for one to live on, even with a roommate. I knew of Tyler's money-making ways as he bragged about it to me all the time. His 'business' grew to a point that he boasted about owning pretty much all of Northern Michigan. He would take pictures of the money and text them to me. At the end, he was making about $1,800 per day. This all came to an end when his landlord received a phone call from Tyler's neighbors. The neighbors thought there were a lot of cars coming and going from that crappy little trailer and threatened to call the police. The landlord was very angry and was going to kick the boys out. Tyler said he was done distributing, and he quit that day. Sean then proceeded to take Tyler's customers and continue business behind Tyler's back. We think Sean started to do Meth as he started being very paranoid and violent. One of Tyler's breakdowns was when he woke Sean up in the morning to tell him he was leaving for work and please take care of the dogs. Sean said, "Don't touch me! Don't talk to me! Stay the F away from me, or I'm going to come up swinging!" And that's the day Tyler moved out and hasn't spoken to any of his friends since.

 

Tyler and Sean lived together for almost a year. I didn't see him much. He came over once a week to drop off his laundry. He didn't attend family birthday parties or visit on holidays. He did come for Christmas, although he didn't stay long. The reason he gave for this is that he didn't feel comfortable at our house. He didn't feel welcome. Tyler claims that we don't really like him, and we don't really talk to him when he's over anyway. Of course, none of that is true.

 

After his high-school graduation, Tyler went to a few temporary agencies around the area. He got a job working for a company that refurbished auto parts. He stood on a line and sand-blasted parts. It was a hot and dirty job. That lasted maybe 3 weeks, then he quit. He decided at the last minute that he would try to go to college to be a history professor. I quick applied him to pell grant and got him enrolled at Northwestern Michigan College. He took a world history class and a psychology class. Seven credits were all he could handle, and he handled it very well. He went to class every day until the last few weeks, then he started to lose interest. He ended up passing his classes with awesome grades, but decided that college wasn't for him.

 

Throughout the year, Tyler has changed his mind many, many times regarding what profession he would like to pursue. He wanted to be a Supreme Court judge so he could promote anarchy on the government from within....a good idea actually, since Supreme Court judge is a lifetime job. Then changed to history professor. Next he wanted to visit monasteries in Tibet to try to find some peace in his life. He was preparing to live a celibate and mute life. He told me he would probably like it so much there, he would just become a monk. Then he decided to become a welder. He wanted to be an underwater welder and travel around the world making big bucks. Of course, I really like this idea, so offered to put him in a welding program to get certified, but he vehemently opposed that idea. No more school for him! He will NEVER go back to school. F school! I talked him into applying for Job Corps. What a great program! They will take low income people to the age of 24, teach them a trade while giving them a weekly wage! Job Corps could help Ty find a job, a place to live, and teach him how to manage his money, all this for free! He agreed to go, and the day we called Job Corp was the day they changed their phone message to say they were no longer taking applicants. I couldn't believe what luck! I googled them real quick, and sure enough they were pretty much shutting their doors and laying off hundreds of employees. Wow. Thanks a lot Obama. Glad we spent all those billions of stimulus dollars on absolutely nothing instead of teaching low-income kids how to make a living.

 

The last med Tyler tried was Zyprexa 15 mg. He took it for a few months, then decided he was going to quit all medicine cold-turkey. That was in December. I inwardly freaked out at first. Then I had my psychiatric rotation in school. I had researched Tyler's medications, but now I understood things better. The side-effects are horrible. If I had schizophrenia, I wouldn't want to take medicine either. Sedation, resting tremors that make your hands shake really bad, tardive dyskinesia, damage to the heart, slowed cognitive function. I can't blame Tyler for not wanting to take them.

 

I have been on high alert since December. It seems like Tyler has a psychotic break whenever it's finals time for me and my husband. That would be approximately every 3 months. For some reason, Tyler has a really hard time mentally beginning in late February until June. He keeps in contact with me, and I with him. He has slowly opened up to me. Since December, he has had racing thoughts. Sometimes they are so bad that he can't put words together. I know this is happening when he gives me short one-word answers. When telling a story, he will tell the beginning and the end but forget the middle so it doesn't make any sense. His short term memory is steadily declining. He easily forgets simple things like when he has a pizza in the oven, or something cooking on the stovetop. He can't use the timer on his phone as a reminder because he is so busy reading cooking directions, he forgets to set his timer. He then gets distracted while cooking, so he burns the food. He is becoming more and more paranoid. He thinks all of his friends are plotting against him and talking behind his back. Watch out if Ty starts talking about the government! He will go on hour-long tirades about how corrupt they are and how he plans on overthrowing the system. He thinks Chavez was a victim of chemical warfare instead of cancer. He thinks the Boston Marathon bombing was a government plan. Tyler told me he had a gun that an old guy sold him, but never transferred ownership to Tyler, so he can kill someone and it will never get traced back to him. That really bothered me, to say the least. I spoke to Sean about it, and he told me that it was really an air-soft gun. Tyler was forgetting to eat. There was a point where he hadn't eaten in four days. Thankfully, Sean started cooking for Tyler and was making him eat. His paranoia started to spread to food. He could no longer eat prepared food that came in a blue wrapper, or red, or green. That meant Tyler was no longer eating the  frozen burritos and chimichangas that he loves. This was big! He lived off those things! When we spoke about it, he said the food was poisoned. When I asked him how the bad guys knew which ones he was going to buy so they could poison them, he replied that they were all poisoned and his body is different from everyone else's so the poison would only affect him. I asked how he knew they were poisonous and he said sometimes the package says "If you eat this, it will kill you." He said he can eat things in a red and yellow wrapper, or blue and yellow wrapper, or green and white wrapper. He can also eat fast food if he can watch them make it. Oh man.....it became very hard to grocery shop for him. Tyler called me several times after driving around. He said the stoplights were jumping around, and he thought the light had turned green so he drove into the intersection only to have his friends tell him to stop because the light was red. He was afraid he would get into a car accident and kill people. This winter we had a lot of snow and ice. When driving alone, a hand would pull back Tyler's hoodie and whisper in his ear that his car was a piece of shit, and he was going to lose control and kill someone. Tyler can usually handle the voices okay, but he does not like to be touched; especially on the head, shoulders, and neck. He was starting to believe the voice, but more than that, the touching was freaking him out and he was afraid that would cause him to lose control. He tried not to drive alone. Tyler developed a superiority complex. He believes that everyone is incredibly dumb - so dumb that he can't stand to be around them. They are so stupid that he becomes angry at the decisions they make and he wants to hurt them to teach them a lesson. He told me that there is no one at his level of intelligence. That led him to tell me he thinks he is a demi-god. I told him that was impossible because I had never had sex with a god. He seemed to accept that, but still thinks he is far superior intellectually. Tyler has episodes of mania. He will call me and talk for hours with hardly letting me get a word in. He switches subjects around very quickly and randomly. He mostly talks about government, science, and how he hates Christians. He confabulates a lot. He tells a story and adds all these crazy details into them that I know are not true. Like how he was in a gang in Las Vegas (which is true), and he would get into fights all the time, breaking one guys arm badly, dealing cocaine and meth. He even thinks we went to jail for 9 months. He tells me now that his hands shake because he was a meth addict (not true). He also thinks I forced him to go to church, and all the kids were so mean there. Of course, they were all Christians, so now all Christians are hypocrites. He told me about the time where he went to the sunday youth group and he got up on stage and was asking all sorts of questions about how do they know Jesus was real, and how do they know there is a God, and how it's possible that he created the earth. The leaders told him they weren't going to answer his questions, and proceeded to drag him off stage and throw him out and never come back. Of course, none of that was true. When Tyler went, he did like going. He had friends there. The church - Central Christian in Las Vegas (google it. It's awesome) - was one of the most open, non-judgemental places I have ever been. The pastors there encouraged questions about everything. Tyler's voices are constant. They talk to him everyday, all day. He will not tell me what they say, except that it's not good. He sees hallucinations all the time - from things/people on the side of the road to birds flying into his windshield, to monsters in his house, to a lady holding a dead baby. She cries all the time and screams at Tyler that this is all his fault. Tyler told me that he can no longer read. The words jump around on the page, and he can't comprehend what the book is about. School is no longer an option. He can't read the news apps on his phone like 9Gag anymore. He has no friends. He has scared them all away, or so he says. I don't know what to believe. Tyler is a very sociable kid who has always made friends very easily. He is funny and quick. People flock to Tyler, and they want Ty to like them. It's always been that way, but he doesn't remember that. He is very logical, but he is second guessing everything now. Sometimes he calls me and asks if he is really smart. He thinks he tells himself that he knows things, but he can't trust himself, so maybe it's all a lie and he really knows nothing. He doesn't know if anything in his head is real anymore. He doesn't know if memories he has are true or a figment of his delusions. He asks me to tell him when he says something that is not true, but when I do, he gets explosively angry. He has agnosia - when you don't recognize the symptoms of your disease. When I tell him he is manic, he just hangs up on me after mumbling that he has stuff to do. He also has anhedonia - not able to find pleasure in anything. He is extremely indifferent to everything. He calls himself a sociopath, and I think he is kind of proud of it. He says he doesn't want to feel anything, because if he did, he would be in torment all the time.

 

Tyler has convinced his family doctor to prescribe him Adderal. At first he just wanted it to sell, but he has started taking it. This is an amphetamine that, according to textbooks, makes schizophrenia symptoms worse. His psychiatrists would never prescribe this to him. I can tell when he takes it because he is calm. He is in a good mood, and he can have a conversation with me. His legs aren't bouncing a mile a minute. He can sit still and concentrate on things. Maybe the textbooks are wrong. Maybe he has schizophrenia and ADHD. There's no textbook case when it comes to schizophrenia. Everyone has different symptoms, and everyone is affected differently. Over the past few months I think the Adderal lasts the 12 hours and he feels great. When the effect is over, he crashes and his mind goes crazy. He gets overwhelmed and ends up calling me, absolutely hysterical. And by hysterical I mean crying so hard he can hardly talk. I am the only one he can talk to. He has no one else. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to believe anymore. I get these calls all times of day and night.

 

I hate seeing him like this. I hate that every waking moment is a struggle for my precious, wonderful son. I wish I could take it away. I wish it was me instead. I would give anything to switch places with him. I have and will continue to drop everything to be at his side.