Tag: disability

Dark Heart

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, psychache, suicide, suicide attempt

30-Jan-11

Been up the last few hours. I have such a heavy heart that it is ready to kill me. I am haunted by everything that is wrong with my life. Been thinking about my cousin who is now a marine and yet I hardly know because my family drifted apart. It saddens me that I don’t know my “little” cousins anymore. The oldest is engaged and will be married later this year. I feel less a part of their lives with each passing year.

I do not know who I am anymore. Last night in a fit of torment I threw down the gauntlet and told my ptx that I will die this weekend. I so wish I could act on these feelings. The brokenness inside kills me every night. The sorrow that is deep within my chest shall never be revealed nor relieved in any such way. I am just a freak who is suffering silently with only these words to fall on silent blogs. I only wish to end this daily torture. Animals are treated more humanly than human beings. It has been said that you control your own life and happiness. Well my happiness lies beneath the earth or as a pile of ash. I do not care what remains of my bodily essence. My consciousness is what is the death of me. I am not truly dying a slow death but am only being tortured every minute I dare to breath. This can’t be what life is about. To go on suffering just so others do not feel your loss. I have snapped and I don’t know if there is any coming back. I want to put a plastic bag over my head and die of asphyxia. Yes it may be painful but once that last breath is gone, I shall be free

complaints

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, CES, Chronic pain, medical

CES (Cauda Equina Syndrome) is a literal pain in the ass. Just when you think you have things going fine, it will flare up on you to remind you of all that you have been through, to remind you that you still have nerve damaged parts of self, whether it be your bottom and genitals or you lower extremities. Just now I got into bed after using the bathroom. I don’t know what I did but I know I didn’t just stub my toe through it feels like I just did. I forgot to use my slippers on my feet because unlike pre-CES I still like to walk barefoot. But there is ceramic tile that is COLD and can cause spasms in my bad foot if exposed to this temp, like it did tonight. So my foot is reminding me that I can no longer walk barefoot around my house and that I somehow stubbed my toe today without realizing it. Wonderful.
I had my sister’s car today and while driving to pick up my dad, I was pretty tired. I didn’t sleep too well last night and woke up early this morning to do some errands. The errands exhausted me and I should have taken a nap but I knew if I did, I probably wouldn’t sleep well tonight. So I am driving my sister’s car and wondering why I am slowing down. I have my foot on the gas, or so I thought. So I push a little harder on the pedal and come to a complete stop. I didn’t know where my foot was. I mentally took a break from the proprioception because I was tired and because of that my foot was on the wrong pedal. From that point on I knew it was going to be a long night. I keep having to remind myself where my right foot was at all times and this gets to be mentally tiring. I am sure those who are reading this have no clue what I am talking about. But think right now, do you know where your feet are? Can you close your eyes and move your feet up and down and then know when your foot is up and when it is down? I no longer have that sense. It was gone. Sure I compensate for it now but when I am tired, all bets are off. It’s like driving on automatic pilot when you go somewhere. You want to get to point A but your mind is thinking point B and when you get half way to B, you realize you really wanted to go to point A and have to turn around. Mentally, I have to be aware of my feet at all times or I will trip or in this case, I will just come to a complete stop in the middle of the road and wonder what is wrong with the car…
I question driving. I don’t like to drive at night because I am more fatigued and my proprioception (sense of sensing) can be off more. This doesn’t happen all the time and luckily I don’t drive that often anymore since my car hit its last pothole.

ramblings 10

by Midnight Demon, posted in Chronic pain, depression

Got my new laptop and it is different than what I expected. The keys are bigger but a little more centered than other keyboards. I still have a hard time typing because I don’t know where the keys are and have to look.
Windows 8 is different and I might just use this laptop for my blogging to get used to it. I am having a hard time closing programs once I open them. And if I do a certain move on the mousepad, it’s like I press alt/tab to get to another open program. The other thing that kills me is that I don’t know where the control panel is for programs or settings. I am going to have to take a tutorial on the windows website to figure this shit out.
I mailed out my package to the UK today. And I got myself a sub at my favorite sub shop. I smell pretty bad so will need to take a shower tonight as I don’t remember the last time I did. I have been really bad about showering. It’s hard to do when you don’t have place to go to or people to see. I think Wed I am going to try and get up early so I can take my sister’s car for my therapy appt. It will be good to see my therapist. I haven’t seen her since March. We have been doing phone therapy which sometimes sucks because I don’t want to talk. I can’t cancel but I can rearrange my time. My therapist knows I have nothing planned usually so she snags me whenever she has a time open. It kind of helps with the boredom of not doing anything. I was telling her today my troubles with my comparison paper. I told her I have to get over my stupidity problem and she agreed, but it is easier said than done. I believe everything I write is stupid and because of this, I have a hard time going back to writing something once I think it is. It is the biggest problem I have with writing.
Very sad right now as I misplaced my 8 GB drive that had all my research on it. Last time I made a backup of it was dec 2011 so not all is lost but I feel like I lost a part of my life. I was going to wipe out my laptop but I don’t think I will now until I find my drive as it has my last copy of my life. I don’t want to lose all my research of 7 yrs. And to make matters worse, in my haste I lost my backup drive because I forgot the password. It has been a long while since I used this encrypted drive. You only have so many tries before it formats itself. I am beyond pissed right now. I knew the password just couldn’t remember which letters were capitalized.

living with disability

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, CES, Chronic pain, depression, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, suicide

Been thinking how this is the umpteenth Saturday that I have been out of work and I have to say not working on a Saturday night is weird. I had worked nearly every Saturday since 1996, with the exception of when I had to take the day off for family functions or vacations. It sucks to be disabled and I still cannot believe how fast things went from sucky to downright horrible in four months. In four months, I went from working two jobs, to working none. After fourteen years of working at a major medical center in the heart of academia, I was done, finished due to chronic pain cause by a disc fragment the size of an almond pressing on my nerve roots. This didn’t happen overnight. It took ten years to progress to a condition called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), all due to the fact that after my foot drop, I never regained strength in my foot/ankle enough to walk like a “normal” person or at least the way I walked before this fragment wrecked my life forever. I still remember going to a physiatrist that my psychiatrist highly recommended, only to be told that there was nothing to be done. That I was to live my life as is for the rest of my life. That my foot slapping and weakness was never going to get better. I just wish that he took the time to give me some alternatives other than this. If I perhaps was put into an AFO (Ankle/Foot Orthotic) sooner rather than later, maybe the outcome would have been different.
I have been trying to work on a comparison paper for the past few weeks and have hit a road block. I don’t know where I want this paper to go and am stumped as to who to ask for help with it. It was my idea but the depression of last month kind of through me for a loop and I am now trying to get back to my writing. The hard part is that I think this paper sucks, or rather that my writing sucks, and I just can’t move forward on it. I lost whatever it is that I was thinking when I first wrote the paper and I just can’t get back into the groove. It is very frustrating. And having to deal with my ankle flaring up every night for the past three weeks has not been helping me. All I wanted to do today was work on this paper but after I read what I wrote I just felt defeated. I don’t know if there is any salvation in what I wrote. I do know that my own criticism of the paper is what is getting in the way. I think it is stupid and doesn’t have any merit, but then I think all my “good” papers are that way. Today I got a good review on my psychological pain paper that I wrote in college. I am still trying to work out how I can go back to school. I want to be able to finish my degree. I am just working very slowly to actually getting up the nerve and doing it. I just hope that I still have time for my credits to still be worth something. It has been four years since I left college due to a psychotic break. Talk about being psycho. Books, email, and the radio were “talking” to me. I was utterly convinced that every song on the radio had a hidden message for me, that all my emails were somehow going being linked to the biggest asshole in the hospital I worked at and he was going to get me fired. While I was reading books or papers, the words were “dancing” and speaking to me in different languages that only I could decipher. Not to mention the voices I was hearing and the paranoia I was feeling from the asshole. Then when the normal meds were still not working, I had to go into the hospital again to get things sorted out because I developed another delusion that a coworker was going to kill me. I was sincerely convinced that she was. But once my meds were on board and I had to take them, it made thinking difficult for me. I no longer could distinguish my thoughts from the voices and when things were silent, I just couldn’t function. I have been hearing voices since I was five years old. I learned to adapt to keep them a secret but when you take meds that are meant to control them, everything stops and you just cannot think. I had a hard time reading and writing. I found that I would read the same paragraph over and over and not comprehend what it was. Words lost their meaning. It was a very difficult time for me and so I decided that school was causing me a huge stress and had to be cut out. I just had to focus on my jobs and getting back to good. Unfortunately, this still hasn’t happened. But I am hoping that with me not working, I can finish my degree. I just am fearful that I will become psychotic again from the stress of deadlines and exams.