Tag: depression

Balancing act with Chronic Pain

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders

I stayed up pretty late last night as the baseball game was on the west coast time. We kicked “King” Felix’s butt and seeing as we took care of Sonny Gray the other night, I have to say this road trip is going fairly well. Sure we have had a couple strings of losses but overall, the hitting and pitching has been much better. I hope it continues. Today’s game is at 1600 so I will most likely be lurking in the BPD chat. It happens every Sunday at that time. Last week was a good chat.

I slept till 0330 today, so my day did not start off well. I just woke up from a nap as I so needed it. I even had coffee before I took a nap and it didn’t keep me up. I feel rested. I didn’t go into a deep sleep, but slept enough to feel better than I did before the nap. I didn’t have any dreams. Lately, my dreams have been really weird. But I don’t remember them long enough to write down or keep in the memory banks. I just wake up feeling discombobulated.

I made breakfast when I got up late morning. I had a bacon sandwich. I really don’t feel hungry for lunch or dinner right now. My bowels have been going most of the day. I guess the senna is working really well, maybe a little too well. Only thing that I think I am going to eat next is rice or a grilled cheese. My mother is most like going to call me soon. I don’t care that is what I want for my dinner, when I get hungry. And I got no appetite right now.

I need to take a shower today but my back has been acting up while I stand. Even sitting, my lower back just wants to cramp out. I don’t know what that is about. I haven’t done any heavy lifting or twisting of any sort. But there has been a change in the temperature so that probably is what is causing this havoc. I can still move, just gingerly. I had set a goal for myself today to shred some old prescription papers. I still haven’t done it, yet. I keep meaning to when I go downstairs but I just don’t grab the stack to take with me. I probably will do it after the game as I won’t have anything to do this evening.

I have been feeling really low today. Actually, the last few days my mood has been lower than it should be. I haven’t thought of suicide but I am not that far from it. It’s always in the back of my mind. It’s when it’s in the front of my mind that things get from bad to worse. Every day I do this Mood Traces app activity. It lists all the criteria for depression. Each day you rate how your mood is. If this app is accurate, I have been pretty depressed the last few days. Of course, I don’t really need an app to tell me this. But it’s nice to monitor my symptoms. It is going to suck when I switch phones. I don’t think I am going to keep the app. As great as the app is, I find it depressing to know how depressed I am every day. It kind of makes me feel guilty about my moods, like I am not trying hard enough to make myself feel better. Every day it also records your daily activity levels. Even on days when I don’t leave the house, I can get a few minutes of activity as I walk around my house as I am always carry my phone, usually. But then there are days when I have 0 minutes of activity and it makes me feel bad that I didn’t go out or at least try. Mostly those days are rest days because my ankle needs to rest. If I have too much activity, my pain levels are going to spike. Then I am going to be in a worse mood. It’s always a balance act in dealing with chronic pain.

I read my “idiot” book today. The plot thickens. I am really enjoying reading this book. I think the next book I am going to read from Dostoevsky is “the Double”. That was a very interesting story. I finally wrote the review for the “Graveyard Book”. I posted it on Goodreads and Amazon.com. It was a short review, nothing elaborate. Just short and concise, which I think every review should be. When I was reading the reviews for the book (which was over 1200), I couldn’t believe how long some of them were. It was like reading a book report on some of them. And if you didn’t read the book, the reviewer gave away most of what the book was about, which I thought sucked.

Saturday Blog 20

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders

Saturday Blog 20

Last night I was refreshing the Twitter suggestions to follow when I came across a former therapist. I haven’t seen or heard from him in over ten to fifteen years. I didn’t think he would follow me back but he did. I always liked him, but he was kind of not all there when it came to suicide talk. Which is why I had to “fire” him. I then starting thinking about whether or not I wrote about him in my book, Midnight Demon. I started thumbing through my book and I couldn’t believe how short the chapters were. I know it’s a short book (just a little over 150 pages) but I have no recollection of where he would be written. So if he gets my book and reads about himself, oh well. I gave him a paper that I wrote and he retweeted it. Other than that, we haven’t had any other contact.

It’s really humid in the house today and it is making me grumpy. I hate humidity more than I hate the heat. It’s cool in my room because the fan has been on for the past week. I also keep the door to my room closed. Only time I keep it open is when I am not in my room.

I really have not been having a good day. I woke up around 0630 after falling to sleep around 0230. I stayed up till around 0800 and then some band woke me up. I have no idea where the hell they were playing but they were really loud. I needed coffee so I made a cup. I still feel like a migraine is coming on because I cannot tolerate sound. I think I will wait until the headache comes before I start medicated. It could just be because I have little sleep that I am more irritated than not. I hate being so sleep deprived. My mother thinks they were playing on the street behind us. I hope this isn’t a weekly thing. It will drive me crazy. The music wasn’t bad but the songs all sounded the same, unless they were playing the same song over and over. I have no idea. Because the amps were so loud, you could barely make out what they were trying to sing. They stopped about an hour ago so I can go back to sleep after I do my writing.

I didn’t get too many likes for my short story. I did get a lot of views on it though. I guess it’s either one or the other. Like the other night, my stats soared really high. I had 201 views in one day. That almost never happens. The most I have been getting is around 50. I do know that it was a person in the US. And they kept on coming back to my home page. It was really good to see my numbers go up. I passed 41,000 views. That means that 41,000 people have read my blog. I feel so lucky that people read my blog and can get something out of it. But most of all, they come back to read my future posts.

Last night I got really pissed while poker. I had a pair of queens and the damn game was acting up. It went to the bottom of the screen to play some stupid ad and I lost the hand! I was so pissed. Now I am weary of playing. I tried a new game today, Household. It seems very similar to Pioneer Trail, the game that closed last month. I had to try another game because I am very bored and reading only gets you so far. I really like reading but I can’t do it for long stretches of time. I just lose interest and get impatient. Last night I read two chapters of “the Idiot” and the second chapter was a challenge. I am thinking of reading “Lethal Code” but it might activate my delusional self and I really don’t want to be delusional again. I have a tendency to believe what I read is true and seeing as the cyber wars are reportedly true, it might just get my imagination running. I still have to write a review for the “Graveyard Book”. I really want to write one for this book but every time I think of something, my mind blanks when I open a new document. I might have to handwrite it and then type it up. I have it in my mind what I want to write. It’s just getting started that is the problem. Once I start, things usually go smoothly.

Marathon Bombing Sentencing and Other Things

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, mental illness

Marathon Bombing Sentencing and Other Things

The bomber of the 2013 Boston Marathon explosions has been sentenced to death. I was kind of hoping that he would spend his life in prison but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I feel very sad that another life will be taken, however justified. I am for the death penalty and believe that people who do horrendous things should die, and he did do horrible things, taking 3 lives at the Marathon and then an innocent police officer. He and his brother terrified the city for almost a week before getting caught. I hope the victims and their families can rest easy now that justice has been served. He wasn’t convicted on all his counts, just some and that was enough to warrant the death penalty. I am sure there will be appeals that will go on for months before the death occurs.

I have been in a rotten mood all day and this sentence just didn’t help it. There is a sense of relief as now maybe he won’t be in the news as often anymore. I don’t have to be reminded everyday of that day when my world came apart. I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak. I have been moody as all hell. I think it’s partly because I have not really eaten today. I had breakfast early this morning, a slice of pizza left over from last night. I really haven’t eaten since then. I went to Starbucks and had my free mocha. I had earned the reward from my 12 purchases. I no longer use my Starbucks app because hackers have found ways to siphon money from your bank account using the app. So I just use my gold card.

I wrote a bit while at Starbucks in my journal. I wasn’t too distracted by people or what was going on outside, which is rare. I wasn’t even on my phone that much checking Twitter or Facebook. I lost 6 followers in the last 4 hours. I got a bunch of followers in the last few days so I am guessing they were bots or because I didn’t follow back (I hardly do, unless they are a bona fide real person) right away. I am not likely to follow someone with a name for “music xxx”. A lot of authors have followed me in the last few weeks. I still don’t know how they find me. Today I got a follow from a guy in the UK who is an author. Never heard of him before but his English isn’t too good as he had some grammatical errors on his profile page. I didn’t follow him back.

I was a block away from home when my ankle gave out on me. It exploded in pain and made it difficult to walk. I am still hurting. I took a pain pill about a half hour ago so I should be getting some relief soon. I just hate when this happens. My foot wasn’t doing too good before I went out but sometimes when I forced myself out, it settles down. The drawback is that I will have severe pain on the way home or after. Seeing as it just hit the early evening hours, I am going to have a long night of pain before I even hit bed time. Baseball game is on late tonight so maybe I will listen to it. Last night, I was out cold before the game. I woke up around 0400, which sucked. I then went back to sleep and I had a weird dream. The dream was that I was back in East Boston doing some police work. It was weird. When I woke up, I really wanted to go back to sleep to see if we caught the guy! My stupid medication app alarm went off, waking me up.

Despite my sleeping difficulties, when I woke up at 0400, I felt rested. Though I was kind of pissed at waking up that early. I must have slept for a good seven hours, a record for me. I really should have made coffee when I got up this morning, before my nap. I think I would have done better had I stayed up rather than fallen back asleep. But with me having to take pain medication, I don’t know if I will be up late or not. It’s weird that if I take the same dose during the day, I get sleepy and have to take a nap. But after seven in the evening, it can keep me up. I don’t know if my anxiety over the pain contributes to me staying up or not. Sometimes, I have to take Ativan to calm down some, just to get sleepy. Sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t, depending on the level of pain. I know by now what will keep me up and what won’t. If I have it in my mind to sleep, I usually do. It’s just when I get the writing bug in me during this time that I find it hard to sleep. If I don’t write, the longer I stay up and that means Hyde can show up. He will come out if I am exhausted, in severe pain, and can’t sleep because I need to write. It’s terrible. And the anxiety of not writing is sometimes worse than the physical pain itself. I don’t know what lies ahead of me tonight or how many pain pills it is going to take to get it under control. I am sort of dreading it. But I will have my baseball tonight and that usually calms me down enough so I can sleep, sometimes. If it is an aggravating game in which we lose, I can get hyper. And that usually means I am up till 0300. The only thing I have to do tomorrow is pick up my prescription. Hopefully, the pain levels will be down when I wake up and I can do this errand.

Brick Walls

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, depression, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, psychache, suicidality

7-Aug-14 Brick Walls

I am currently on a psychiatric unit in a hospital. I’ve been here for a week now, with no hope of getting out anytime soon. I am here because I am profoundly suicidal. All I see are brick walls surrounding me and they keep on closing in on me. It’s like a prison that only I can see. I am surrounded by these bricks and no one cares how high they get. And they certainly don’t care how they got there.

I want to take my life because I am stuck, just like these brick walls. The cement has hardened each brick into place so you cannot move it. My thoughts of suicide have also hardened to the point where they don’t budge. I feel very hopeless that this hospitalization will not help detach one of these bricks so that I make break free of the confinement I feel. If enough bricks fall, I may see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I doubt that will happen. I never see the light for long. I am always in a dark place. I am always feeling hopeless. And hopelessness and suicidal thoughts are not a good combination. They seal the cement and lock me in to this confinement that I am in.

The doctor and staff are trying their best to keep hope alive for me, but I just don’t see it. All I see is the brick wall that is impenetrable. Nothing or nobody can get through it or to me. It will take more than a jack hammer or two to get through to me right now. And it seems that no one owns one. The staff is too busy to care about the bricks. They just want the cement to fall to force me to see the light as the bricks become loose. Just so they can discharge me. They don’t care how the bricks were formed. And this hurts because no one takes the time to see how much I am hurting like they used to.

I have been trying to stay in the moment but my moments are just filled with suicidal thoughts and feelings. They are also filled with plans on how to end my life. Each thought makes the brick wall stronger so no one can breakthrough. Each brick has been mounted with feelings of inadequacy, shame, indignity, depression, hopelessness, worthlessness, and unbearable pain. Pain is the biggest brick. It lies in the center surrounded by the other bricks that I just mentioned. It exceeds all others in thickness and size. It is killing me, literally and physically, to be in unbearable pain all the time. The pain stems from just left of the sternum of the chest wall and captivates the entire left side of the chest cavity. It is a pressure felt day in and day out. In essence, it is like a ton of bricks weighing on my heart.

As the cement hardens around the brick, making it so difficult to breathe, the pressure on the chest increases. No medical tests exists to identify this weight. It’s not visibly present. That makes it difficult to explain without the feeling of sounding crazy. Who is going to believe a suicidal person that there is a weight on the chest when no one can see or feel it? It is not measured by tests or electrocardiograms. It is just a heaviness that fills your soul. And the soul cannot be seen or felt. Nor can it be measured. No one’s pain is the same. Each is unique to that individual. And my pain is what is strangling me in this moment of time.

The pain is always present in times of despair. It ruins any hope one might have and increases the weight of the bricks bearing down on you. Nothing alleviates this pain. There are no pills that can ease the pressure or painful despair. It’s ever present and deepens the despair because no one understands it. All the symptoms of depression and suicidal thinking makes it very difficult to treat. And the longer it lasts, the higher the brick wall is built. Will the doctors and social workers have what it takes to help bring down the brick and mortar? Very unlikely. They don’t have the time to really get to know me, much less help me. I have resigned myself to stay within these brick walls until they envelope me so I can no longer breathe. Each day they move closer, causing me to feel more isolated and the feeling of suffocation grows stronger. Love doesn’t have any effect on these walls that have surrounded my heart. My heart has become stone a long time ago. Only negative feelings are allowed to pass through. I have given up on positive feelings ever passing through my little barricade. It took years for the brick wall to be built. It might take years to be torn down. But the suicide demons won’t allow that. This time the brick walls will win. I no longer have the energy to chisel my way out of my own prison. But then, I am in a psych ward where chisels are not allowed. You just expected to go to groups to cope with the demons rather than allow them to fall.

And because no one knows the depth of my prison, I am here for a long time, in solitary confinement. The walls are dark and gray, just the way that I feel inside. I doubt I would ever get parole from this darkness that fills my soul. If I do, it is only for a short time before I am back in solitary. The light barely has a chance to touch me before everything becomes dark again. That is why I don’t trust happiness or feeling good. I much rather be content about things than feel happiness. Happiness, to me, is a fleeting emotion that is hard to hold onto. It is slippery like silk, never lasting more than a few minutes and devastating when it leaves you.

So I sit here in my room, surrounded by darkness so the sunlight won’t come in, staring at the brick wall and it staring back, trapped in my own prison.