Therapy

Sorry, I have no intention of continually harping on about my various health problems, but I was thinking about this, and wanted to log it here.

Going through therapy was, quite frankly, the hardest and most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life.  There was one session out of sixteen where I didn’t cry at all. The vast majority of them had me in a sobbing, wasted heap on the floor.  But the procedure, in my case, was absolutely worth it.

Here is a random analogy. You're standing by the side of a fast running torrent of water. The side you're on is stormy and thorny and full of danger and things jumping out at you to attack you. You're terrified the entire time. The other side is lush green meadows. You must to get to that meadow, but to get there, you have to go through the water. 

That water looks scary. It looks dark and murky. It looks like it might kill you. You feel like there’s no way of getting through it without drowning and being swept away. 

However, there are some things that look like they might help you over, rocks and branches and shallow spots. On the other hand, there are also terrifying waterfalls and deep holes and tangling weeds.  Your only guide is a person who has a wealth of knowledge about crossing this river.  They can hear you, but they can’t see you or what's in the river. The only way to get across is to share with the guide what you can see.

So you have to say, "Right now, weeds to my left, a rock in front of me and a whirlpool to my right. Should I try the rock?" The therapist can then say, "is the rock green?" and you can say "Yes."  The therapist might say, "Avoid the rock, in my experience that rock will be too slippery for you to hold on to. Try the weeds, they look like they'll tangle you, but I know they're strong and will take your weight."

It's terrifying. It takes a massive leap of faith, it can be shockingly painful to be in that water, but you have to get to the other side.

It might be that you take the weeds and they give way and you're clinging to the rock anyway.

It might be that you panic and say, “No, I can’t try the weeds! It’s too scary, let me try the rock! The rock! I need to try the rock!” and they might say “OK, try the rock, lets see how that goes and you might try the rock but slip and end up clinging to the weeds anyway.

But the key thing is, you have to communicate that to the therapist so they can absorb this, and work out how to get you along the next couple of meters, and then a bit further, and a bit further until you get to the other side.

It can be a really beneficial relationship. It can really help you to get to the other side, but the therapist has to know all that you can see to make it work.

I was quite lucky. Largely do to the medication that I was on, I was in a position where I was well enough to know there was no way round it so I just plunged into the water. It was hideous, but having taken that initial leap, I was already wet so there was nothing left to lose. Because I'm human, I was in the river shivering and suddenly realised I had no clue what I was seeing, and I wasn't entirely sure what the guide needed to know. Consequently, I failed to tell my therapist about several key things, and I fixated on something else, so I spent longer in the water than I might have done otherwise, but as he said when I was out and dry ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it, sometimes these things are harder to see when you’re in the water.’

There was one slimy weed he wanted me to conquer and though we went through it over and over with me just barely hanging on I couldn’t understand why he made me do that. Until I was out and dry in the meadow and six months on I had a moment of ‘Oh! That’s why that was important! Doh!’

But I got out. 

It is possible to get across and get out.

Drabbles

OK, back to more regular service. Well, as regular as this blog has managed to be as yet, but it's still early days in the blogosphere.

My current favourite thing in the world is writing drabbles (disclaimer about obviously prefering my children and James etc.).

Drabbles are 100 word short stories usually based around a single word or phrase prompt. If you go into rules and stuff with 'writing for fun', they have to be exactly 100 words, so it's a real thinking exercise in some cases. It also matches my attention span at the moment.  Currently, mine are all here...

Rapid Eye Movement

And they of course are based on the Sherlock characters.

But I was thinking, should I bring some across here, out of the Sherlock fandom, to develop my own original characters? It might be interesting.

Just thinking at the moment, nothing more.

I am struggling.

It's not a big deal, really. I'm not sure that anything can be done about it apart from to sit it out, but this is a space where I kind of want to put things as honestly as I can.

The situation is this: I feel ill.

This is fine, sometimes people feel ill. They either take something for it and get better, or sit it out and get better. The thing that I'm struggling with is that I don't know why I feel ill and my brain is itching and rebelling at the not knowing.

This, again, taps into the mental health problems that I have. I've had them for a long while, I have them now, and I have no reason to believe that I'll ever stop having them. Sometimes I feel extremely resentful about this. Sometimes I curse the world and myself for making me this way. Actually, at the moment, I'm finding it a frustration and nothing more. It's a frustration, because I honestly can't tell whether it's clouding my judgement on the feeling ill or not.

Here's the situation. I'm having sudden feelings of 'illness'. The symptoms are nausea, extreme light-headedness, heart racing, shivering, feeling cold in my extremities even on ragingly hot days, extreme tiredness (of the kind where if I just blink for too long I'll be asleep). Now, none of these symptoms are anything to write home about. I've had them all together, fairly often over the past five years. We've checked thyroid, iron levels, pituitary gland, and I know for sure that there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. The most reasonable explanation is that I'm having sudden drops in blood pressure, probably due to panic and as a side effect of the medication I'm on.

All well and good.

So this is what I'm struggling with at the moment. I've just been ill. You may have heard me whining about it here and elsewhere. I've been told to expect a long convalescence period, and to not to expect to feel normal for several months. The thing is, 'normal' for me includes all the symptoms listed above. Those symptoms could also fit into a number of other illnesses including the post-pneumonia thing. My imagination is annoyingly active and at the drop of a hat, it will happily start diagnosing me with the black death or the ebola virus or some other such nonsense.

So at the moment, my life keeps falling into the following cycle:

1. I feel ill, perhaps breathlessness or dizziness as you would expect following pneumonia.
2. I notice that I'm feeling slightly ill, and this will spark a full on panic attack, with the symptoms that I've listed.
3. I don't notice that I'm panicking, just that I'm feeling really unwell and I need to lie down and abandon my family so I don't vomit on them or faint in front of them.
4. While I'm on my own, lying down, feeling ill, I start to think 'Oo, these are bad symptoms, what if there's something really wrong with me, like the plague, or the ebola virus or some other such nonsense?
5. This leads to; wow will I tell my children that I'm going to die? I need to ask James if I've got the right level of life insurance. What's the most appropriate way to tell people? Well, I'd better wait until my test results come back before telling anyone anything. (I don't know what test results I think I'm waiting for, but I start assuming a long stretch of medical intervention and start planning what happens and when.) I want to see my children grow up. I can't not see them grow up. Shit, if I die before the next season of Sherlock, I'm going to be extremely pissed off!
6. I start imagining my death, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. Not even for Sherlock.

Now, reading this, I'm guessing people would think 'she's such a hypochondriac!' or 'What a loon!' or 'What an attention seeker!' and yes, I am all of those things. They all happen to be symptoms of the Depression that we all know about and I'm being treated for. And unfortunately, knowing that doesn't make the feelings and the thoughts any easier to deal with. (Apart from the Sherlock one, I can quite quickly decide that I'll definitely get to see that come Hell or high-water.)

In the meantime, I'll be lying in bed, often in tears, watching the ceiling spin and terrified to move. This will go on until I venture downstairs and cry at my husband.

Now, I'm not totally sure where I'm going with this, other than simply knowing that telling someone, or blogging about the fact that I'm being panicky and weird helps me remember that all of this is simply a symptom of the Depression, and not the plague, the ebola virus or some other such nonsense. It's a panic attack, and they're slightly worse and slightly more frequent simply because I'm run down as anyone would expect to be following an illness.

I don't do much activity, but what I do do is generally focussed around staying mentally well, so walking places, particularly with the kids, going to work (which I complain about but I see people and I know I'm good at it), and the writing in the evenings, they all play a part in keeping my mind balanced so that I don't fall into these panic cycles. Unfortunately, all of these things have been curtailed slightly recently, so again, I'd expect my mind to start running off at the moment. So on that level, feeling like this now is actually normal and expected.

But like I say, knowing that doesn't make it easier to snap out of it. Or I can snap out of it, my my addled mind just jumps onto the next problem it decides to make up. It's almost as if, I know I feel the physical symptoms of panic and worry, so my mind has to make something up to fit those feelings onto.

It's hard to find something else to think about, because my attention span is extremely short at the moment. Even the writing, which I love to do, fizzles out after the first hundred words or so. I drift off from films and even TV shows that I've been looking forward to (brain to addled to understand Doctor Who, for crying out loud), I can't think well enough to play computer games. I'm just stuck in a panic rut without the energy I need to scramble up the side.

What has helped is the enormous amount of support I've been getting from all corners. I've been checked up on and monitored and advised regularly, Sis has taken the kids off me several times so I can calm down about how exhausted James is getting and sleep without feeling guilty, and James is doing everything that needs doing and letting me sleep or just ignore him as often as I need. Work have been brilliant about not pressuring me to go back (yes, I know this should be standard practise, but we all know places where it isn't).

It's all been good. It's all been the sort of kindness that gives me warm fuzzy feelings instead of the cold, panicky ones. There's absolutely nothing more that I need from people, seriously, nothing more could be done by anyone that would make me feel better right now.

I'm still Depressed, because Depression is an illness and not simply a reaction to stuff. I have a self made 0-10 depression scale, where 0 is feeling as low as I've ever felt in my life, and 10 is feeling 'normal' (which I'll describe as 'living in the now, enjoying what I'm doing whether it's easy, hard, happy, sad, but ultimately, something I can deal with and not even questioning my ability to deal with it, and just knowing it's one moment in time so not even thinking about beyond that, if you know what I mean'). On that scale, currently, over the past five days or so, I've averaged out at a 3 or a 4. I've had better moments, I've had worse moments, but probably on average, about 3 or 4.

I'm still going with the 'sit it out' approach, even though I've identified that I'm pretty bad at the moment. The options that I have are quite scant. I'm on the highest dose I can take of my medication, and I don't want to switch to anything else, because I've tried lots of kinds and this works where most of the others make things worse, so it's worth waiting. I don't need (and can't afford) more therapy. All of this is physical. I've been as bad before and I got better then, and when I can properly get back to normal physically, as long as I'm careful, the mind stuff will follow.

So ultimately, though I'm struggling, all is also well. Or at least it will be.

Right, I'm glad I've got that off my chest. It was, I feel, a good rant.

About that thing...

So, the place-holder post that mentioned a slightly annoying virus? Yeah, turns out I really was ill.  The first week I was diagnosed with a bronchial infection, so I dutifully took the antibiotics prescribed.  I continued to shiver, shake, turn blue, collapse and generally feel like death, so I staggered back to the doctor to tell her that I thought I needed more time of work, and I was very, very sorry.  She checked me again, and uttered the word 'Pneumonia'.  I was prescribed a new set of antibiotics and instructed to take things very, very easy. I had to go back home to get my purse to pay for the prescription because it had not occurred to me that I might need more drugs.

Turns out, having pneumonia is quite dibilitating. Who knew? I have learned recently, that I'm not very good at taking things easy. Fortunately for me, for most of that week, I was unable to do much but lie on the sofa and pray for a swift death, but the fact that I wanted to do other things had me in tears most days.

The doctor had said that if I was in any way concerned, to come back and see another doctor the following week (she was on leave), and feeling like the biggest wuss in the history of wussy-wuss-pants, I staggered back to the doctors again on the Friday to see someone new.  I babbled for a while, saying I just didn't know whether I should go back to work or not. I argued that I don't do manual work, and that technically I could sit in an office chair and cough at a computer at work, but I didn't want to make myself worse so wouldn't go if he thought it was a bad idea.  He considered all my arguments, then listened to my chest and said 'you still have pneumonia, you're not going anywhere.'

So another week of antibiotics. And remember that mistake I made with the purse on week two because I'm sometimes exceptionally thick? I did the same thing on week three.

The good thing was that at this point, most of the fever had gone, and my breathing was just free enough for me to be able to walk to the kitchen to make some tea.  I was also able to sit up and write!  Hurrah!

I saw the doctor again on Friday, and she listened again, and agreed that I was pretty much there as far as the pneumonia went, and I was fine to try to work the next week (this week) as long as I didn't push myself hard at all.

I took 'don't push yourself' to mean 'yes, you can take the children to the part for a couple of hours as long as you don't run after them, jump up and down or anything of that ilk' so that's what we did on Saturday.

Sunday I needed to spend the entire day in bed to recover.

I think it's possible I'm still underestimating this thing.

This week, I have Tom for three days, then I'm going to try to work on Thursday.  I suspect it will go well, though I've been instructed by my team, my boss, and my doctor not to push it if I don't think I can manage a full ten-hour day.

Who here thinks I'm going to take that on board and not overdo it?

Yeah.  Me neither.

Pip xxx