I’ve been out to my family since I wrote my memoir in 2014. I didn’t tell my mother until 2017 when I legally changed my name. She first accepted me and then when the paperwork came, she didn’t want to call me my name and insisted I was still her daughter. Fast forward to now.
In Dec, she was diagnosed with cancer. In the beginning of March, she finally called me son. At first, I thought it was because I kept on telling the medical staff I was her son. But then she really shocked me when she told my aunt, unprompted, that her son was here. We never talked about it. I didn’t know how to feel because she was dying. She died a month ago on Apr 4th. I am proud she finally accepted me. Just wish it didn’t take till her dying for it to happen. I still am conflicted and sore.
Anyways, that is my story
Category: mood disorders
day 5 post op, feeling shitty
Day 5 post op, feeling shitty
I woke up once during the night. My mother and sister were up. My mother was congested and was coughing up shit. I don’t know if she was puking or not. I made sure she was okay and then went back to bed. I took some pain meds because I was hurting. There is an area on my chest that twinges. I am not sure if it is incisional pain or the nipple reattaching but it is weird. It doesn’t hurt but it does throb. I hurt the left side when I got up around 10 to empty the drains. OMG the pain was bad, I could hardly move. I shuffled to make coffee. I just feel shitty and worn out. I don’t have a fever.
My mother is feeling better today. She is more alert than she was yesterday. It was so difficult watching her be so lethargic because her sugar was so low and then even when we brought it up, she didn’t come out of it. We just let her rest.
Sox are winning right now 6-3 over the O’s. Houck is pitching good today, so far. I just hope the bullpen doesn’t mess up the score. We need a win.
I hope the drainage from the drains continue to be less. I had 30 mL from the right side today and about 10 on the left. The right side is more swollen than the left, even though the left hurts more. If it stays at 30 mLs, I could have the drains out and see what my chest looks like! I am so excited to be flat. I have waited for so long. It is a dream come true for me. I am finally who I am meant to be. Now I just need to get rid of some of my belly fat. I plan on trying to walk more now that the weather is nicer. Nothing drastic just a block at first and see how my foot reacts. I still am protective of my CRPS foot/ankle. I see my pcp this week about it. I hope she will put me on some meds for it. I am almost out of gabapentin. I hope my doc will refill it tomorrow.
I have therapy tomorrow morning. Lots to discuss. I have a new body that I still haven’t seen yet. I have to take Ativan to calm me down because the compression vest is getting me all anxious. I can move my chest but I feel like everything is constricting me and it feels like suffocation. I was able to have a bowel movement today and wipe myself. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to reach but I was able to without pain. I still need to take some Miralax to get going but I have appointments the next couple of days so I will take it when I am home. I have no idea where I put the vouchers for the taxi that I got. It’s not where I thought I put it. Hope I didn’t throw them away by accident.
I am so tired today. I tried to nap earlier but couldn’t get comfortable. It takes a lot for me to get comfy these days. I have to be careful moving my arm as it pulls on the drain and hurts. Just sucks. Really hope tomorrow is a good day for me. I will know in the morning if I will be going in to take the drains out. All depends on how much fluid there is.
Sunday Musings
Sunday musings
I am still reading Linehan’s memoir. I am learning more about DBT this second go round than I did the first time I read it. I seem to be more accepting of DBT as I am realizing that there is evidence DBT works with highly suicidal individuals. The trouble is, it take a lot of work as there is so much to learn. The two takeaways I am getting from this second reading is the two skills radical acceptance and STOP. STOP stands for stop, take a step back, observe, proceed carefully. I am finding I need to practice this skill as otherwise I get angry and nothing gets accomplished. I also need to radically accept that I have depression and trauma issues.
I woke up late this morning. I didn’t get up till after 12. I kept getting severe headaches, like migraines. They would go away if I just stayed still. It happened three times after my alarm went off to take my morning meds. I thought I would have to take a migraine medication to get rid of it but it seems to have gone away on its own. I had started getting these kinds of headaches while in the hospital. I thought they had gone away but the last two nights they have come back.
My cousin texted me this morning saying that Ohio State has made it to the playoffs and they are playing Georgia. That is going to be a tough matchup. Georgia just won yesterday. They killed LSU by a big number. This is what I love about college football games, they score big numbers.
I am thinking about mailing out a card that I wrote out and then getting pizza for my late lunch/early dinner. Problem is that I have no energy to get moving and I know if I force myself to do it, I will have to take a lot of breaks to go around the block. I found my sunglasses but I still am unable to find my transition glasses. I have no idea where they went to. I know if I find the case, I will find them. I hate when I misplace things. It drives me crazy.
I miss baseball. It doesn’t look like the Sox are going to sign Xander Bogaerts. I just hope he doesn’t end up on the Yankees. I still don’t know if JBJ is still with the team. I watched a baseball game while I was in the hospital and he was playing for the Blue Jays. I don’t know if this is true or not. I will be sad if it is. I have no clue how the season ended because I was so sick in the hospital.
Yesterday, I listened to Taylor Swift’s 1989 album. Today I am listening to Rob Thomas’s Someday on repeat. I love this song so much.
I am feeling suicidal. Nothing really happened in the last half hour or so. I just feel like ending my life. I see no good in it. I have imagined how I would do it two different ways. I won’t act on it, though I do want to. I just don’t want to end up back in the hospital. There is no guarantee I will end up back on the same unit I was in. I could end up somewhere else. That keeps me from going to the ER. I know I spent a few days in the psych ER before I was transferred to the unit I was in. I don’t know how long I was there as I wasn’t myself. I was in a confused state. I don’t remember if I had my phone or not. If I did, I know I wasn’t using it. I was much too paranoid about it. I am working through the feelings of distress I am feeling. I am distracting myself by writing about them. I have therapy tomorrow and will tell my therapist about this. I want to die so bad that it is almost like nothing else matters to me, not even top surgery. I have hit a new low in my life. I try to keep telling myself life will be different when I have the surgery but will it? I thought about going back to college while in the hospital after I recovered from surgery. It seems impossible right now but I want to make an effort in the next couple of years to earning my degree. I want to finish it at UMass Boston. Trying to make goals helps defend against the darkness, least for a little while.
I am feeling worthless right now. My psychache is high. I am a little perturbed and my press is at least a three. I spoke how I wrote the book Darkness Always Wins while I was in the hospital. I was and still am in a dark place. I don’t know if I am going to recover from this episode of depression. Meds have made little improvement to how I feel. I know realistically, it could be a year or more before I recover. It is the way recurrent depression is. I don’t buy that I have bipolar disorder. My depressions are too dark and stay dark for periods that are much more similar to major depression. I really think I am misdiagnosed. Fortunately, the treatment is the same: antidepressant therapy. I need to take an antipsychotic because I am prone to hearing voices otherwise. I have done well with Latuda, though it is causing some dystonia for me.
I just read a blog that I wrote a more than a few years ago about Shneidman’s psychache theory. I was trying to think about it while in the hospital. I remembered the three P’s, press, perturbation, and psychache. A 5-5-5 indicates imminent suicide. I was a 5-5-5 in the hospital at times. I tried to remember the psychache scale by Ronald Holden. I couldn’t remember his name or if I had it on my blog for staff to look up. My memory has been so much affected by what I have been through.
I had dinner with my family tonight. It helped a little being around them but at one point I wanted to tell my sister I needed to go back to the hospital. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her though so I kept quiet. I will talk more about this with my therapist tomorrow morning. I really feel like shit. It is like the song going down in flames, “Falling into this, again.”
about my hiatus
About my hiatus
I have been in the hospital the past three months. I was not in a state where I could write a blog. I was doped up most of the time and barely knew what was going on around me. I was sick with renal failure, covid, and infection called C diff. I was barely eating so they had place an nasogastric tube down in my stomach for a bit. I don’t know how long this tube was place. I had taken a pic of it sometime in Sept. I missed how the season ended for my Sox. When I came home for a bit, I thought it was the end of Aug but it was the beginning of Oct. I was home for a week or so before going back to the hospital for psych. I spent four weeks in the hospital on the psych unit. I got really good care there. I learned my top surgery was postponed and I was very, very devastated. It was good that I was in the hospital because if I wasn’t, I probably would have ended my life right then. I was so angry and frustrated as I didn’t have answers and had to wait for them. I had no access to my phone so I didn’t have the usual supports I have when I am home. It was extremely frustrating. The staff tried to help me but all they could do was sympathize with me. There was only one LGBTIQQ staff person on the unit and even she couldn’t really understand my predicament.
I have an appointment next week with my pcp to get medically cleared for top surgery. I really hope this conversation goes well. It will be the first time meeting my new pcp as a fully conscious being. The first two times I met her, I was still in the confused, delusional state. All I could do when I met her was blink my eyes and nod yes or no.
I am having difficulty writing in a constant stream of consciousness. It has taken me two days to write three hundred words for this blog. My thoughts are still hard to write with everything that I have been through. It was really difficult in the hospital as I really lost the ability to write. Writing has always been a coping mechanism for me and when I couldn’t think to write, it hurt, literally. I would get these headaches that felt like my brain was being crushed. It literally hurt to think. I got several migraines while in the hospital. I would wake up around 0330-430 every morning with severe migraines. It was terrible. The trauma of everything I went through was very difficult to process. I had become catatonic at one point.
I am still feeling wicked depressed and anxious at times. I am off all pain meds and off my Ativan. It is weird not taking meds around the clock like I once did for years. Now I just take it a few times a day as I am taking my blood pressure med three times a day and take the Latuda at dinner time. It makes me tired and I often find that by 1900 I am sleepy. But that could be because I have been waking up before 0500 most mornings. I find it hard to get back to sleep with these early morning awakenings. I am so much clear headed now than I was in the middle of October. My memory is still not there on what transpired the six weeks I was on the medical floor of the hospital. I just have these weird dreams/delusions that sometimes intrude in my head. One day while in the psych ward, I was flooded with memories and couldn’t make sense of things at all. The anxiety it produced was terrifying. I was convinced I killed my mother and a bunch of weird shit around my house. Taylor Swift music got me through a lot of the anxiety but while in the psych ward, I didn’t have my music to calm me so it was very difficult to cope. Now that I am home and have music again and my laptop, I am coping so much better. I am reunited with my online friends again and it feels so good because I was missed so much. I have missed blogging so much. I regret that I didn’t write before now but it has been hard finding my writing voice again. It has been a real struggle.
In closing, I am going to try and write a blog a day like before, even if it is less than 500 words.
midnightdemons7 
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