Starting the day off in pain

Starting the day off in pain

I woke up late this morning due to pain in my ankle. This is the third day in a row that I have woken up in pain. I took my pain meds and was debating on going back to sleep but decided to make coffee. It was really good and took away the drowsiness of the pain meds away. I felt energetic so I took on a task that I have neglected all weekend: cleaning the stairs. I was doing fairly well until the last four or five steps. My back decided I had enough but I wasn’t done yet. I had to rest before I finished the stairs. Then I swept the area around the stairs as they haven’t been swept in a while. I then vacuumed up the dust and stuff rather than trying to get it in a dustpan. I was done for the day. My back thanked me kindly and I went back up to my room to rest.

I have been reading Twitter. Nothing interesting is going on. I called my therapist as I wanted to talk to her but she is booked. I told her to call me if she got a chance. I just feel like I need to talk to someone because I am losing my mind with pain and the thoughts of suicide are hanging around more than going away. I just can’t seem to stop thinking about ending my life because I can’t stand not being able to do things without pain. Even taking a shower hurts me.

I printed off the disability pass document because I have to renew it. I will drop it off to my PCP’s office on Friday when I have my appointment. Friday is going to be a long day for me because I see the NP in the morning and then I have PT in the afternoon for my Achilles problem. If it causes me more pain than what I am already in, I won’t go through with the sessions. I just can’t bear more pain.

I was going to read Adler today but I am just not up to reading and concentrating. I might read the mindless book about fieldstones. This guy talks about stones a lot in this book. Basically a stone is a note that you write when you have an idea for a book or the book you are writing. Why he just doesn’t say “notes’, I have no clue. It’s getting wicked redundant but it’s mindless reading so I don’t mind it. I might read some Dostoevsky later tonight. The Sox are off tonight so I have plenty of time to read. I just wish I had some motivation to read Adler. I am sure I could finish the chapter today if I did.

My psychiatrist is still on vacation. She won’t be back until next week. It will be good to see her. I will need a refill on my trilafon by then. I hope she changes the order to taking it twice a day as it seems to be working better for me than taking it once a day. I can reach her via email if I need to. If my therapist doesn’t call me today, I will email my psych. I haven’t emailed her since last week when I was in a rut and agonizing over what to do because I was in pain and suicidal. I really wanted her input as the voices were out of control and so was my pain. It was like a double whammy of things going on at once. But me getting all worked up because of pain anxiety got the voices going too. It just is a bad situation. And to make things worse, my therapist is on vacation the next two weeks starting next week. For the first time in 16 years, I am having anxiety over her going on vacation. It’s like my routine is being taken away from me for two weeks and I am having a hard time dealing with that. I do have PT while she is gone so I have some structure but it’s not the same.

It’s another humid day so I am staying in my AC’d room. I don’t really have to go out today, though I still want to get some burgers and hot dogs so my rolls don’t go bad. I wish the meat market sold the hot dogs I like but they don’t. So I need to go to two different places to get these items. I wouldn’t dare go out given that my back and ankle have been screaming at me the last couple of hours. Maybe tomorrow I will go, if I am not in too much pain.

Kind of in a rut

Kind of in a rut

I have been in serious pain the last two day and it has been affecting my mood. I feel hopeless that this onslaught will continue and that I won’t get any relief. I just took both my strong pain meds and regular pain meds because I just don’t know what to do anymore. I figure maybe both can knock out this cycle that I am in and give me some relief.

I have been thinking about ending my life again, because of this pain. I feel trapped by it and no one wants to help me with it. But then, there is nothing that hasn’t been done. I have tried PT, ultrasound therapy, shots, immobilization, etc. and nothing has helped. I haven’t really done anything the last few days and it flared up on me. All I have been doing is sleeping! How is that hurting myself??!!

Soon as the weather cools down some, I think I will end my life. I am tired of going on like this. I am still not sure if I can walk to my destination, but isn’t that what cabs are for? I just hope he/she knows where they are going. Of course, my biggest fear is being found as I will be in a public place. It is mostly deserted though, so I think I will be okay. I just hope that I have enough meds to do the deed. I am 1 mg short of a full lethal dose. I hope it won’t matter.

Dostoevsky: Love and Suicides

Dostoevsky: Love and suicides

I was just about to give up on finishing reading this deathly boring book about religion and brothers when I came across an interesting passage that made me love Dostoevsky even more than I already love him. He wrote about loving one another no matter what and if you cannot love a man, love the earth and soak it with your tears so the fruits can come up, or something like that. Then when I was finished reading that section, he writes this:

“But woe to those who slain themselves on earth. Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. They tell us that it is a sin to pray for them and outwardly the church, as it were, renounces them, but in my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them. Love can never be an offence to Christ. For such as those I have prayed inwardly all my life. I confess it, fathers and teachers, even now I pray for them every day”. Father Zossima in Brothers Karamazov.

I am reading this book on Kindle so I can’t quote the page it is on. But isn’t it beautiful? That in the late 1800’s a man wanted to pray for suicides when they were condemned by the church? And in Russia of all places!

Dealing with Chronic Pain and Suicidality

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.