Tag: Stupidity

July 4

I am not going to delve into the irony of celebrating the independence of the United States from England while the country is busily installing our first king ourselves. Anyone likely to be reading this shares the same existential dread I do but that is a different conversation. What I want to talk about today is explosions.

I don’t know if the brain-stem level enthusiasm for blowing things up is uniquely American or something that is just a product of the recklessness of youth but either way, people just don’t let up. Fireworks are, as far as I know, illegal county-wide now but that doesn’t really seem to have discouraged anyone.

The hypocrisy coming off this post is obscuring my screen, so allow me to justify my change of stance. Not just change, I suppose, but polar reversal. I was as mindlessly enthusiastic about blowing stuff up in my youth as anyone and, like most American males, the recklessness of youth lasted well into my 30s. Since then, however, I have had a number of experiences which have led me to change my position. The key experiences, unsurprisingly, were working in an ER, developing a hyperactive startle response1, and owning a dog. As I have aged the risk to my own personal fingers, toes, ears, and nose has diminished considerably of course but one still has a certain sympathy for the people who will spend the rest of their lives, starting tomorrow, unable to count to twenty unassisted. The startle and the dogs continue to be an issue in the household. Having a ninety pound dog trying to hide underneath you because some yabbo in the street set off a firecracker is a unique experience.

I suspect nothing is going to change how my fellow Americans choose to celebrate their rapidly vanishing freedoms so if anyone needs me I will be hiding under the bed with the dogs.

  1. It is possible that these two things are related. ↩︎

Ouch

An important lesson was learned yesterday. Yesterday was my first session of my second round of TMS, which was fine. There was a lot of talk about “dosing” and “intensities” but what it comes down to is, they’re zapping the left side of my brain a little longer this time. I think. I once again reassure both myself and my audience that there is good science behind it. The truth is, though, even the people who do it still don’t know exactly what it does or why it works. But it does.

The difficulty began when I decided I should go out shopping immediately after I got back. The shopping took considerably longer than expected and I ended up being out of the house for 4-5 hours1 which, it turns out, does not work for me. Or at least it didn’t yesterday. I’m not sure exactly what I did in between when we got home and when I went to bed, which was about 8pm, but I slept for almost 12 hours with no significant interruptions.

Okay, I can already hear people saying “WTF did you mean by ‘does not work’, sport?” so I’ll try to provide a little more detail. I have, in the past, described the situation as being like needing to go to the bathroom. You can be walking around and you’ll get that little kick from your bladder that says “start thinking about me”. This, as we all know, is not urgent and you can ignore it. If you ignore it for long enough, there comes a point when you don’t really have a lot of choice in the matter, you have to go. Many2 people will not have allowed things to get to that point, which is good, but you can imagine. So there came a point yesterday when I had to go and I kind of couldn’t. So I pushed through. I didn’t do anything awful or inappropriate3 but I really can’t remember a lot of detail about the rest of the day and it became pretty obvious that I wasn’t thinking clearly at times.

I did get home safe and sound and, as mentioned above, after sleeping for nearly 12 hours I even feel better. I am still much more physically tired than I would have expected but most of my brain is back on line.

Small steps.

  1. Which is not as long as I would have guessed. I’m basing this off when I left the house and semi-cloudy recollection of when we got back and if I had guessed I would have said it was 6-8 hours. ↩︎
  2. I worked in an emergency room for a long time. I know not everyone has lost control of their bladder at some point but the number who have may be higher than you think. ↩︎
  3. Except possibly being very disagreeable company for my wife. I’ll have to ask. ↩︎

Clever Title

November kicked my ass all month and then it kicked it some more. Now we’re in to December and the ass-kickings continue. I was denied disability benefits for the second time. Again, I haven’t seen any indication of why. I assume it would be the same reason I was denied last time, which was The Powers That Be not seeing any reason I couldn’t just go back to work.

This was going to be a much more cheerful post about a couple of times I had managed to talk myself out of having a panic attack but then I found out I was denied benefits and I’ve had all the stuffing knocked out of me again1. This is the beginning of my third year of sitting on my thumbs and I can’t seem to even get started without the carpet being pulled out from underneath me.

I am incredibly lucky that I continue to get support from my family but I shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know what The Powers That Be see that gives them such confidence in my ability to just go back to work but whatever it is, I definitely don’t see it. Or feel it. Its hard to not return to my personal favorite explanation, the “Lazy Piece of Shit Theorem” but I have been assured by many people that doesn’t hold up2. I still have a long list of appeals available to me, and the process continues but I don’t see much reason for optimism3.

Edited to add – A while ago, as part of the disability application process, I finally got all the dates of where and when I worked sorted out. It isn’t really relevant to anything right now but here it is:

February 2013 – Start at Swedish CVICU

July 2019 – Leave Swedish Cherry Hill for staff RN position at Swedish Issaquah

October 2020 – Leave Swedish Issaquah for staff RN position at Overlake

March 2021 – Leave Overlake for staff RN position at Virginia Mason

January 2022 – Leave Virginia Mason for RN Supervisor Swedish Issaquah

March 2022 – Leave Issaquah for UWMC

November 2022 – Last worked

So after spending close to seven years at one job I suddenly changed jobs 4 times in the space of two years. That has to mean something?

  1. Please don’t bother pointing out the significance of small victories like this. I’m aware that this is progress, of a sort, but being able to occasionally self-regulate my emotions (a skill most people learn as small children) pales in comparison to the disaster that is this country’s social safety net. I also realize I’m somehow supposed to remember that failures in one area don’t invalidate successes in another but, again, I have a hard time seeing how having a delicious dinner on the Hindenburg is supposed to make up for being horribly burned to death ten minutes later. Call me cynical. ↩︎
  2. Expert opinion is definitely against me on the Lazy Piece of Shit Theorem but all the evidence I’ve seen is, at best, Grade V (things you believe that I don’t) so I remain unconvinced. ↩︎
  3. I have a great deal of difficulty maintaining any sense of optimism about anything but, as a wise person once told me, that’s depression for you. ↩︎

Bad Brain

(Please note: this post has nothing to do with either the seminal 80’s punk/reggae band or the song by The Ramones from their 1978 album Road to Ruin. If that’s what you’re looking for you can stop here)

Anyone with an internal monologue1 will likely be familiar with this phenomenon. My brain will occasionally go into this mode where everything is broken and nothing can ever be fixed. It exists, in my case, solely to shit all over anything and everything I do. Progress is meaningless because you’re never going to finish, no matter how much you do it isn’t enough because you didn’t do everything, that sort of thing.

Bad brain has been rampant recently and I don’t have much explanation for why. If nothing else, November/December marks the beginning of the third year of me hiding inside playing video games, with no end in sight. That by itself may be enough but who knows? That’s the real frustration for me. There is no way to figure out what is going wrong or why with any certainty. I can construct a coherent narrative to explain my symptoms, but is it correct? no way to tell!

Brains are a waste of time.

  1. Something like 5-10 percent of the population have no internal monologue whatsoever, which blows my mind. How does that even work? ↩︎

It’s a Process?

As I have mentioned, something I’ve been learning, slowly, is I can’t ignore things anymore. I was really good at ignoring things. So good, in fact, I assumed that I was letting things go and moving on instead of continuing to drag all these things behind me. I had another example of this phenomenon over the weekend.

In the interest of providing full context, I am going to confess to something that will likely make more than one of the people reading this make the Look of Disapproval ಠ_ಠ. Due to very typical glitches in The Best Health Care System In The World™, I ran out of eszopiclone (brand name Lunesta) which Dr. Psychiatrist prescribed to help me sleep1. I was out of it for about a week and finally got it filled again on Wednesday or Thursday of last week. Keep in mind, I’ve been chronically sleep deprived for probably 30 years, so I assumed a few days with disrupted sleep was not going to have that much of an impact.

Another item on the list of things I didn’t think would matter was anniversaries. October 0f 2020 was close to the peak of my mental health implosion. The significance of anniversaries for PTSD is something that falls into the “Know vs. Believe” category for me. I have been assured by multiple sources who all know way more about these things than I do that your brain keeps track of these things and they can potentially be quite disruptive. The part of my brain that understands science knows this to be true. The part of my brain that doesn’t really believe there is anything wrong with me in the first place rejects this idea. As has been pointed out in other contexts, science doesn’t really care if you believe it, anniversaries appear to affect me whether my brain wants to admit it or not.

On Saturday, in the midst of these two things both of which I was firmly convinced were not affecting me at all, I took on something of an emotionally charged task. This was a project I had been dreading taking on for some time and had a number of factors, rational or not, that had built it up to something quite intimidating in my mind. It turns out this was probably not a good idea. I was an absolute basket case on Sunday and only started feeling like my brain was functional again Monday afternoon.

What I have learned from this experience is, I really do have to pay attention to my own state before I dive into anything. Not only that, I have to have enough on the ball to say, “I have too much going on, I can’t take on anything else right now”. My previous history has not provided me much experience with doing this.

  1. As an aside, I want to sing the praises of eszopiclone. My relationship with sleep aids is peculiar. Anything I have tried previously has either not worked at all, or worked too well. The last medication Dr. Psychiatrist tried, doxepin, turned me into a zombie for 24 hours on the lowest available dose. When I was working, the solution was to turn to medications to promote wakefulness instead of trying to help me get more sleep. Eszopiclone has been flat-out miraculous. My sleep patterns on this drug have been more normal than they have been, possibly ever. I sleep 6-8 hours, I’m a little dopey in the mornings, and then I’m pretty much a normal human. I have REM sleep every night. It’s astonishing. ↩︎

Clever Title

It turns out Dr. Psychiatrist is very likely correct in that I have found a plateau of stability with my current medication regimen. There are unquestionably still some bumps that need to be smoothed out. I still startle at just about any unexpected noise, although this is better than it was previously. I still have occasional episodes where I see or hear something three or four conceptual jumps from anything hospital related, my brain immediately decides to make those jumps, and settles on “Hey, isn’t this just like [$awful_thing]”? No, it really isn’t like [$awful_thing]. In fact it isn’t connected at all. Thanks for bringing it up though, because now all I can think about is [$awful_thing]. My brain is not particularly helpful a lot of the time. And, of course, I still can’t seem to tolerate being out in public for more than 2-3 hours. On the up side, the first hour or so seems to be getting a bit easier but when it’s time to go, it is still time to go.

Bumps aside, this calming of the inner turmoil has allowed me a bit more clarity than I have perhaps had in the past, which brings me to the point of this particular post1. I am improving, and I continue to improve, but I am not doing it quickly. Also, there really isn’t much I can do to speed up the process. It has been brought to my attention that putting pressure on myself to recover may, in fact, be counter-productive. This is a realization that has been growing for a while now and I am only starting to really grasp what it means.

Among the more obvious sequelae of not being able to hurry recovery is the effect it has on my prospects of returning to work. Previously, as recently as this summer, I had been operating under the assumption that when it came right down to it, and I had used up all the resources that have been made available to me, if I wasn’t ready to go back to work I would sweep everything under the carpet again and just go do it, much like I have in the past when I was feeling run down and burned out. What I have come to realize is, this is how I ended up here in the first place. There is no room under the carpet anymore and I can’t keep trying to sweep stuff under there. Not “can’t” as in “shouldn’t for my mental health”, “can’t” as in “am actually unable to”. I find that I can’t2 ignore things anymore, which may also explain why I jump every time there’s a noise.

I know I have posted about how I never really understood how people who survive disasters could describe themselves as lucky3. If you were lucky, your house wouldn’t have been hit by a tornado. My difficulty was misunderstanding the word. You can have Win The Lottery luck, or you can have I Didn’t Die luck. I bring this up because I am incredibly lucky4 in that I have a great many supportive people in my life. The time will come, sooner rather than later I suspect, when I’m going to have to lean on the people in my life even heavier than I am already.

  1. Penalty; unnecessary alliteration. Five word penalty and repeat the paragraph. ↩︎
  2. See previous discussion on the intended sense of the word “can’t” ↩︎
  3. Nope. Still not going to go back and look up which post it was. It’s back there somewhere. ↩︎
  4. In the I Didn’t Die sense of the word. Again, in the I Won The Lottery sense I wouldn’t be in this position to start with. With as vague as this goddam language is, it’s a wonder anyone can communicate at all. ↩︎

Hey, Isn’t it an Election Year?

Alert readers may have noticed that, unlike previous incarnations of my blogery, news and politics have been absent from all three or four posts I’ve made since the latest resurrection. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, anyone likely to be reading this also, likely, aligns closely with my own political views. “Preaching to the choir” is the applicable phrase here.

Second, as I believe I have mentioned previously, this is a really shitty time in history to have and anxiety disorder1. I have been something of a news junkie in the past but I just can’t handle this election cycle. In the past, not that long ago, worrying that a major-party candidate was going to engineer a coup if they didn’t win would have been the irrational anxiety, now it’s barely newsworthy.

I am aggressively trying to avoid the news. I am going to attempt to withhold comment except to say, if the country makes it through this election more or less unscathed I may have to rethink my opinion on the existence of the divine.

  1. To be fair, I can’t really think of a good time in history to have an anxiety disorder. Maybe April 11, 1954. ↩︎

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.

The benchmark for stupidity

Back in the early 2000s (by which I mean 2000-2001) I worked as a nurse in the emergency department at our local university hospital. Among the injuries we saw on a semi-regular basis were adult men (and it was always men) presenting with a fracture of either the fourth or fifth metacarpal bones (sometimes both) and no other injuries.

what the fourth and fifth metacarpal bones might look like

This particular injury is known as a boxer’s fracture and results from, as one might guess, punching a hard, unyielding surface such as a human skull or, much more frequently, a wall.

In my mind it did not get much dumber than punching a wall. You start off with a bunch of problems, something makes you lose your temper and you punch a wall. Now you have all the same problems you had originally plus a fractured hand (and it was almost always their dominant hand because that’s the one people tend to throw the first punch with) and a bill for an ER visit on top of it.

With that all said, this is how I spent my Thursday evening:

ulnar impaction syndrome is a degenerative joint disease similar to arthritis

I knew what I’d done as soon as I did it, although I did spend a couple of hours trying to pretend I didn’t.

So, as the man said, how did it come to this? The short(-ish) answer is that I am having an increasingly difficult time arguing that the PTSD-like symptoms that I’ve been having aren’t actually real1. The longer answer is that I really can’t point to anything specific. I’d been feeling off since the Tuesday of that week; more irritable, harder time concentrating, more than usual sleep disturbances, etc. and by Thursday afternoon I was moderately dysfunctional. I really can’t remember what I was doing right before. I was upstairs actively falling to pieces and went downstairs to try and get somewhere quiet. I went back to my office and then I was back out in the hall with a fractured hand.

I have to revise my opinion of at least some of the boxer’s fractures that came through the ER. This is, I think, a perfect example of that “toxic masculinity” you hear about these days. Men in America, certainly men around my age, were still acculturated into fairly traditional gender roles, especially when it comes to emotional intelligence. There comes a point where the only way one knows how to express and attempt to manage the intensity of emotions that one is experiencing is through violent rage because men have traditionally been actively discouraged from experiencing negative emotions in any other way.

I hope that others can maybe avoid these self-destructive patterns and learn a lesson from my experience.

And that lesson is: punch something softer than a wall.

1 This is not to say that my brain isn’t trying to tell me this is just an example of how serious I am about sloth and malingering; that I would go so far as to injure myself just so I could better fake mental health issues shows real dedication