Dear all,
Firstly, thanks for taking the time to read my post.
My father in law was admitted to ICU with sepsis in February 2023. He spent 5.5 weeks there; three of which he was in an induced coma. He was then stepped down to HDU and is now on a normal surgical ward awaiting transfer to a rehabilitation centre.
He's done exceptionally well so far in his recovery and is practically a walking miracle. We were, like many of you on here, called in to say our goodbyes, but he's pulled through and is doing amazingly.
The problem is, I used to work in healthcare and had experience with high dependency care, so was acting very much as my FIL's patient advocate and also explaining a lot of what was going on to my family in layman's terms, as FIL's care was incredibly complex at times and nobody else in our family has any kind of healthcare background. I also live abroad now so was travelling back and forth between my home and the UK where my in laws still are a lot, and then when I was back home, doing a hell of a lot over the phone to help the family.
During the time that I haven't been in the UK I've been working my normal shift pattern and 10 weeks after all this started I'm a mess. I'm not coping well with being one of the only members of the family who has had to work my normal full time schedule during all this and pick life back up in between visits as if everything is fine. I feel like I've not had that time to breathe, and grieve, and just generally come to terms with what's happened. I'm having various types of therapy, exercising etc to try and help myself but I still feel so lost and empty because I've either been doing things towards my FIL's care and/or working FT.
For a bit of extra context my in-laws are basically my parents - my own died many years ago and I'm now incredibly close to my husband's family, so I've been incredibly floored by all of this as much as they have.
If any of you have been in this situation, how did you take time to "grieve" for what has happened?