Tag: suicide ideation

Ankle Chronicles 8

by Midnight Demon, posted in cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, depression, suicidality

Ankle Chronicles 8

I was in mega pain last night and still am today. My ankle is swollen and despite being off it most of the day, it has not gone down. I wish I could say that it was because I walked too much or stood too much, but that isn’t the case. It just hurts and I don’t know why.

I really, really, wanted to vote today but never got the chance. I woke up in the early morning and felt like shit the rest of the day. So I laid low and slept. I still am tired and feel like I could just doze right off. I just had dinner, nothing fancy, just scrambled eggs and toast with juice. I didn’t have lunch, unless you counted the handful of chips I had washed down with coffee. Not even the coffee woke me up enough to let me shower. And I really want to take a shower but I guess it will have to wait till tomorrow. I have physical therapy tomorrow afternoon. It should be fun when I tell him that I didn’t do the exercises because they just became more painful as I did them. I tried, I really did but I just couldn’t handle the pain.

I don’t know why I am so sleepy today, other than not really sleeping last night. I feel hung over, like took too many drugs or something but I didn’t. I didn’t even have any gabapentin. That usually gives me a big hangover. But I didn’t take any. I guess I am just dehydrated. Other than coffee and juice that I drank, I didn’t drink any other fluids today other than a few sips of water to wash down some pills. If I am not thirsty, I just don’t drink. I know I should drink more but I just don’t think about it. Especially when I feel like crap.

I feel bad that I didn’t vote today. I had every intention to but it just didn’t work out. Oh well, there is always next year. I really don’t care that much about politics anyway.

My foot is throbbing big time. I suppose I should take something for it. That will make me really sleepy. I had to take a strong pain pill last night to get relief. Now my bowels have stopped working. I am going to have to take something to get them going again. I hate that and with me not being hydrated, that is no fun. But I can’t hydrate myself now or I will be peeing all night and that will not be fun either.

Needless to say, I didn’t work on my writing today. I really wanted to go to Starbucks and write but I was too sleepy after my therapy session. I woke up just in time for it too. Luckily she doesn’t call exactly when she is supposed to so I had a few minutes to get myself together. She read my blog that I sent her about how I had to leave the SPSM chat the other night. I hardly remember what I wrote, I never do. Once the thoughts are out of my head, I usually don’t remember them. But she reminded me and we talked a little about it. Mostly we talked about my ankle pain and how it is driving me berserk. I don’t get any respite from it anymore. Every day I am in some level of pain. And it sucks. I still don’t think she gets it. I honestly don’t think she understands just how much my pain is controlling my life and that there is no more having a life. My life now just revolves around taking pain meds around the clock and sleeping them off at times. I don’t even think she gets the bowel issues that I get from my nerve injury. She says she does but I don’t really think she does. And I know she doesn’t get the level of shame it brings me every time I lose my bowel control. It just sucks and it got me wicked depressed. I don’t think any medication can help me this time. My mood was doing fine until my bowel accidents. Now it’s headed south and I think it is going to stay there for some time. I just hope I don’t become suicidal again. I really don’t want to be in the hospital again this year. I spent 3.5 weeks there in August and I don’t want to go back. They wouldn’t understand my disability anyways. All they cared about was if I was going to kill myself that day and if I wasn’t then so be it. Who cared about anything else going on in my life that was making me suicidal. But that is a subject for another blog post. I really don’t want to write about how crummy that hospitalization was.

So I left tonight’s chat…

by Midnight Demon, posted in bipolar, blogging, cauda equina syndrome, chronic physical pain, psychache, suicidality

So I left tonight’s chat

Don’t know if anyone that reads my blog knew, but a 29 year old woman with terminal cancer ended her life today, on her own terms. She basically committed suicide. It got me thinking about Robin Williams and why his death was not treated the same way. He was battling demons we knew nothing about and a medical illness that threw him off the ledge. I don’t blame him for killing himself. It makes me sad, but also makes me happy that he is in a better place than he was in. No one understands why I have such happiness for those who kill themselves. But for this woman, I am having a hard time feeling happiness for her. I am glad she chose the method of her death and she had free will and all. But a part of me doesn’t like that she was an advocate for choosing to end your life with dignity and she took it. So we lost an advocate and that bothers me.

Then I entered the SPSM chat that was discussing this. The current president of the AAS sends out a PDF of Shneidman’s 10 commonalities of a good death. That’s when my suicidality peaked for some reason. Then talking about how depression was a terminal illness just made me snap. I had to get out of the chat room. I could have just left without saying anything but I said something, that today’s topic is too triggering for me. I got some pleasant responses. Then I got a weird one that said that I should be kept abreast of the topic. I was like “Huh”?

I have no one I can talk to about this and so I just decided to write, like I always do when I am in distress or feeling intolerant of my feelings. It helps me to put perspective to my thoughts. I also have been terrified of crapping myself for the past few hours and it has taken it’s toll on me. I have decided that if I crap myself tonight, I am going to take all of my meds, every last pill that I have will be ingested. I have had enough of dealing with the indignity of crapping myself. I can’t live like this anymore. I am only 38 years old. I should be able to control myself but that control has been taken away from me. I am no longer an “anal” person, so to speak. It is draining me being this way. I could cry but why bother. Darkness envelops my soul. I feel like I should not live like this anymore. Isn’t it my right to die? I may not have “good” reasons. I just want to end my suffering, is that so bad? I have no purpose in my life. I have no responsibilities like I did before. The only responsibility I have is to clean my sheets or clean my room, which never gets done because I don’t have the motivation to clean. My mother takes care of the cooking and cleaning, though it kills her to do it. She cleaned the bathroom and it took her almost three days to do it. She did it a little at a time. And I have to do the same or my back goes out. But lately my ankle pain has been worse so I have been having a hard time standing for any length of time. I was given exercises to do to help do something but all they do is cause me pain. I stopped doing them because I hurt so much afterwards. I shouldn’t be in this much physical pain. I have tendonitis in all of my tendons on the outside part of my ankle starting from where the bone is to my feet. There is a tendon called the peroneous that wraps around the ankle and anchors into the foot. Aren’t I lucky that I have aggravated this tendon and the ones surrounding it. The docs don’t know why. But the usual course when they don’t know what to do with you is to send you to physical therapy, like that is the cure all. I am so sick of physical therapy and it hates me. My goofball swelling has returned and it is throbbing like no tomorrow. Yet despite this pain, I am not suicidal over it. I am more suicidal over the fact my bowels have taken a run for the hills and decided not to tell me when they are moving. Usually if I have gas, I know I will soon have a movement. But lately, the stools have been soft and when I fart, the stool comes with them. I have shit myself twice in the last two weeks, both times in bed. The first I was lucky that it didn’t leak onto my bed sheets as I was in bed at the laptop like I am now. The second time, I didn’t even feel myself shit. I just farted and thought that was that. Wrong. I got up and there was a yellow stain on my bed. Fuck. I was wearing black underwear so it didn’t show anything but my pajamas did. I feel like the biggest asshole on the planet. And if it happens again, I want to kill myself. I have stayed away from taking laxatives and fiber pills. Now I will have hard stools that will cause me to bleed but I don’t care. It might also flare up my nerve pain in my ass but I don’t care. That will be the least of my worries. I don’t want to shit the bed again, literally or have another accident. I am lucky I have my menses now so I am wearing a pad. But pads irritate my skin after a while. When I had my menses that lasted for more than six weeks, I thought I was going to go insane. And I was wicked irritated by my clothing (female underwear) and the pads. The elastic in the female underwear was digging into me after a while. I don’t know why. But even my boxer will irritate me after a while too, especially if I don’t shower on a regular basis. And I have been too depressed to keep up with hygiene. I just am a mess. But with my menses, I have been forced to shower nearly every day. But now they are showing signs of stopping so I might be back to my every two days routine.

I have been safe so far tonight with passing gas and not having friends with it but that could change at any moment. It scares me to think that I might shit myself again and not realize it. I bought diapers for when I go out. I refuse to wear them when I am in the house for fear of just wasting them. Thing is, I don’t trust myself anymore and that has been a hard thing to endure. I have gotten used to peeing myself more than crapping myself. No one understands this. No one really knows this, aside from my therapist. I haven’t seen my psychiatrist in more than a month because of my own mobility issues and now she is out of the office because she broke her hip. I miss her really bad. I also feel bad going through what she is going through. She said she needed surgery so that must have been a real bad break. We have been together for twenty years and this is the first time, other than her maternity leave, that we have been apart for an extended period of time. So I this weighing on me as well. I am set with my medications for at least a month. I hope she is back soon but I know that it takes at least 6-8 weeks for a bone to heal. She didn’t say how long she would be out for but my guess is that she will be back after the holidays. This so sucks. My demons are coming back and I don’t have her around to corral them back into outer space. My therapist can only do so much. And lately, we have been on the wrong page of things. I am getting frustrated with the whole talking on the phone all the time. She is ok with it, course she would love to see me in person but I don’t have transportation to go out to where her office is, which is 30 miles away. I am still trying to finagle getting my sister’s car one week and going out to see her but my sister has been so stressed lately that I don’t want to bother her with my needing her car.

Closing thoughts: I feel a little bit better since writing this out. I love having a blog that I can write my nonsensical thoughts out. I still feel ashamed about myself but I know it will go away in time. I hope it will anyways.

Therapy Woes

by Midnight Demon, posted in bipolar, blogging, depression, mood disorders

Therapy woes

I had my session with my therapist today and not for nothing, she is a complete air head. I kept telling her I was pissed at HER and she was rubbing it off on my family members, like they were the source of my being mad. Then she was convinced that Jack was the source of the being pissed. I told her I was mad because you didn’t text me back yesterday. I felt that was a legitimate reason to be mad. I texted her at 0730 and there was plenty of time for her to text me a message that she was unavailable. It would only take a couple seconds, well with her maybe a few minutes, but still. Common courtesy. She says she doesn’t text. Bullshit. Most of our communication about sessions are about texts so how can she NOT text. She is just being naïve and that pissed me off more. Most she could have said was that she was too busy and didn’t have the time to text me back. That I might have accepted. But she didn’t. She read my other texts from that day. She read part of the blog I sent her so I know she got my texts.

I then cancelled tomorrow’s session as I am done with her for the week. Our next session isn’t until next week. She doesn’t like it but tough. She was trying to talk me into keeping it but I was against it. I am just so pissed off I don’t want to talk with her. And it is against her. I am tired of feeling like this is a one-way street, I give her input but she never returns it, and I am not just talking about getting back to me about the appointment. I feel like I give her so much and I just get so little in return. Nothing I write about gets acknowledged or validated, least not without some prompting. Most I get is, “yea, I read your text”. So I am left with what am I supposed to do when I feel like that again. I just have to figure out every thing on my own, why bother with therapy? She is just being so useless lately. All last week she just kept on harping on my father and losing spoons. That was what we chatted about ALL THREE SESSIONS. It was like a repeat button on all the days we were talking. I am thinking of sending her this blog but what would be the point? She reads how I feel and then what? We deal with her anxiety over the fact she is clueless about treating me all of a sudden? She still wants Jack to come out and she thinks that is what is causing me to be angry but it is not, not 100% anyways.

I have to deal with my father on Tuesday and I don’t want to be in a public place when we talk. I have no idea when the appointment is, as I will find out on Thursday. I missed the call and I figured might as well wait till Thursday so my father is informed that he has to see another doctor for his problem. I really don’t want to be squeezed with time as I have no idea how long this appointment is going to last. Specialists are rarely on time with appointment schedules. Even the doc he will see on Thursday runs late all the time.

So with Tuesday being out, I have a week of no therapy. Maybe this break will be what I need to regroup and think about where to go from here. I don’t know what I am doing in therapy anymore. I told her today that I wanted to quit therapy and she was like you can’t make that decision when you are angry. Fuck. I can’t stand her. I guess I am wanted her to be reciprocal in what we talk about but I guess that is not going to be the case. We seem to be always talking about apples and oranges lately and I think talking on the phone is the problem. She doesn’t pick up things when I talk but I do pick up things when she talks. She just isn’t as insightful as I she once was. I don’t know when this happened. Maybe it’s been there all along and I just never picked it up until now. But it’s pissing me off going through stuff and not being heard. Like I told her, Saturdays seems to be a bad pain day for whatever reason and I will think about ending my life. Did she offer any resources to deal with this? NO. Did she even acknowledge my suicidality surrounding this? No. So now that I don’t have my therapist to text to anymore, I have decided to use twitter for my venting. I know it leaks to Facebook, but I don’t care. Most people on twitter don’t listen to what I say anyways, despite having over 200 followers. If I am not going to get an acknowledgement from her, at all, I might as well seek other sources of validation. I know I am a nobody. I am not famous in any sense of the word. Funny that the song by Luke Bryan, “Do I”, came on my MP3 shuffle just now. Song is fitting. “Do I just need to give up and get on with my life? Baby, do I?” that line seems to resonate with me right now. I just want to know if I am still good enough for therapy or if I should be turned away and get on with my life. Even if I do send this to my therapist, there is no way I can know if she reads it or not. I won’t know until the next time I talk with her. It’s not like she is going to text me or anything. She couldn’t even pick up the fact that I was crying on the phone today. WTF. Seems I have been doing that a lot lately.

It will really suck having to stop therapy and go see someone else. But I don’t know what to do anymore. Seems like after my hospitalization things have gone downhill. And I don’t know what to do to make things uphill anymore. She talks and talks and hardly listens. Then when she does listen, I have to make sure she is still on the line because things are so quiet on her end. For all I know I am talking to thin air and I think that sometimes I am. She is just not on the same page with me anymore and frankly, I don’t even think we are reading the same book. It is really frustrating the hell out of me.

Playing games on Saturday

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

Playing games on a Saturday

My ankle is still pretty sore so I have decided to stay in another day. I probably will stay in tomorrow too as there is no bus service to where I need to go. I have been playing my games since 0500, when I woke up this morning. I have four Facebook accounts and I just use them to play this silly, aggravating, annoying, mindless, game. I have to get the stuff I need, and when I don’t get it from my neighbors, I use my other accounts to get the items. So all morning and into the afternoon, I have been playing this game. My mother seems to be bored with TV as she is playing her game, Kismet. It’s a Yatzee type of game.

I don’t know what I did, but I seemed to have pulled a muscle in my groin after using the toilet. I got up the same way I always do, but when I got to my room, I was spasming and in horrible pain. It seems to have settled down some but it is still tender. Just what I need, to be laid up further with my back. I hate being in pain, but it has become my normal. My life would probably be abnormal if I didn’t have one pain or other.

I really wanted to go out today. I wanted to mail my therapist her letters and to buy coffee for the house. But I am sleepy because I took some Ativan to calm down the spasms. There is always Monday to get these things done.

It is kind of cold here in Boston today. I should probably see if there is a college football game worth watching. But I really don’t want to leave the comfort of my bed. I have the internet so I can check the scores. Twitter is no help. I have too much nonsense feed to weed through to find my scores. There are only two colleges that I care to watch, Ohio State and Nebraska. I don’t really know how I fell in love with OSU, but I do know I fell in love with Nebraska when I watched the Tostito bowl back in 1996. That was one incredible game. I never seen a quarterback rush like I did that game. It was really cool. And as my Patriots were sucking that decade, it was pleasurable to watch a football game that was winning. I was in Nebraska when I was watching it. I was visiting my friend’s family. It was the first time being away for Christmas and New Years.

My mood has sucked the past few days, most likely because I have been in pain. I am really worried about the appointment with the foot doc that I have in about two weeks. I just have a feeling that he is not going to find anything wrong and I am going to be back to square one. Worse is that he will only offer injections and that is something I am NOT willing to do. My ankle has been through enough. But I am worried with the ankle swelling reaching my Achilles. I wish I could chuck if off as just doing to much but there was real pain when I touched it. Not a good sign. Swelling appears to have gone down and so has the pain, except in my usual spot. I can’t get the swelling down there behind the malleolus bone. I just have been floating with suicidal thoughts the past few days. Nothing serious, other than that they are there. I haven’t made any plans or anything like that. I just wish I would stop breathing or just not wake up. I am so sick of living with this pain. For three days I have not left my room except to eat and use the bathroom. I want to change my sheets again but I don’t have the energy and besides, the other sheets have not been washed. They are just sitting on the floor of my room. I suppose I should get them washed but everything is an effort. I will bring them down the stairs the next time I have to. Until then, I will continue to play my game.