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Story of my father, fronto-temporal dementia

7/15/2022

Published on October 26, 2021
Author : Shoshin

My wife asked me to tell you about my father and his disease. My father suffers from frontotemporal dementia, which is rarer than Alzheimer's. It attacks less the memory than the behavior at first, knowing that it is the front of the brain that is attacked first.

My father has always been "very special" because of his bipolarity and other behavioral traits, but I understood with this disease that it was something else, he said everything, but really everything without any filter and the actions were immediately executed, in short hardly thought, without discernment

The first major element was the day my mother called in secret from their home, he had decided that she had to listen to the television on a loop without interruption if she ever closed her eyes even a little, he threatened her with violent reprisals, she had tried to approach the authorities in secret but no one wanted to believe her, no one wanted to help her, thanks to the state, so she called me for help

To help her, I made my father believe that my wife needed help planting flowers in front of our house (I live in an apartment, it's absurd) and he believed her (sometimes you need a touch of the absurd to deal with the absurd).

I talked with him for hours and he told me crazy stories and we left and years of more intense nightmares started from there

Unknowingly, my mother had started a forced stay with me for a few months, but at least she was safe, for now.

As soon as we got home, it took a few days and I managed to convince him to go to the emergency room not for his illness but for a so-called heart attack he thought he was having

When he arrived at the hospital, of course he didn't have a heart attack but was in psychosis and our doctors gave him pills without any follow up, what had to happen happened. I will spare you for now the crisis I had to face alone afterwards and the fact that I also inherited a cat.

Since telling this kind of story takes a lot of energy, I will try to tell you other things another time.

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Ti-Coune, a survivor

7/15/2022

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Published on October 26, 2021
Author : Nancy (Admin)

A few years ago, my husband went to pick up a sweet little cat from someone who was expecting a child and could no longer care for her.

When she arrived at our house, we quickly noticed two things: her skin was yellow and she was much too thin for her size. We went to the vet with her. He didn't think she could survive.

My husband is rarely the type to give up when it comes to an animal. The savior symptom maybe, laugh but then he asked if we could try something and the vet said we should try to get her on a special ultra-protein food, even if it is by force, to hopefully jump-start her system and liver among other things.

We worked for months to get him from 4lbs to 17lbs, a more reasonable weight for his size and we succeeded as you can see by looking at the picture

I do not judge the people who give their animals, it is not my role, what I say on the other hand if you miss time it is better to give it quickly to another person who will have time to avoid this kind of problem

She has given us years of joy since this event and we hope it will be so for years to come.

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Living with mental illness

7/14/2022

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Published on October 25, 2021
Author : Shoshin

A few years ago I experienced a post-traumatic shock with psychosis. Today I realize that it was a psychosis but at the time for me it was a normal thought that is how psychosis works

My father had made a serious plan to decapitate my mother and me, he had spoken openly about it when he was admitted to the psychiatric emergency room in Sherbrooke, he had been in psychiatric detention for a month and had been released without any follow-up after having seen the psychiatrist only once, one can then agree that I was quite panicked by this state of affairs

From that point on, I began to lie on the couch every night to protect my family. I watched the entrance even after my father was hospitalized in a nursing home in a mental ward.

I imagined all sorts of scenarios where people would try to get into my house and kill me in all sorts of ways, to the point where I was hearing things that no one else was hearing and seeing signs where there was nothing but I was still pretty believable and I always hid my distress well so no one was too aware of my condition.

I tried to call for help and more than once at my CLSC at the time, but I was turned down with platitudes like go for a walk, walking when you are afraid of people is not that great.

Without going into detail, at some point it turned sour. All of this led me to a deep depression.

I called the Quebec City crisis center that someone in the system had already suggested to me instead of 911. I ended up in the standard emergency room for hours and even more hours later in the psychiatric emergency room, they gave me medication without telling me that it could make some symptoms worse.

I ended up in both ERs a second time a few weeks later so I started a long journey and I'm better now but I'm like a person who had a heart attack. I am much weaker than I was before, for better or worse.

This is only part of my story

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The ego from my point of view

7/14/2022

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Published on October 15, 2021
Author : Shoshin

For me the ego was a tyrant that I obeyed every day and that ruled every aspect of my life, until I realized that the ego is nothing more than an ephemeral concept that must be at best a tool but certainly not a tyrant.

It is certainly disappointing for one who is driven by his ego to understand that we are ultimately a mortal being, a construct of many cells that briefly cooperate with each other to give us the impression of being, if you want to take it further, a collection of subatomic particles.

The topic of this conversation is not theory though, now that you know this you can mentally burn this debate and tell yourself that you are now free of yourself, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you are allowed to, it is up to you to make this ego into something constructive, if you were a passenger on a cruise ship, would you rather ruin your life and the lives of the other travelers or make this trip go as smoothly as possible, it is up to you to see what is

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My beginnings as a Shoshin with Buddhism

7/13/2022

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Published on October 11, 2021
Author : Shoshin

I am going to talk to you about my discovery of Buddhism. Don't think that for me Buddhism is a religion, it is not the way I understand it, at least not in the way we westerners define it.

Anyway, I think that from the point of view of people, we could call it a philosophy of life.

To begin with, I was in a very bad situation. I had just come out of a phase of suicidal thoughts. I had had a psychosis and my life was not going very well, especially in my mind. Even though I can't say I'm luckier now, I see things differently.

I would go to the library and look at random shelves and see books on Buddhism, I figured I had some free time, I was in the middle of a depression, so I started reading the basics, to look at other points of view and especially to meditate, at the beginning, meditation was a kind of torture because when you already think too much and the ego is untamed, don't think that at the beginning, it makes your life peaceful, on the contrary but it taught me one thing: Putting things in perspective, learning to see things from higher up, from another angle it has helped me a lot to put in perspective what is going on in my life, my ego is a better tool and less of a destructive force now it is something I have acquired.

I work on myself, at home. I leave the internet to my wife Nancy but I like it when she gives me a summary of things on the net that helps me understand another aspect of life.

I will continue to tell you about Buddhism from time to time, see my partial understanding of it here

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Story of my father, fronto-temporal dementia

Ti-Coune, a survivor

Living with mental illness

The ego from my point of view

My beginnings as a Shoshin with Buddhism

The Free Shoshin

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