write the pain

Write the pain.

For those that are frequent blog readers, you know I write about my pain, physical and emotional, most, if not all, the time. It has been the cornerstone of my blog. I can articulate what few can and my readers like what I write because they can relate.

Writing about pain has been a staple of my blog. It seems I cannot write without some measure of pain. It can be the pain associated with depression. It can be the pain associated with the chronic pain condition that I have. It can be a pain that keeps me awake at night. The pain that tears at you and is unrelenting. Whatever type of pain that I have been feeling, it has caused frustration, anguish, despair, suicidal thoughts, and agony. It makes you dread waking up in the morning. It makes you want to sleep forever, to have this escape of no consciousness. It wears you out. And exhausts you. It causes you to be unmotivated. To want to stay in bed and not face the day. But for me, it also has been the stimulus behind so many writings. I write about my darkness that is a short story. I write about the chronic pain and suicide ideation that happens frequently.

Pain has been sadly, the inspiration to write this blog because it causes such dark thoughts, and by dark thoughts I don’t mean just depressive thoughts. I’m talking about suicide ideation. Thoughts that make you think you would be better off dead than to continue living. Dark thoughts of suicide, the ones where you cannot express in normal conversation. Most of my dark thoughts are expressed in this blog because the therapist hours do not occur between 11 PM and 3 AM. It’s hard to find any here to listen between those hours. So I read about the pain. I write and I write till I am succumbed by pain meds or psych meds or exhaustion. I write the pain. Because if I did not have this outlet, the dark thoughts would take over. And I would cease to exist.

Pain is exhausting, be it physical or emotional. And to have both occur at the same time is just torture. When the meds don’t work, when the pain is overwhelming, when all you feel is anguish and misery, that is what causes you to feel like life is not worth living. Writing helps to express what I cannot it sort of makes life more bearable as the father of suicidology has said many times, decreased the psychache (pain), decreased the suicide. I have found writing the pain decreases in my dark thoughts. This doesn’t mean I have found a life worth living. It just means life is more bearable for me.

just so frustrating

I just came home from eating dinner at my cousin’s house. We had a good time. I told him about my book but didn’t say anymore about the content of it. He is one of those people that thinks that if you don’t talk about suicide, it doesn’t exist. He doesn’t know about my attempts for this reason. He doesn’t want to hear about it. He rather hear about how crippling my depression is than hear about how suicidal I have been. It is a barrier so we just don’t talk about it.

I also didn’t talk about my being transgender. He made a comment tonight about how I am his favorite girl or something to that effect. I wanted to correct him but then I figured why bother.

I had an extremely long day that was mostly dealing with my family members. I think the only two members of the family I didn’t have to deal with today were my youngest niece and my brother in law, oh and my nephew. So three. I am exhausted just thinking about it. My morning was filled with going up and down stairs. My ankle is thanking me kindly right now with pain. No matter as I am about to take my night meds and go to bed. I am hoping that I will stay asleep till eight but I doubt it. My track record hasn’t been good and I didn’t get a good night sleep last night. I went to bed after two in the morning and then woke up an hour later. Took some Ativan and only slept for two more hours before I said the hell with it and stayed up. I lost track on how many hours I have been up. Plus I am sick so that doesn’t help me much. If I continue this way, I know I am not going to get rid of this cold.

I had therapy today and my therapist was on her high horse, which pissed me off. I warned her that if she didn’t settle down, I was going to hang up on her. The one advantage of phone sessions. I finally told her about what my AAS blog is going to be about. I didn’t tell her at first because I wasn’t sure if I told her what I did and I was afraid that she would be mad at me or get all worried on me. I don’t know when this post is going to be published but when it is, I will reblog it here. I think it is an important post about chronic pain and suicide.

Tonight while I was over my cousin’s, I was thinking of suicide and how I don’t think much about it these days. I guess because my chronic pain is well controlled and I am not hurting too much these days. But the depression. Man, that is a whole other can of worms!! That is making me wish I was dead so bad. I just don’t want to be alive and there is really no one I can talk to about this. I haven’t been able to tell my therapist because we have been dealing with my family issues lately more than my suicidal thinking, or death wishes. They are more like death wishes than actual suicide thoughts. I am not planning my death or anything. I just wish I was dead. I dread waking up most mornings. I have been having bad dreams. So I can’t even have a restful sleep even if I wanted it. It’s so distressing. I haven’t told my therapist about the dreams. She knows I have been having weird dreams but not every night. She doesn’t know that and I am afraid to tell her because I know she wants to talk about it. I would talk about it but I don’t remember the dreams. I remember the people in my dreams but not what they were doing or anything like that. It is so frustrating. And makes me wish I was dead all the more. I just want to escape. I need a place I can go to without judgment and criticism. Away from my family for a little while. I don’t want to go into the hospital because they aren’t going to do much for me and will most likely make my sleep worse. Plus I am not suicidal so it is not like I need to be in the hospital. I just want to die. I feel like the future is closing in on me where it was expanding on me before. Maybe I don’t have a future. I still believe that I am meant to kill myself. But I don’t have the lethality to actually follow through with it. It’s just so frustrating. I can’t live and yet I can’t die. WTF am I supposed to do. Yet I continue to exist. And I don’t like it.

it’s about suicide not a love story

My niece gave me a copy of Office 2013 the other day. It took a couple of hours to download. It was a trial version so I didn’t pirate anything and she is not the type to do such a thing. Anyways, after it downloaded I couldn’t use it anymore because it had passed its user quota. But the damn thing messed up my 2010 settings and it took me awhile to fix. Now all is right with the world.

I had a scary dream last night, or should I say this morning. It had something to do with my nephew and my surviving aunt. I don’t remember more than that but it was like death was looming over them. I hate those kind of dreams.

I tried to sleep most of the day because I am still not feeling well. I hate colds. They just drain the life out of you. And because my voice is affected, I can’t use my Dragon software to type this up. Bummer! I just think it’s cool that I got software that I can hopefully use so I don’t have to type all the time.

I heard back from the editor of the AAS blog. She liked my article and wanted some stats. So I gave her some to put in the blog. Now I hope I don’t have to wait three months for her to publish it, but I understand if there are more pressing articles than mine. I am just happy I am writing again for this blog.

My mood kind of sucks right now. I don’t know how much of it is because of this cold or if it is just the depression. I just want to sleep and losing an hour last night didn’t help. I woke up around midnight and didn’t go back to sleep till 0430 only to wake up around 0830. I fell back to sleep around 10ish and then woke up around 2. I was hungry so made something to eat. Now I just want to go back to sleep. I have an 1130 appointment tomorrow with my therapist. That is going to be fun as usually I am not really awake at that hour. I am always waking up before seven. But I don’t usually have the energy to do things. Sure I am sick and that might be the reason why I feel so lousy. I just can’t help but think that it is more that my depression is getting worse instead of better like I thought it was. I still have no interest in things. I really am behind on my reading. I haven’t touched Far From the Tree in weeks. Only book that I picked up was The Savage God. I still remember reading one of the reviews for it and she said that it was a depressing book. Well, duh. It’s on suicide not a love story!

I just recently bought another new book called Super Brain. It’s by Deepra Chopka and Rudy Tanzi. I am a follower of Tanzi on twitter and he keeps quoting from the book so I had to get it. I loved his first book on Alzheimer’s. He has been in the neuroscience field for quite sometime now and I have been following his career since his first book. Granted I have been lax in it for the past couple of years, only because I no longer have access to research search engines like pubmed and psychlit. One of the perks that I had when I had my job at the hospital where he also worked. I would so love to have access to the research database again. I really miss following Jobes, too. But if I get my butt back to school, I will have access to all of that and more.

Course my pattern has been to buy books or receive them and have them collect dust for a while before I pick them up. I have about eight books now that are just waiting to be read. And I don’t have the inclination to read them. It sucks when my depression takes my reading away from me. Not only is it hard to concentrate but I lose interest in what I am reading more often than not. Or lately, I just want to finish the chapter and move on to something else but I can’t seem to read fast enough to do so. It’s like everything is so slow. My thought process is so slow. And it really hurts, not in the physical sense, but in the psychic sense. It’s already March and I have yet to finish one book I started last year. I usually read at least three books at a time. Now I am lucky if I read one. It’s not like I don’t have the time, I do. It’s just I don’t have an interest and it bothers me because I love reading. I am going to try and read something tonight, before I go to bed.

really vulnerable right now

Had a painful day today. I am very sore from my fall that I took yesterday. Walking is more difficult now because my knee and thigh are involved in giving me pain.

I feel lousy because I still have this cold. I don’t know if it is getting better or worse, but it definitely isn’t going away. I have been taking vitamin D supplements to try and boost my immune system. And no that is not a typo, I meant D. I participated in a trial of vitamin D to help boost immune function and it does work. Since I have been taking it, I have not had bronchitis or pneumonia. It does lessen the effect of the cold but I have been lax in taking it every day.

Voices are still around taunting me. I am trying not to listen to them but it is so tiring to do so. My defenses are already down because of this cold that I got and my pain threshold has been increased. I am just really vulnerable right now.

I emailed my PCP’s office the other night and got a response. I had to laugh and ask myself, did they even read the message?? I told them the nerve block didn’t work and I was not going to see another specialist ever again for my ankle problem. Or have another test done. The nurse writes back “oh I see you have further tests to be done and see a neurologist”. I am like WTF are you kidding me lady!! Did I have to SPELL it out that I am DONE with anything anyone else can think of that is causing me this pain and not help me with it??? My pain meds are working and that is all I fucking care about. Just as long as my doc continues to prescribe them, there isn’t going to be any problems.

I got an email from my pharmacy saying that my medicine, which I just put in a refill on, is out of stock. So today I call to see if it has come in and find out the manufacturer is having problems making it. I am like what??? I heard about this shit happening but not to my medication!! I have enough to cover me and hopefully it comes in tomorrow but if not I don’t know what I am going to do. I need my Ativan! I hate having to ration it and just take it if I really need it. I might have to use more Neurontin to cover my issues as lately it has been helping me with sleep.

Been up since six this morning. I hate waking up this early and I didn’t take a nap today. I am really cranky. I made myself breakfast, like I always do. I might have breakfast for dinner. I am too lazy to make something else. My specialty is fried egg sandwich. Used to be scrambled egg but now it’s fried egg, once I learned how to turn the egg over, LOL. It is not an easy thing to do without breaking the yolk! And I love the yolk. Probably why my cholesterol is high but I don’t care. I just read something today that said that having chronic depressive episodes is “causally linked” to heart disease. So if I am going to have a heart attack that kills me before I kill myself, I am for it! But I wonder if the reverse might be true, that heart disease causes depression?? HMM there is something to ponder! But then you have the health junkies that die of a heart attack so I don’t get it.

Tonight, which is soon, all I am going to do is watch the TV show MASH and laugh. I love that show.

Oh and I forgot…today is my thirteen anniversary of CES, Cauda Equina Syndrome. 13 years ago today I lost my ability to walk and within a month got it back but I had to have back surgery to have that happen.