Tag: suicide

thinking about stuff

by Midnight Demon, posted in suicide attempt

I finally found the book I was looking for. I read some of the introduction, which clearly states the book is “for clinicians by clinicians”, then read the part about the Aeschi working group guidelines. If everyone is working toward stopping suicide, why can’t someone who is suicidal be a representative of the group? Who would really know what it is like to be suicidal better than someone who is ACTUALLY thinking about ending their life? The whole concept of the Aeschi is to bring clinicians to a patient orient model rather than a physician/clinician knows best model. I have read this book repeated and this is the first time that I got angry at it. I used to marvel at the insights these clinicians have. But now I am second guessing that they don’t know anything. Maybe it just is that I am in a pissy mood and feel like no one cares, that I have cried wolf too many times and that my despair just isn’t important anymore. I don’t know. I do believe that the attitudes need to be for the patient rather than the comfort of the clinician. That part I do believe in.

I was going through the book and I forgot that when I was at the last conference, I had the book chapter authors sign it. I got the John Hancock of my favorites. I kind of laugh because they don’t know that I am crazy and who would ask for an autograph at a professional conference? I even had my consultant sign his chapter. I talked with him after the conference. I don’t think he knew just how much it meant for me to have his autograph in my book. I now have two books signed by David Jobes. Not that it increases the value of the books to anyone but me.

I kind of am in a low mood. I am in mega pain and can’t fricken sleep. I haven’t gone over to the dark side but I know it’s coming soon as I get over tired enough. This really sucks. I am trying to listen to music to help drown out the emptiness of the room but it’s annoying me more than helping. I hope the demons don’t come out tonight. I already emailed my psychiatrist once tonight and I have a feeling I will write something more depressing if Mr. Hyde comes out.

In the book after the forward by Marsha Linehan, I wrote Styron’s cauldron piece. I can’t remember why I did that. But it just seemed fitting. There are a lot of notes in the book that I took. Some I can’t even read my own handwriting! I hate when that happens. I know I am not a suicidologist as much as my therapist thinks I am. I might know a lot about suicide but that doesn’t make me a suicidologist. I am just not quite there yet.

thoughts about death

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression

I am in a deep dark spot and thought I would write about it. I am tired of living this way all the time. Every night around this time (between midnight and 2 am) I get what I call the midnight demons. It is the time of night where my thoughts are dark and almost sinister. All I think about is death and suicide. I don’t feel joy, even if I had a “good” day. I don’t feel much of anything except extreme sadness. People think that this is depression but it is much more than that. I know one day I will die by my own hand. I want it to be now. I have voices that watch me every second of my waking hours. I started to have chest spasms and when I told the voices, they said I could be having a heart attack. I told them I wouldn’t be so lucky. I often hope that I have appendicitis. I won’t get the operation because I want it to kill me. I can go naturally. I know it will be a painful death. No one survives an appendix rupture. I will refuse all treatment.

I wrote earlier today that I felt blank. I still do. I just have thoughts of death because I don’t feel anything. Anything is better than living like this. I can’t even sleep away my darkness that I feel inside. The only thing that I do feel is pain in my stupid ankle. It is a constant pain that has driven me to thoughts of death. Doctors have told me it is tendonitis but if that was all that it was, I should have been healed by now with rest and ice and elevation, but I am not. I don’t think doctors have a fricken clue what I go through on a daily basis. I talk with my therapist at least twice a week, for fifty minutes each day. I don’t think she gets me. She says she does but I don’t think she does. Same goes for my psychiatrist. She says that if I didn’t have pain, I would be less suicidal. On some level she gets it but I don’t think she really know just how suicidal I have become. If she only knew what was swirling in my head. I have voices that are constantly talking to me during my waking hours, I think I have said this earlier. They talk to me about anything and everything. They seemingly are my best friends, you can say, if that is possible. We have conversations that last for hours. Some times it is deep, other times not so deep. Some of the voices try to help me, others could care less and just want to make sure I am in pain. I have tried to control them with medication but still they continue despite this. I think that is why I am always in a flux of mental pain. Like I am tonight. I am numb but not numb enough. I have seen worse nights than I have tonight. But I am hoping when I go to sleep it is for the last time. That I won’t wake up in the morning. I am hoping to die in my sleep. I know that is unlikely. I do not have any health problems that would cause such a thing. Unless of course, I do have the silent heart attack and it kills me instantly.

blah 3

by Midnight Demon, posted in blogging, chronic physical pain, depression

Ever had one of those days where you just feel blank? Like nothing is going on inside your head, no thoughts, no feelings of any sort, just feeling blank? Or have those days where nothing tastes right? Yea, I am having one of those days. I tried to make it a good day but I just feel so blah, like everything is an effort.

I got my hair cut today and I thought I would feel better but I didn’t. I waited around for the bus to the Square to get my coffee and decided to get Mexican food instead of a pastrami sandwhich and it just didn’t taste right. I had half of it then threw it away. I then got my coffee, a pumpkin spice latte, iced and a pumpkin scone. The scone was edible. It was okay but the latte was terrible. I don’t know why but it just didn’t float my boat today. I drank half of it and tossed it. I just was not in the mood to finish it.

My therapist was able to fit me in her schedule today. I guess I should talk to her before the weekend. I hope that I can explain this blank feeling to her. She probably will just say ah ha. And that will be that. I hate it when she says that. I’m going to try and talk about the grief of not working. I think I am having a bout of it today. A friend of mine I used to work with is on twitter and still works in the lab. I miss working with her. She always made me happy when I was grumbling at work. It made the day go by faster because we would have a good laugh to ease to the tension of the work day. The job was stressful. We were responsible for people’s lives as we were the ones to order lab tests the doctors had ordered. If we ordered the wrong test, which happened occasionally, it would suck because it could delay treatment of the patient. I miss it, but I kind of don’t miss the stress of it, especially when it came to pediatric tests. I always felt bad when a little one was sick. Sometimes the nurses drew too much blood or not enough, mostly not enough, and expect us to perform miracles on a tiny drop of blood. I remember we had a newborn who needed a glucose and the nurse sent us the sample like three times and each time was the same amount of blood. She didn’t understand that we needed at least a half a tube of blood to get the test done. The worst part was that the parents were lawyers and were threatening to sue or cause something because she had to repeatedly stick the baby. I felt bad but we need more than a drop of blood to do our job.

We then had funny diagnoses from the ER. My favorite were the ones that came in because they were drunk and fell. Well no shit. Whoever drinks to the point of alcohol poisoning is going to tip over and get hurt. It really sucked when it was a young person. You just knew they could become alcoholics if they weren’t already there. But it was interesting working in the lab. Got to see some really cool specimens and others that were just beyond gross. We once had a sample that was supposed to be urine but because the patient was doubly incontinent, we got both stool and urine. And it stunk really bad. When I called to ask the nurse about it, she just said do the best we can. Yea, hold our breath as we analyzed it and hope we don’t pass out!

I wish I could remember the fun times in the lab. We used to have a lot of fun until a certain supervisor got jealous and made us stop. She really was a bitch though she would always play the injured party when caught. I always tried to keep my “good” side with her because she was such a backstabber, but toward the end of my days, it was getting harder and harder to do. She realized how much of an impact I had when I was there and soon laid off her phoniness with me. Not like that made things better, but it was a step up. I remember there was a time we played a joke on a friend. She had injured her foot in a car accident and took her sneaker off. Well, a coworker and I decided to hide it on her. When she came looking for it hours later, we made up some story that we used the pneumatic tube station and tubed it to blood gas. (it was still in the front office where we were but didn’t let her know that). She hobbled to blood gas looking for her sneaker while me and the other coworker who was in there just laughed our asses off. We actually forgot where we put it, until we went searching for it ourselves. The expression on her face was priceless. Those were the good days. We got the work done and still had a few laughs. Then the lab changed and so did the laughter. It was just work, work, work. Sure we would still have our breaks and such, but damn, it was hard keeping up with the patient’s samples coming in and not enough people to log them in. There were nights we had to leave the outpatient samples for night shift. We could only do so much in eight hours. And computer downtimes, scheduled or unscheduled were always a bitch. You always got that one not so understanding clinician who wanted his stuff above all the others just so his shift could come to a close. We would go out of the way to find it and then find out that there was another doctor covering him. So much for it being a priority!! I would get so pissed off.

There were days I would just get to work and be in a bad mood. Saturdays were the worst. If day shift left us outpatient bags, I was even in a worst mood. Plus they always seemed to wait for me to come in and hand off the problems that should have been dealt with hours ago. I had a rule of not talking to be until after six o’clock, because by then, things were caught up and day shift was really gone and all the problems have been dealt with. But never failed that a half hour or even fifteen minutes before my shift ended more problems would come in and I would have to stay on till exactly midnight or after to make sure they were dealt with and handled properly. I always made sure things were clearly documented so the supervisor would know what was going on. And in my line of work, you had to be clear otherwise mistakes would make the mistake worse.

I liked my job. It was routine. I was the one that was there the longest and knew the system better than anyone (other than the computer staff). I also helped where I was needed even if it wasn’t my “job” for the day. But things got more difficult the more my mobility slowed me down. When we had the big analyzer machine installed, I found I couldn’t run it and aliquot specimens in the same shift. I would be dead the next day and often it lead to me calling out on my next scheduled shift, which I rarely ever had to do. Once I stopped having a car, getting to work on Sunday was getting to be impossible. I was late and it took me over two hours to get to work, by public transportation. I just said the hell with it and worked during the week and Saturdays. Sometimes, I would work only half shifts and even those were painful. I sometimes had to leave my shift in a wheelchair or half way through, go down to the emergency room because the pain got to be so bad I could hardly stand. My leg would swell and hurt really bad. I never found out why it swelled and hurt so much. I just found that I needed a day in between working until finally I had to have restrictions in my day in order to work. Then lost my job because it couldn’t accommodate me. That was really painful, emotionally, because I worked my ass off even through the worst of my pain. I had no idea that it was so restrictive. But it was the only thing that I could think of so I wouldn’t have to take any more time off work and get off FMLA (family medical leave act). So I went from working two jobs to trying to work forty to none in four months. And it sucked! I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I tried to get another position in the hospital but little did I know the hospital had a hiring freeze on. I needed a job that I could work sedentary but couldn’t find one. Then when I lost access to my work email and such, I stopped looking and filed for disability. I already had two psych hospitalizations and was working on a third when I was out of work. I had to file for long term disability, which was a mountain of paperwork. I think it took more paper than social security! I got both within a month of each other. I was glad because finally I could pay off some bills that had piled up while I wasn’t collecting anything. But it still is tough living on a monthly check. I still have not learned the art of budget. I seem to pay the most important bills, my cell phone, Starbucks, health insurance, and cable bill. What I have left has to last me until the next month, which sometimes it doesn’t. I could have a dollar to my name until the next check. And I always make sure that I have transportation money or I am not going anywhere for the month. And that will suck!! I just got to figure out how to spread out at least two hundred dollars of spending money and make it last a month. And somewhere in there has to be food money. I can’t live on coffee alone.

writing bug today

by Midnight Demon, posted in depression

I know this is my third blog of the day but I can’t help it. I have the writing itch and I can’t seem to stop it. I just can’t stop thinking about what I have been writing today about suicide and it has not really triggered me but I feel like I can’t stop it.

A fellow blogger wrote a comment about the frustrated needs in my last blog. I guess I wasn’t too clear about that. Frankly I am not too clear about it myself, only in the respect that I can see it myself and maybe that is not really clear. I will have to research it more as there are some top ones that always get people to think about suicide when their needs are frustrated or not met. I know succorance, validation, and affiliation are some of the top ones. I don’t know if this will make sense if you haven’t read my other blog, (my suicide career), it talks about frustrated needs as a precursor to suicidal thinking. It is the buildup of these unmet needs that might lead to suicide. Everyone has them, and most are met but for those that are mentally ill it can be challenging to have each of them met and feel satisfied with them. And all of this is related to the father of suicidology, Edwin Shneidman. He was a great guy that thought long and hard in the path of suicide prevention. He so wanted a psychometric assessment to evaluate suicidal thinking. Unfortunately, what he came up with was not always sound and easy to perform. Luckily, his successor, David Jobes, has been able to have a validated and empirically sound assessment called the suicide status form. Unfortunately, copyright laws prevent me from posting a new form. There is however one that has been filled out online if you search for it. I have used this form in my therapy and it has helped me. You can get it in his book Managing suicide Risk. I have made copies and have it in a word doc for easy copying.

I don’t know why I am thinking about this today. I have been up since three thirty this morning writing and writing and writing. Now my writing partner has come up with something else for me to write and somehow have it crossed linked to our blogs as tomorrow is National suicide prevention day. This is a wild idea. Hope it works out well for the both of us.