IC suicidal ideation

I haven't written much, because there are not many words right now.

I am keeping on keeping on keeping on.

I am wading through the days, like thick mud. I am caring for myself and for my children as well as I can. I am doing the necessary things. I am caring less and less about the outside world; about anything, very much, except what is absolutely necessary.

My blinkers are on and I am plodding onwards with still the very best part of the day being when I can take a tranquiliser and go to sleep so that there is no pain for a few hours.

Sleep is a little death , who said that? I can't remember. I am reading and reading and reading, but I remember less and less.

It is as if everything is falling away and I am in the world but not of it. Things that mattered just don't matter anymore. The only things that still matter, that always mattered, are my children.

I have become slightly obsessed with Peaches Geldof. And I have to ask myself why. It is not as if I was obsessed with her while she was alive. But I think what she did was brave. If indeed it was intentional. And yet that leaves two little children with no mummy; how can you square that with yourself?

One in four people with IC think about suicide a LOT. I read that somewhere. And the rate is 10% higher than in the population as a whole. Ideation, where you simply imagine death as a blanket covering you, like a permanent sleep, is common too, because there is no pain. NO PAIN. imagine that , if you suffer from chronic pain.

Sometimes I have even got to the point of resenting my children for keeping me tethered to this world.

And that scares me, too.

My daughter asked me, in the wake of her Grandma dying, why everyone we love has to die. As I tried to comfort her, she turned to me and asked me 'Mum, with all that you suffer, don't you ever think it would be better just to die? If you didn't have us?'. ' But I do have you,' I replied. 'But what if you didn't?'... 'But I do,' I repeated. 'I do not deal in imaginary scenarios, sweetheart, only in realities. I do have you and so that's that'. But although I tried hard not to lie to her, not to tell an outright lie, there was a lie in my words.

Because the thought of just not being, not carrying on, not waking up in pain and going through the day in pain and getting up to the bloody school to realise I will either have to pick the children up as quickly as possible in pain or look for a toilet urgently (there isn't one that parents can easily use without embarrassment of one kind or another), not holding conversations where I can no longer focus on what the other person is saying because all I am aware of is my bladder.... is so alluring. It is like a siren's call: not to be, not to be, not to be.

I'm pretty sure that's what Peaches heard and I think , in a way, it is gutsy to do what she did.

And yes, I know all the counter-arguments. But that's still what I feel.

When you have to force yourself to keep on living, what kind of a life is it anyway?

(The antibiotics are not working, by the way; or perhaps there is a 5% improvement; it's so hard to tell. But it's basically the same. And I know I can't live for thirty or forty years like this and moreover I know that I don't want to.)

So where is the choice?

When we no longer have a choice, what new fresh prison hell is this IC life?