New drug, new woman.
DrJ changed my drugs yesterday. With just the change of one small tablet, one tiny little white pill, I can feel the flood gates of sanity fling open and normality drown me wave after wave.
After experiencing rolling anxiety attacks of growing intensity over the last six weeks, to have them stop almost immediately is just breathtaking in its glory.
Things I’ve noticed of late:
– I really really REALLY hate anxiety attacks. They suck big time.
– The irony of drugs that are meant to make you feel better making you feel way shittier for oh A WHOLE FUCKING MONTH is only kinda amusing for oh, a DAY. Tops.
– This morning was the first morning in close to a month I woke up a) not shaking b) not completely nauseous – just slightly and c) not totally a bazillion per cent in the grip of an anxiety attack. I’m yet to view this with any level of excitement/thank CHRIST/insert any other expression conveying a sense of of PEACE.
– the moon last week was absolutely remarkable
– I’m losing weight and LOVING being thinner, feeling my hip bones and jaw bone again. But the being SO FUCKING HUNGRY is kind of boring. This is the ONLY good part of my meds at this point in time – that they make me feel so much like crap I don’t really feel like eating.
– We now own two dogs. I am both deeply resentful and absolutely fine with this – I see this as situation as perfectly acceptable proof I am probably bipolar.
– WHY when you basically feel like topping yourself does everyone tell you how fabulous you’re looking – is there some sort of suicidal glow of radiance?
– I know my kids know all is not right in Camelot when they say things like, “mummy, what does overwhelmed mean?” and I reply “just watch me for a few minutes and you’ll know what it is”.
anyway, that’s all.
I have been seriously thinking of not writing here anymore, I seem to have scared Bec off into a far more genteel of space over at The Ladies Lounge and it just doesn’t seem I have anything to offer, but here I am, writing inane shit once more. Maybe the meds are finally starting to work…
Men should be dying to do the housework
I had to laugh… this is just what Surfing Free has been campaigning about over on her blog lately – and now there’s a rooly truly academic study to back up her case!
mtc
Bec
before I got sick and worse.
My head doesn’t work that well. Sometimes it fires on all cylinders and I’m intelligent, witty, compassionate and productive. Other times it almost feels like its eating itself and I become introverted, paranoid, nervous, anxiety-laden, easily distracted, unmotivated and highly unproductive.
In the novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, there is a passage where she retreats into her depression and refers to it as closing the shutters on her house, watching the light slowly shrink to a smaller and smaller point until she is left in total darkness. This is the best description I have found of what happens when my brain decides to turn on itself.
At the moment I am returning to anti-depressants. I find it deeply ironic that the side-effects of these little white pills are heightened feelings of the feelings I’m feeling that are making me a contender to be on them in the first place. It can take two weeks for the side-effects to dissipate. I’m a day off that two weeks and instead of lessening they have heightened in the last three days.
For the past two mornings I’ve been woken by our youngest for his feed. He then goes back to bed and I retreat to mine to lie there at the hands of a massive anxiety attack. Adrenalin pumps through my body as my teeth ache at being clenched for so long and so hard. My heart is racing, and has been for what feels like the last two weeks. I know this isn’t the case but it still feels like it. My neck is so stiff that if I move suddenly a hot hard pain grips my neck and right shoulder. My skin feels uncomfortable. I’m so tired, so very very tired, even if I get a full nights sleep. I simply do not want to get up. I want to shut the door on my life and just make the world go away. The impact this would have on my family, on my boys, makes tears instantly spring to my eyes. I want and need to be near people but I hate being touched. I am craving solitude.
Food and my body become my enemy when I’m like this. I find myself completely repugnant. I’m not really hungry but I eat almost constantly. Then I hate myself even more. This goes on and on. I can eat the most healthy food in the most reasonable of portions, but I will still berate myself for needing to eat it at all. I am the compulsive gambler, the alcoholic, of food. I get to the end of a day when I have eaten properly and try to punch the air in victory, but I’m so very tired I will have the same fight the very next day.
Not many people know just how hard and long this war has raged in my head. I’m scared they will look on me differently. Not give me work because they don’t want to overload me. Not tell me a joke or share a story with me because they think I might take it the wrong way or will not be in the mood for such frivolity. Not come to me for support or advice because they don’t want to stress or burden me even more. (Even though all these things are critical for me as I claw my way back to normal brain-land.) My greatest fear is that they will make allowances for me.
I hate it when my brain decides to eat itself. I try to remember what I’m like when it’s well. When I write well, have great ideas, am proactive in all areas of my life, am happy. But it feels so far away and is so fuzzy around the edges I wonder if I will ever feel that way again. I have a deep undercurrent of fear that asks what if the little white pills won’t work? What if I’m going to have to battle my brain each and every day? And that is the worst part of all.
here. In so many ways. The quandary of a joint blog is that sometimes one is down and the other is up. And there runs the risk that one is seen to be raining on the parade of the other, and so on and so forth.
Bec is in that place at the moment of about to endure the hell that is moving and the grief that is dealing with a bank but all for moving into a delightful home that will give her and the brood more space than they have ever had before. I’m so glad she’s opened the Ladies Lounge because quite frankly too much talk of grevillias over geraniums or camellias instead of azaeleas and I would be a definition of narky never quite encapsulated by a human being before.
But this week has been very very grim for me. The dog was the straw that broke my back, then I got sick. Then Jasper got sick. And all along there was a sub-plot of Mum upstairs being sick. And still sick. So just when I think I can’t take any more, she comes down all “I think I need to go to hospital”. And then let the feeling of complete overwhelmation; the absolute “I am barely holding it together for my family, I have no more to give and I just can’t carry your load as well” feeling; the subsequent shit-heap of guilt at being so inept, selfish and incapable; the rolling anxiety attacks where I feel like my heart may burst from my chest, that I’m going to vomit (again) and my skin is absolutely on fire take hold.
I believe this week is the closest I have come to a complete nervous breakdown. I came close once when Felix was a baby, but you know, such fond memories fade with time. Maybe this is what it is? Maybe I’m in the midst of one?
I’m permanently cranky and on edge. I can’t get out of bed in the mornings. I lie awake in the middle of the night feeling like my body is on fire as I am gripped by anxiety about nothing, I’m not even lying there worrying about how we won’t ever own property, or about Oscar, or about Felix’s literacy, or the latest round of bills, or that we will be living with my mother until she draws her last breath and if I can’t care for her through gastro how the fuck would I do so if she was dying, I’m just anxieting. I have night sweats. I am crying all the time. I don’t want to go to work. At all. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Small talk makes my neck itch. I am melancholy, forlorn and have such a pervading sense of hopelessness sometimes it makes it hard to breath.
See?
Forget raining on Bec’s parade, I’m a torrential floodwater warning dousing of relentless rain.
I know I am taking measures to come out of it. I know it takes time. I know I need to see my shrink sooner than the 23rd, but after missing a whole week of work last week that is not realistic or feasible. I know, I know, I know.
I’m closing comments on this. Just because.