Tag: psychological pain

Go Boldly!

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

Go Boldly!

The Canadian Star Trek stamps that I ordered last week finally came today. I am so excited. I love collecting stamps from other countries. I have a beautiful poster of Mexican stamps that would go nicely in my room but I never hung it up because I was too lazy. I am thinking more of setting up shelves in my room for all the books that I have because I don’t really have the space for bookcases. My walls are pretty bare.

I got out today, finally. It was a challenge because I was really tired after therapy but I pushed through it, got dressed and caught the bus. I had to go to the bank to make a deposit. My mother thankfully gave me a few bucks so my checking account doesn’t go in the red. I am still debating on cancelling my Amazon Prime membership then reinstating it later this month when it’s closer to my check coming in. I really like the 2 day free shipping option. Though I might just pay for the year and be done with it. I don’t know. I will decide in a few weeks which way to go.

I got the reading done and actually read more than 10 pages because it was a very interesting read. I am learning about Adler’s psychology and it’s interesting that he thought of “holism” back during the times of Freud. He wanted to treat the whole person, not just the diagnosis. His concepts are not that far off and more psychology people are into this type of psychology, an integration of mind and body kind of thing, though Adler didn’t exactly put it that way.

I had 5 shots of espresso in my soy latte. It was a bit strong but it did the trick. I am wide awake. I feel like I have energy so I might continue reading what I started as I do have a deadline to meet. It’s kind of exciting to be reading this knowing that I have a deadline. I feel like I am back in school or something. I know what I am doing might now mean much to the person that I am doing this for, but it means a lot to me to be learning something that I normally wouldn’t read, which is why I picked Adler over Freud. I do hope that I get this book when it is published but I will mostly likely buy it if I don’t get it. I am getting to be a bookaholic. I just seem to “buy” the books more than read them. Just like my composition notebooks. I buy them to have them, not really write in them, LOL. Which reminds me, school season is on the way so I wonder how many I will buy before September…

I had therapy today. I asked her if she knew anything about Adler and she said her memory was faint on the subject. It was a boring session. We didn’t talk about anything that we didn’t talk about the other day. Though we did talk about her upcoming birthday. She didn’t want to talk about it but I had to because if she wasn’t born, I probably wouldn’t be here or worse, be talking to some other shrink. She always seems to think my birthday is special so I kind of want the same for her. I still have her birthday gift which I probably won’t give her till I see her next. I thought about mailing it to her but I think that is kind of impersonal. I told her this weekend is Peal Jam weekend as they are playing at my favorite ballpark, Fenway Park. I wasn’t able to get tickets because they sold out in minutes, not that I had the money to begin with. It would have been great to go though. So I will have my own concert in my room, blaring my favorite Pearl Jam songs. There is just one album that is missing from my Pearl Jam collection. I have no idea when it came out. I think it was the album before their current one. It’s on my list of CDs to get. All my Pearl Jam albums are CDs except for the current album, Lightening Bolt. That one I bought digital, which I could make as a CD, if I really cared to.

I really can’t wait to show my sister the gift that I bought my brother in law, which is the Canadian stamps. It’s the first time buying anyone a Christmas gift in a LONG time. I just hope I don’t misplace it between now and then or put it in a “secret” spot and forget where that spot is. That would be terrible.

Dealing with Chronic Pain and Suicidality

by Midnight Demon, posted in Bipolar Disorder, blogging, Chronic pain, chronic physical pain, depression, grief, mental disorders, mental illness, mood disorders, psychache, psychosis, suicidality, suicide, suicide attempt

Dealing with Chronic Pain and Suicidality

Over the past few days, I have been in moderate to severe pain. I have a pain syndrome that flares up without warning, usually right before I am to go to sleep. I will lie down and my ankle and foot will flare up with pain. Normally, I will just take a couple of pain pills, wait for them to kick in and then go to sleep. The pills work because it’s physical pain. What is really troubling me, lately, is the persistent pain, night after night after night.

It doesn’t matter what I do during the day. I can go out, have my daily routine of going to Starbucks and writing for a bit before returning home. I might be out for an hour or two, depending on how much I feel like writing and if the coffee holds out. Lately, despite drinking coffee, I just want to sleep. I have been sleeping more the past week that I have the entire year. A dear friend says that it’s because I haven’t been sleeping and I should take advantage of it because it might not last. I agree with that. It’s unusual for me to sleep all day as I never usually do unless I am deeply depressed.

The other night, I snapped when the pain hit. I became really suicidal and seriously wanted to end my life that night. Trouble was that I was in no position to do it. I vowed never to kill myself in my home where my family members could find me. I have a place that I want to go but the heat has been the only thing holding me back, at the moment. I feel like I don’t have a life. That this battle between chronic pain and depression is just too much to bear. I am tired of fighting it night after night after night.

It’s a tiring battle. I think that is part of the reason I have been so tired lately. I am just mentally and physically exhausted from dealing with my mental illness and my physical illness. No one knows how hard it is unless you deal with one or the other. The past few hours, I have been dealing with a rebound of songs in my head that sound like they are playing but they are not. It’s part of the psychosis. And for the past year, I have been battling that aspect of my illness.

I have known since I was 16 that I needed to be on medication for the rest of my life for my mental illness. I knew there was no other way to deal with it. Through trial and error, I finally found the right combo of meds. Unfortunately, finding the right antipsychotic meds has been elusive. Medications that used to work, no longer do so. I have gone back to the older generation of meds because they work for me better than the second generation. It’s a little bit more riskier because of side effects but I am not on that high of a dose. I just hope that in a month or two I am still on the same medication and that I don’t need to change. That is my fear.

I have known for a very long time the odds of me taking my life is great. I am in the high risk category of risk because of my past history. I can write about this history but it’s not important and will take up too much of time. I just know that one day my life will end by my own hand. I know that this will happen because I feel it. I know that it will happen sometime this year. My biggest fear is that if there is a heaven or hell, I will spend eternity with my father and that is something that sometimes keeps me here. But I don’t believe in those things but who knows what truly happens when you die.

They say that most people who are suicidal just want to end their pain. That is true. I want to end my pain and my suffering because no one can help me with it. Yes, I take pain meds to deal with the physical aspect of my suffering and it does help. But it does nothing for my psychache, for my psychological pain that I feel. I still feel that I should die because I am so damn tired of living this so called life. I don’t have a reason for living. I don’t have a purpose. I have nothing keeping me here. Sure I have my family that are dear to me. But what good is it if I can’t enjoy their presence because of pain? That I can stay with them for a short while and then have to go back up to my room to put my foot up because otherwise I am in too much pain to be good to anyone? Sometimes, I really think that my family and the people in my life will be better off without me.

my new book and other musings

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

My new book and other musings

Last night I was struggling with fixing the errors that my word doc had on it on my new book. I wanted to see how many pages I had so I knew how many more to write. After all was said and done, there seems to be about 99 pages to go. If I work at least 2-3 pages a day, I might be able to get it done by the end of the year. I have been going over my blogs that I have written over the past year and sort of picking out which ones I deem “best” for my book. It’s a lot of work as I have a LOT of blogs as I write nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. But it beats having to open up word docs on my screen and reading them. This way here if something seems interesting, I just pull up the word doc, and then pasted it in the template that I have, once I edit it to make sure there are no errors.

I didn’t do anything except make coffee today, so far. I had a crappy sleep as I kept on waking up every two hours or so. It was so annoying. So I slept late right through the afternoon. I haven’t had anything to eat except for two cookies. I am out of my coffee. I seriously have to buy some more next week. I can’t be without my coffee. I might have to use my sister’s Keurig this weekend. The Keurig cups she has is decent coffee. It’s not Starbucks quality but close enough. I am going to try the new Brazil coffee next week and see if I like it.

I started reading a new book on how to write a novel by Lawrence Block. I don’t think of myself as a novel writer but after the new book is written, I will have to write something else. I don’t know if I can do it but I can try. I know I am no Neil Gaiman or even Lawrence Block but writing does come naturally to me.

Yesterday I was bored so I decided to clean out my junk hamper. It was a collection of all suicide research articles and books. I don’t know how they accumulated there but they did. Unfortunately, the book I was hoping to find, wasn’t there. I have no idea where the book is so I marked it off my reading list as “read”. I was half way through it anyway. It bothers me that I don’t know where this book ended up. I will find it when I am looking for something else.

I was going to shower last night but I got lazy. I think I will today after dinner. It’s a really hot day, again and the house is hot. I was hoping for it to cool down last night but it never did. I want to try and go out tomorrow to get an espresso over ice while reading the psych book I bought. It would be nice to finish the chapter.

My friend in Canada sent me the link to her post office. They have Canadian Star Trek stamps that I want to get for my brother-in-law and I. I think he will really like it as he is a Star Trek junkie like I am. The stamps don’t come out in the US until September. I plan on getting several sheets to save as well as use, not that I use snail mail that often. Or maybe I will just save them.

Evening Saturday Blog

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

Evening Saturday Blog

For the first time in the last two weeks, I missed my afternoon dose of trilafon. I am kind of beating myself up about it but there is nothing I can do about it unless my symptoms come back in full attack. They haven’t so I think I am okay with just taking 4 mg tonight. It was one of those, yea I will take it in a minute and then forgot when the minute passed. I do the same thing with my blood pressure meds, which is why I have an app that reminds me to take my meds.

I usually take my first dose of trilafon a few hours after waking up, usually after or while I am having my coffee. I figure if I take it with the coffee it fights off the drowsy effect. Today I had two cups of coffee and I was still tired by the end of the baseball game. I pretty much watched it from beginning to end, well, watched a couple of innings and then listened to the rest of the game. I am happy they beat the Skankees again. When Sandy Leon was batting, I just had a feeling he was going to hit a homerun. I didn’t say anything because that jinxes it. And when I heard Joe Castig say that ball is gone, I was whooping up and down on my bed. It was so sweet. That made it 5-1 at the time. The final score was 5-2. It was a good game.

I finally finished one of the books that I started but my Kindle ran out of juice. That is the only problem with technology, needing power. A regular book doesn’t need that kind of power. You just have to remember to carry it with you. I had already finished the single but at the end it had the beginning chapter of another Keller series. I think I already read it as it sounded familiar. The book is written by my favorite author Lawrence Block. Keller is one of his characters that I like. He plays a professional assassin. Block’s first book that I got hooked on was “Eight million ways to die”. He had this series by another one of his characters called Matt Scudder. I just fell in love with Matt when I was 15. He was struggling with his issues with alcohol and I was struggling to stay alive with my suicidal thoughts. Block’s books gave me the much needed distraction to keep going. I feel like I should write to him, but I don’t want to sound corny. I do have his email address because what I have to say will be longer than 140 characters in a tweet. I am not that tactful.

Now I am trying to get into a Scudder-like mystery/crime novel written by Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling. I read the first chapter this morning and it was so meh. It was just so ordinary. It reminded me of a book by Block, “out the window”. I know that I shouldn’t be judging this like a Block book but when that is all you have read for the past two decades, you kind of have a standard. But this book, “The Cuckoo’s Calling” was a National Bestseller so who am I to judge it.

I have been reading my blog from two years ago. Seems like almost every day I wrote more about my pain than about the suicidality I was feeling. My blog has taken such a turn from being about my suicidality to chronic pain that I had to change the brief description as it was more about my physical pain than my psychache. I know I don’t write about my suicidal thoughts that much anymore. I still get them when my pain is off the charts. But it’s mostly my physical pain that is off the charts lately. My psychache seems to be in check. I guess being on an antidepressant has benefitted me the last few months. There was a time back in September 2015 after my New York Times article was published that my depression got worse. I am so used to it that I hardly remember when the episodes start and when things get worse is usually when things start clicking that something is wrong. It’s rare that I get physical symptoms of depression. But that is how bad things got. I just wish the weight I lost was more significant than it was. Only because I gained it all back, sadly. I was so damn close to losing my ideal weight but nope, it wasn’t meant to be. I am just grateful that my NP isn’t a big weight freak like my PCP was. It was really stressing me out and actually caused me to gain weight than lose it.

I have no idea where my writing is going. I have thought about it a million times but nothing comes to mind about what I want to write. It’s been months since I wrote something. The only thing that I did write while I was in the hospital was the first hour of my father’s home visit before he died. He lived only two hours after bringing him home from the nursing home. I still haven’t written it up. Nor did I finish it. The last hour was difficult to write without having PTSD symptoms. I never wrote it. Tonight I was thinking about the last time I saw him before he died. It wasn’t as painful as it once was. I also wrote a lot about him in 2014 in the blogs that I read. That was when he had a GI bleed and his hydrocele surgery. I didn’t write in detail about his illnesses because it is my blog and feel that I should be writing more about my feelings than him. He was the source of my suicidality for a long time. Now that he is gone, I am less suicidal. Don’t get me wrong, I still get suicidal. It’s just that his joking and torturing that made me want to die is gone. He just made you feel like a nobody. And that is how I felt whenever he was around. I also felt like I didn’t matter, that his needs were more important than mine, because they were. He had to come first and if he didn’t, he got so mad. That was how he was. And unfortunately, I miss the bastard.