I DO RECALL A TIME not too long ago when I posted "X o'clock calm" a few times, meaning a lot calmer than I was a couple of hours ago (when I had been in a manic frenzy). Well I'm not exactly feeling wonderful but I am trying to bring myself up or at least distract myself with nice music. I don't handle depression very well I'm afraid and yes I feel depressed and have done since almost precisely 3:30pm last Monday. That is the time that I crashed down from my high and I've been feeling increasingly bad since then. I recall the time because I was supposed to meet Valium Marilyn down the library at 4 and by the time I got there I felt so dire I couldn't even distract myself with the books. I gave her 14 minutes then disappeared into HMV the record/DVD shop where I bought stuff I didn't even want (Michael Jackson) in a forlorn attempt to cheer myself. Now the cheer has vanished and I don't know what to do, how to handle this crisis, what I'm supposed to be doing next, what I'm doing wrong. I'm doing something wrong else I wouldn't be suffering like this. And I want an explanation off that doctor I don't think he realizes how much he does my head in just listening then saying nothing when everyone around him is saying "bipolar" and I feel in sore need of a word to YELL IN THE FACES OF NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS for judging me, looking down on me, thinking me a fantasist and a liar because maybe THEY manage to shower, wear clean clothes and put themselevs together on methadone but I don't. I get more lost, more fucked up and frankly more ill the longer I take that stuff. I turn up to most meetings looking like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards and people wonder why I don't want to engage in the weirdo group hug! Would you want to hug anyone if you hadn't showered for the best part of a week? Yes I could shower. But it takes me an hour and I've no clean clothes to change into. So I either shower and don't go. Or do go and go dirty. That's the limit of my coping skills and we've gone way past "cannot be bothered" into "it never happens".
I have a desperate desperate problem I have to sort out somehow and I don't even know where to begin. Y'all need to bear in mind I've had troubles with my moods going back arguably to childhood and most certainly since my late teens. I had symptoms of bipolar intermittently from my early 20s though these were originally triggered by antidepressants, so I thought they didn't count. You have to bear in mind the label "manic depressive" while sounding very much more interesting than plain depression also scares the living shit out of me so I decided to hide anything that could possibly be construed as manic from prying doctors until a couple of years ago. By which time I was taken as a deadbeat junkie looking for an excuse to justify my using. Now I get into the mess you all know about. Well, the bits I told you about, and suddenly the doctors are listening. I know doctors and I know human nature and I know when I'm being taken seriously and I'm taken seriously now. Now that I find out if I am actually bipolar I'm not just type one but "severe" with it. Which makes me very bitter, because I asked for help repeatedly and was nodded at and ignored. I told the doctors when I was in the shared care scheme which is a methadone programme for junkies who are doing "really well" (ie ones the ordinary clinic hasn't time for any more) that unless I addressed my long-running problems with moods I wasn't going to make much progress tackling the addiction side of things and got lots of nods and no action whatsoever. THEY are the professionals. It's up to THEM to help ME when I ASK FOR IT. AND I GOT NO HELP WHATSOEVER UNTIL I WAS SO CUCKOO THE WALLS WERE SPEAKING TO ME AND I HAD TO RESTRAIN MYSELF FROM SETTING MY HOUSE ON FIRE AND JUMPING THROUGH AN UPSTAIRS WINDOW. This is the shit I have been trying to deal with. Me going so badly off on one I just don't know what I'm doing any more. You can put whatever interpretation you please as I'm sure you will do. Self-indulgence, hypochondria, whatever. The fact is I was not drug-taking, I wasn't drunk and you get the most watered down version acceptable. I cannot post in full detail, I just can't.
I mean, I realized at one point I had probably been yelling and screaming to myself in my thin-walled room far more frequently than I'd realized. And it suddenly makes sense why my housemates who used to treat me like a junkie but mumble hello now scurry away and hide completely at the first sign of me.
Yes we're back to THIS yet again, because THIS is a whacking great huge unresolved issue that I'm frankly tired of dealing with on my own. I don't know what to do. I feel suicidal or I feel so high I just cannot be bothered with the most basic social niceties. At the extreme I stopped being a human being and had a tiger in my head who ROARED my thoughts for me. I was amping with energy like a nuclear power station (this was a couple of weeks or so ago). And I wondered why people backed away from me in the street!
All this is incredible fun in the high phase but I crashed down and now I'm suffering for it. I'm writing in a lovely clear window of peace, serenity and calm that pragmatism tells me probably won't last. I'm not being negative I'm merely being realistic and if you were like this you'd have to be realistic too. I'm not asking anyone for an answer. I know you can't give one. I see my doctor next Thursday and I only hope I am in a good enough mood to bother leaving my house because I've been so hacked off of late, if I didn't want to go, I just wouldn't. I have been sorely let down by the medical profession when I did all I could to ask for their help. Now that they're willing to give it I really need to do what I have to and just get to appointments in time. But the way things are going I can't get my head round sorting out one set of clean clothes and a clean me by next Thursday. Yeah, it's like that.
This doctor knows exactly what's going on, what drugs I took when, how much, how I felt and when, what happened, how intense it was when and for how long, when x started, when y started happening and when I turned into a living bunch of ZZZZZs. So don't worry on that score. I was so desperate when I saw him last December I could only give unvarnished, unedited truth. I had no idea what he wanted to know or see, so he just saw me. No pretence, no cover-ups, no acting, no "showing what he needs to see". I felt broken, confused, injured and very, very raw. I was in such a mess I had to remind myself to move my arms down when I put them up. My head was rushing but my body was frozen. What I recall most was how shocked he looked at the state of me. Psychiatrists have to be poker-faced for their job, but this one gave himself right away. Nothing I have seen or heard or read, and I did avoid excessive reading about "symptoms" ~ no attention span for one thing ~ but nothing that I did hear did anything to put me at ease. Words like "serious" "severe" and even "lifelong" crop up an awful lot. This pinning it on drugs I gave up months and years ago stuff ... I don't think that's going to wash. This guy seems to think I'm mentally diseased. So apart from trying to cheer myself up with films like Meet the Fockers and mugs of hot chocolate I don't know what else to do.
And I'm leaving it there. Sorry to rant yet again on the same old same old shit. It's just every time I think of what to post it's this issue eating away at me. Originally when y'all said I was thinking too much you probably were assuming I think about what I post all day long, which I don't. But now, because I'm down down down and out, I do think about my failings a lot. And I don't know what the hell to do about them.
Peace and best wishes to y'all. Have a cheery weekend. And if it ain't cheery, may it at least be tolerable.
SEAL: CRAZY
i love this tune
SONIQUE: PUT A SPELL ON YOU
SONIQUE: FEELS SO GOOD
12:33 THIS actually cheered me up: "how did you get diagnosed?" stories....
Skype me baino1610 talk might be cheap but it might help
ReplyDeleteTry to hang in there, Gled. And try to make that next appointment too.
ReplyDeleteJanice~
hi
ReplyDeleteglad u had a bit of peace
this is just a quick hello as i pasted a long one last night under bye bye H as it was around the same time u wrote yur next one.
i knw this is irrelevant to you as u were using the baby thing to describe how u felt, but to me its not.
THEY DONT DO THIS TO BABIES!
that will break any mothers heart to read that
it breaks mine to think/admit i gave birth to an opiate addicted baby.
i was on gear & methadone and breast fed (their suggestion)
to wean her off.
yes i know being pregnant should be enough to stop anyone using . . .
but unfortunately its not.
i read in great detail re the effects and consulted consultants
(yes instead of just stopping)
yes she needed the milk
and i weaned her over 18 months.
other girls on the ward who could/would not breast feed were advised to swaddle the baby tight in blankets(warmth and stops the jitters)and hold them constantly.
most mums (of normal babies) were home the next day. we were kept 3/5 days till they settled. the nes that were not breast fed did settle after 3/5 days.
in the very worse cases, extreme iv use crack/smack they were taken to hdu to be monitored but the only one i saw like that, the mother upped and left anyway.
(money 2 go & make)
it is heartbreaking truly agonizing
and yes the guilt is horrendous.
and will be even more if what u say is right about them growing up to like H.
Please God NO
try and keep hold of that peace
its God-given. Thank him and ask 4 more (please)
x
ps worst case in hdu (high dependancy unit) r given oramorph
ReplyDelete(oral mrphine) in tiny doses. babies are also given this after major surgery, but they dont necessarily grow up to be smack heads. soz to go on it just hit a nerve. (and u know how that feels);-)
catch ya later
x
gleds, you talk so much sense about getting said mood disorder under control before you can sort the addiction, it's not much help to you but its defo the stance i take in my work in mental health but i know a lot of docs and other workers dont.
ReplyDeletewhat does naomi the dd lady say, hopefully she agrees?
Sorry this is coming out in the wrong order but I want to answer Buggalugz first bc it's about babies.
ReplyDeleteThis thing wasn't something I was 1st hand it was on tv and the mother was cooing at this detoxing baby "it's ok it'll be gone on a week" and i thought "why didn't you fucking do it then you bitch" i was an addict at the time and i'd done cold turkey for a week so i knew what it involved. but i also knew she would have lost that baby
i have a friend with 3 kids and at least 2 were born when she had a massive habit i think her middle kid, youngest boy had a 3g a day iv habit, she was dealing and i believe she really was using 3g a day; i've gone past 2g when i had money (i mean every day for weeks on end) so i can easily believe she did 3g, it just cuts me up to think what this did
but he's ok and all her kids are ok and i don't think they'll go to drugs that was just me being negative
this woman is one of my best friends and i never thought worse of her for being an addict and getting pregnant she's v fertile and it just happens its natural people talk these days as if babies are something you order from a takeaway they do "just happen" if you have sex, i mean come on! please don't get too upset i don't mean anything by it, really i only brought that up as a metaphor because it spoke volumes the way this kid on tv was grasping thin air, like it knew it needed something but didn't know what that was what was horrible
i assumed they gave morphine iv bc you only give babies milk at that age and they're intubated and iv'd up already and it cuts a lot of crap to just bang them up, that's what i'd want for my kid. if they dared give it methadone id go nuts but if i had a heroin addicted child id want it to get morphined up as much as possible to suffer as little as possible and it's over in 2 weeks or whatever sorry am i going on
how can i possibly think any less of you for having kids? it's just an issue people don't talk about, for obvious reasons
sorry i honestly didn't mean to stir up a load of shit, i hope you're ok
Baino: I don't even know how to use Skype but i put your number in my black book which has my appts in it. I wouldn't worry too much my mood varies like a wavy line problem is it's always "low" why can't it go up again?
ReplyDeleteI don't think I get anything like as low as I go high, at least not 99% of the time. If I did go that low I'd be utterly catatonic!
i'll try emailing you but i have endless problems with it, i sign in and the stupid thing does nothing for hours
Janice: I have to go to that dr. then he can see me all yummy and depressed and see that I am what I said. Not that he hasn't read that. I messed myself up a LOT by taking heroin which masked problems i said i had then i presented as far too animated so i must have looked like i was exaggerating.
Lizzy: they were fucking useless just nodding one of those women looked at me like a space alien when i said i'd googled unipolar and bipolar depression and matched the bipolar type... weeks later i realized the FUCKING IDIOT assumed i meant mania/depression contrasted with depression when i clearly said i looked at 2 lists of depression symptoms and presentations and i happen to match the typically bipolar presentation of depression with oversleeping, low anxiety blah blah blah i still don't have a diagnosis even Naomi thought i had one but i don't and it's starting to drive me round the twist i can't even do self help can't do anything can't use whatever word it is can't help myself can't tell another person am stuck in useless noman's land everybody knows what it is nobody says except off the record. unless it's drug-induced it has to be bipolar or bipolar + something else there's just no way i can see i can match nearly every diagnostic criterion on both phases the only reason i don't match some is bc i'm too fucked up to get out my own front door when ultra manic it's a job getting me keys and phone together let alone money or anything else i can't hold court in pubs because i can't use a shower (or i just don't) if he can't diagnose he can surely give an "it looks like" which is all you get in psychiatry anyway as i say i just want a word to yell at those fucking NA wankers. very well meaning but no we're NOT all in the same boat that has become more and more and more plain to me i just look at how they live and how they cope however miserable they are they cope ok i just couldn't do what they do crime wise or crack wise i'm just hacked off with the whole fucking thing, i don't really want to change off methadone because morphine will just blockade the moods then i'll still have to come off it so may as well face the shit now, anyway i might be depressed but it's nowhere near as low as the high is high, that went right to the top, albeit briefly, so i'm glad
sorry to go on