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.