Positive and Negative Symptoms

IS IT BAD for my cactus to live by the window?

I wanted him to get early morning dew ~ the condensation from the window. But won't this give the poor swine frostbite? The poor thing is recovering slowly from his spikey false flower wounds.

He has scabbing around the dots at the top of his trunks where the "floral toothpicks" skewered cruelly in. I have the tiny trotterdonkey fake flowers on my Boogie Nights DVD. The staves are covered in dried dark green cactus-scabbing-juice where hte evil florists pricked them nastily in. I have named the Cactus Kenny.

As we speak, Kenny is still on Donkey Ward in the Cactus Hospital. When he gets better he will be transferred to Horse prior to discharge. If he gets worse and the withered top banana spreads to other bananas causing a Withering Disease, he will get emergency therapy on Ass Ward. When he does make a full recovery he's still due to come in for outpatients appointments at Clopper House, our state of the art Cactus and Succulent Aftercare Building.

Because I am a schizoaffective schizophrenic I have a follow-up appointment on Thursday to be queried and probed to see how mad I am. Dr McGuinness, the Psychiatrist who tells me not to drink (wah wah!) has passed me along to a home help team thing where I get tested to see how schizo I am. Plus how affective.

My affect has actually gone to normal. I know they probably all think I'm hypomanic when in fact I'm NORMAL but that's the thing about psychiatry ~ there is no "normal". I'm secretly hoping to go a bit hypomanic because an "attack" of hypomania feels "like free coke" ~ of the sparkly variety (sparkly and white not sparkling and black!!) Did you iknow btw, that individuals in the 3rd world think Coca Cola's ickky because it's fizzy and BLACK as you'd think no "natural" drink would be... This is actually counterintuitive as Coke's formulation has barely changed in over 100 years and its ingredients are indeed 100% natural!

Anyway I'm quite OK today and very glad of it.

The mood has gone UP to normal.

I perused some fascinating books earlier in the public library, including one by a woman who was a GP who got so depressed she actually had to go for psychosurgery, which is the modern-day counterpart (involving a tiny tiny degree of actual surgery, compared to the old technique, which basically involved shearing the brain in half) ~~ to lobotomy.

I once saw a TV documentary on modern-day psychosurgery which is only performed on sufferers of treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Which fascainted me, because after I got depressed in childhood, the symptoms faded into OCD.

Two bipolar sufferers who had been stuck in depression for over a decade apiece ~ and a lady who couldn't stop counting backwards, she had OCD so badly... all three had precisely the same brain operation. And in all three cases precisely the same area of brain tissue was lasered.

They had this operation and every one of them got better. One of the bipolars had to come back for more, but he was fine afterwards and back doing his art. Brain operations for depression. How amazing is that!

*******

4pm and I've just finished a sinkfull of clothes washing. I am fully into keeping clothes clean myself.

Deshane, my care coordination type person says I have low self-care. That's why he wants me moving into a mental health house.

It makes me feel weird knowing people ~ Professionals ~ sit about talking about me as having mental health problems. What I had called Plain Old Laziness is what Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Drugs and Mental Health Lady calls "negative symptoms".

Negative Symptoms are what you do get in schizoaffective and don't get in bipolar (despite the name).

Negative Symptoms means you keep yourself to yourself, avoiding others; it means you feel flat, even when not clinically depressed; and that you just cannot get yourself together. Naomi says it's this that keeps me "ill" even when I feel relatively fine. And no medication can treat it. The positive symptoms of Hearing Voices, rapid mood swings and paranoia have mostly gone. I did get some really weird abstract thoughts in my head in a bush this morning (where I was going for a wee). Most of the Positive Symptoms have been banished by risperidone, but the Negative ones remain...

... So that's what I'm fighting against. Even when not depressed I have these things that are symptoms but they don't "feel" like them. They are called Negative or Deficit Symptoms because they mean something isn't there that should be there, as opposed to a Positive Symptom like a delusion or a hallucination, which is something that is there that "shouldn't be". So I'm fighting against this feeling of apathy which is a part of this illness. I don't know whether I'll actually beat it, but I'm trying.

Well I have to go now. I jotted most of this in my notebook earlier, so I hope my half hour is long enough to clatter it into the "system".

Kenny the Cactus passes on his finest regards to you all ...

(Can anybody tell me what species of Banana Cactus he might be ..?)

SEE YERS ALL LATER! :-)

The Fake Flowers Scandal

I PULLED ALL THE FLOWERS out of my cactus last night (it is a cactus not a succulent; it has carefully hidden spines...)... and found every little scarlet flower was on the end of a scarlet toothpick! It was my family who told me this might be the case, so I yanked at one and a one-inch wooden stave came out after it. So my poor cactus is in cactus-hospital with inch-deep wounds where these fake flowers used to be!

I found one that looks something like mine, but mine has more banana-shaped "leaves" and the trunks they grow out of aren't tiny stems like this one, but great tubby trunks with white furry patches where the bananas have rubbed against the plants in adjoining pots and fallen out...

The bananas are pointier and less bulbous than these, but they also turn red (though less strikingly so) at the end.

DOES ANYBODY KNOW THE NAME OF MY CACTUS?

And will it ever get flowers? And what do they look like. Please tell me they're not scarlet ones that come on giant toothpicks!

Succulent

I BOUGHT A RED-FLOWERING (green coloured) succulent today. It looks beautiful, with things that look like green bananas growing out of tubby tree trunks and the tiniest round red flowers popping out the top.

I've looked for a photo of one like it but can't find one.

I spoke to my Mum because it's mothers' day (and I didn't even know till it was too late to send a card). I think she was afraid of me moving into a care home because she thought it was a cop out. Or more to the point that I would find it hard to adapt to. (I actually found moving into a "normal" home hard to adapt to, believe it or not. That was four or five or more years ago and I'm doing no better now than when I moved in...)

She says sending cards is "just a waste of money". She always says that. I would have given her the plant if I'd seen her. She says she has Killer Fingers (or a killer thumb, to you Americans) that is the opposite of green fingers or a green thumb. She kills houseplants dead. I always preferred buying plants that were growing, it seems a shame to buy cut when you can buy a growing houseplant. Which is where I thought this "cactus" as the florists called it, would come in. I only hope I don't kill it now. I watered it for about a second under the running tap and was going to repeat that once weekly. Surely that won't be too much..?

OK I'm off now, I'm going to try and hunt for a picture that matches it but if I don't find one I hope y'all are having a nice weekend!

Monday: Still Around!

SORRY I'VE NOT BEEN BY ALL WEEKEND... financial logistics prevented me from topping up my internet account and so I could not get on to change anything which is why you've been lumbered with Barbra Streisand's The Way We Were up top for three days ... I do apologize. Though I was surprised how many of you liked it. Streisand reminds me of more innocent times, before drugs. But a lot of people I know do not like her music. But hasn't she got an amazing voice??? Did you see how mesmerized the crowd were by The Way We Were? Wow. Not a lot of performers have that ability.

Today's musical choice is by Don McLean: The Grave.
And the entertainment clip: Barbra Streisand on What's My Line 1965 (American TV) - "321 views a/o 13/8/7: 13:53".

I've not been up to particularly much over the weekend except excessive sleeping. Felt too ill yesterday, upon waking at 4pm, to go over to Mother Hubbs's for Sunday lunch, so I just stayed in and had chili'd up scrambled egg on toast ...

My goldfish bowl plant selection has been dying, I've just found out of lack of water combined with excessive heat. Even when I water the earth every few days, I come back and it's so dry as a bone even that succulent I had has lost most of its seedless grape shaped leaves and to of the five stalks have badly wilted ... So everything's removed, repotted in cut-off (plastic) lemonade bottles (holes in the bottom to replicate plant pots) ... my flowers, which all died, now have little green buds; the ivy, some of which totally carked it, has partly revived (well one of the two trailers has ...) but the succulent looks ill still and I'm after a new lemonade bottle to cut off for that... Wasn't till I put my hand in the now almost empty glass sphere and felt how very intensely hot it gets in there ... I think I was right to have decided right from the start to reserve it as a cactus plantation ...

I will let you know how all my replanting jazz goes ... Sorry this isn't much of a post: I just wanted to change my daily vids to something else and tell yous all I was living, breathing and quite OK. Spoke to my Dad last night. Some kind of future must be on track for me, but only I can do that ...

Righto, till laters ...

Gleds

Plants and the Clinic. Amy Winehouse Basket.

AT THE DRUGS CLINIC. I went there first thing as missed my appointment the other day. She did at least say to me "I know you would have come on time if you'd remembered," which is quite something. Lots of people just can't be bothered to turn up. Also it can be quite a strain if you don't feel like talking because the appointments can go on for over half an hour.

Well my instant CD collection has finished (for now). I just innocently went into Sainsbury's for pasta when Amy Winehouse accosted me from the shelves (not the spirits aisle either!!) and jumped into my basket. Well it was "only £4.97" for "Frank" ... wow that was her first CD and she has some style! Thankfully it does not encompass that song "rehab" ... which would wind me up hearing that word ...

All that remains on my mental shopping list is:
Frank Sinatra
Bing Crosby
Ella Fitzgerald ...
... that type of thing.

I keep watching that Say Say Say video ... it tells an old-fashioned story. I like videos like that (another one would be Madonna's Papa Don't Preach). You don't get too many vids like that these days. Just the star dressed and made up in thee or four different styles in three or four locations, a nonsensically surreal "plot" if you can call it that and the three or four totally ill-matched performances spliced together as if the whole combo "means" something ...

What else? Not much.
Oh!
The drugs people have leaflets all over the place warning that there is indeed barbiturated "gear" doing the rounds. Which would certainly explain my very extreme hypersomnia those days ago ...

... also I forgot to say what I did there. We are coming up with a plan to improve my life.
It involves repotting my plants: the ivy withered thru lack of watering: whereas it's bunged in (in a glass sideways goldfish bowl type thing) with a succulent and ... sorry I can't remember the exact name of the flowers but Ruth identified them. Big dark serrated-looking leaves; tiny pinky-white budlike flowers (I mean even when they're open they're reminiscent of buds) ... the succulent will stay in with a new cactusery in there, the plants will come out ...
... it just so happened I was looking my filthiest because I was on my way to pick up clean clothes and a towel which must have looked really bad ...
... so as well as repotting plants and putting diddy things like them around and CD players and music, trying to make the hovel I lived in (admittedly it was a hovel partly of my own making I accept that) but I'm trying to turn it into a normal home now. If I can do that I can become drug free, she says. (OK not like a celestial magic wand will be waved. She means if I can do that I can start to work towards the other. And by drug-free I mean methadone free not just illicit drug free.
Which is good news!
Wahey!!

***

PS: isn't Linda McCartney lovely..? Poor Paul marrying that strident cow who seemed nice at the beginning now they're barricaded behind bulwarks of newspapers flinging false legs and old copies of Pipes of Peace at one another ... nasty business

Apple-Shaped Terranium

I JUST BOUGHT AN APPLE-SHAPED "TERRANIUM" FULL OF PLANTS. Because I had £10 and didn't want to spend it on drugs... It cost £9.99 from Sainsbury's Homebase and was the last one left. I did look desperately about for a more picturesque one. Mine was last actually for a good reason: because the plants are overgrowing it. I have no idea what the plants are or what I'm to do with them re watering. There's one pale green coloured succulent and some ivy (ok I do know what 2 of them are). But the one at the back that really is overgrowing I've no idea... actually what am I saying: it looks quite a lot like the thing I bought my Mum for mothers' day. Big serrated dark green leaves. Little pink and white budlike flowers. (They still look budlike even though they've opened.) This one is very soon going to have to be excavated out. Then I might turn this drop-shaped or apple-shaped (it's a blown glass droplet with top stem and side hole; all one piece) thing into a cactus-ery. Ruth: do you know what I'm meant to do with it? They've sprinkled "decorative" orange woodshavings upon the topsoil which is going to make it mighty hard to take out the back plant and still make it look the same. But hey the orange stuff looks pretty tacky anyhow. Maybe I will just mix it in the soil. (Or is that bad?) Ruth is a flowering expert. Ruth do you know what to do..??? Tell you what, it would look lovely with Chinese Mousey pottering about inside. One day, when I get my digital camera working again (needs fresh battery charger) I shall instigate Chinese Mouse photo shoot inside glass planted-up teardrop. And if any photos turn out OK I promise I shall learn how to and post one (or more) up.

I only went in the bleedin' Homebase bc I was so bloody depressed and didn't know what to do... it is a "gloriously" hot day but oppressive and very sunny and blueskied. And police sirens still wailing as I speak. And trucks trundling past. Does anyone know that Stephen King story Children of the Corn? He sums up so mightily the feeling of being lost in the hush wind blowing rushes-like endless sunshining lost and strangely sinister seas of the corn ... I used to have a whole volume of his short stories that I only read when I was feeling (drug) "sick" ... Now I've managed to lose the lot, which is a shame. As although King is blabbery I do have the attention span most of the time for his stories ... (My attention span was genetically modified from a Scottish highland gnat's. Maybe Gnat King Coal's. Or something.)

Which reminds me talking of bizarre things I am (re)reading Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason which is the Queen of Chicklit. Most chicklit (at least the bits that fell open on my perusal at Waterstone's) seems to be about bra sizes and premenstrual inconvenience. At least Bridget Jones is genuinely witty. I like the Renee Zellwegger film version when Colin Firth discovers her diaries compromising revelations open to the world... she sees what he must have read. Swears. Scurries to put on shoes. Runs after him into the snow (this was computer-enhanced digisnow btw)... returns distrought to flat feeling Colin Firth gone forever... only for him to return saying "I noticed your book was full so I've bought you a new one" (probably from Smythson's of Bond Street.)

Right I am about to venture back into the bright sunshiny day to plonk new "vase" home.

Second song of the day yesterday was meant to have been The Verve: Drugs Don't Work, but couldn't get crosslink up (delay between posting and it appearing in blogue) on time.