Real People:
I Married A Schizophrenic
I met Michael while in a restaurant with my
best friend. We'd both been through a bad time with relationships and had vowed
we'd had enough of men, but when I saw Michael my good intentions went straight
out the window!
He was sitting at a table with a mate and I
could see him looking over. The next thing I knew, he'd picked up their table,
carried it over and placed it next to ours. I laughed so much. Michael was
lovely - so funny, outgoing and a bit of a party animal. When he kissed me, I
turned to putty. We were meant to be together.
I was 23 at the time with a 17-month-old
daughter, Kayleigh. Michael was wonderful with us both and 16 months after we
met, we were thrilled when I became pregnant. In July 1995, Michael proposed.
We began looking for a house and couldn't wait for the baby to arrive.
But then Michael began to behave strangely. A
few months earlier, he'd broken his leg, ending his dreams of becoming a
semi-professional footballer. He was very low, and became depressed and
withdrawn. Then he started
having
hallucinations.
He was in the bath one day when he started
seeing black clouds around him and said the water had turned black. I knew
something was terribly wrong and called a doctor, but she just said he was
overworked and he would be fine after a good night's sleep.
A few hours later, I woke to find Michael was
missing. So was Kayleigh. The police found him wandering the streets in his
pyjamas with Kayleigh in his arms. Then when he got home he refused to come
inside, saying could I see the beautiful lights in the trees and growing more
and more agitated.
He caused such a disturbance that the police
came and took him to a secure psychiatric unit. The doctors felt it would be
better if I didn't see Michael for a while. By now five months pregnant, I
could feel our baby kicking, but Michael wasn't there to share it. It was
dreadful.
Soon, Michael, a storeman, was let home at
weekends. He was on 26 tablets a day and was a shadow of himself. He sat in a
chair, rocking backwards and forwards.
I was scared of what the future held for us and
when a community psychiatric nurse said he had
schizophrenia, I was
shocked. People think of schizophrenics as violent characters. But Michael was only
a danger to himself.
In February 1996, our son Liam, who's now
seven, was born. Michael was on so much medication he couldn't cry, and instead
made a yelping noise, like a dog. I was desperate, but then Michael's firm got
him into a private clinic and different medication worked wonderfully.
As he got better, we started to rebuild our
lives. When I gave birth to our daughter Rhianna five years ago, Michael held
my hand and, this time, he cried.
On Valentine's Day in 1998 we got married. It
was a public statement of our love. We'd always been close, but everything
we've been through has made us even stronger. Mike's doing well now - he's on
just one tablet a day and all the symptoms have disappeared. We're soulmates
and I never doubted for a second that we wouldn't pull through.
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