Tag: psychache

turn for the worse

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

Turn for the worse

I’m feeling extremely low right now. I just read a blog by my favorite actor, Wil Wheaton. He wrote about his depression and I feel so bad about it. It really sucks that he suffers from it like I do. I worry that some day he might take his life during one of his lows.

I am feeling hopeless. I got thoughts swirling around my brain about death and dying. I wish I never flipped through the book and found that stupid lethal dose table. I can’t get the thoughts of overdosing out of my head and now I have a handbook on exactly how much I should take based on my weight. It will take some calculations, but I can do it. I am so tired, just like Wil.

This has gone on for two months now. I don’t think I am ever going to feel any better. I know it’s too early to say whether the antidepressant is going to help me but I doubt it is going to work. I don’t know if I should bother taking it. I just feel so hopeless, like nothing is ever going to feel right again.

The heaviness is back in my chest again. It’s like this huge weight that presses upon me, making it hard to take air in and out. It lingers and stays put, never moving or altering it’s position. It’s just there. I hate it. I hate my life. I hate everything. Nothing brings me joy or pleasure. Food shopping is probably the only thing that I find fun. I order all this stuff and then go back over it when I am not hungry and take things off it. I ordered ribs at $17 a rack. But it’s been so long since I have had them, it might stay on my order.

I have such a strange relationship with food these days. I will either not eat anything or I will eat just small things all day and be bloated. I will crave a certain food but then when it’s cooked up, I can’t eat all of it. Even if it’s a sandwich, I will eat half and then be full. My therapist thinks my stomach has shrunk because I haven’t been eating regularly. But then, I need to lose weight so I don’t mind the give and take go round. I just wish it could be on a steady keel. Like eating small meals every day and not getting the hungry horrors any day. It really sucks.

The fatigue from the depression is the worse. I feel like I could sleep for days but I hardly sleep. Then I will have a day or two where all I do is sleep. I sometimes don’t sleep at night but I will sleep during the day. If I didn’t have to see my father today, I know I would have been in bed all day. I am just so exhausted and I haven’t done anything to warrant it. But then, being in chronic pain doesn’t help. It also sucks the energy right out of you.

I just don’t want to be anymore. I still wonder what it will be like to take my BP medication, all of it and see if it causes an event. I don’t know if it will kill me. Might make me sick and that is what keeps me from doing it. I have tried not to think about these things but being really depressed makes you think of these things. I just want an escape. I am feeling trapped, emotionally, like I am in a prison and there is no way I can break out. My heart hurts so bad. Yet it continues to beat like nothing is going on. My autonomic nervous system doesn’t know that I am dead inside.

I should kill myself. Maybe I should plan another date.

Bad Pain Day

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

Bad Pain Day

My day has not gone off to a good start. I woke up early, around 0630, and my ankle was hurting so took some pain meds. I went back to sleep faster than I think the pain meds kicked in. When I woke up a few hours later, I thought I was ok. I wasn’t in pain. Then I got up and stood. My ankle was killing me with the pressure of standing. But I had to go pee so had to walk and go down stairs. I don’t remember if I had something to eat or not. I just wanted to get off my leg.

Some time during the night a good friend IM’d me. She needed my input on some gender “privilege” questions. I found the questions to be scary and some of them offensive at the same time. I couldn’t answer them because I didn’t know what to say. Some were yes or no answers, others required more thought. It was very difficult. There were questions about bathrooms and such. I never gave it a thought because I am still my “assigned” gender. Until I have surgery, I will use the designated bathroom for women. I can’t picture myself using a men’s bathroom with knockers on. That is just asking for trouble, in my opinion. And the doctor questions were really biased. A medical professional shouldn’t have to ask what gender you are to swab your throat because you are sick. Strep doesn’t discriminate. But if you are being swabbed because of an STD, I think you should see a different doc.

After I went through these questions, I decided to make some dinner. My ankle again didn’t like me walking on it. Course, my mother was ever so helpful in saying “maybe I twisted it”. Yea, I twisted it while I was sleeping all afternoon. It’s been almost four years that I have been out of work because of my ankle injury and she still doesn’t get it. This is why I hate bringing up my pain issues with her or telling her I am in pain because I get dumbass responses. She still thinks I need to find a doctor that will help me. I guess the 15 that I saw before I was deemed disabled weren’t good enough. If 15 doctors can’t figure out what is wrong with me, I give up, because doctor numbers 16 and 17 still don’t know what is wrong with me. I wish I could see the ankle doctor that I saw when I first hurt my ankle eight years ago. But he is no longer at the location down the street from me. He was a good doc, straight forward, no horse shitting around the bush. I think that is when my ankle started to go downhill, but I will never know. It was the other side of my ankle that I hurt, not the outer part. For the most part, I would say it has gotten better because I am not in as much pain as I was 3.5 years ago. Resting has done it’s job.

But why my ankle would bulge when I put weight on it today, I have no clue. Once I start walking it eases up but soon as I rest and start standing again, holy hell. I was going to take a shower today. It’s no longer in the works. I will try again tomorrow.

My mood kind of sucks right now, not to say it was good to begin with. I still have a heavy heart and black clouds following me. I am really tempted to restart the remeron just so I can have some relief from this darkness. But the risk of gaining weight outweighs the benefits right now. I really don’t want to regain the weight that I lost. Sertraline will be better, if I can get a hold of my pdoc. I’ll start on a baby dose and then if I tolerate it, move to 50 mg. Of course, there is no guarantee that even at 25 mg I will not become nauseated. And there is always the possibility that my pdoc will say no. It’s doubtful, but a possibility. I just priced a new SSRI called ViiBryd and it’s $50/month. If I go on sertraline, it’s, no kidding, $1.35/month, at the 25 mg dose. Sickening.

I have been sleeping most of the day because what else is there for me to do. I am very tired anyways. I wish my CBC showed that I was anemic of some kind that would explain the tiredness, but nope. All came back normal. I hate when there is nothing physically wrong with you when you feel so rotten. It’s just so annoying. Like my ankle pain. Every x-ray and MRI showed normal stuff except for some swelling in a place that wasn’t near my pain. I thought so many times of stabbing myself in my ankle to prove there was something wrong. Even if I damaged a tendon, that would at least be something rather than nothing. There is nothing I can do about the darkness that is surrounding me. There is no x-ray or MRI for that. And it sucks.

Holy Fucking Cold

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

Holy Fucking Cold

It’s freezing out today. I should have stayed home but I had to fix my father’s pills. Only reason I am doing it today rather than tomorrow is in case I needed to call a refill to his doc’s office. He was not in the mood to see me. He is still mad at me. I could care less. I did what I had to do, emptied his trash for him, and then left. I missed the bus because the elevator took forever to get to his floor. He doesn’t have the world’s fastest elevator but still. Four minutes wait plus the walk to the station and the bus was gone.

I felt unmotivated to do all that I did today but I got out of the house. I made coffee this morning but made the mistake of eating a banana. Coffee and bananas don’t mix, just to let you know. It left me with a sour stomach and I couldn’t finish my coffee.

I emailed my psychiatrist, again, to get a time for us to meet. She is finally back in the office. This is the last time I am emailing her for an appointment. She doesn’t respond, oh well. I really don’t care. I guess you can say I have the case of the fuck its. I weighed myself this morning and am down another two pounds. Don’t really know how that happened as I have been eating. Maybe I just haven’t been eating enough. Not that it matters. I still can lose like 70 lbs so what is two more? I guess the stress of not having to worry about losing is actually working now that I don’t have a PCP isn’t pressuring me every month. I have an appointment with my new PCP in a week and a half. I thought about canceling it because the dizziness is gone but I really want to meet her and at least know her face and she can know me. Despite losing this weight, I was still a little dizzy walking my usual route and got out of breath. I know I haven’t been out in a couple of days but being out of breath is not a good sign. I also felt a little racy heart wise. All I need is a cardiac condition. I am due for it. All the studies show that depression leads to cardiac problems. I will die if this happens or maybe I will wait for the big MI to kill me. Will save me some trouble.

My mood is still kind of suicidal. I just wish I was dead. I have no plans that I can act on. I have no impulse to do it, though this morning I thought of putting a plastic bag over my head than go to my father’s. I just feel really rotten and am terrified that the psychache is going to come back. I don’t know if I can handle that pain.

As much I really didn’t want to do it, I ordered Chinese food for dinner tonight. I think I deserve some decent food as my appetite is back, even though my mood sucks. I know I probably won’t eat half of it but that is the beauty of leftovers. I am trying a new place as my favorite place closed more than a year ago. I ordered from Grubhub because it’s easier than ordering on the phone. It’s so easy to just click and click, especially when you are hungry. I didn’t have lunch, but then I usually have a late lunch and dinner anyways.

Twitter Rant: CAMS and Suicide

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, mood disorders, suicide, suicide attempt

I wrote this at 0400 today. excuse the hashtags

Twitter rant CAMS and Suicide

I wonder if there will ever come a day when there isn’t a hierarchical relationship between client and clinician in the matters of #suicide. That clinician and client work together to deal with #suicide and all that it portends, without judgement, stigma, or fear. These are the musings I have at this hour. Anyone can be trained for suicide prevention but do they go with that training or own prejudices. I have seen that changing clinicians’ minds about how they deal with #suicide training doesn’t change their perception of it. The old stigma of “they’re going to do it anyways” so why bother helping them is prevalent. If it doesn’t change their perception of #suicide, why then bother spending hundreds of dollars for training if you aren’t going to use it?? Case in point, at the Menninger clinic, they had a CAMS study where the authors noted the clinicians resistance to this easy framework. Again, it was hierarchical, the clinician knows best, the client knows nothing, This truly needs to change if we are to prevent #suicides. CAMS was designed to work with all disciplines (SW, PhD, PsyD, MD, etc.) Yet these clinicians had their biases & stigma preventing an open mind. CAMS is unlike any other theory, is quick to learn, and has less paperwork. Along with the SSF, it really help deal with #suicidal clients. I might be biased for CAMS only because it saved my life and I think it is the most superior #suicide assessment out there. Here is my blog about #CAMS. #CAMS is also NOT a replacement or new treatment but a theory that working collaboratively helps someone who is #suicidal. my musings started when a therapist was complaining about the use of the CBT paperwork and stayed away from it in her practice. As a patient, I can totally understand why the CBT paperwork is so daunting. I never liked it and don’t think it is helpful but others have found it helpful. And you have the CBT nuts that swear by it. I just wonder if it is because that is all that they were trained to be like DBT therapists. You don’t have to change disciplines to work with #CAMS, after the assessments, the client will need that discipline for treatment. I still would love to replicate the study in the Boston area about therapists and their attitudes toward suicide and training. Final thoughts are that #suicide training is under utilized in this country and not mandated. when is that going to change??