I even developed Ulcerative Colitis which is excruciating and life threatening but it at least gave me some protection ( she didn't follow me into the bathroom), and some of the doctors and nurses were nice to me.
Yeah it was pure, relentless hell. More like warfare....boredom alone stuck in my room, interspersed with unpredictable attacks that could go on for hours. Never had a conversation with her...she was not capable of participating in normal conversation. Communication was limited to lecturing, haranguing or screeching in bizarre twisted rage triggered by who knows what, or non-sequiteurs, or sometimes phony sweet platitudes..
It's strange cuz of the weird difficulty in understanding how bad it was. Like intellectually I remember mostly everything (I'm much less compulsive about remembering and talking about it anymore, though. Thank god.), but kind of in a numb sort of way. Know what I mean?
I didn't realize, for example, how bad it was when in a blind rage, she held me down and tried to stab me in the face with a scissors when I was somewhere around nine. I finally realized how traumatizing that was (sort of) when my ex was in a blind drunk rage and was in my face with his finger. His eyes were bugging out, face red and spewing spittle and foam flying as he tried to hold himself back---and what did I think? I thought, "oh my god that's exactly what my mother looked like". That experience was a couple years ago.
Bleh. Well lucky I'm in a slow assignment at work, right now. They don't need me at the moment so I can hang out here.
Time to think of other things now.
Now I just gave myself a sweaty hot flash talking about it!