Sunday Things

Sunday Things

I made myself breakfast. I made pancakes and as usual, I left the dishes and pan. My mother came home from visiting my aunt. She goes there every morning and spends a few hours there. When I went downstairs, I took out burgers and my black bean burger for lunch. The burgers needed to be defrosted so I will have them tomorrow. As I was cooking my bean burger, my mother said she was tired of cleaning up my dishes. So after I ate, I did the dishes in the sink (wish included her stuff from breakfast and lunch). My ankle is not happy with me right now.

My mother had the rugs cleaned yesterday morning. Now we had the task of moving things back to where they belonged. Some of the stuff was heavy and I helped my mother put those things back as she has a worse back than I do. I am hurting from it but I know I have drugs to help me. She doesn’t take anything and it would take her two days to put the things back. Now I just plan on resting and watching a movie. I follow a Civil War blog and their last post was of a trailer for Lincoln the movie. I am going to watch that. I love this movie. I practically know it by heart as I have seen it so many times.

My pain was kind of weird last night. I was hurting but it wasn’t skyrocketing. It was low level and one pain pill seemed to help it, which is good because if I keep taking two pills, I am going to run out by the 4th. I have to do a balancing act right now between the regular pills and the strong pills. I am sure tonight I am going to be in serious pain because of doing the moving of things to help my mother. I took a NSAID to see if that helps but I swear it works as well as a sugar pill would.

I got an email from my cousin this morning. She invited me and my sisters as well as their kids to her daughter’s birthday party. I wasn’t going to go because it was north of me and I don’t have transportation. I decided to get a Zipcar for the evening so I can attend. I have no idea how much this is going to cost me. I hope that my Golf car is available because it’s $7/hr. I will reserve it in advance so I can try and get it. It will be fun to see my cousins again. I haven’t seen them since my father passed away.

My sister just royally pissed me off. She just got my mother’s rugs downstairs cleaned. Now she wants to do my bedroom as well as my mother’s. I would have to do some serious cleaning in my room for my rug to be cleaned and I have no place to put my stuff. So I told her forget about it and she said my rugs are dirty and need to be cleaned. Sorry, they aren’t that dirty. Sure they could use a vacuum but that is all they need. It sparked my suicidal feelings. Once again, my things mean nothing to my family and I am being treated like a piece of dirt. Sure, it’s fine when I need to watch their fucking kids and everything but to help me out? Not a chance. It’s not fucking happening. I don’t give a shit. They can clean my room when I am dead.

I am beat

I am beat

I left the house a couple hours before my psychiatrist’s appointment to have some blood work done. I thought a lipid panel was ordered so I fasted. It wasn’t ordered and I was starving by the time I got to the hospital. Figures. There was a wait for the blood vampires and I got one of my friends that I have known for years. Unfortunately, he has never drawn me before and had to stick me twice to get blood. After the poking and sticking, I left for Starbucks. I had about and hour to kill before my appointment. I got something to eat and my espresso. I then went back to the hospital and waited 45 minutes for my appointment. I wrote in my journal while I waited.

I wasn’t nervous until my doc was ready to see me. We talked more about pain control than about my psych issues. She wants me to take more of my strong pain pill than my regular ones because she said I was tolerant to the regular stuff. I didn’t think about that at all as being the reason why I needed so much more meds to calm my pain episodes down. She also is going to email the NP about my issues and see if they can do something for me, rather than just printing off my scripts and saying have a nice day. A monkey can do that.

She didn’t ask what my date was and I didn’t infer I had one. I am going to skip the date, for now and see if anything changes when I have my next pain management appointment with the NP. I see both my psych and the NP the same date, one before the other. Lovely. I should have had my psych appointment after the NP to let her know how it goes. I guess she will just have to get an email from me afterwards.

I missed the bus when I got back to the Square. I had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. I was not happy. My ankle was killing me and then my calf starting cramping up on me from the brace I was wearing. I forgot to put pain meds in my pill box so I went without. An idiotic move, I know. I wanted to get home quickly because my mother was cleaning and huffing and puffing while doing so. I wanted to make sure she was okay. I hated waiting and for some reason my damn Twitter app wouldn’t load new messages, even after I restarted my phone. I hated being twitterless. It helps pass the time. When I did restart, I got a flood of messages so my network must have been down on my phone, even though I had the bars. Weird.

My ankle is throbbing up a storm right now. I might have to take another pain pill. I don’t want to take the strong pain pill just for pain that is manageable. It’s like a 6 right now. I usually take the stronger pill when it’s above an 8. Course, the pain scale can be meaningless for those with chronic pain. My mother just called me saying she was making dinner, but I am not hungry. I really want a damn nap. I am tired after all the walking I did between the buildings of the hospital and going to Starbucks around the hospital, which was a few blocks away.

Mail had come as I was walking out the door this morning. I got my Star Trek shirt finally. I have been invited to a costume party for Halloween and so I will wear it for that. It’s not a real uniform, just a T-shirt with the logos of the Next Gen uni. I love it. I got to wash it though and hope it survives the first wash or I am going to be pissed. It’s got some kind of glittery things on the decals so that is why I am worried. I wish I knew where my real comm badge was. I did have the real uniform at one time but it ripped because I gained weight. I was really sad to throw it away. I kept the pins and the comm badge though but I haven’t seen it in years. Oh well. The place I bought the T-shirt is going to sell a real comm badge that is Bluetooth enabled so it works with your phone. If I live, that will be my reward. It comes out some time next month.

It was surprisingly humid today, which didn’t help my pain levels. Rain was in the forecast so I wore jeans instead of shorts as well as a button down shirt. I was sweating to death by the time I got to the train station. I was also cursing myself because I knew it was going to be near 70 today but thought with the rain it would be cool. I just wasn’t expecting humidity. Damn New England weather. Can never trust it. I have the AC cranking now to cool off. I am very glad I didn’t take it out when we had the low temps two weeks ago. Seems like Indian Summer is still around.

Feeling Nervous

Feeling Nervous

I am supposed to meet my psychiatrist tomorrow. Our last appointment was close to a month ago. I have been keeping in touch via email, sending her blunt feelings about my suicidality as well as blogs relevant to my suicidality and in general how I am doing. I am feeling nervous because there was an email I sent to her last week that basically told her that should I not show up for a future appointment, it is because I am dead. I think in that email, I told her I have a date but I don’t remember. I generally write cathartically so after I finish, it’s out of my mind so to speak. I never got a response from that email so I have no clue if she read it or not, so I could be worrying for nothing. Still, if she has read it, it’s going to be one interesting session.

Rain has started to fall and my ankle is kindly hurting me. I can’t sleep, though I took a nice two hour nap after dinner. My mother made escarole soup. There was no more chicken soup thank god. I wouldn’t have eaten it. I took a shower after the nap so I think that is why my ankle is cranky. I just took some pain meds so I hope it knocks me out soon.

Aside from feeling nervous, I am feeling depressed because I am in pain. It’s that same old thing every single night. I so want a break from it. I just have windows where I don’t have pain instead of more than a few hours. Then the pain meds wear off or I move my ankle and it starts all over again. How I miss the days when I didn’t have to take so many pain pills to get relief. There was a think on Twitter that said that tramadol is being abused in some countries because it’s “as potent as morphine”. I had to laugh. I was on tramadol and it was as effective as Tylenol in relieving my pain. It didn’t do shit. I know for some people it works but for me it didn’t help at all.

When I see my MD in December, I am going to ask for two more pills a day for my pain. The NP that I see really doesn’t give a shit about my pain. She just prints out the prescription and basically tells me to have a nice day. This is all in theory because I plan on ending things soon. The only person that can really stop me is my psychiatrist. That is why I am so nervous about my appointment tomorrow. If she feels I need to be in the hospital, I am going to be so screwed.

Being suicidal is a very ambivalent state. You want to die yet you yearn for hope to keep you here. Guilt also keeps you here, when it gets a hold of you. The guilt of those you leave behind who will be in pain from your loss. I wish I never knew about survivor loss and guilt surrounding it. Not knowing about it made having suicidal plans easier.

I didn’t kill my therapist

I didn’t kill my therapist

I had told my therapist to text me after she eats my cake but never got a text. I thought I killed her sweet tooth for good. That was until my pain shot up and I had real thoughts of ending things so I texted her our code for her to get back to me ASAP. She was at a professional engagement so couldn’t call me but we texted for a few minutes. She wanted me to go to the ER, which I declined because what were they supposed to do that my doctors couldn’t? And what ER would I go to, the medical side or the psych side? Either would be hours of waiting and I just am not up for waiting. I told my therapist I would take my meds early and hope for the best. I was crying at this point because I am so damn frustrated.

I didn’t really do anything but go up the damn stairs after going to the bathroom. Soon as I felt the pain, I snapped. I started crying and wonder what it would be like to go to my spot right now and take the pills with me. Kind of play with fire and see if I get burned. I didn’t care. Before I did get dressed and try and figure out how to even walk to my destination, I called my therapist. I am laid up but tomorrow is another day. Unfortunately, I have to talk to my therapist so I can’t be running off to my spot to end my life. Not that I could run, but you get my point.

It sucks that I didn’t talk with my therapist. I really could have used hearing her voice one more time today. Now I have to wait till tomorrow to hear it. I hate that I am crying like a baby with being in pain. I don’t know how much of it is because of sadness and how much of it is because of the frustration that I can’t do anything to help myself. I did take a sugar pill to see if it does anything. You know, in case this pain is truly in my head and not in my ankle. So far there has been no change in pain levels. But then I have taken a full dose of pain meds and Neurontin. I haven’t broken out the strong pain pill yet.

I was thinking of writing how traumatizing it is to be in pain all the time, every single day and not have a rhyme or reason. How many people go upstairs every day and not experience what I experience? I say that it is traumatizing because it makes me think of my bigger illness, cauda equina syndrome. When I was first diagnosed, I lost feeling in my lower extremity and my left leg/foot was in pain. So I associate that pain with getting CES. And since that day, because I am vulnerable to PTSD (I already was diagnosed), I keep having mini flashbacks of that terrifying time. No matter how many times I try to talk myself out of the feedback loop that this is happening again, it doesn’t seem to work until I take some Ativan to calm myself down. Then I can think a little clearer and see that it’s not happening. That I am just having a pain flare up and things are going to be okay even though I am in agony. I just need to wait till my pain meds kick in. I sometimes wish I had IV drugs to make it happen quicker because waiting up to 45 minutes is torture.

I really hate talking about trauma stuff because I am in denial that things happened the way they did. I was twenty-five when this happened to me so I really was naïve to the situation. I just thought that I needed some pain meds and some physical therapy and I would be good as new again. I had no idea how serious my condition was and it wasn’t like the doctors were all that helpful. Hell the surgeon told me I would be up in three days. Three days later, I still couldn’t move my feet or toes. It wasn’t until a week later I could move my big toe. Things came back so damn slowly. Then when I thought I was doing better I got hit with a staph infection that really knocked me off my feet again. But that is another story for another day.

When I finally saw my therapist three months later in person, she had said that I was traumatized by the surgery and what my body did to me. I didn’t want to believe her. That was 15 years ago. Now I get it. And it’s this trauma I keep experiencing every single night that is driving me whacky. I am sure my hormone levels are off kilter in some way shape or form from going through this every night. No wonder I can’t fucking sleep. I am too stressed from being stressed. I might not understand it physiologically but I know that eventually this shit is going to kill me if it’s not dealt with.