Tag: coffee

writing is difficult at times

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, depression

I went to my “happy place” (Starbucks) today to sit and write. Unfortunately, all I did was sit and check twitter on my phone. I decided to write an introduction for the book I was writing. Nothing came to me. ZILCH in over an hour. What I did write was the shortest and most boring introduction to a book. I might as well just have written the word INTRO and call it a day.

I have set what I think will be an impossible goal for me, to write four pages a day till Sept 20th in my book. I have found that once I start, I have a hard time stopping. But the thing is, to get GOING! Lately, even with my blogs, I have been finding that I have to turn off my phone so I am not bothered with incoming text or email messages. I don’t get phone calls anymore. If I do, I usually have the MP3 player going so I know when I have a call. I actually have tracked my phone calls since I left work. Hardly any minutes go for landlines anymore. I get like 700 minutes a month and at least 70 minutes will be used. I have unlimited mobile to mobile so it doesn’t matter how many minutes I use. I kind of hate it because I am paying 450 minute for nothing, get 300 bonus minutes, and I don’t use it anymore. I just pay for my data plan, which is reasonable I guess. I never use more than 2GB of data a month, but then I have unlimited data so it doesn’t matter. I am paying for a tablet that I don’t use data for. I would love to cancel the contract but it will cost me $200 to break the contract. I have until March to cancel it anyways. Not like I use it much. I just use it for the Kindle app so I can read, but I have so many hardcover books that I am reading, I hardly use the tablet anymore. It got old a month after I bought it so I am not sure anyone will want it. I do use it for email or something when I go in the hospital. But I don’t know if they will allow it anymore. Some places are going all no technology. Even using a cell phone is prohibited.

I am kind of feeling pressured to write these four pages a day. But I added some stuff to the document last night from a previous version of my book. Taken together, I have like 150 pages of stuff. The first version is just a compilation of my first few blogs and some other stuff I wrote that I think should be included in the book. The thing is, that I have become such a condensed writer that for me to expand is difficult. Sometimes I feel like I write and just go on not making any sense.

I have been having waves of sadness hitting me pretty hard today. I don’t know why as I had such a good day yesterday. I think it is because my foot has been bothering me today. Since this morning, my foot and leg pain has been bad. I literally had to force myself to go out today. Even putting on my sneakers today hurt, which almost made me want to go back to bed. After getting my latte, I was really hurting even though I was just sitting in Starbucks playing on my phone. I tried to come up with something to write but it was impossible. The sadness was so palpable.

Tomorrow is my BFF from childhood birthday. It just is another reminder to me that I am getting older and I don’t like it. I never imagined that I would make it to my thirties, let alone past my twenties. Pretty soon I will hit the big 4-0 and I am not sure I can take it. I just want to die now so I don’t have to spend my days in bed withering in pain.

I meant to go to the grocery store today. But after getting out just for my coffee, I couldn’t bear standing anymore. I will try tonight when my brother-in-law gets home so I can take the car. I got a pumpkin cupcake recipe off the internet that I am dying to try. I love pumpkin! And this will be the perfect snack for me to have or even a good breakfast. I just don’t know if I can stand to do more today or not. But I am getting hungry and have not had dinner yet. I am debating on making pasta or reheating the left over Chinese food I got last night. I just don’t want a repeat of what I went through last night if I have the Chinese food. I got really bloated from the grease. I should have ordered from my usual place but I wanted to try another restaurant. Now I know better!

early morning post

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

It’s almost five o’clock in the morning. I woke up to go to the bathroom and when I returned to my room, my foot didn’t like it. I am in so much pain right now it’s not funny. I don’t know why this happens. I was in pain before bed but nothing like this. It really kills me.

I took the day off yesterday. All I did was sleep. I was watching the baseball game but couldn’t stay awake for it so took a nap. I guess my activities on Saturday really wore me out. I am finding that if I do a lot for one day, the next day I need to recover from. It is typical of those suffering from CES, Cauda Equina Syndrome.

I got tweeted a post about a study on coffee and suicide. Turns out that if you drink more than 2 cups a day, you are at a 50% reduction rate for suicide. Now if only I can bring myself to have two cups of coffee a day, maybe the suicidal thoughts will decrease. The article can be found here.

I just realized that with my therapist on vacation, I have the ENTIRE week to myself. I have NO appointments. I don’t know if that means I will have a long week or not. But it frees me up to go for coffee earlier in the afternoon. Maybe I can work on my lyric book. This book is about songs that have meaning to me. I write down the lyrics and then write a few pages about what the song means to me. So far, all I have done is write down the lyrics. I haven’t done any interpretation of the song. I figure I will do that later. As far as my book is coming along, well it’s not. I haven’t written anything in it in weeks, with the exception of adding a blog story to it. I figure if I write a blog that has some meaning or tells my story, I would tack it on.

I had a weird experience last night. My niece was cuddling with me while we were watching a movie. I know she wasn’t going to molest me, but she kept on using my breast as a pillow and I got uncomfortable. I then almost panicked that she was going to start touching me. But she is eight years old so that is very unlikely. I have a history of sexual abuse from a cousin and it would start out that way. I just go very uncomfortable but tried to work it out. I guess I don’t like cuddling very much because of that incident. It was really difficult and I had to keep reminding myself that she was only eight and was not going to hurt me. I hate when I get sensory flashbacks. They are not fun!

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.

A day at Starbucks

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, depression

I’m at Starbucks drinking my Isla Flores. I don’t know what I am going to do when they get rid of this coffee. I like it more than West Java and it is from the same island (Indonesia). It is really hot today so I am glad they have the A/C cranking in here. It’s going to reach 95 degrees today. I don’t like heat. It drives me crazy. There have been studies done on suicide that state that intolerable heat causes suicide, or makes it more prone to suicidality. I know because there have been times I have thought more about suicide on hot days than I have on cold.

I have an appointment with my psychiatrist today. I don’t know if I am going to tell her about my plans. I don’t want to risk going into the hospital. Though for the first time in a long time, I didn’t wake up with doom on my mind today. I slept pretty good. That is the first time I slept through the night without waking up at some early time. I still have my menses and cramps, that are driving me crazy, especially on this hot day. I want to go into a pool and get wet today but that is not going to happen. I’ll just take a shower when I get home to cool off.

I am glad I brought my laptop to Sbux today. I like writing outside of my room. I might work on my book today. I haven’t worked on it in so long. I added double space and it is now 48 pages. I guess that is a good number to start with. There are some things that I’m editing as I go along.

Despite lowering the dose of my antipsychotic medication, I have not had any delusions or bad voices. The voices will ramp up at night to keep me talking by asking questions of my day or come in when I am resting. I hate that. I try to ignore them but they get so insistent. Sometimes it is just questioning how my day is going; other times they question every decision I am making. Why am I taking this bus over that bus, why am ordering this food over that food. You sure you want to do that rather than this. Or they tell me that I am doing everything wrong, some times including breathing. Like is there a correct way to breathe? Seriously. Half the time you are not even aware of it so WTF. Or they ask me why I am doing something, like just now they asked me why I put my sock in my sock and I reply that I don’t want to lose the other sock. I found this method has worked to keeping my pairs of socks together. Less mismatching.

It is like a sauna in my room right now. The ceiling fan is just moving hot air around. While I was at my psychiatrist appointment, I wanted to do a psychache scale. I no longer write the graphs in my journal as right now it just wastes paper as I don’t use it. So I look on my phone. I don’t have it in my files. I check my dropbox files and my google drive, NA-DA. I am pissed. I hate not having my files when I want them!! So now I have to place these documents and the SSF on my drives because I don’t have them. It would be nice to have them in an emergency. Like when I was in the hospital and they needed a safety plan for me to be discharged. I didn’t have my crisis response plan (CRP; see this blog for what it looks like) in my journal because it was a new journal. I didn’t have it written out in a word doc so I had to rummage through my PDF’s looking for it on my phone/tablet. Then I had to write it all out, substituting what my therapist and I came up with the generics of it. That was fun because I had to rush. But what truly pissed me off was that they didn’t even want a copy of the damn thing. They just wanted to make sure that I had one. So sometimes the CRP is useful in hospitalizations and sometimes it is not.