I experienced a lot of mental abuse as a child at the hand's of my very seriously mentally ill mother. My father worked from 4AM - 8PM and rarely saw the way we were living as she was capable of putting on a good show. She had Munchausen's and frequently convinced doctors she was sick and was prescribed medications she didn't need. I had issues in the womb and during birth which caused her to believe I was sick, so I spent the first four years believing I was very sick until I overdosed on the antibiotics she had managed to collect and my father relegated her position in life to "babysitter". She had a lot of animosity towards me and we did not get along. She wrote long letters meant for my father explaining how useless I was, what a burden I was, how stupid I was for not doing better in school and how I was tormenting her life with my existence. She hated me and didn't understand why my father didn't.

They had thirteen years between them and my mother married at 23, my father in his late 30s. She had me ten years later, making my father nearly 50 and essentially the primary caregiver for both of us. She was unceremoniously thrown out when I was 16 because she wanted me to leave and my father disagreed. Unfortuntely after she left my father's health took a turn for the worse and he was forced into early retirement and spent the first four years in and out of the hospital because of bad health due to years of neglecting himself. He eventually had to use a wheelchair and I became his primary caregiver at 17 years old, making meals, cleaning up after him, doing basic medical duties & administering medication, paying bills & buying groceries. I tried to work and during my first week he ended up back in the hospital, creating a huge amount of anxiety and guilt so I dedicated my life to helping him. 

When I was 19, I saw my mother for the last time during a mental/physical health crisis my father was having. He had hit rock bottom and was asking me to leave the house so he could die "peacefully". I wasn't allowed to call for an ambulance, I was only allowed ot pack a bag and find somewhere to stay until he had passed. I freaked out and called my estranged mother who called his sister's who finally called an ambulance. The last time I physically saw her, she was telling police officers that I was not well and that my father was making it worse for me. They took me to the hospital and put me through intake but they had closed me off from everything and I panicked and found a way to leave. My mother passed away four months later, suddenly, from a heart attack at 51 years old. 

Her family was quite angry at my father because she had claimed that not only was he physically and mentally abusing her, but that I was as well. Her boyfriend told us that my grandparents were dead because she told him that and I saw them alive and well at her funeral; but I wasn't allowed to tell them she had created these lies and instead had to live with the accusations that I had physically harmed my own mother and somehow supported my father doing it as well. My grandmother, again, who I was suprised was alive at all, told me she would "talk to me when she was ready". That was ten years ago and she nor anyone else in the family has made an effort to speak to me.

My father's health continued to decline and I briefly moved out of the family home for about two and a half years - the only time I had ever lived away from my father. During this time I made a ton of visits back to the home, cleaned for him and generally took care of whatever I could continue to take care of while I living almost three hours away and being unable to drive. Due to relationship issues, I moved back into the family home and lived with my father for the last year and a half of his life.

However, he did not go peacefully. I want to describe this in full because it's something that weighs heavily on my soul on a daily basis but it's not pretty. He had diabetes which had caused a wound in his left foot to turn into gangrene. This happened when I was sixteen but the hospital did not want to remove his foot, hoping through extra care it would heal. Much of my medical care was surrounding this foot which was literally rotting away on his body, emitting the most foul smell (you will always be able to identify dead flesh once you've smelled it) and fluids which leaked on the Lazy-Boy chair he slept and lived in. His joints began failing early on and he no longer wanted to get up to use the bathroom so he would urinate in a water cooler he kept beside the Lazy Boy and empty whenever it became too full. Eventually he had gotten so bad that he was not able to use the bathroom to defecate properly either and would leave feces on the toilet seat or smeared on the counters and doors. He was not able to shower and refused to have anyone participate in showering him so he used a brush I believe was for washing cars or trucks to scrub himself while perched on a plastic patio stool inside of the shower. He did not have handles for the bath or the toilet, so everytime he used it it created a huge amount of anxiety that he might fall and injure himself. 

Which was very frequent as well - a few months before he passed he burned his foot with hot coffee but failed to tell anyone, including his nurse which came in once a week to check on his wound (which was still there ten years on). When I saw it, the flesh was beginning to rot and pus with pieces literally hanging off. Thankfully after my own dedicated care, it healed - but I also realized at that point my father needed round the clock care, regardless of what he wanted. But we had a very co-dependent relationship and I was not capable of going against him. So as he ballooned up from his organs shutting down due to neglecting his diabetes, I let him sit in his chair for a week before forcing him to the hospital the first time. He came home with a catheter and an entirely new set of medications that were now life or death for him. Within three months he ballooned back up but now he was also losing his sense of reality; yelling at me for no reason, thinking people were stealing from him. One morning he called me to the living room and he was sitting in front of his Lazy-Boy in the fetal position. He said he had been calling my name for the past hour and when I tried to lift him, I couldn't. I didn't have the strength. I began to live in a panic that he would collapse and I'd just watch him die because of what he wanted. He started to catch on that he was creating huge trauma and finally allowed himself to be taken to the hospital where he died within three weeks of staying there. 

Now, although I've described this not so great life - my father was everything to me. I don't even think I'm angry that I gave him ten years of my life. Ten very important years, might I add. I wouldn't take it back and if I had to, I think I'd do it again but maybe I'd develop more confidence and stubbornness, much like my father, and pushed him to do more for himself. 

I do however have a ton of guilt - that I didn't do a good enough job. That I should have done more. Or less? So I'd have a career? 

Once he passed away, I drifted aimlessly in a very serious depression that includes alot of PTSD because of everything I had gone through. My father's family was actually seperated from him as a young child, he grew up in foster care and had two children out of wedlock when he was eighteen. One of those children passed a few months before he did and the other is still alive, but I am estranged from them for several reasons. I had a very hard time taking care of my father's remains and his body sat in the morgue for a month before I came up with the money on my own accord to cremate him. 

I've been to the local hospital a few times now for suicide attempts & welfare checks. I have a doctor who has been supportive and spent time listening to me and has been fair in his assessments - I'm probably not going to "get better" over night and I'm probably not even "mentally ill" per-say but just a person dealing with the result of whatever this has been. I asked him about quitting smoking and he told me he couldn't even recommend it because I seemed to be so stressed out and so on edge on a regular constant basis that taking away one of my coping mechanisms could only do worse in the short term, despite the damage it could cause in the long term.

But how do I cope with no family? My friends live at home still even though they're in their late 20s and if they don't they receive hand outs from their parents which I don't get, all of the holidays are nothing but traumatic for me - I can't even call my father up and have a nice chat, you know? Losing that lifeline was really everything to me and now I have no one I can talk to and everyone who witnessed my traumas are dead. I feel like I grew up in a bubble and find it SO hard to relate to my peers because of my childhood trauma and now I'm further segregated because of the medical trauma and lack of family support. My "friends" seem to do nothing but pity me because I don't have these things and I have to pretend like everything is fine all the time because it "bothers them" that I may be bitter and jaded about the cards I've been handed and they'd rather applaud whatever successes I manage to pull out of my a--. 

I live in poverty in a place that continues to add to my anxiety but I already lost my last apartment due to severe depression and inability to hold down a job. I've applied for disability but I feel totally unworthy of it anyways because I cared for a disabled man and I know what disability looks like so I don't even think I'll get it so I'm stuck in this poverty-depression cycle with no support system and everyday just seems to meld together. 

Sorry it's long, I'm a pretty big mess of problems and these are only the ones bothering me the most.