Tag: chronic pain

Midnight Demons Are Back…and it sucks

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, depression

I did my what has now become my daily routine. I took a shower and then headed to Starbucks for my coffee. Because I earned so many stars (rewards), I earned a free drink so today took advantage of it. I also got another banana coffee cake as I was in the mood for something sweet. I then sat and journaled about my therapy session.

Last night I sent her a pretty nasty text message because I was in so much pain. I told her “fuck you, I am still keeping my date. Ankle has exploded so fuck you.” I didn’t get much sleep last night because I was hyper and because I was in pain. I have had a few hours sleep and the coffee helped. I am getting scared though. I am feeling like I am separating into two people. During the day I am Dr. Jekyll and during the night, I become Mr. Hyde. My moods are drastically different. If given the opportunity last night, I know I would have tried to take my life last night. I was that crazy that much. Now, because I am not struggling to sleep and not in crazy about of pain, it’s like a night and day experience. I have to ask myself, did I really think those things? I know the text message meant what I said and I know I wanted to talk to some one but who do you call at 3 in the morning?? I wrote a letter to Dr. Jobes, telling him of my demise and thanking him all the same time. I don’t know why I did that. I just thought he should know that I was struggling and used his works and it still failed me somehow. Maybe I wasn’t using it right. Maybe I am just a failure and can’t be helped. Maybe I am just too hopeless a case. I don’t know if I will send off the email. He doesn’t know me, not in a personal way anyway. I doubt that he remembers who I am other than the crazy guy that keeps asking him for his autograph in his works. I adore him. I admire his brilliancy in the field of suicidology. Yet why do I feel I should tell him I am committing suicide? Maybe I am hoping he will send me a reply that will give some affirmation that my life is not a total failure and loss. But if I don’t get a reply, how then will I feel? What if he takes my threat seriously and tries to hunt me down to get me help? I don’t know if I can take that chance.

Last night I wanted to chat so went to the twitter boards to see if there were any suicide chats going on. I know twitter isn’t a chat forum but there might be something under trends and such. No such luck but I found a ton of people writing their suicide notes or just making fun of being suicidal. Not my cup of tea. And NO WHERE did I see a prevention tweet. Usually I see one from the National Suicide prevention, Lifeline but there was zippo. Pretty sad to see all these tweets and no one really helping. I asked one person why she was writing a suicide note but didn’t get a response. It was four in the morning. I couldn’t believe the stupid tweets about suicide, such as my math book has so many problems it committed suicide. What is funny about that?? I just don’t get it. I did go to one forum for a text chat but it’s only from 2 pm to 2 am. I guess you can’t be suicidal outside those hours. I guess you could always go to the emergency room but by the time you are seen over the “real” serious cases, you are exhausted and just want to go home and sleep. I know I probably could have called my psychiatrist but I also know that she would be worried as I NEVER have called her that early in the morning unless it was a true emergency. I’m not saying I was not in bad space last night, I was, but I knew she would try and talk me into going to the ER to be admitted or at least evaluated. To me those things are one and the same and I wasn’t going to get near either of those places.

So hear it is day light and I am feeling better than I was 10 hrs ago. I didn’t do anything different. I just go a little sleep and went about my day like nothing happened. Guess the midnight demons are really back.

coffee and therapists

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, psychache, suicide

Went out for coffee today. I didn’t feel like it but I forced myself to. I gave myself an incentive, that if I went I would get something sweet. I usually just get my coffee and maybe a sandwich, if I am hungry. But today I really wanted something sweet so didn’t need that much incentive to get a coffee cake. I like that the baristas are getting my order down pat. I don’t order anything fancy, just my favorite flavor, which is now Kati Kati, grande size but in a venti cup. This is so I have plenty of room for the half and half. I also put in several packets of sugar. I need my coffee sweet, which is why I usually don’t get something sweet.

I did accomplish something today and that was finishing the book why do people die by suicide by Thomas Joiner. I had an autographed copy but lost it on the train the first week I read it. Much to my sadness. The book was good and I learned a few things that I hope I retain. He is a cognitive therapist so he focused on that during the strategies for dealing with suicidality. I really liked the book because it not only dealt with personal experience (his dad died by suicide while in grad school), he also listed empirical data to back up what he was talking about. I am a research geek so I tend to like stuff like that. He also used terms that put people that couldn’t understand the technical stuff into words that people could understand, like how neurotransmitters interact. It was a very interesting book. I also bought another book that he wrote called Myths of Suicide, which I hope to read after I finish reading Lincoln’s Melancholy.

My reading voices are back, thank god. I can’t seem to focus unless they are there. I got a comment from my psychotic while reading blog and this person said that she only hears her voice while reading. I find that so interesting. I never hear my own voice. Unless my voice is male sounding, which I don’t think it is, not yet anyways. But then I do have enlarged ventricles in my brain that cause the voices. Not as large as those found in schizophrenia but enough to have a radiologist comment on it. I had the MRI the first time I was hospitalized when I was sixteen. They ran a bunch of tests on me the whole time I was there, from cortisol suppression studies to psychological tests such as the inkblot. I remember how much paperwork I had to do for the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory. I hated that. I did that more than once over my lifetime for various studies I was involved in. It is a LONG inventory. I am glad it is not used in clinical practice, unless you go specifically for psychological testing. It would make for a long afternoon or morning.

I have been feeling self-harm urges the past few days. I don’t know why that is. I just have the urge but usually distracting myself or listening to music helps. I have not cut in years and I like it stay that way, though I still have my “kit”. Even though I don’t use it, I still find it comforting to have it around. I also have been getting urges to overdose but these quickly pass as I just can’t do it in my house. Symptoms of my illness.

The dreaded nerve pain has come again. I really tried not to stand too long while waiting for the bus today to get my coffee. I tried not to jiggle my foot in a way that I know would upset it later. But I did do stretching exercises while I was on the phone with my therapist so maybe that is why it is angry at me. I never know what will make it upset. It’s like an untemperate, abusive person. You just never know what will set it off. The cold. The heat. Wearing socks. Not wearing socks. Moving it this way versus that. It’s a never ending battle. I am so sick of it. I am tired of hurting. And nothing helps curb the pain. My pain meds can only do so much, which is knock me out most of the time so I can sleep. But that is only for a few hours. Once the meds wear off, I am screwed. I wake up and sometimes it take a little but to register that I am awake before the pain starts. Other times it is because I am in pain that I wake up. My sleep has not been good the past week. I keep waking up between 0230-430 in the morning. No matter what time I go to sleep, I always wake up during those hours. If I fall asleep before ten, I am always up four hours later. I can’t stand it. I usually play my games or check twitter. If I am bullshit, I might write another blog or journal if I don’t feel like opening my laptop. Sometimes, I try reading and usually that works to put me back to sleep, unless I am in roaring pain. Then I just stay up until the pain meds kick in to knock me out again while withering in agony.

This week’s AAS blog is about finding a therapist that won’t run away or panic at the mention of suicidal thoughts. I want to laugh and say, have you read my therapist blog? I have had ten therapists run away from me soon as I mention that I have had suicidal thoughts in the past or been hospitalized because of them. Course I am hospitalized frequently so that doesn’t help my case. I have been hospitalized at least eight times since 2008. My last hospitalization was last June. So it has been a year but if these damn voices don’t stop, I might have to go back in. The voices and being suicidal doesn’t mix too well. But getting back to therapists, they can be tricky. I kept on being referred to another therapist, who would then refer me to yet another therapist. Before I knew it, I had ten within a month’s time. I finally gave up and stuck it out with my current therapist, even though I don’t see her in person frequently. I think I will see her next week. I will try and get my sister’s car.

I know why therapists don’t want to take on suicidal clients. They don’t want to be liable. They fear malpractice. They even fear losing the client. But I believe that despite this, with the right treatment, therapists can see suicidal clients. It just takes a little bit of courage and trust, a lot of it. Not only on the therapist’s part, but also the client. The client also needs to have a trust in the therapist that they aren’t going to be dumped in the hospital every single fricken time they get suicidal. The therapies out there that help are by David Jobes, CAMS and by using his suicide status form. Also using the Aeschi model helps. Knowing why the client wants to kill themselves says a lot. By not allowing the client to share his story, he gives his therapist a reason to distrust him. I do hope that there comes a day when graduate schools are mandated to have some kind of suicide preventions/treatment protocols in their curriculums. It shouldn’t be up to the therapist’s own style of interviewing that should be dependent on their suicide knowledge. That and the use of no-suicide contracts should be discontinued as long as something like CAMS is in place or the QPR by Paul Quinnett. I forget what QPR stands for but it is a useful resource.

I don’t get nerve pain

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression

I don’t get nerve pain

Truly I don’t. My room got freezing cold because I had the a/c cranked because it’s hot outside. My foot gets freezing ice cold, even under the blankets and a pillow so I put a sock on it. Now it is warmed up and hurts like holy hell. I am so sick of this shit. I know I put off my suicidal plan but it is back on again. I am not going to live with this shit. No fucking way. I didn’t do anything to my foot though it feels like someone is stomping on it. I have it up on a pillow and it still hurts. I just don’t get nerve pain. I was doing good all day. I thought today might be a day that I won’t have to take my pain medication but NOOOOOOO. My foot had other plans.

But such is my life with CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome). Thing is other than my foot getting really cold and then really hot, I don’t have any other symptoms other than pain. My foot doesn’t change color. It doesn’t swell up like it used to. I just have this exploding pain that comes for no reason. While I am at REST, when I want to go to SLEEP. And the pain isn’t the same. Sometimes it is exploding. Sometimes it is like it is in a vise. Other times it feels like some one is taking a hammer to each individual bone and trying to crush it. It is agonizing. Other times, if it’s not the bones in my foot, it is my ankle bone, the lateral malleolus. This is right where my peroneous tendons are. I have chronic tendonitis of these tendons. And they hurt big time. And when this pain starts it is like someone is driving an ice pick right through my ankle bone. It starts off the same way as my bones in my foot. They get really cold even though to the touch they are warm. Then it gets warm and it hurts like fucking hell. All I know is that I can’t sleep when I am in pain despite taking the meds because then my anxiety creeps in and it’s all over.

See, when my Cauda Equina Syndrome (CES) started, way back when, it started in my left leg/ankle. So now I have a bad association with pain in my ankle flaring up and me thinking I am going to get CES again, which is worse than the pain in my foot! I could lose total function of my bowels and bladder, my back could go out, I could lose motor function of my legs and end up in a wheel chair. It’s not pretty. But it is what I fear because I have a disc in my back that can make this happen at any time. I have been living with this fear for the past few years and it especially troubles me that the disc touches the nerve roots that control all these things but the docs won’t do any type of surgery because there is no compression. So I live in fear instead. My anxiety goes up and it takes an Ativan to get me to calm the hell down and music to put me to sleep (sometimes). I usually have my anxiety in check but when I am in serious pain, like now, it takes forever to calm down from it. I have to constantly move my toes or realize they are there and not numb to make me feel better. But sometimes during these flare ups, I can’t move my toes and that just sends the anxiety up to panic mode. But as long as I can move my hip, leg and ankle, I know that I am ok. But living with this anxiety is no fun. It drains you like no tomorrow.

Meds are kicking in so I will stop here for now. For those that read this, know that you are not alone with your symptoms.

sleepless night

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression

Listened to the Sox win the game. I can’t sleep. It is too hot in my room despite the A/C cranked. My ankle is killing me and I just took an Ativan to try and calm down as my thoughts are squirrelly. It’s going to be a long week as the Red Sox are on the west coast this week which means the games are going to be late ones. I have not missed a game all season, though I might have fallen asleep during one or two. Listening to monotone voices will do that.

I miscalculated my numbers for reaching 10,000 views for my blog. Unless I can get 40 views per day over the next two weeks, I am not going to reach it. My average is 20 views per day so I seriously doubt it is going to happen. But, stranger things have happened. I got 143 views in a single day. If that happens again, I will be in good shape. The nice things about knowing the stats is where the views come from. Today I had about 10 different countries looking at my blog. Usually I just have the US, Canada, the UK, and sometimes Australia. Today I had those four plus Bolivia, Belgium, and India. I forget the other countries.

I hate it when I can’t sleep. It makes me really restless and the more I try to sleep the more restless I get. Which is why I am writing. Sometimes writing will calm me down enough to sleep. I don’t feel racy. My thoughts are just going around in circles because my ankle pain is driving me nuts. I had a deep stabbing pain earlier this evening and now my ankle and foot are on fire. I can’t seem to find a comfy position to put my foot. I am a side sleeper and usually sleeping on my right side will ease the pain but not tonight. So I switch and that makes it worse. I can’t sleep on my back because I will have to raise my feet up so my back doesn’t hurt. And I am too lazy to grab my trapezoid foam cushion to put my legs up. I know I am making excuses. But it’s tough being in pain this late at night. If I am not asleep by two thirty in the morning, I will take another dose of my pain meds. I can’t take anymore right now because it will be too early.

Because of my suicidality, I have been thinking of going in the hospital but there is no way that I can. Not with the way my current pain med prescription is written. I will only have one pill every six hours. That is not going to do me any good, especially when I am in this amount of pain. And if I get a flare up in the hospital, which I most certainly will, I will be beyond screwed. I know I did too much today and now I am paying the price. I hope tomorrow will be better but it already is tomorrow.

My mood still sucks. I still feel like I am in a bottomless pit. I hate it. I have tried to get out of it a few times today but it seems every time I try, the deeper I am sucked in. I have listened to good music to try and keep my spirits up but it has done nothing for me. Just made me think more about why I am single and not in a relationship. Made me think of my ex-girlfriend who I know I hurt once again. I have been meaning to try and text her but I know it is probably for the best that I leave her be. I miss her though. I miss talking to her. But she is crazier than I am. Because of this, I broke up with her again. She just doesn’t realize that she is hurting herself in ways and I can’t be around that. I have tried to point it out to her several times and still she goes back to the same behavior so I put an end to our relationship. It was difficult to do but it had to be done.

Maybe that is why I am depressed. I have not told anyone about how I feel about losing her. Everyone has told me to dump her, that she isn’t good for me. But yet I have not told anyone how much it hurts being apart from her. I know she isn’t good for me and I am probably not good for her, but that doesn’t mean that my feelings got hurt in the process. We have known each other since high school. It really hurts to see this relationship end because of differences of opinion and her wanting to be the victim all the time. And she not taking care of herself. That is what killed me. We are 90 miles away from each other and I couldn’t be there for her even if I wanted to. And another reason why I ended it. No long distance relationship lasts.

I guess I will stop here as it is approaching 2 am.