What’s a moment that made you question reality?

There were a lot of times with my oldest where I would question reality, especially right after she moved in with us. One particular event really sticks out to me. For a couple years, she would complain about a giant purple bruise on the top of her foot that would not heal.

She regularly went to the doctor, physical therapist, mental health therapists, occupational therapist, and cheer classes. She would mention this bruise to everyone and everyone would tell her to do this and that and whatever else to placate her and get her back on task.

My oldest had a DHS investigation over this at one point. She was saying we were not taking care of her health and letting her suffer. It went on for years. She would get into screaming fits with me and I really never knew what to do. Everyone was giving her the usual placebo things you give to a child to make them stop complaining and for a while we went a long with it.

At seventeen, she is threatening to call DHS again because of this bruise. This bruise was never real. There was no mark on top of her one foot. Her foot looked like the perfect mirror to her other foot and she never complained about a bruise being on that foot.

One day, we were in the house and she tried to tell me it was too dark in the house to see it. It was the middle of the day, sun shining, middle of summer. I told her to go outside. I followed her out and asked her to outline where the bruise was on her foot. There was nothing there. I pulled my phone out and took a photo of it. When I showed her the photo of her feet together, she was shocked. She did not see the bruise.

Turns out this mystery bruise that so many experts weighed in on, was just a hallucination. She was known to suffer from all types of hallucinations: auditory, touch, and visual. Either nobody had thought about it before or none had bothered to mention to me that this was another hallucinatory event.

She screamed, cried, and lost her mind over this bruise for years. We saw all kinds of specialists. Once I showed her the picture, I never heard about the bruise again. Not a peep. It was such a small thing, but the way everyone would kind of pat her on the head and tell her to take it easy or treat it like a sprain or something. I felt absolutely crazy because I never saw this bruise. Everyone went along with it and I was constantly being threatened to be accused of abuse. I knew I was doing everything I could, but DHS investigations have to run their course regardless.

Then poof! It was all over. Even now, I get a bit choked up about it. I was threatened, screamed at, and verbally abused about a hallucination for years. I am not sure I will ever truly recover from the drama of that one thing. I told all her providers and they all made note of it. They all seemed surprised as if this had not been a large issue for us for years. It was so good to move on from something I could not fix.