Sucking It Up With Help…Finally

The appointment with my GP yesterday afternoon went better than the one in the morning. I always feel better when I actually see her and not just her staff or a nurse practitioner. I’m just going to have to be more insistent about that in the future; I don’t care how busy she is. She was far more open-minded and understanding than the Rheumatologist, especially when I told her that I didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of care I felt I needed from him. I told her that I felt that his basic message to me was “Suck it up.”

Oh, yes, I get what he was saying about how we need to treat the depression and the sleep disorder and that will help the pain overall. I’m not stupid. I do understand the connection all of these things have to each other and how it’s easy to get caught in some sort of whirlpool drowning effect where the pain makes me more depressed which affects my sleep which causes more pain which makes me more depressed and so on… I got it and I told her all of that. However, I also said that I can’t foresee “sucking it up” if things continue as they are because things are only getting worse and not changing anything isn’t going to help matters as I see them. Certainly, I don’t see my depression getting better or my sleep improving if nothing is changed.

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26 Million Minutes

Over the weekend I read a well-written article in Health magazine by a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease. What I particularly liked was her thoughts on the inner-frustration, the fact that unlike other patients of well-known illnesses like cancer, you don’t have something growing inside of you to be angry about, to blame, to focus on; the thing attacking your body is you. It’s your own body that’s harming you and hurting you and slowly killing you in some form or the other and for the most part no one knows why or how to stop it. You have no one to blame but yourself and you don’t even get a ribbon or a badge or a parade or a march. In fact, most of the time, you’ll struggle to find a doctor who’ll give you the right diagnosis, if you find one that believes you at all — like a flashback to the days when PMS was all in our “pretty little heads” and the doctor would pat us on the head and smile patronizingly.

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Melatonin No More

I stopped taking the melatonin last Wednesday. I had determined that it was causing some sort of daily rebound headache/migraine that my usual migraine meds couldn’t seem to work on. As my mother pointed out, I was kind of damned if I did and damned if I didn’t since I was getting really excellent sleep results with the melatonin, which turned out to be 3mg not 1mg, but was making my migraines worse as a result.

Unfortunately I have not slept at all well since.

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Seeing The Light

So I’m on day 5 of the light therapy experiment. I’m not particularly sure it’s working out the way it’s supposed to. I kind of got the impression from the bits of research I did that there would be some positive improvements right away even if they were small ones.

According to the directions, you are supposed to take an assessment at Apollo Health’s website. This determines the start-up schedule for using your light. For example, since my body naturally wants to wake up at 9am and I want to wake up about 6 or 6:30am every morning, it recommended starting on a Saturday with 15-30 minutes at 8am, then Sunday at 7am, then Monday at 6am and continuing from then on at 6am and eventually you may be able to go to every other day at 6am, etc.

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Lobbing Lemons

Someone once told me that when life sends you lemons, lob them right back.

It’s been an incredibly frustrating and stressful week.

Sunday for about 3 hours or so, my cable and thus internet was out. Because I am on-call for my job, I require the use of the internet at a moment’s notice to be able to dial into the computers at my workplace so I can fix the problem. It actually is an emergency when such a thing occurs and it affects people’s lives. I take it quite seriously. When I talked to their support people then, they said that it was an area thing or rather that someone else in my area was having a problem too and that they were sending someone out to fix it. It was fixed that afternoon.

Monday morning when I woke up, there was no cable or internet. I called again. They said they’d send someone out. I have no idea if they did because there was a huge electrical storm across the state that afternoon and that’s when all kinds of weirdness started at work. When I got home, there was not cable or internet and the message on the support line said that my town was experiencing outages.

Tuesday morning when I woke up, there was no cable or internet, but there was no more message on the support line, so I talked to the support people again and they said they’d send someone out.

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Feeling Down

I have been feeling more and more generally depressed lately, just a general overall sadness not attached to anything in particular. Nothing I can blame or focus on, though if I wanted to, there are lots of things I could let myself dwell on. I try not to dwell on things I can’t do anything about or I don’t know how to fix. Mostly, it’s just this sense of hopelessness that seems to be hanging about me like a cloak and even though I can manage to smile and joke with my co-workers or the puppy daycare folks, I always feel like I’m one or two seconds away from bursting out in tears for no real reason at all.

During my last visit to the general practitioner, I mentioned that I didn’t think my antidepressants were working anymore. Since I’m maxed out on the dosage, it’s been decided that I need to see a psychiatrist to change the med on top of my regular therapist, a nurse practitioner. Of course, I can’t get in to see the shrink until August 20th.

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