Month: July 2024

Another Clever Title

I never quite know what to do with myself when I’m like this. I know retreating from the world and everything in it is probably not the healthiest option right now but it’s kind of all I want to do.

I believe I mentioned previously, Dr. Psychiatrist is adjusting meds again which always seems to make me a bit unsteady no matter what is being adjusted, or by how much. In this particular instance I switched from just bupropion to a relatively new combo drug approved in 2022 that adds, of all things, dextromethorphan. The theory is the addition of DM will improve my anxiety symptoms. If I don’t have any terrible side effects, I’ll be increasing the dose of DM in a couple weeks.

Whatever the DM is supposed to do I wish it would get on with it. I’m certain I’m not terribly pleasant to be around when I’m this symptomatic and, as I mentioned above, I have increased difficulty doing anything other than sitting and moping.

I hope people will bear with me until I’m tolerable to be around again. Fingers crossed it won’t take too long.

Clever Title

Lead in paragraph that is long enough to make the drop cap work. I don’t care what anyone says, I like drop caps.

the difficult is, you see, days and months can go by when nothing changes. I could post endless variations of “I woke up, ate breakfast, then sat around the house doing nothing until it was time for bed again” but I don’t think that’s what my audience wants.

So I am forcing myself to write about something. This week has not been great. The symptom du jour is anhedonia which has meant I haven’t really wanted to talk to anyone about anything, ever. So of course this was the week I had three people reach out wanting to chat. Which I would love to do, if my brain could figure out how to break out of this funk.

I was going to write in a bit more detail about how the funk is hitting me this time but instead, I’m going to bed.

This Was Going to be a Different Post

I started out intending this to be about all the outlandish assumptions my brain tries to function under. Instead, its going to be about how difficult it is for me to accept help, or even praise.

First, it has come to my attention there were a few people unaware of the existence of this blog until now. For anyone in that class, I apologize. It was not a deliberate oversight, when I started this thing I thought I had mentioned it to anyone who might be interested. I was apparently wrong. Not in that the people who I missed weren’t going to be interested, I just missed some people somehow. Anyway, welcome to whatever this is.

Back to the actual topic of this post.

It is very difficult for me to accept help, or praise.

Thank you for your attention.

Edited to add: It has been longer since I looked at this blog than it has been for many of the people reading this so, out of morbid curiosity, I went back to start reading some of the older posts. I can’t do it. I started reading them and was okay until I started hitting posts about covid. Looking those over was not a good idea. Lesson learned

Edited further to add: The thing is, I’m kind of interested to go through those posts because I really don’t remember much detail at all between about March of 2020 and sometime in 2023.

Somewhat More Verbose

Among the happenings over the last year was being denied social security disability benefits. In spite of opinions to the contrary provided by my actual care providers, SSDI felt there was no reason I couldn’t “adapt to other work”. The nature of the “other work” was not specified.

I had tried, over the preceding 16 months or so, to not count on getting disability benefits. I knew it was a long shot, at least the first time around, but I also didn’t have a long-term Plan B. This has not contributed anything to my peace of mind.

The Plan B I was pretending I had, and which I don’t think was really fooling anyone, involved me sucking it up and going back to work. What with my preexisting doubt there is anything really wrong with me in the first place (well documented in previous posts) and social security insisting I could adjust to other work, I tried hard to resign myself to the idea of returning to hospital nursing. Several incidents of greater or lesser significance over the last few months have persuaded me this isn’t realistic, in spite of any protestations I might make to the contrary.

As one might infer from the numbers in the previous post, I remain symptomatic. I still don’t know what to do with myself when panic-brain takes over, which happens much too frequently in spite of everything. Dr. Psychiatrist is still experimenting, trying to find some combination of meds to make me a bit more functional. which is a process I am trying to not get discouraged about as well.

Am I better than I was this time last year? Probably? But certainly not better enough.

Hi Andrew

If anyone is likely to have some sort of RSS or whatever the latest subscription/reader/feed application is on this site, its you. So hi.

My MHP (mental health professional, for those not in the know) suggested I should share more information with the people around me. I have been assured this will be therapeutic for me and appreciated by the people around me. I remain unconvinced on either point, fortunately the chances of anyone actually reading this are negligible so off we go.

Very little has changed since the last post, made over a year ago. Read that one and make of the situation what you will.