Tag: depression

perception

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

Had a visit with my primary doc today and it went well. I got what I needed and now just need to settle for the month of what ifs until next month. We discussed the paper I sent him and agreed that though my intention was clear with him, his staff was a moron in handling it. Instead of getting the point of what my pain was meaning to me, they just focused on the small suicide part and disregarded everything else in the paper, which pissed me off. I had given this to my neurologist and my psychiatrist and if there was any suicidal warning in the paper, I think the white coats would have been thrown at me in a heart beat. But this is what it is, CYAM (Cover Your Ass Medicine). My neurological condition ignored and I am again just a mentally ill patient.

 

After my appt I really didn’t know what to do with myself. I came home and had something to eat as I hadn’t eaten anything all day. My foot was sore from walking around and felt like I was walking on hot pokers. I debated on taking something but decided against it because I didn’t want to be sleepy.  Tonight the show Perception is on and I can’t wait to watch it but it is a few hours away. This show has found meaning to me with the parallels of the main character’s struggle with schizophrenia and my own battles with psychosis. I too have the main voices and the ones that come along just to haunt me.

 

I tried writing on my suicide attempt paper but it really did not hold my attention for long. I seem to have lost my writing ability for this for now. I ended up editing it a little bit trying to make it make sense a little more. My hopes of it being a sequel to my other paper have been dashed, as it is already so long there is no way I can introduce the lyrics now.  Plus I have not felt strongly about this song in a long time so trying to get the juices flowing has been slow and uneventful. I wish I could turn and write the paper like I did the other but I had more to go on with the other than with this one. It has turned painfully personal and I just cannot let the human element of this new paper die with just what I have written. My experiences, though I do not know if they are valuable, have been injected into this and I can’t seem to remove them without taking away from the paper. Now I find myself writing about every attempt I have made in my life and the consequences of those actions.  I don’t know if that is what people want to read about but I write about the aftermath and how it felt after each failed attempt.  Maybe I have just given up on trying again and that is why it has been so long since I have attempted again. True I feel like the biggest failure in the world knowing this but how can I not. This is deeply personal talking about the lowest point in my life and wanting to end it all and then by some grace, still be forced to live on afterwards because of some kind of divine intervention. Of the many attempts I have tried, only 1 was medically serious to warrant a hospitalization. The others were not so serious but did lead me to another hospitalization. Since the age of sixteen I have had close to 30 hospitalizations. Most have been involuntary as I posed a danger to myself and it is law to hospitalize for that reason. I just wonder why I have survived this long. Am I suicidal if I don’t attempt and just plan? We can go into the whole what makes a person a suicidal ideator vs an attempter but most would agreed prevention lies in before the attempt not after. We hear stories about suicides and their survivors but what you don’t hear at all is about the attempter that survived. These truly are the ones that need the most attention to but because their world is so private no one really knows. Unless someone survives a shotgun wound or emmolation or hanging attempt, you often don’t see the scars of attempters. True those that slice their wrist leave scars but most do survive to eventually tell their tale. There are countless overdoses every year that get under reported or if successful get ruled as accidental poisonings rather than suicides mostly to either spare the family the “shame” or because there was no clear indication that the poisoning was intentional. Most people believe that unless there is a suicide note, it is not a suicide because he or she wouldn’t do that. I would say that the majority of people who attempt and fail feel too ashamed to admit what they have done and so cover their asses by saying it was an accident or just a foolish impulse but for those that succeed we will never know.

Change my mind

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

Tell me that all is right in the world. For some reason I feel really suicidal and I just can’t help thinking things will be better with me gone. I am hearing John Berry’s change my mind…say you couldn’t live without me, that you’re crazy about me. I guess everyone wants to be wanted and maybe that is what triggers a suicidal attack for me. I want to know that I matter to someone anyone and when I don’t have that connection, I feel lost and maybe lonely of this feeling I can’t describe.
So I’m staring at a bottle of crown royal and thinking maybe I’ll just get drunk, drunk enough to numb the pain of this feeling. If not I guess I just go ahead with my thoughts in the sewer. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. It’s like the bad feelings have been unleashed and I am trying to stay afloat but they keep weighing me down. Maybe I’ll just go to sleep and tomorrow won’t be as bad as what I’m feeling right now. Maybe then I will have changed my mind…

killer bees, 10-dec-10

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

The past three days I have been thinking about what to write on here.  My topic was going to be about the killer bees and how they always seem to come out when I want to go to sleep.  The bees aren’t real. It is just this buzzing sensation I get because of the nerve damaged caused by a disc fragment in my spinal nerves.  I have been living with this condition, called Cauda Equina Syndrome (CES for short), for the past 9 ½ years. I actually got it twice. The second time was in 2006. I had it easier the second time around because I knew what to look for and how to get the proper care as well as what I knew to expect.  That helps big time as the first go round didn’t go well.  I was only 25 yrs old when I got it. My leg gave way one night, 12 hrs after seeing my chiropractor and got worse in the next 72+ hrs since then.  I had seen a doc the Monday as I could barely put any weight on my left leg and all the doc did was give me pain meds and a pain shot. He didn’t tell me about warning signs or nothing.  A couple days later I was to have an appointment with my psychiatrist, but by then the damage had spread to my right leg and I could feel my toes on either foot. I had foot drop in both, but the worse was my left where most of the damage was. I couldn’t walk at all.  She wanted me to call an ambulance right away but because of the current detours, I couldn’t be 100% sure I would end up at MGH so I decided to wait for my friend to come home and take me.  I was at her house anyway and didn’t have the key to lock up, plus she had 2 dogs so I didn’t want to leave the house open to them or have an incident where they attacked the EMT’s.  I know I added more time to the clock, but I didn’t want to go to some rinky dink hospital and then be forced to go to MGH in worse condition.  All this time, I just thought I needed some good PT and pain meds and I would be good as new. I couldn’t be more wrong.  Soon after I had my MRI (after being in the ER 12+ hrs and being up for 24), the radiology tech’s face was ghastly.  He said that I shouldn’t move.  I wanted to tell him, “buddy, if I could walk, do you really think I would be in this wheelchair???”  3 hrs later I was in the OR. My L4-L5 disc had ruptured. It was the size of an almond compressing my cauda equina nerves.   It took me a week just to wiggle my toes a little bit.  I had to learn how to walk again, which is probably fine if you are a kid. You can fall easily and not worry about doing damage. If I fell, I was afraid I was u going to end up back in the OR.  I had to wear orthotics called AFO’s to keep my feet where they were supposed to be while walking.  I had a long recovery.  In 3 months I was using just a cane to get around. I still have the walker.  I hope it continues to collect dust but you never know.  I was still having back pain all throughout this.  It wasn’t until my doc put me on oxycontin that I really got better.  I am off it now for reasons I won’t go into, but it really saved my life. I doubt I would be able to work 40+ hrs a week now if I hadn’t been on it. It helped me heal and push through the pain so I could get well.

Six months into recovery, the nerve pain started.  My foot and left side of my leg from the outside burned something fierce. This lead to another wonderful med, Neurontin or gabapentin as its generic name is known.  Some people cannot tolerate this med and have had bad side effects. My system loved it and it has worked wonderfully.  With a high dose at night, I was almost pain free most of the day. Now, not so much.  I never thought much about the difference between brand name and generic, but with this med, there is a huge difference.  Once dose is usually all I need (on brand name). Generic I need a slightly higher dose to get me the same relief.  But the one thing it doesn’t change is my sleep.  This nerve pain is not something to mess with.  I have some nights where not even the bed sheets can touch me. Other nights, just before drifting off, the deep pins and stabbing begins, jolting me upright.  It drives me crazy because unless I take the gaba, I will be in pain. The side effect is that it takes me a long time to wake up after dosing. Sometimes I need at least 10-12 hrs of sleep to sleep it off or my brain is just foggy.  With my job, I need to be able to be places early in the morning so I can’t take it every night like I need to. Plus with me taking it with my other meds, it really knocks me out.

I have been having a lot of suicidal thoughts over the past few years. I have written so many wills and good bye letters that I know one day I will just end my life. Most of it is because of this pain I deal with every day and I’m not really talking about the physical pain. Mental pain is with me every day, every second. There is no escaping from it and there is no drug I can take to relieve it. I have a high pain tolerance. I just realized over the past few days that because I take ativan, I don’t seem to get the recurrent thoughts of suicide in my head as much. I think most of it is because of my physical pain caused by CES and the downfalls of having to keep track of things that no other “normal” person would think of, stressing me more than I realize.  How many people do think when the last time they urinated or had a bowel movement. If I don’t keep track it could be a week before I had a BM or significant long hrs since my last void that I am going to have an accident or a leak, well mostly a leak. I only had one accident and it was my fault as I should have gone to the bathroom before going home but I thought I would make it and I didn’t. Now I know that I can’t ignore those signals anymore and it stresses me out.

Working long hours and days does help with the depression. It keeps the thoughts out that lead to planning and contemplating when I will and how I will kill myself. I know that I will someday and have already begun to do so. Maybe this will be my last writing before I die to tell you what really goes through the suicidal mind up until death.

frustrated, why yes I am!!

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

Feeling really frustrated. I didn’t get my Long Term disability approved today as they still need more information which means I won’t have any money for the next four weeks. I am also frustrated because I am down to my last few tablets of pain meds because apparently I have been in more pain this week causing me to use what I had. Now I have a few to carry me till Monday because my PCP thinks I am an overdose risk because of my mental illness. My safety with my narcotics have never been an issue and both my psychiatrist and therapist can vouch that I have found more lethal methods of killing myself than overdosing. I am just so damn aggravated that I have to be swimming in pain and then just when I think I am going to get relief my PCP decides I have to stay on the boat and I can’t come to shore. I have to continue to suffer this game of his, not mine. I understand the risks involved but withholding pain meds to a chronic pain patient just doesn’t make sense to me especially when that pain makes me want to kill myself. I have not thought of killing myself since this regimen but then my mood has been alleviated somewhat. The reason for this I am not sure other than I just can’t stop and think of how shitty my life truly is at the moment because if I stop and do think, I might be back in the abyss faster than David Copperfield disappeared the statue of liberty.

I am so tired of fighting for everything. I fight to stay alive when I don’t know why, I struggle just to make ends meet and I struggle just to make it through the day without causing harm to myself.  And now I have to struggle to deal with my pain meds when before I was given them freely. I have not and will not harm myself with these drugs. The rope I have in my room will suffice. Or the many plastic bags I have in my house will do. I just have to concoct some brilliant plan that doesn’t allow my family to find me, find some location off and hide myself with my ID so they do not have to have that awful experience.

I see my doc on Monday and I hope that I can hold out until then. I have had to use more pain meds because I have been in more pain lately. I don’t know why. Sometimes I have pain while going about my business and other times like today I am hurting really bad and all I want to do is cry. My back and leg is giving me the Nth degree of pain and I don’t know what hurts more. I got someone stabbing me in the back and my ankle is exploding in nerve pain. I think me adding neurontin might have helped me sleeping better.  I just don’t know what combo will work one night and what will work the next. It so fricken sucks not knowing and no doctor can say just why this is. They just have their own ideas on what will work and what will not but even then it is a trial and error game.  It’s like with my trials of antidepressants. I have been on ALL of them. I can run off the list but that will be pointless because I am sure that most of you will say yes I have had success with this one or that one. I currently have had some success with Cymbalta but it is expensive and when my insurance runs out I am not sure I can continue to take it. Then we have all the mood stabilizers and surprisingly, I have not been back on one since Jan of this year. I think that I might go back to it but not right now. I have not been having the ups and downs of life just mostly really, really, really DOWNS. Twenty years ago I probably would have been committed to a hospital as I have been in and out of the hospital since I was sixteen.

I have been having a harder time. This has been since I found out my father’s liver cancer has spread to the good part of his liver. He is now facing radiation treatment. I guess you can say that he is having his due for the cruelty he brought to my sisters and mother, though he will deny it, saying he was a “good father” and that he was “just joking”. I am sure that he was “joking” when he told me to jump off the bridge when he found out I was suicidal. That was a painful night when he came to my room. I was sure that he wanted me to stab myself with the huge knife that was hanging outside my bedroom door but no, he said if I wanted to kill myself, to go jump off the bridge. I guess I finally got “permission” to end my life. My life is obviously worthless to him. That is why when people tell me I matter I do not believe them. How can I when my father told me how to kill myself?  Here’s a clue dad, it is not a joke what you told me. I took it to heart just like when you called me a liar and said that I was nothing. I am nothing. I am worthless, my life does not have any meaning. How could it?