My Stepsister

My Stepsister


They say that blood is thicker than water.  I don't believe this is true in all cases.  I come from one of those "blended families" and I have a lot more ‘water' than ‘blood' in my close family.

I am the eldest of three stepsisters, one stepbrother, a half sister, a half brother and a partridge in a pear tree.  I always wanted a big family and used to complain of being an only child.  Be careful what you wish for.

A lot of people think I'm quite a cold person, but I love my family and my best friend dearly.  Of course it is easier to tell this to complete strangers after a few too many in the pub than it is to their faces most of the time, but there it is.  A deep love, that courses through my veins and makes me feel the need to protect them all with a vengeance.

My closest stepsister, Anna has been having some problems the last few years.  The sorts of problems that have led to her staying in hospitals and attempting to take her life on more than one occasion.  We'll call those problems ‘mind flu'.          Anna is only nineteen, so as all those wonderful optimists say, "she's got her whole life ahead of her".  But has she?  Of course for Anna that's the problem.  She doesn't always want her whole life ahead of her.  On the days that it gets really bad.  The days when the big black cloud in her head tries to squash her and mentally take over her whole being.

I have never discussed Anna's ‘mind flu' with my other stepsisters, Anna's blood sisters.  It's not that we don't speak; we just don't speak of that.  Strange you may think, but not that strange if you were in a similar situation.  It is not an easy decision, but one we seem to have made together without it openly being announced.  It goes without saying that everyone who cares about her worries about her every second of every day.

Close your eyes and imagine switching your mobile phone on at 6.45am only to receive a text message that says, "I cut myself quite badly last night, I'm in the hospital, I want to leave but they won't let me.  So I guess I'm stuck here.  I'm okay, please don't worry about me."  Despite what you may think, it's the last five words that cause the most pain.  Anna knows the heartache it causes, but it's never enough to make it stop.  No matter what medication they give her, how much support is offered, it will never be enough.  The demon inside her head needs to be killed, the vampire sucking the life out of her, staked, the monster under the bed, banished.

The world can be a very scary place for Anna.  Sometimes I feel angry with her because she might succeed in her suicide attempts, intentional or not.  In one of my rare moments of being warm and open we discussed this anger and fear.  Anna told me that when it happens, she can't think about anyone else, even to pick up the phone and call for help is a mountain she is unable to climb.  I told her that I was terrified that one day she would finally succeed and we would all be left here without her.  The honesty and the reality of the whole conversation made me cry.  The look on Anna's face when she saw my tears was of complete shock to say the least.

Maybe up until that point she thought I didn't care that much.  The odd visit to see her in hospital, the phone calls and text messages aren't always enough.  Sometimes raw emotion is needed in extreme circumstances.  Life and death, literally.

If you have never suffered with depression or any kind of ‘mind flu', it is very difficult to understand someone who is suffering.  Fighting every second of every day, just to get through to the next.  Waking up in the morning and not knowing whether you are disappointed or relieved to be waking up at all.  Mood swings that can have you laughing at something completely random one minute and then wanting to smash someone's face to pieces the next.  We all experience feelings like this to some degree, but not as severe as people like Anna.

It is not something that one can just "snap out of".  It needs to be treated with the same care and consideration as all other medical conditions.  Unfortunately, in this day and age there are so many different types of depression that the doctors are finding it difficult to pinpoint which one is affecting my Anna, and which medication will keep her balanced.  To solve this they keep prescribing her various cocktails of tablets, hoping to hit the jackpot by discovering the correct one.  While they continue with their little pill experiment, poor Anna, my sister of more than ten years, has to suffer with horrific side effects.  I will not go into detail.

Recently Anna has been doing a lot better.  She has a boyfriend who has stuck by her through the rough patches and a family who still love and care about her unconditionally.  The tablets she is taking at the moment seem to be working so far, although Anna has confided in me on more than one occasion that she hates the fact she may have to take tablets every day for the rest of her life, just to keep her ‘normal'.  I told her to just think of them as no more than a vitamin supplement, something that people take every day out of choice.  I don't know if this helped at all, probably not, but what else can I say?

I still have those endless nights when sleep will not come and I worry about how Anna may be feeling and if she is in a happy place, although those nights are fewer and fewer lately.  I take this as a positive step in Anna's recovery and hope that this is the start of a new life for her.  The life that she wants now, that she talks of often.  The future.

So is blood really thicker than water?  I don't know and to be honest, I don't really care.  Biologically speaking, blood contains 83% water, so does it really matter either way?  If the love is there, it's there, and will always be so.