Category Archives: General Medical

Because I Can

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I’m finally letting myself show anger, even rage, call people on the bullshit they hand me, their lies, singular or repeated, all of it.

Because I can.

I purged an old, dead email account of its contents the other day.  What (at the time) I felt was a stupid move was reading a bunch of those emails first.

I was aghast.  I saw myself being emotionally and psychologically abused to a horrifying degree.  Had there been a physical analogue, I would have been the woman in the ED who “fell down the stairs”, “walked into a door”, or was “just the clumsiest woman ever, you won’t believe what I did to myself. . .”  And I would have ended up there daily, until eventually I landed in the ICU, on life support.

Reading those emails was something that needed to happen, though, because it wasn’t just one relationship, and it hadn’t been just with guys I was “involved” with.  I took a long, hard, painful look at the woman I have become, and I’m angry.

I’m angry at myself, but I’m also angry at all of the people who had a big hand in turning me into this woman.  Because I never used to be this way.  You swung at me, I ducked and hit back twice as hard.  You lied to me, I called you on it straight out and gave you the option of being honest henceforth or getting the fuck out of my life.  You treated me badly, or took advantage in any way, I walked and never looked back.

I entered treatment for my bipolar, and slowly, but slowly, I began to wear down, and people took advantage of that.  Even though I knew I was doing everything possible to be well, and that I had never taken my illness out on others — except for a few, a very few, bursts of shouting and tears — I felt like I was a burden just being in people’s lives, and I had to do everything I could to compensate and please others.  This belief was reinforced when friends I’d known for years started backing away; the mother of one of the children I nannied for started distancing herself and telling me how disappointed her child was when I didn’t show up for something because I was curled up in my bed, sobbing, unable to even move (yet I always at least gave her notice that I wouldn’t be there); and finally, my sister, with whom I had always been very close, and my best friend of 20 years both decided to cut off all contact with me, basically telling me that they couldn’t handle “my drama”, and other behavior that was completely beyond my control — even though I was still working my soul to the core trying to prevent them or anyone else from being negatively affected.

Clearly, there was something wrong with me beyond my illness, as a person, and I was lucky to have anyone still in my life at all, so I had to (and did) do anything and everything to keep them.

FUCK THAT.

A sister who walks out on you when you are at your lowest is not a sister.  For a long time I have been compassionate, because she genuinely didn’t get it.  She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting well.  But you know what, it doesn’t matter if you understand or not; you love someone, you support them.  You do not call them “a black hole”.

A friend who uses her children to hold you hostage — consciously or not — because you know they are little and they love and need you, and that if you call Mommy on her lies and bullshit and manipulation she will cut off the contact you have with them, I don’t even have a word for that.

Friends who back away because you are as contagious as a leper, and even if they know that statement is true, who don’t want to deal with the fact that you have to fight constantly to keep your head above the swells while they can get up and live their lives every day are not friends at all.

And new people in your life whom you will put up with, excuse even, all manner of garbage from, all while hiding or making light of how bad things have really gotten, because you’re desperate for someone, anyone, to “support” you and show you kindness. . .  Well, that one is on me, but I never would have gotten there without the concerted efforts of the people above.  Yes, they had every right to make a choice to remove themselves from my life, but they were cruel and weak and cowardly to have blamed me, instead of having the guts to admit that they couldn’t deal with being spectators to the struggle I was living and the constant pain I was in.  Because, had they done so, they would have had to admit to themselves that what I lived every day was an enormous struggle, and so unspeakably painful, and they were cutting and running, abandoning me when I needed them more than I ever had.

For years I have searched for the reason I let my former psychiatrist lie and manipulate and force me into electroconvulsive therapy — I can finally use the word FORCE, for the very first time, and you don’t know what a triumph that is — and at last, I have found it.  It was the result of a long line of abandonments and betrayals and manipulations and lies by those I loved and trusted most.  I had been made to feel like less than nothing for so long that I had come to believe it as gospel truth, and who cared that the old me, the real me, had been firmly and unwaveringly against ECT with all of her being for three-and-a-half years?  She wasn’t standing guard any more, and my opinion didn’t count.  How could it, when I didn’t count as a person myself?

That’s something I get to carry with me always.  The permanent brain damage, and the post-traumatic stress I have from being anesthetized, having electrodes hooked up to my head, having a current, a shock pass through my brain to induce a seizure in me — sixteen times over.  I blamed myself for that, too.  Up until about an hour ago.

And still, I put up with bullshit and manipulation and being treated as less than a person by people I love, because it is all I know anymore.  Almost three years to the day of my first shock and seizure.

Now, three years and fifteen days after that first blast of electricity, arguably the lowest point of my life, it ends.  I’m done.  I’m worth more than that, a hell of a lot more.  I am often a hard person to have in your life, and that has always been so, it has very little to do with mental illness.  But I am the best friend you will ever have, if you are willing to accept me, all of me, and give back.

I am smart.

I am compassionate.

I am intelligent.

I am strong.

I am creative.

I am resilient.

I am supportive.

I am loving.

I am beautiful.

I am selfless.

I have a strong moral compass.

I am patient.

I am understanding.

I am honest.

I am accepting.

I am forgiving.

I am idealistic.

I am open-hearted.

I live my beliefs.

And I once again believe that I am worth it, that I am worth more, much more than I have been given in the past six years of my life.  From friends, from lovers, from family.

So I will live my life accordingly from this day on.

Because I can.

“I ain’t a soldier, but I’m here to take a stand. . .”

~ Jon Bon Jovi/Richie Sambora/Billy Falcon


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Finish Line

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Last week my life as I had blissfully known it, for the past year at least, came to an end.

I have been struggling very hard to write something to update everyone, and failing, and failing, and failing.

I wanted to explain more of the situation, but that’s not going to happen, so here are the bare bones.

I can no longer take Carbatrol, which has been my mainstay in mood stabilization.  Not ever again.

It's the Great Big Book of Everything, with everything inside. . ."

It’s the Great Big Book of Everything, with everything inside. . .

I have been through every drug and then some; when I stopped counting in 2010, there had been more than 70.  So I am at a point of patching together what I call the “least worst” solutions for my future.  I have a three-inch thick binder filled with my notes, my doctors’ notes, medication inserts, pharmacy info, articles from different websites, and I’m basically using that, along with a grip of reference books, to decide which drugs were the most effective and the least intolerable.

It’s only been five days, but things have really gone incredibly badly to start.  I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m actually very well-equipped for this, in one way, in an important way.  I have been through this fire, for five-and-a-half years I went through it, and I came out the other side alive.  I know what to expect, and I know that I can get through again.

The thing that is knocking at my infrastructure is that I honestly and truly believed that this was it for me, I had found my cocktail and that was what I would be taking until I drew my last breath.

Also, there is the added element that I’m giving serious thought to looking for a new psychiatrist.  I am undecided here, as I need to sit down and discuss some things with mine first.  Additionally, I went through this process a little more than a year ago, for the first time since I’d sought help in 2006.  I got my first psychiatrist on the second try, and I didn’t know how lucky I was.

When I went through my search last time, I had very few doctors recommended to me, because my then-psychiatrist and my primary just didn’t believe there were many equipped to handle my case.  And, in fact, of those few, all but two said that they didn’t think they could help, because they honestly didn’t know what could be done that hadn’t already been tried.  I appreciated that frankness.

Essentially, what that means is if I do need to find a new doctor (still a big if), there is more than likely only one whom I can go to locally.  And that’s if he is still around, and still taking new patients. I do have information I saved on several national options, but there are enormous practical and financial considerations there. So, we shall see.

My parents are being very supportive, in their way.  After Thursday’s appointment, I told them I am no longer going to discuss with them what medications I am taking, because the last thing I need to be thinking when trying to figure out how to make the best out of a bad thing is, ‘Mom and Dad are going to freak out about this one.’  That really should not be in my mind at all.  Mom took it surprisingly well, she understood completely; Dad, well he will learn to deal with it.  He just loves his baby daughter and worries about me so much.  They both do, after these past years of seeing me hysterical and blanked out and taking me thrice weekly for ECT and rushing me to the ED many times and sitting up nights watching me because they were worried I would stop breathing.  Those are memories a parent can never erase.

So that’s the gist of it.  That’s how my life changed completely over one Thursday in January.  I was one month and four days shy of a perfect year.  But I’m glad I didn’t know that time had an expiration date stamped on it, because if I had, I wouldn’t have loved it as carelessly and blissfully as I did.  I wouldn’t have assumed and made plans and, yes, taken things for granted.  Taking things for granted is not always the monster it’s made out to be, my loves.  And if I have to spend another six-and-a-half years, or the rest of my life, striving for eleven months more like these just past, I will say that it’s worth the trade.  The reward is worth the fight.  More than worth it.

 

The rest of the crew.

More of the crew.

I’ll get through and find something, but it’s probably going to be an endless road of different drugs and dosage adjustments and changing this for that.  I won’t say I’m delighted, but neither will I sit here and wonder and wail that I can’t deal with that prospect.  To me it has never been a question of “how long” or “an end” or “too much”, it just is and I keep going, because this is the life I am living, and that is the only choice I have.  To keep going, to plunge ahead, to try something else.

I will always keep myself afloat, even if it means clinging to the fin of a shark.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Please Don’t Take A Picture

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Any psychiatrist who says to a patient who is crying frantically to him or her on the telephone, “Well, there isn’t anything left to do,” should be taken out into a field and shot.

Not shot and killed, mind you.  Not even shot where it might do severe damage, maybe just leave a lifetime of arthritis.

Then, they should be rushed immediately to the hospital, and given all the best medical care — but absolutely no anesthesia or pain medication in any form.  They should have to lay on the operating table, wide awake and fully conscious as the doctor probes around for the bullet and patches them up.

And every time they cry out from the agony of it, the doctor should respond with, “There isn’t anything left to do.”

They should be given nothing to treat the pain for the duration of the healing process, either. Not even an aspirin.  And they should be expected to immediately resume all duties of life, never wincing, never groaning when the pain shoots through them, not limiting themselves because they know they are injured and healing.

They should have to keep going through every day of their lives, and I hope that doctor who removed the bullet did a shitty enough job so the old injury does pain them regularly, so that they can have a constant reminder of what it is to be desperate and be told by the only person who can in fact do something, “There isn’t anything left to do,” when they knew the whole goddamned time that there was a great deal left could be done.

* * * * *

In case I haven’t made it vividly apparent, I had a very upsetting encounter with my psychiatrist this evening.  The story is for telling another day (if at all), but I am okay.  I want everyone reading this to know that.  And I am sorry if I worried anyone with my previous post.  Sometimes I need to write to get things out, and sometimes that writing needs to be public, and sometimes that writing needs to be vague.  It was not my intention anyone should be upset.

Sending you love and kisses,
(a very tired)
Ruby

“After all, tomorrow is another day.”

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Boobs!

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I have a complaint to make.  I am sitting here on my bed, typing this post, and I am wearing a bra.  I also wore one for the entirety of the day yesterday.

I’m thinking probably most of you don’t see what the complaint is yet.  Women wear bras.  It goes along with the territory of being female, like periods and pregnancy scares and getting paid less than a man to do the same job.

But wait.

I’m going to share my story with you, but first I’m going to share the story of why this piece almost didn’t get written.

It’s in the title there.  It is the title, in fact.  There is this spoken/unspoken/outspoken rule that as women, if we want to be respected and taken seriously and not viewed merely as sexual objects, we can’t write about our boobs.  I gave you all a detailed, in-depth (pun intended) rundown on my uterus last year, but unless we’re talking about nursing or something, we aren’t allowed to discuss our mammaries.

Well fuck that.  That tied me up briefly, I won’t deny it.  But then it made me explode on the same level that wearing a short skirt equals asking to be raped does.  So fuck it, for the next several hundred words, you’re going to read about my boobs.

I have always had small breasts.  Like, all my life, ever since I first got them.  The biggest they ever were, in my early 20s, was a 34B.  That was only for a year or two, I was most commonly an A, sometimes barely.  And I was quite happy with my boobs.  I didn’t want them any bigger.  I had a few padded bras, because some items of clothing just look better with a different silhouette, bigger ta-tas, but at the end of the day, stark naked, I liked them just fine as they were.  Even when I put on a shit-tonne of weight a few years ago from medication, my boobs did not get any larger.

So, last year around this time, I was sporting a 32A.  Had been for some time.  Had my lingerie collection, t-shirts, dresses, everything suited me fine.  (Side note: I love pretty clothes!)  In February of last year, I gained a little weight, ten or fifteen pounds due to medication.  Not anything to freak out over on my frame, especially because — get this – I love my body.  Have for pretty much all of my adult life.  Okay, maybe not during the major weight gain, but I didn’t love anything then, so it’s difficult to include that.

But my bras, predictably, still fit.

Now we head into March last year.  The minute the warm weather hits, I shed all my pants like a dead skin and wear nothing but dresses and skirts until it gets too cold again.  I love my dresses so much. . .  That’s a different post.

So most of my dresses are lined, and being small-breasted, I don’t wear bras with them.  I spent all of last summer bra-less in dresses, and I was happy, so happy.

Last summer was a very good summer, with lots of traveling and seeing friends and family and having my photograph taken for various celebratory occasions.  And it was upon viewing a few of these photographs, at the end of the summer, that I went ‘Holy shit!’

I was popping rather inappropriately out of some of my dresses.  Not to the point of showing nipple, but certainly more than I was comfortable with.  I’ve always believed in a rule of thumb I learned long ago from Cosmo (yes, Alice, I know what you’re thinking, but when they stick to their areas of expertise, they can actually give you some helpful advice), which basically states that the less you have, the more you can show.  It’s actually a sound principle in my mind, and I have come to believe it even more lately.

The point is a lot of those dresses were pretty low-cut.  When you have no boobs, you can wear shit that’s cut practically to your navel and still look classy.  Trust me.  And yes, women with big boobs can pull off the low-cut and classy thing too, it just takes effort.

The upshot of this realization is that I had to go buy new bras.  I was slightly astonished when I was sized at a 34C.  I wasn’t really delighted, but I thought I’d adjust, I got pretty bras and matching panties (this always helps me with change, and not just in my boobs), and I started wearing bras.  It was getting to cooler t-shirt and pant weather anyway, so the cycle was still in order.

Except, within a month, I was shopping for new shirts, because the XS I had worn for some years just wasn’t cutting it.  And I went in to get a basic bra, and a very helpful woman at Victoria’s Secret gave me like ten different bras and the one that finally fit me was a 34D.

What.  The.  Fuck.

In a month?  I’ll shorten the story and tell you that the month after that, I was up again into a 34DD.  I’m hesitant to say that’s where I am, because while I haven’t sized up since then, I’m afraid to jinx myself.

Now, clearly something is wrong with this picture.  As in medically.  And today I have an appointment with an endocrinologist to try to find out what it could be.  Perhaps, as importantly, what I want to know is: will I ever get my old boobs back?

I’ve gotten a lot of comments from female friends and acquaintances (and even the nice woman at Vicki’s) about how, hey, great, now I’m stacked, and yay, at least I didn’t have to buy them (someone did actually say that).  Because apparently the world is so hard-wired to think that all women must want big breasts that clearly, I’m thrilled.

I’m not.  I’m pissed.  There’s the superficial shit, like my wardrobe has been cut to nothing. All of my beautiful dresses?  Trust me when I say that these boobs will not fit into those dresses.  And I don’t have the budget to go shopping right now.  Even my necklaces — long strands of beads do not lay well on big boobs (Thoroughly Modern Millie taught us that one), and even shorter pendants I now find buried in my cleavage most of the time.

Oh, yes, cleavage.  That’s new for me, and I’m not loving it.

On another level, we address my original complaint, which was the fact that I am wearing a bra, and I now have to do this regularly, even at home.  And what bras!  There is just. . . so much to them.  The difference between the same bra in a 32A and a 34DD. . .  I can’t begin to explain.  And the worst part is, it’s necessary.

You may or may not have noticed, but I feel like I’m kind of writing about my boobs as if they were entities separate from me, not part of my body at all.  There’s a reason for that.  They feel like foreign bodies.  Like they’re tumors or something.  I still have issues with coordinating around them.  Do you know how many goddamned Percocet I lost down my shirt in the past month?

And that’s the biggest problem (not the Percocet, I always found those, eventually).  I’m not comfortable and happy with my body anymore.  Maybe I would have dealt okay if my boobs got big through puberty — or if not at the time (because it’s puberty), I would have been okay eventually and loved my boobs.  But this is not the kind of surprise you’re prepared for at 32.  By then, you’ve got the breasts you’ve got, unless you get pregnant, and then all bets are off.

I don’t like not liking my body.  No one does, but I’m not used to it, and that adds an extra layer of uncomfortable.  And I know that, endocrinologic mysteries aside, if these are what I’m stuck with, then I will have to learn to be happy about that.

But I will always mourn for my beautiful red strapless dress, which I hadn’t even occasion to wear yet.

dress

These boobs will not fit into that dress. You’re going to have to trust me on that.


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Blog For Mental Health 2013 Is Here!

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Once upon a time, there was a lovely young lady named Lulu. She was bright and vivid and bigger than life (she still is, don’t worry, I just talked with her the other day), and it was an especial desire of hers to advocate for understanding, strength, support, and education about mental health.  She had suffered a long time with her own mental illness, and she never wanted anyone to feel alone, as she had.

If you’ve been reading this blog for very long, my loves, you might know her as the woman with whom I co-founded the community mental health site, A Canvas Of The Minds.

(Side note:  Please, if you haven’t, go check Canvas out.  It isn’t just a site about being mentally ill, it’s about dealing with so many aspects of life, and chances are if you can’t relate to any of our authors’ pieces personally, we still touch upon topics and situations that you may have to deal with through a friend or a loved one.  If nothing else, it will give you a glimpse into life with mental illness, and hopefully foster dialogue and understanding.) 

So.  Last year, Lulu did something awesome, something so much more, which caught on like wildfire.  She started Blog for Mental Health 2012.  It was a simple idea that united a community.  If you have ever seen this badge on a site (and chances, are, you have):

well, that all started with her (and yes, I know it wasn’t here, but let’s not psychoanalyze me right now).

Now, to be absolutely clear, this isn’t an award.  I want to make that very plain, because I know that many bloggers feel that the blogging awards passed along, however well-intentioned, sometimes have a bit of a “chain mail” feel to them.  I would love to see even “award-free” bloggers taking up this gauntlet, because it is something else entirely.  It’s a simple, yet very powerful way for a community of mental health bloggers to show that they are proud of their lives, that they are writing for themselves as well as for those who have not yet found their voices, that they are ensuring no one ever has to feel alone when dealing with mental illness.

This year’s badge is especially cool, because Lulu put together a number of different choices.  She posted them on her blog, Sunny With a Chance Of Armageddon, as well as on A Canvas Of The Minds.  The community then got to vote on which image they wanted for 2013.  After a mostly scientific tally (read: I made tally marks in a notebook scientifically), I can reveal to you the Blog For Mental Health 2013 official badge:

Designed by Lulu, selected by the community!

Designed by Lulu, selected by the community!

Here is how this thing works:

1.) Take the pledge by copying and pasting the following into a post featuring “Blog for Mental Health 2013″.

I pledge my commitment to the Blog For Mental Health 2013 Project.  I will blog about mental health topics not only for myself, but for others.  By displaying this badge, I show my pride, dedication, and acceptance for mental health.  I use this to promote mental health education in the struggle to erase stigma.

2.) Link back to the person who pledged you.

Blog For Mental Health 2013 « A Canvas Of The Minds

3.) Write a short biography of your mental health, and what this means to you.

So, I carry diagnoses of Bipolar Disorder I, and also nearly every anxiety disorder in the book (the book being the DSM, the one used for making these diagnoses) — Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Possibly also Impulse Control Disorder.

I kept a lid on things until I was about 25, when a whole series of events led to a complete and total nervous breakdown.  The short version is something along the lines of six years of medications (soooo many medications, like upwards of 70), talk and structured therapies, eventually electroconvulsive therapy — which was the most horrible experience of my life, and left scars I will carry forever.

A lot of you who are reading this probably don’t know all about that.  That’s because something happened at the beginning of March last year, I can’t really explain it, but I became well again.  I became the girl I was at 21, when I could do it all beautifully and flawlessly and joyfully.  I have spent this time healing, and I know that I won’t ever be exactly that same girl; I’m a whole lot wiser, and sometimes much sadder.  I have to take my medications regularly, or things can get pretty rough for me.

But I am happy, oh so happy.  And were you to ask me if I would go through all of that again, six years of Hell (capital H) to get where I am now — 32 years old, living on disability, in my parents’ home — my answer would be a resounding, ”Yes!”, without qualification.  I am more blessed than I ever imagined I could be.  I love and I am loved, and I discovered the wonderful, loving, supportive community of all of you because of my journey.

4.) Pledge five others, and be sure to let them know!

I am pledging five of my fellow bloggers who have stood with me, and have proven their mettle in my eyes as mental health bloggers.

I’m going to put a little twist on this one.

First, as the entirety of Team Canvas was pledged in the original post, I’ll start out with five other bloggers whom I know and respect and who have made lasting contributions to the online mental health community:

Cate, of  Infinite Sadness… or hope?

Mel, of Toby and I together and/or scienerf (I wasn’t sure which to pledge)

Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars

Kevin, of Voices of Glass

Pride in Madness

But I also would like to include five more bloggers, just a sampling of the newer voices I am reading, who may not yet know about this.  So I pledge:

My Mind Matters

2bbritt

How To Fly Over The Cuckoos Nest

Bipolar 2 Dad

AnxiousElephant

If you happen upon this without being pledged, I still pledge you.  Feel free to take the pledge!  Promote awareness!

5.) And, as something novel for 2013, Lulu and I ask one more thing of you.

As you may have noticed, Canvas does not keep an official blogroll, outside of links to our authors’ personal blogs.  For something new and special to introduce Blog For Mental Health 2013, and really build a sense of community — and show everyone how many of us there are, and how strong we are, coming together — we are launching a Blog For Mental Health 2013 Official Blogroll!  So, in addition to linking back to the person who pledged you, please include the link to the original post in your piece.  As this gets passed along, link back or click here and leave a comment containing the link to your pledge, and we will put you on our Blog For Mental Health 2013 Official Blogroll page!  Show the world our strength, show them our solidarity, show them what we are made of.  Take the Blog for Mental Health pledge and proudly display the badge on your blog!

(And yes, I do know that I stuck about 752 links in here.  I figure the more this gets passed around, the more some will get lost, and I want people to be able to find their way back to the original post and page!)

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

It May Not Always Be An Easy Life, But It’s My Life

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And I just want to live while I’m alive.

I think it’s time to update everyone.  I’ve had a very eventful couple of weeks.  To the point where I haven’t told anyone not directly involved in said events anything about them, not really.  It’s taken some processing time.  Also, it’s painful for me to be still long enough to write anything.

So, the new year started off with a bang.  I went to see my infectious disease specialist on the second.  There was good news: I am no longer in the acute stage of mono, I am now in the convalescent stage.  Except that really is only good news on paper, because the convalescent stage can last up to six months.  And having had mono before, I know that it’s pretty much guaranteed to with me.

I felt so miserable (physically) that very day that I went to the urgent care directly as I had finished my appointment, and they pumped me full of two liters of fluid.  I didn’t have to pee once.  I tell you this, because as anyone in the medical field might recognize, it was indicative of my severe dehydration.

The next day I took my two younger sprites down to see the lights at the Denver City and County Building, as I was meant to do the day before, but couldn’t, being hooked up to an IV and all.  This may have been a mistake, as I was in no shape for it (there was much to see, so we got out and they ran around while I trailed behind and hollered for them not to get too far away), but we had a really nice time and I managed to save my meltdown(s) until I came home.

I haven’t melted down like that in a long time.  That night I was like Vesuvius.  Explosions and tears and anger and yelling and frustration. . .  Well it got very ugly.  I was emotionally and physically drained, and had made the mistake of actually looking long-term and realizing that July was when I was probably going to be back to about 85%.

See, that was (and still is) kind of a huge thing for me to deal with, because I pretty much spent three years in bed due to mental illness.  Except for appointments and very rare visits with friends, I lived my life curled up in my sheets.  I couldn’t wrap my head around being forced back into a state like that, even temporarily, and even when I was doing pretty damned good psychologically.

Well, I had a lovely friend, whom I actually reached out to — which is huge in itself — help me through that night.  And for that (among other things) I’ll always be grateful to her.

So I’m dealing with the mono recovery road, but I’m also dealing with sciatica.  I developed mild sciatica about a decade ago, in my left hip and leg, when The Artist formerly known as Babygirl (I can’t call her Babygirl anymore, I’m afraid, she’s 13 and way too grown up) had been riding on my hip for a couple of years.  It went away — I would get a tinge every now and again, but no big deal.

Well, starting last Fall, it came back, and it came hard.  A couple of the times I went to the urgent care for Dilaudid injections, the sciatica was my primary pain.

(Side note:  My primary care doctor and I — the one I was certain there was no hope of salvaging a relationship with — somehow hit the reset button during one of my urgent care visits.  A doctor at another location in the same network that my doctor works in essentially treated me as a crazy drug-seeker, which pissed my doctor off righteously, and I’m wondering if it maybe made him see the way I felt he was treating me [minus the drug-seeker part, he's never treated me badly from that standpoint].  Whatever it was, he and I are now on the best terms once again.  Just goes to show you, there is always hope when a person is a good person.)

It continued to build, and it continued to build, and after seven urgent care trips in two-and-a-half months, and a conversation on the phone with my doctor this past Thursday, I ended up spending Thursday night in the emergency room.  My doctor wanted me somewhere they could do a more thorough workup, instead of just treating the pain, and I was happy to defer to him.

It took two shots of Dilaudid (I don’t think the first one was more than one milligram, I think the second was about twice that), but finally, finally, and for the first time in months, I think, I was out of pain.  I knew that day that I was in a great deal of pain, and waiting in the ER to even get through triage was pretty ugly, but I don’t think I knew how bad the pain really was until I got out of it.

So I saw my primary in the urgent care on Friday, because his office said they couldn’t get me in until the beginning of February (he said other things when I saw him).  I have an MRI set for Monday morning to check for a slipped disk or spinal compression, I’ll be set up for physical therapy contingent on the results of that, I’m taking an oral steroid — if that helps there will be steroid injections to follow — muscle relaxers, and I’ve got my good friends ibuprofen and oxycodone keeping my pain minimal for now.

It took me some time to process all of this, and I’m probably not done — right now I’m just kind of high.  I keep hearing things from people like, “Wow, you just have one thing after another,” or, “It never stops for you, does it?”  And there is truth in those statements.

But, with the exception of The Night Of Vesuvius, I’m alright. Better than alright.  Even that night was just some dealing and processing I had to do to get to here.  My mental health is well intact, praise God, and everything else will fall into place as long as I have that.  After being without it for so many years, I feel like as long as I’ve got it — and all of the support my amazing friends and family show me — I am leading a charmed life.  It may sound cockeyed, but then so have I been cockeyed for pretty much all of my life.  ;)

You may not be hearing from me much, as I have instructions not to sit for long, and when I do rest, the only way that I’m comfortable for any length of time is if I lay down and stick two big pillows beneath my hips.  You try working on a laptop at that angle.

But I’ve been playing on Twitter; if you don’t already know me there, my handle is @BlushingScarlet.  That I can do from my phone, which is easier to stick on my stomach and type with.  I’m going to still do everything I can to be a good admin for A Canvas Of The Minds, which now has so many wonderful authors that they can easily run they site without me (which is good, I may not be writing much there for the present).*  I’m reading posts from my phone, and clicking the “Like” button is my version of “I was here, thank you for giving me something worthwhile to read”, and sometimes I will attempt a comment — though those can get a little too runaway for a phone and a girl like me.

My personal correspondence is going to be a little slower.  And by that I mean even slower than normal.  Same with comment responses.  But just know it isn’t because I’ve forgotten, okay?  I love you all so very much.

I’ll leave you with the pictures I took in the ER while high as a kite on Dilaudid, Prednisone, Valium, and at least one or two other things.  I honestly just remember there were multiple shots and I swallowed a cupful of pills, and those of you who know me well know that for me to have been that willing to put so much blind faith in any doctor, things were pretty bad.  But I had fun trying to take pictures amid the tangle of wires (blood pressure cuff on my left arm, pulse oximeter on my right pinky, oxygen hooked up to my nose, mp3 player headphones in my ears to help zen me out) in my little ER bed.  Thank God the nurse left the sides up, I probably would have fallen out.

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And also, I give you the immortal words of Jon Bon Jovi, from the song Its My Life: “My heart is like an open highway/Like Frankie said, ‘I did it My Way‘”

“Don’t bend, don’t break, baby, don’t back down. . .”

I won’t if you won’t.

Kisses,
Ruby

*Speaking of Canvas, we can now boast of two Freshly Pressed authors! In case you missed it, DeeDee was Pressed in December for her piece Coming Out Bipolar, Round 1, and just this past week Alice was Pressed for her piece Epic Quests and crap like that. Congratulations to them both; they write good shit, and more importantly, they’re good eggs. Now they just have to get something they’ve written for Canvas Pressed!

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Crazy People DO Get Sick, Too

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I should be asleep.  Something woke me up in the middle of the night, in spite of my exhaustion, and since I can’t figure out what specifically it is, we’ll say that it was this.

Yesterday, my dear friend Laura — who is a doctor – published this post, Crazy People Get Sick Too.  I know that links are thrown into posts all of the time, but you really need to go read this one to understand fully what I am about to write.  I am completely in earnest about this.  I have a few little things I can get done while you read it, so please, go ahead.  I will happily wait (though I suggest that you don’t read it while eating, otherwise you should be fine).

Have you read it now?  Truly?  Thank you for that.  I don’t think in the whole year-and-eight-months I have been writing this blog I have ever pushed, really insisted that you read a post, so you have to know that Laura’s post mattered to me a lot.

The part that really grabbed me and started the tears was this:

He firmly emphasized to his small crowd of followers that it was nothing short of criminal to instantly brand every human being who presented to the ER (or anyplace else) with a medication list that included psych drugs, or was delusional, or disoriented, or hallucinating, or even violent, as being a “crank,” and ignoring the possibility that this person might be physically ill, just like anyone else.

That med school professor certainly deserves a “Hell yes!”, but why did it start me crying?

The thing that I don’t want to write, because it makes it too real, the thing I have been avoiding up until now: my own doctor.

Long before anyone knew I was crazy

Long before anyone knew I was crazy

My doctor has been my doctor for more than half of my life.  That’s approximately 17 years, my loves.  I followed him from practice to practice to practice to practice because he really was that good.  He was an ER doc as well, so he was quick on his feet, and saw many things that regular primary care doctors aren’t familiar with.

I really fell for him, though, the first time he uttered those three little words:  ”I don’t know.”  You may or may not have noticed, but doctors don’t ever like to admit that one.  They will do everything possible not to have to cop to not knowing.  My trust in him became complete (relatively speaking) when he told me, “I don’t know, but I know someone who does.”  He always had a wonderful specialist up his sleeve.

Fast forward to now.  Every appointment I’ve made in the past eight months — probably longer, but I was too out of it to notice — I have gotten the same response.  It doesn’t matter what symptoms or complaints I have presented with, he has told me, “If you don’t feel better in a week, call me.”  And for a long time, I let it go at that.  I was frustrated, but I had put more trust in him than I had ever put in any doctor.

Finally, I got to the point that I wouldn’t even go see him.  Recently I was twice into the urgent care, that was where my mononucleosis was diagnosed.  I was miserably sick for more than a month before I made an appointment with my doctor.  Even then I only did it because I already had a diagnosis.

After I had been branded "crazy". Can you spot the difference?

After I had been branded “crazy”. Can you spot the difference?

Of course, at that point, I already knew what his diagnosis of me was: hypochondriasis.

I was crazy, so my word could no longer be taken.  In spite of the fact that in late Spring I told him I thought I was hypothyroid, he said I wasn’t, I insisted on a test, and lo and behold, I was right!  And then in Summer I told him I needed thyroid supplementation, and he told me I didn’t, and once again, I was right.  There are more stories like this, but I think you get my point.

But he was a good man, I believed.  If I just sat down and had a come to Jesus with him, I could break through all his pigeonholing of me and he would realize this wasn’t me being crazy, and that he had been treating me in an unfair way. . .

Well, I’m very sad to tell you that I couldn’t break through.  He is a good man, this I know, but he looks at me, and the word CRAZY emblazoned across my forehead is all that he can see.  He told me that “there are problems with the MonoSpot test”, and that I needed to get up and go out more, get back to kickboxing, when I was having trouble making it up the stairs.  Essentially, I didn’t have mono, I was just depressed.

Okay.  Okay doctor.

Please don’t get angry reading this.  I’m not angry.  I’m sad, and I’m a bit at sea.  I have to figure out how to end this relationship while my doctor and I both still love and respect each other.  Because I do love and respect him, in spite of things.  He’s a good man.  He was just raised in a time and school of thought where once crazy equals always crazy.  It may be hard to understand, but this really isn’t his fault.  It’s one of those things that is no one’s fault.  It just is.

And now I have to look for a new doctor for the first time in about 17 years.  It would have happened soon enough; my doctor is no spring chicken.  But I don’t relish the prospect.

I know, lots of people find new doctors all the time.  I’m lucky I had a good one for so many, many years.  But that’s what makes it even more difficult.  I’m not just changing doctors, I’m ending a relationship.  A relationship of more than a-decade-and-a-half, a relationship that I knew, no matter what else was going on in my life, I could always count on and trust.

You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Ties That Bind Me

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As you read this, please remember that I take all medication under the supervision of a psychiatrist, and also that my drug metabolism is quite unusual, so I often take very high doses of medications that would be extremely unsafe for most people. Don’t ever, ever try this at home.

Two days before I was to embark on my latest trip back to Pittsburgh (Monday, the 15th), I felt myself stricken with anxiety almost immediately after waking up.  I took a Xanax, and I did pretty well running what were meant to be the last of my pre-travel errands.  I went to sleep that night calm: purchases made, laundry done, a whole day left to arrange things in my suitcase.

The following day I woke suddenly at 4:22 in the morning, despite the fact that I had gone to bed at about ten the night before, and my body likes much more than six hours of sleep, especially if I have ingested any benzos.

I couldn’t get back to sleep.  A little while later, I again recognized anxiety and took a Xanax. I went out for a chai, and drove around in the five a.m. darkness for a while, allowing the fresh air from the open windows to soothe me.

Within another hour came another Xanax.  I was wound up like a spring.  I realized I had one or two more errands to run after all, and down the hatch went Xanax number three.

It was at that point I realized I was in the grips of a panic attack so intense that the last one of its caliber had sent me to the Emergency Room for a night.

Sitting in the parking lot in front of the open-air mall I was about to patronize for some odds and ends, I talked on the phone to my shrink.  He could get me in for 15 minutes that afternoon, could I make it?

Could I?  I would have cleared my entire schedule!  As I hung up the phone, I realized what had woken me up in the early hours of the morning had been terror.  I just couldn’t figure out why.  I had general anxiety about the trip — I’m not a nervous flier or anything, these trips just bring with them a special brand of family stress.

Xanax number four was popped in the doctor’s waiting room.  If you want to count along, that’s eight milligrams of Xanax in as many hours.  And not only was I not asleep or in any way goofy, I was so wired that my psychiatrist, who had previously been against giving me any more benzos, was pretty nearly throwing them at me.  I got more clonazepam (Klonopin).  I got more diazepam (Valium).  I got permission — actually it was much more like encouragement — to take the diazepam on top of the mass amounts of alprazolam I had already ingested.  And for the first time in the relatively short ten months we have been seeing each other, I thought, ‘Thank God for this man.’

But even with all of that, do you know what I have spent most of this trip doing?  Arranging my belongings.  And rearranging them.  And taking things apart to reorganize.  It wasn’t until I repacked my carry-on for the eight zillionth time that the light bulb went off in my head.  Hello, OCD, haven’t seen you around for a while!  Haven’t missed you, either.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know it could be so much worse, because in the past it has been so much worse.  I’m soothing myself, while distracting my brain from all of the germs I can feel on every surface of this hotel.

I’m dealing.  I’m coping.  And while it certainly isn’t the most fun way to spend my trip, it’s a very interesting insight into the way my anxiety disorders are linked.

I’m just praying that nothing triggers my PTSD.  Which, given that it’s primarily linked to a fundamental betrayal of trust — and electroconvulsive therapy — I’m thinking it’s unlikely.

I’m praying it’s unlikely.

(Note:  This post was written Sunday, the 21st (four days ago) while I was traveling.  I’ll pre-date it accordingly, but just a heads up that this is not exactly the current state I am in.)


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Any and all permissions set forth here are superseded, and when applicable revoked by this page’s Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Sometimes You Have To Stop With The Commenting. . .

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. . . and just write a damned post of your own, already.  This is something that often keeps my comments on other bloggers’ posts to a minimum, honestly.  A post will get me thinking more and more and I will try to respond in a comment and it will turn into such a long and involved soliloquy that I have to interrupt myself and say, ‘Ruby!  Five hundred words does not a comment make!  Write it up as a damned post, already!’

And so I will.

This post is brought to you by DeeDee, author of Disorderly Chickadee.  She has recently added her fiery and indomitable voice to A Canvas Of The Minds (if you don’t know what that is, then click!), and a question posed in her very first post, Where Do I Begin?, got me all excited to write.  The question in question was, “Where does my condition end, and I begin?”

I have a much more well-defined – yet still extremely nebulous – answer for this one than the majority of people carrying mental illness diagnoses, I suspect.  To the anxiety components, I have mentioned before (y’know, somewhere in the annals of this blog) that I come from a long line of bona fide worriers.  From my great-grandmother, to my grandfather, and on to my mother has passed this trembling torch.  None of them would ever be classed as having an anxiety disorder (I can speak with total certainty about my mother and my grandfather, to be fair I did not know my great-grandmother, but my mom did).  My mother has to take some Valium before flying, but that hardly counts.  At its very worst it would be a mild phobia, specifically pteromerhanophobia (good lord, now there’s a word).

For whatever reason, that torch exploded into an inferno in me.  But that isn’t something I want to focus on here.  I don’t embrace it.  Anxiety, in any form, I am learning to solidly kick the ass of.  Anxiety, even worry is never useful or productive.  Concern is something we should all have, but once it goes beyond that stage – pfft.

Let’s talk about bipolar disorder in the context of where it ends and I begin.

The first thing I will tell you is that I was here first.  BD came later, after I had myself quite well-established, thank you very much.  This is probably what has saved me time and again, by the way.  Having such an incredibly well-defined sense of myself since. . . I don’t know what age.  To hear my mom talk, and to rely on memories and other internal evidence, I was probably born with that.  Yes, I was so fortunate as to grow up in a house with a loving family who encouraged this sensibility in me, but there is something else, something inside of me that would still be there had I grown up otherwise.

In any case, manic-depression was an uninvited guest to the party that is me.

But maybe it thought it was invited.  Maybe it got confused.  Because the other thing that’s highly pertinent is that I have what is informally called “a bipolar-type personality.”  I don’t know how common this is in others who carry this diagnosis (or, for that matter, in those who don’t).  It certainly isn’t often heard of, or if it is, only in the context of confusion and what is me, wait, is this the disorder, I don’t know!  But I know.  And the people who have known me longest know.  And even my darling PCP knows that when I am not in an episode, when I am completely and utterly symptom-free (ahem, now), I am still wild and unpredictable and madly passionate by temperament.  Always have been, always will be.  That’s just Ruby.

Which is not to say I cannot differentiate between symptom and personality trait. Actually, it is meant to say the exact opposite.  I certainly can, and with rare precision.  But having this temperament inherently made it much more difficult for me to do so, and made my disordered ups and downs infinitely easier for me to disguise.

It did something else.  It fractured relationships after I chose to seek treatment.  Not so many, but some very important ones.  It fractured them because people who loved me, people who wanted most desperately and tried so very, very hard to understand it all – through years, exhausting years of me trying to ‘get well’ – simply couldn’t.  Because now, things that I was putting forth as symptoms. . .  Well those aren’t symptoms, they’re just Ruby being Ruby.  She’s always been like that.

When in fact I hadn’t, I had just hidden the transition, the massive tectonic shift inside of me so beautifully, and not sought for help until more than a decade-and-a-half after the fact.

Oh well, right?  It’s no one’s fault.  These people didn’t want to lose me in their lives any more than I wanted to lose them.  It took me a while, but I did come to understand that.

And I wouldn’t choose to be any other way, or to walk any other path than the one I have.

Moral of the story:  ”And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

What A Day For A Daydream. . .

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Alright, alright, alright.  So I love John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful.  I was totally born out of my time, musically (and perhaps in many other respects).  John Sebastian is not only an extremely gifted songwriter, but he has very much rolled with the times and the changing memes of music.  And my parents (who were there) describe him simply as “Mr. Woodstock.”  I believe it.  I can see it.

Today I ended up spending in my own sort of Daydream.  I had what is commonly called “stuff” to do this morning, including an insightful visit with my primary care doctor.  Now he has been my doctor for more than half my life, so he’s seen a lot of shit go down in me.  He’s funny, he doesn’t believe that this time is any different from the brief periods of “stability” or “euthymia” that have happened for me in the past.  Okay.  That’s alright.  I get it.  But his nurse said to me, as she was checking me out after my appointment, “There’s something about you that looks different.”

A million superficial things could be credited.  Wearing my contact lenses instead of my glasses.  Just having had my hair touched up last week.  The way I did my makeup today.  But I choose not to credit them.  I think she saw the sparkle emanating from my eyes.  The one my mom saw when she stopped me in the hall last Sunday night.

Something looks different about me because something is different, within me.

So this afternoon, I figured I would catch up on some emails, comment responses, other blogs, do things for this blog and for Canvas, and on and on (incidentally, check out the awesome new piece of art in my sidebar, courtesy of Tallulah “Lulu” Stark, my very good friend, co-founder of Canvas, and all-around totally inspiring lady).

But it was (and is) such a gorgeous day Where I Live, and I wasn’t going to waste that.  So I slathered on the sunblock – I hope you lovelies have all bought a new bottles for this year, because they pretty much need replacing annually – and took my laptop out onto the back deck, along with some assorted sundries.

Well, apparently I have never played with my laptop outside.  I discovered that I couldn’t read the screen of it with my sunglasses on, and the light was much too intense for my baby blues with my sunglasses off.  I pondered what I should do for about half a second.

“And even if time ain’t really on my side,
It’s one of those days for takin’ a walk outside,
I’m blowin’ the day to take a walk in the sun
And fall on my face on somebody’s new-mowed lawn.”
~ John Sebastian

So what if I didn’t end up walking, but instead reading in the sun for hours without my mind telling me I should be getting stuff done?

Besides, I did enough walking yesterday.  I saw my Sunshine (aged nearly nine) and her sister, my Wild Thing* (aged very much four), and they dragged me walking all over the world!  We walked to the park, played there, then home again for lunch, then we walked to the nearest Starbucks because they wanted Frappuccinos (I know, right?), then home again. . .  I thought it bookended this week beautifully.  Last Sunday with my Babygirl, yesterday with my Sunshine and my Wild Thing.  Now I just have to get them all together at once, and watch the fun that ensues.  :)

So that was my afternoon.  And I’ll get to the rest of everything during moments less sun-filled.

Moral of the story:  Time is always on your side.  You just have to figure out how to spend it.

*You now have all of their names: my Babygirl, my Sunshine, and my Wild Thing.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.