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​I cannot sleep. Pain is keeping me up and sending me to a bad place like it always does at this late hour. I have taken vicodin but it still hasn't touch the pain. It is very quiet in my room (other than the constant bickering in my head). I need the sound machine on to drown out my thoughts. I really want to do something harmful but not sure what. I'm going mental. I don't know what is real anymore. I feel like I am in a dream yet I know I am not sleeping. Very weird but I don't care. I took 4 mg perphenazine tonight and still the voices are harping. I seriously don't know how much longer I can stave them off.

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midnight demons strike again

It's almost 3 am and I can’t sleep. I am very tired but my thoughts are in a dark place. I decided to work on my little research survey and found that it was harder to put on paper than it was to think it up in my head.

My pain levels are still through the roof, though the meds seem to be helping tonight. Yesterday I didn’t think I was ever going to fall asleep. Thursday I had a phone session with bozo and told her I wanted to die this weekend. Course I have been saying that for months now. Today I really did want to do die because I am so frustrated that I cannot find relief in dealing with my pain and my leg being swollen is not helping my mood any. I just want to cut my foot off at the ankle. I’m so tired of being in pain every day and no one knows what to do about it. My pcp has decided to put me in a boot for 2 wks. It that doesn’t work, I am not sure what to do. I might have to be on bed rest completely and that thought is not helping me as I will go fucking nuts just sitting around the house doing nothing when there is so much work to do for my research job.  I feel like I am on this merry-go-round that just bring me going from doc to doc and not getting any real answers.  I just don’t want to live anymore. I have no desire to live to see tomorrow. I only do because my body has decided to continue to do the body functions that allow me to live. I have thought of so many ways to end my life and I soooo want to go through at least one of them and I will, but it always is one day. I really don’t know if I am capable of ending my life anymore, I just seem to think that thinking about it is somewhat better than acting on it all the time. I know that might sound crazy but it’s true. I have thought about so many ways of ending my life the past few months and even prepared to do so yet I never seem to really act on going through with it. How pathetic is that?? I feel more like a loser because I say I am suicidal yet I have not acted on my thoughts or feelings for years now. Most I have done is take massive doses of neurontin but I know that doing so will not kill me. I am pathetic.

My last day (Jul 1, 2011)

Woke up with my leg killing me, not sure if I could walk. Got out of bed and it wasn't too bad. Today is the day that I am ending my suffering. Either late tonight I will hang or od. I haven't quite decided what method I am chosing.

It's all because the medical docs refuse to treat my pain and the stupid pain management doc needs to have me screened by a psychologist before he will do anything. I need to wait 6 wks for all this. Too late. I won't be around.

I have been in chronic pain the last few months and I just can't take it any longer. I cannot live like this. I have done things as normally aspossible so no one has a clue what I will be doing though I have confided in a couple of people. No one is to blame except for the drug addicts who make doctors work harder to screen out those in chronic pain vs those that are abusing it. And also the lawmakers who make it difficult for doctors to treat those in pain by making rules of how much they prescribe a month. I curse these people that have no idea what it is like to be in pain 24/7 and have no relief. I have seen all types of doctors. My therapist and psychiatrist can no longer help me. All they can do is provide supportive care. I know they will be the deepest hurt by my actions. But I hope they know that me not suffering anymore somehow helps them.

Everyone says I should go to the ER to see if they can give me something but I just ran out of hope. Or maybe it's just that I feel so helpless. Right now my foot/ankle is a ten. I just plan on going to work to finish my last project for research. Then it's all over.

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Bad few weeks (May 26, 2011)

The last few weeks I have been in a deep funk, made worse by the events of this week. Two weeks ago, I had a bowel accident. I had stayed in soiled underwear the whole day as I had no idea I was farting stool bubbles. I was mortified to say the least. I had to go back to work because of samples. It was the first week back from vacation and there were a lot of subjects. I went home, showered and changed and had therapy with my bozo. Towrds the end of session, I had a severe spasm in my left foot. This caused the intractable foot pain to start and I have been in pain ever since. This week (5/23) I had a bout of diarrheal illness. I really crapped my pants, twice. Once while passing gas and the other just by shifting in my seat. My mood has gone from worse to totally darkness. I have never felt so humiliated and demoralized. All I can think about is ending my life right now. The next day I see podiatry to find out what is wrong with my foot and he says NOTHING! All the structures look fine on the x-ray and even if I have an MRI, things will most likely be normal. It most likely ALL due to nerve pain. Just shoot me now. I have never felt do lousy as I do right now nor so damn hopeless. I have to be treated by yet another doctor who probably will have no clue how to help me nor have the adacedy to tell me the truth. I am so tired of living in pain every single moment of every since day. Bozo thinks I should be in the hospital but I don't think that will help. I'm just so damn frustrated. I have been doing the bare minimum at work, except I called out monday because of the puking and diarrhea. 

Since Tuesday when I saw the foot doc and he had no answers for me, I have just felt like the world ended. CES has continued to wreck my life. I cannot escape the nerve damage. I cannot escape the pain and that combine with the mental pain I deal with on a daily basis just makes me more suicidal every day. I just want to end the misery everyday. I told my therapist I would end my life this week but I have no energy for it. Imagine being so low that you can't even end your life because it just drains you.

Now to add to my aggravation, my neurologist won't be available next week as she won't be in the office. I reschedule for an afternoon appt and they need to hange the time, which I cannot do because my father is having surgery that day. The secretary then tells me the next fricken available is DECEMBER! WTF! I am so pissed off right now it's not funny. I'm emailing her and telling her I want a referral to another neuro as this is ridiculous.

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Why do I continue to live?

I guess I am not as great a blogger as I wanted to be.  The past few weeks have been really busy with work and by the end of the night, all the energy I have left is for my gaming on Facebook.  Once again I have come at an impasse with my therapist.  I had last week off so I had some time to think about our relationship.  I came up with the same things that I have been thinking for a long time now: I don’t want to continue in treatment, I have no reason for living nor do I wish to live anymore. I just don’t have the energy to actually kill myself. I have not been depressed over the past few weeks. I just have been seriously of ending my life, usually by hanging, just for “fun”. Almost like a “double-dare” to myself.

Now that I am back to work and my research job realized just how much I do work my butt off, I really just want to end my life.  I’m needed yet I really don’t care.  I have become callous or maybe jaded, maybe both, to how others perceive me.  I just feel so dead inside. Not cauldron is stirring but yet I feel that if I don’t try and end my life, I might just go crazy. I have no intention of living any more yet I seem to do just that. I get dressed, go to work, fulfill my obligations and responsibilities yet nothing gives me pleasure or joy. I just do it because it keeps my mind off which tree branch will hold my weight.

My therapist has finally realized through a “consult of my own” the reasons for my misery and yet we are seeking the counsel of an outsider who deals with suicidality. I have often wondered if he would be of help. But how is he supposed to make me want to continue to live when I do not wish to breathe anymore.

Another sleepless night 2

For the past month, I have been in some serious pain. My foot has been really bothering me and nothing seemed to help except for taking pain meds when it got to the point of not being able to bear weight on it. I needed a refill of meds so made an appt with my PCP to fill him in. I am glad I did because I have a stress fracture in my foot. Nothing traumatic happened but I am willing to be bet a severe spasm caused it to break a bone in my foot. I was supposed to see the foot doc last week, but the day before, I some how ending up taking out my back.  I couldn’t move for most of the week and my hip was hurting pretty good so I thought I really messed up my back or caused a muscle tear in my hip. After nearly collapsing on the stairs while going up to my room the other night, I finally decided to go to the ER.  At first they thought it was a hernia but tests were negative so they think I might have strained a ligament. I still have the burning hip pain in my back and am kind of stiff, but the pain has been manageable since leaving the ER.

I haven’t seen my therapist in over a week. We have been having phone sessions because I can’t walk or sit too long without pain. I managed to work this weekend but by the end of the night, I was still hurting. I must be twisting something while I am walking because even while I was taking a step that I thought was normal caused a twinge in my back and buttocks.  Right now it feels like I have a hot poker in the back of my hip/back area.  I was going to cancel the appt with the Neurosurg but now I am thinking it might be a good idea. I am calling my PCP tomorrow as I know I did something and I think I might need PT to work things out again.

Mood wise, I have been up and down. One minute I am fine, the next I want to hang myself from the nearest beam.  I had bozo read the chapt by Goldblatt in Jobes’ book.  All she got was it was me trying to tell her to get support. DUH. That was part of it. I forgot most of what I read because I really didn’t keep a notebook on it. I finally got the book that Goldblatt has written a chapter on and it is impressive. Part of the reason I have been thinking about him, is that I have been contemplating having a psychoanalytic therapy with him to see if that helps with my suicidality but I feel so hopeless that I don’t even want to try it.  I have no reason to live, I don’t want to live. I just continue to live because it is expected of me and people want me to be around. Yet I am in pain every single day and being in a different body every day takes its toll on me.  I live a lie every day, put a smile on when all I want to do is chop my head off or strangle myself in some fashion.  I would OD but that has not worked in the past and I am too afraid of it failing again that I can fathom going through with that plan again.

My research boss has given me a huge project to do right before I am to go on vacation. I am more than pissed off. But I am going to do as much as I can then say arriverdici.  I am going to DC. I just hope that I can walk and not be in so much pain every day. I know that I will be doing a lot of walking as I will be touring but fuck I can barely walk more than a few blocks right now as it is.

Just a vent

I woke up at 730 this morning with my big toe screaming at me. It then did a little wiggle dance as if to say hi, i'm there, just didn't want you to forget about me. Anyone experience this? I don't know if it's a spasm or not. It wasn't painful just felt weird.

Now my lower back is smarting, side of my leg, ankle, and foot is burning like no tomorrow. If I didn't have to go to work early, i'd take some neurontin but I can't risk a hangover and looks like i'm going to do a 12 hr shift. No one gets that I can't do this anymore. I can't even pathom it. I keep pushing through the pain because I know if I stay home, I will end up killing myself. All I wanted to do today was catch up on my tivo, change my sheets, and possibly make some room to get to my closet. Instead I slept most of the day, getting up at 4pm and then meeting up with some friends for coffee. Sheets and tivo not done. Then I find out I have 102 emails at work, 20 of them regarding my job because the person that was supposed to cover for me didn't and there was panic. How am I supposed to trust this person to cover for me when I am out of town in 20 days??  I'm just so sick of being the lone ranger, of having to deal with loads of responsibilities by myself with pain levels of 8-10 every day, lost sleep, and not having the will or drive to live every single day. I just cannot go on like this. My family doesn't care. My doctors don't care, my bosses don't care. They just want me to be around 24/7 because they don't want to feel the pain of my loss. What about my pain? What about my suffering? Am I just here to suffer so you don't feel bad?  I'm so tired of this shit. I can't suck it up anymore. Every day I think about hanging myself at work just to stick it to them. MGH cares about pain my ass.

I just hope my pharmacy can refill my script for ativan and I can pay out of pocket because it's too early for my refill.  I had to take extra because of everything that was going on with my eyes and mri's and then going psycho. My pdoc didn't want me taking my anti-psych meds if I had a pituitary issue so told me to take ativan instead. Sure it calmed me down but didn't help the paranoia or voices. Thankfully i'm not paranoid but the voices are still there telling me i'm an addict, criticize me all the time. 

I really just wish I don't wake up tomorrow. I just hate being this miserable and having no one to tell it to. An untold story.

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Crazy thoughts (Mar 25, 2011)

The past two weeks have been stressful because I have had eye problems and back problems. This has increased my anxiety levels which has also increased my paranoia and delusions that someone is going to kill me. My whacky brain has decided that snakeheads are after me and the only thing I can think of that relates to this is the villians in Stargate the Jaffa or G'oulds. The voices are not making this easy. They are keeping me up at night (like tonight) try to prevent me from sleeping.  I so jus want to die.

After these consecutive MRI's, they found nothing wrong with my head or lumbar. Though I might have cysts in my pituitary that the neuro-opt guy is not worried about. Fucking great. My psych wanted me to call her today to see what happened and I just told her I would call her tomorrow. I really didn't want to talk to anyone. I'm just so fucking pissed that I just need to keep doing what I am doing. In other words, nothing is wrong physically with you so just continue to suffer in pain because there is no other treatment for you. No option for my migraines, so i'm just going to tell my neuro to prescribe me fioricet as the triptans my insurance won't cover.

I've been so damned stressed and having bad AH that they keep telling me i'm an addict. Because of this I just don't take the ativan or vicoden when I really in severe pain.  I will only pop an ativan or two if I have spasms in my foot.  I had them real bad about 23 hrs ago. My foot is still sore as my muscles were so contorted. But nothing is wrong with me. I'm just living with chronic pain and is sucks so bad all I can think about now is ending my life.  I so want to learn to make a noose and put my plan in motion about hanging at my job. Why? Because even though they portray signs saying "they care about pain" they never do a damn thing about it. For 10 yrs I have been living this way and all I get is the bad news about how vicoden leads to "other" problems. Fioricet leads to rebound headache, whatever that is. All I know is my vision is blurred and my right eye is painful to light and sound when I sometimes don't even have a headache. But nothing is wrong with me.

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Another sleepless night

It’s been a long week. My eye exam didn’t exactly go as well as I had hoped. Seems like I have a visual field problem in my right eye and after a bunch of testing that came back negative, I need to have an MRI to rule out something pressing on my optic nerve.  The same week, my bladder gave out on me and with the new nerve pain, I am thinking my L5-S1 disc is on its way out. The stress of not knowing what is wrong with me has caused me to become psychotic. I have been feeling paranoid on and off the past few weeks but while I was taking one of the eye tests, I heard voices as the thing was moving.  Dr. P doesn’t want me to take the perphenazine until the pituitary has been ruled out. So in the friggen mean time, I just get to be fucking nuts.  But I am to take ativan just to calm me down and let me sleep.

Then yesterday to make my physical problems A-OK, I find a couple of lumps on my nipple.  Just shoot me now. I really can’t take this stress anymore.  Tomorrow I need to call my pcp’s office and go for yet another exam of some kind for that. Well, I am out of ativan and it’s kind of good that I am as I would probably take the whole bottle now.

I emailed my cousin and friend in DC to let them know I might not be able to keep my plans to visit the end of April.  Which sucks because I was really looking forward to getting away from Boston for a while.

Writing

Out of boredom at work, I began reading an AARP magazine and found an article about self-publishing.  I have no clue about any of this but thought it might be a place to start other than writing on this blog. I actually wrote to someone I know who is writing a book right now on how to write a book. People have always told me to just write but my perfectionism always gets in the way as I edit what I write or half way through the writing realize it is stupid and stop, never to pick up the keyboard again.  We’ll see if this person writes back to me. I also wrote an email to a columnist at the Boston Globe to see if she will write something about cauda equina syndrome.  I think I have a 98% chance of her writing back to me, if that.  I would really love to write a book about people’s stories about CES, how they got it, deal with it, etc but it never comes to fruition. I talk about it in the group but after a week or two, people move on to something else and the subject stops cold.  For those that have written about it, I usually keep their emails in the hope that I actually have the time to put this together, all I will need is their consent to publish.

On the comings of my life currently, last week was hell. Not only did I spend more time driving all over creation, but pain was bothering me big time, my father’s MRI results were not good, and my eyesight in one of my eyes is bad and something neurological is affecting my visual field.  I had called my neuro and she is out of the office until later this week so tomorrow I am going to call my PCP and demand an MRI as I seriously think my L5-S1 disc is on its way out or the inflammation of my S4 has gotten worse. But that doesn’t make any sense as its in the sacrum. Stress wouldn’t affect it directly and it’s not like I’m falling on my tailbone or having some trauma to that area. I really need to get the MRI I had last year and see what is up, course with them not giving me contrast, it will be difficult to see new damage vs old.  Sad I know all this shit. Like one of the docs that has joined the group said, sometimes having this knowledge is not good!

Sleepless night

 I cannot sleep tonight because it feels like my foot (nerve damaged) is in a trash compactor being crushed from the toes to the heel, sides to ankle. It is driving me nutty!!! I took some vicoden but OMG this pain is insane!!

Oh and my neuro's covering doc finally called me after like 3 days. Said to go to ER. F You, tell me something I don't fricken know!! Why not save me 10-20 hrs  while sitting in the waiting room and order the damn MRI I need to find out what is wrong!!  Soon as I find some courage, I will call my surgeon. I'm kind of psychotic at the moment as i'm hearing voices and paranoid that someone is watching my every move. I'm kind of hoping that between taking perphanazine, ativan, and vicoden I don't wake up to this misery anymore. I kind of got bad news today at the eye doc. I'm so stressed about losing my eye sight in one eye, my father possibly having liver cancer, going psycho, and pain being intolerable, I guess I just lost whatever sanity I had.  I emailed my pdoc all this (minus the me not waking up as that wouldn't be good). Oh and did I mention I still have to work this weekend??? I kind of wish I was in the Abbott and Costello stint where they say who's on first cause I really could use a belly laugh...

G

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New scare (Mar 9, 2011)

Had a very hectic day and was on the road a very long time. I was really tired by the time I had come back to Boston and when my shift ended, I took a good friend home. Well I hit a couple of good potholes on the way to his house, which jerked my back.  I think it finally knocked a disc out as my bladder has leaked some, more than I am used to. Now I have no choice but to call my neuro tomorrow to get an MRI done. I would go to the ER but I am just so damn tired I really don't want to wait for hours to be seen then wait some more for consults and hours more for testing.

I do know that should this be CES x 3, I will kill myself. I know I will have to have a fusion and most likely will be permanently out of work for a while & the thought of no longer being independent just freaks me out. I rather be dead than to deal with this a 3rd time in 10 yrs.

Meds are kicking in now so I will stop here for now

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Phone…maybe time for an upgrade now!!

3/1/2011

Rather than listening to the radio, I have played my phone in the auxiliary mode of my car. I don’t know what happened, but now I have no sound. The only way I do, is by using headphones!! It’s a little past 3 am but seeing as I haven’t posted a blog in a few weeks, I wanted to write something.

This past week has been a blur, literally.  My pain started 2/19 at 6:30 am and has not lifted much, unless I take either vicoden or gabapentin (neurontin).  Sunday, I was in so much pain that I bought a new cane to walk around the lab.  Co-workers were asking why I am using a cane and I just said my foot hurts real bad. I cannot stand to stand on it.  So by 22:30, I had enough as things were very busy and I was running back and forth so many times it wasn’t funny.  Soon as I came home, I took 1800 mg of neurontin.  Miraculously, I woke up because my cousin Billy came up the stairs like an elephant and was screaming (aka talking) to my mother who is nearly deaf. This was about 11 am. I was supposed to have this day off because it was a holiday (President’s Day) but we had a pt consented and wanted baseline. Fucking great. So after I had a phone session with my Bozo therapist, I called the dialysis unit and was told that the pt was d/c. YAY for me. I didn’t have to go to work today! I can finally rest, so I took another 1800 mg of neurontin. By 2 pm I was goofy and partially sedated. I played my games on Facebook, much as what I am doing now.  I am tired but cannot sleep.  I was going to read some of John Grisham’s book, The appeal but that book had a way of stimulating my brain because I want to know what is going to happen next.

So in my week of pain, I find that my neurologist is on vacation . It was school vacation week. Lovely.  So alligators are nipping at my toes every night and there is nothing I can do to stop it.  So later that day (Monday) I took 2700 mg of neurontin to shut down this pain. I awoke Tuesday in a groggy state. Not surprising and boy did I need Starbucks!!  I had to work on a database  that I have been neglecting and I had a late appt with Bates so I hung out for 3 hours updating the inventory of this database.  Working with excel always makes me tired.  I had 37 pages to change the database so it took all that time to work on it while I drank my mocha and tried to clear my foggy brain.  The next day I saw my psych doc, and I didn’t  tell her I took nearly 7 gms of neurontin.  So I told her about the pain and my father and all that has gone in since I last saw her and she said see you in a month. Fine I said. Course I email her most of the time anyways giving her updates at least once a week if I feel up to it.

The last 3 days of the week were horrible. Pain returned once I stopped taking the large dose of neurontin. And my bones ached so much I thought I should see my foot doc.

3/7/11

I have seen my neuro last week. She wants me try Lyrica (pregabalin) to see if it works better than the neurontin and won’t make me as sedated.  I took the first dose today while at work and didn’t make me sleepy.  I took my meds a little while ago so am kind of sleepy now but wanted to finish this off before going to sleep.

I’m still in pain and right now the bones in my foot are aching so I will need to take vicoden again to quiet it down. Lately that seems to be the only thing that takes the edge off.  I have been taking the ketoprofen but other than keeping my hands limber, it’s not doing much else.  My left thigh has been giving me grief as well as my saddle area.  So I am confused as to which disc is causing me problems.  I need to call my neuro tomorrow as she said there has been problems with email lately.  I sincerely hope that spending $50 on this new med is worth it. I just don’t want to waste all this money like I did with the lamictal just to find out it ain’t going to do squat!

I got a meeting with Bozo tomorrow so I need to get some shut eye.  

Blog 1st of Marzo (Mar 6, 2011)

Been feeling good the past few weeks, all with the exception of physical pain for the past two weeks. My leg/ankle/foot have made my life pretty difficult. The burning pain is driving me nuts so my neuro has decided to put me on a new med called Lyrica. Some people in the group have had good results with it. Others have not. So this will be another trial and error for me. I just hope that the 50 bucks will be well spent.

The group will be making T-shirts. I really love the idea and hope it pans out. The group is planning a get together in mid april.

Well i'm pretty much falling asleep while writing this as it's 0235 and my meds are so kicking in.  Until next time

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Pain again

Just want to write a bit as my leg is keeping me up again. I was tempted to go to the ER tonight as I could barely walk to the garage. Once the cold air hit my leg, the pain got worse so pretty much had to take baby steps. I know it's because snow is going to fall tomorrow. I wish it would start now and be done with it so the pain switch would be "off".  I really don't think the ER would have done much and I would have been there for hours as the ED was busy. There were already 6 ambulances in the lot so I would have been seen hours later as I was not "critical".

I know part of this is my "fault" because I haven't been taking neurontin all week. I just take it when I need to but I think I need to start taking it every day. It's ghard though because I need to get up early some days and it gives me a hangover if I don't "sleep it off".  I am getting so frustrated with this pain because it just is driving me nuts, even with taking vicoden. But even vicoden doesn't seem to work for me anymore. It helps when I have back pain but does shit for nerve pain. I told one doc who wanted to remove my toe nail on my bad foot that he could give me morphine, oxy, or whatever strong pain med there is and it ain't going to do shit for my nerve pain. He looked at me like I was a druggie and tore up the script for percocet. Never got my toenail removed either. 

What really pissed me off is I was hobbling around work and one of the older ladies I work with wanted me to stay. By 1030, I couldn't stand the pain anymore. It felt like my sneaker was trying to eat my foot off and the side of my leg is so bad I couldn't bear weight on it any more. I had taken 300 of neurontin but it didn't help at all.  I really need to take a day and just pop 3-4 pills every couple of hours. It will get me "stoned" but it will take away the pain for a few days at least.  I've been working so many days in a row
Now i've lost track. Bad I know but my job is important as the samples need to get prcessed or at least separated until they get processed.

Busy week.

This week has just flown by. I really don’t remember most of it. I just know I was supposed to have Tuesday off but we had a new consentee that had me going into work. Then one thing lead to another and before you know it, I put in a full shift. I did have to leave early because in my running around, I didn’t get to do one thing for the next day which was to drop off tubes for a 6 am draw. So I had to wake up at 5 the next day to make sure we didn’t miss it.  Sucked because I never get up at that hour.

Mood has been pretty stable so far. I think the black dog has finally gone to sleep, for now. I still am feeling overwhelmed with everything.  Projects I haven’t started yet keep coming to mind and I just let them sit there until I can find the time to do it.  Sucks when you are the only person to do this stuff.  If I am sick, samples just wait another day.  Only problem is when they are the new samples.  These need to get processed the day they are drawn because they will not be good after a day or more.

I put in my time to try and take a vacation in May. I’m not sure if I can afford it yet. But I know that I can at least not worry about hotels as I will be staying with friends.  My cousin wants me to go see him in Virginia so I am planning on going there for a few days. I want to see my friend in Texas but I’m not sure. I just know that if I am out of state, I can actually take some time off work. It’s driving me nuts to work all the time and I know that if I don’t, I’m going to end up in the hospital again.

Pain as a midnight demon.

It’s 3:30 and I can't sleep. I have been trying to go to sleep for the past 2 hours to no avail. The nerve pain in my left leg has started up and it feels like some one is pinching me.  Since my Godfather’s death last week, I have been in a weird state of mind where suicidal thoughts have been blunted.  Now that my physical pain has started up again, I am thinking of ending it.

For the past two weeks, my neck has been hurting. I finally made an appointment with my PCP and of course he is away until Wednesday. Never ceases to amaze me that whenever I need him the most he is away. I'm not sure if this neck pain is due to the car accident I had a few weeks ago or if it's just because of stress.

I finally called the loan people. I have to pay more than I was expecting which means I'll have to work more in the chem lab than I would like. I am so tired right now to working in that place and the thought of having to work extra days to afford the loans is just killing me. But I have no choice. It's either I pay them the same amount or they garnish my wages that 15%. The nice thing about doing it this way is that after nine months I will be out of default and hopefully my credit will be better. I won't be totally fucked.

I again had a phone session with Bozo because I was just too lazy to get out of bed. I don't even remember what we talked about but she again reiterated what I was saying which totally annoyed me. We talked about my nephew for a little bit and his grandiose schemes, which I have to laugh because nobody seems to know what grandiose means. It's funny how psych babble seems to enter my vocabulary without me even being aware of it. Hard to believe that 10 years ago I was lying in a hospital bed wondering if I'll ever walk again. Around this time the staph infection, was making me very sick. And today I am able to walk but all I have left is this fricken pain that haunts me every night, causing me to lose sleep more than my depression ever could.

I am supposed to be off tomorrow. I hope that I sleep all day. I have not taken any Ativan tonight. But I just took 1200 mg of gabapentin to try and see if that controls this pain. I guess that is all I have to say for now.

(Please note: another Dragon document)

Difficult week

I got word on Sunday my godfather passed away. I was in shock didn't know what to do. I didn't want to believe that it was true. I finally called his wife to see if it was true, and when she started crying so did I. This man was very important to me and I just couldn't believe that he was gone. I also felt guilty about not seeing him around Christmas and wanted to go down the week after Christmas but because of work I just didn't have the time. Before going to bed Sunday night, I e-mailed work to tell them that I was not going to available most of the week. Ravi's group was pretty much okay with it. Chem lab I didn't hear a peep. I didn't even want to wake up on Monday to have the appointment with my PSYCHO therapist. So when she called me at noon, I told her I didn't want to talk. But unfortunately, she didn't hang up and we talked about my godfather. We talked about him for a little bit but I really didn't want to talk at all about anything. Tuesday night I was supposed to go out with a friend for dinner but because I didn't know when services were going to be held, I have to cancel. Turns out Tuesday was the day from hell as I was rushing to take care of all the samples that I would have Thursday with the exception of the sample from Mashpee. Tuesday was also busy in the lab and one of the CLA’s told my supervisor that I would be working. He was not happy when I told him that I was not going to be working. This just made me feel more stressed out than I already was. I also felt bad as I knew that it was busy and without my help they would not finish until midnight. But I was feeling so numb and horrible after another night of not sleeping that all I wanted to do was go home and crash. Around 10 o'clock Tuesday night I found out services would be held on Thursday and Friday in Westwood. I had a feeling it would be but seeing as my car was still being repaired, I was panicking as to how I was going to get there.

My car was to be finished on Wednesday, but because they had ordered the wrong part it was not going to be ready until Friday. Which turned out not to be so bad as my sister ended up driving us down to Westwood. The funeral was difficult and luckily my father didn't attend his own funeral. He was very annoying the entire day. I had only had around five hours of sleep that day as we had to by 7 AM to get to the funeral home. I only cried a few times during the funeral home and mostly it was because I was seeing someone else cry. I really didn't want to work today. But because I thought I would have a research sample, I made it in. And I went well until the tube station broke down and the cleaners decided to wax the floor. We all couldn't wait until night shift showed up and we bolted out of there.

Since finding about Leo, I have been in a numb state. The despair that I have been feeling has been displaced. Thoughts of SI's have been minimal. I don't know if these feelings are temporary like they usually are or are just a part of grief. I still have the picture of Leo and I on my Facebook page. And I still remember the day it was taken. I do hope that I continue keep in contact with his wife because I don't want her to feel left out or forgotten by her one true love and his family. I wish there was something I could do to ease her pain but only time can heal that wound.

(note this is my first document using Dragon. if grammar isn't correct or things don't make sense, it is because it's still new)

Death of a good man

Found out today that my godfather passed away due to a blood clot. It happened so sudden and his wife was real freaked out as he died right in front of her. She was in shock when I talked with her, not that I blame her. She is a good woman. She was more concerned with us than with herself.

After I talked with her, I watched the superbowl game. I guess it was to get my mind of losing my Godfather who I loved very much. I just talked with him around Thanksgiving. I feel really bad now that I didn’t get to see him around Christmas like I had hoped to.  My godfather was a funny fellow. He would talk with such intelligence and seriousness and yet still get what you were saying. His mind wasn’t what it used to be. I would have to tell him who I was and what I was doing every time I called as he didn’t remember. Alzheimer’s is like that.  It runs in my family on both sides so I know the chances are great that I may have the gene for it. 

I called out for half this week. I am more depressed than I was and I just can’t function right now when I know I have a wake and funeral to go to.  I want to be there for my godfather’s wife but my car is in the shop so there is no way of me getting there.  She lives in Westwood, which isn’t close to Boston.  I guess I will just have to see what to do.  I’m just glad he didn’t suffer.

exhaustion

Today I was very tired, more than tired…fatigued to the point where every time I blinks I had to pry my eyes open.  Work was pretty busy until all the outpatients were done. Then things slowed down and boredom set in.  I couldn’t think straight and we got a bunch of add-ons so that kept me busy for a little bit.  I realized my phone needed to be charged and in the process, ending up “renaming” my MP3’s so they didn’t come up as #’s when I go into my song list. This MP3 player on the Palm Pre is weird. It gives you an option of having a playlist, but you need a third party to actually program it. iTunes used to be one of those parties but I don’t have a Mac and I HATE itunes because it always crashes and takes forever to load, even just to end the program.  Bottom line is you can't make playlists. Your only options are to play individual artists and ALL their songs or to play ALL the songs on your phone.

After doing this I was still bored so decided to do my online prep thing. This course is already telling me stuff I already know. BORING. I do the stupid thing and then the final part you are supposed to copy and paste everything you just did with a sentence or two of what you learned. WTF. I learned NOTHING except I am a procrastinator!!  The next module has to do with goals. How the hell am I supposed to do goals when all I want to do is kill myself????  But I can’t write that I want to be dead by the end of the month and actually submit the ways to do it. That might freak someone out and get my ass hauled to APS or some other psych emergency room.  Instead, I just do what I think the world wants me to and go about pretending this is what I want to do with my “life”. I put down that my goal is to finish my bachelor’s degree in 4 years. How the hell I am going to pay for this, no fucking clue. I can barely afford having a car, much less trying to actually spend thousands on my education.  But not only do I have to say what my goals are, I have to list how I am going to accomplish them. I just think about how I’d like to achieve that and write, even though I know all of it is just complete BULLSHIT. Ha..the first time in my life where I am writing that.  The next module is a little bit more intense. I need to work on it like every other day for the next week in order to get credit. That is going to be difficult as next week I not only not have a car to get to where I need to go for my job, but I also have samples to pull for a fellow and I STILL have to fricken aliquot samples for vitamin D testing.

But for NOW, I have tomorrow off and I don’t think I am going to do a DAMN thing except play my facebook games, eat KFC (once I figure out how I am going to get to and back as walking could be icy tomorrow), and then watch the superbowl and hope that both teams lose, which I don’t think will be possible as in the words of John Madden, “the team with the most points win”. I do hope it’s Green Bay only because I really don’t want a sex offender winning his 3^rd superbowl ring and tying Tom Brady.  I have no idea who the players are (course I can say the same for the Patriots) and how good each team’s offense and defense are. But I am sure the commentators will only tell me a hundred times during the first 2 hours of the game.  They are playing in Dallas, which is a nice stadium.  When the Pats sucked, I was a cowboy fan and loved how Aikman played and how Jimmy Johnson coached.  Now that was serious football.

Weather and nerve pain

This week in Boston we got hit with heavy snow. Actually, we have gotten more snow in January than I can remember in my lifetime. So Saturday night after my shift at work, my left leg was really aching and sore. I was the person that was moving samples to be spun, taken over to heme, aliquoting, and running the electronic version of myself, the MPA. I thought it was sore and achy because of all the running around during the 8 hours plus I did a few more hours before my shift as I had to pull some specimens for a study that was to be shipped out on Monday.  However the pain stayed with me the next few days and when the snow started which was Tuesday, I was in really bad pain as I could hardly bear weight on my left leg. Ten years ago this week I was first diagnosed with CES and had similar pain and problem so I was freaking out big time. Wednesday I paged my pdoc because I was in major PTSD mode and my therapist was unavailable due to being snowed in.  She said go to the ER but by the time she returned my call, my leg was feeling a little better and when the snow stopped Wednesday evening, so did my pain.  I was shocked because usually my back goes out. I have never had leg pain due to the weather. It was the weirdest thing.

I told my neurologist about this and we increased my neurontin to help with the nerve pain. I love this drug more than any other drug out there. It’s not a narcotic and doesn’t have any “high” properties but it kind of just zones you out at high doses and leaves you feeling great the next day because you sleep so soundly. Least it does for me. Now I am NOT recommending anyone should take a high dose of this drug for this purpose. But my nerve pain seems to diminish for at least 24-48 hrs at a time, usually with one or two doses in a 24 hr period.  And that in and of itself is blissful.  No burning of the soles of the feet, no feeling like snapping turtle are nipping at your toes. No zapping feeling.

The only down side of this drug is that it makes you hungover. It’s so hard to wake up the next day and get moving. But even though I know this, I still feel something is wrong with me.  My fatigue level has increased in the last few weeks. I can only be up a few hours before I need a nap. I lose motivation for working and then need to come home and rest. I am just so exhausted.  Take yesterday for example. I got up around 11:30 am because I had an appt with my psychiatrist. She had cancelled because the weather was bad but I didn’t know this as she emailed me at 6:30 in the morning.  My car was buried in the snow and there was no way I was shoveling out so I hung out with my niece for a couple of hours watching her and her mother play on the Wii (video game) and had lunch with them. By 2 pm, I could have gone back to sleep I was completely exhausted. But I had to go to work because I thought there was a sample waiting for me.  I struggled past this exhaustion, get to work and find that the pt that was supposed to get drawn got discharged. I came to work for nothing. I was not happy! I might go to the doc next week to find out why I am so damn tired all the time.

The midnight Demons are at it again…

It’s 3:30 in the morning. I have already taken my meds x 2 because I’m in so much pain I really don’t know what else to do and seeing that I can’t sleep anyways, what the hell.  Past few days my left leg has been in really bad pain to the point that bearing any weight on it send me over the edge. Course this is messing with my PTSD big time because the same thing happened ten years ago exactly this time of the year, in exactly this way, that I ended up with a life changing event that I am still dealing with.  See I was at a bar, 12 hrs after a chiropractic session for back pain that my leg gave out on me while standing and over the course of the next 3-4 days, my leg got weaker and weaker because a disc in my back ruptured and was compressing my nerves in the area known as the Cauda Equina (horse’s tail). These nerves and roots are what makes your legs, bowels, bladder, and sexual organs functions as well as give you sensory sensations in the skin below the waist.  Compression to these nerve for any length of time causes damage, sometimes permanently to this delicate system. I had to re-learn to walk again when I was 25 years old and then again a few years ago, though it wasn’t as bad because only the upper leg was affected. Now because I can’t bear weight and I am not having back pain, I really don’t know what to make of it.  Since having CES (Cauda Equina Syndrome), it messes up your whole pain reception.  I don’t know if this flair up is because the weather is bad or because a disc is on its way out. And because I am in really bad pain, my thoughts are also keeping me awake with the worse case scenario. I always seem to find that if I think the worse that can happen, it usually doesn’t. Yet if I try and make something light, the worse DOES happen. Right now my nerve pain is so bad it feels like someone is taking a cheese grater to the bottom of my foot, turning it into hamburger. My calf muscle is clinging to my bones so tightly that I think the bone is ready to snap from the pressure. And if I put any weight on it to say take a step anywhere, it does feel like I have glass shards in my muscles.  I really don’t know why this is happening. It could have been from the slip I had at the T station last week.  It could have been that when that idiot driver hit my car, it also hit my back causing a disc to dislodge unbeknownst to me.  I didn’t have any real back pain. Sure my hip has been bothering me but I have been attributing it to sitting too long and walking around the lab, which usually aggravates it.

The demons are planning on ways to kill me. I rather be dead than think I may have to have another surgery and that this is the beginning of CES x3.  I told my therapist today I was going to end it after my shift tonight but I realized I couldn’t because yesterday was my niece’s birthday and I didn’t want to mess up her day.  And I had a bunch of work obligations to go through tomorrow/today that needs to be sorted out. I figure I can kill myself after all that gets done. But the fucking moron ptx called me while I was at work demanding to know what I was going to do after work and if it didn’t “please” her, I was to go to the ER. Jerk. So to avoid going into the hospital to wreck my life more than it already is, I agreed to see her tomorrow, as I need to be in her part of the country anyway.

Huge snow storm is on its way. This must be the most snow I have ever seen in my life. I know the blizzard of 1978 forced a lot of people in bound as they couldn’t move until the streets were plowed and shoveled their way out. But we are getting the snow in spurts. And the feet just pile up with no where to put the new snow. Oh joy. I’m just glad I don’t have to shovel it!!

Dark Heart (Jan 30, 2011)

Been up the last few hours. I have such a heavy heart that it is ready to kill me.  I am haunted by everything that is wrong with my life. Been thinking about my cousin who is now a marine and yet I hardly know him because my family drifted apart. It saddens me that I don't know my "little" cousins anymore. The oldest is engaged and will be married later this year. I feel less a part of their lives with each passing year.

I do not know who I am anymore.  Last night in a fit of torment I threw down the gauntlet and told my ptx that I will die this weekend. I so wish I could act on these feelings.  The brokenness inside kills me every night. The sorrow that is deep within my chest shall never be revealed nor relieved in any such way.  I am just a freak who is suffering silently with only these words to fall on silent blogs.  I only wish to end this daily torture. Animals are treated more humanly than human beings.  It has been said that you control your own life and happiness. Well my happiness lies beneath the earth or as a pile of ash. I do not care what remains of my bodily essence. My consciousness is what is the death of me.  I am not truly dying a slow death but am only being tortured every minute I dare to breath. This can't be what life is about. To go on suffering just so others do not feel your loss.   I have snapped and I don't know if there is any coming back.  I want to put a plastic bag over my head and die of asphyxia. Yes it may be painful but once that last breath is gone, I shall be free

Sent from my Palm Pre on the Now Network from Sprint

ramblings of being nothing

Today was a somewhat useful day. I wish it was more productive but things just didn’t end up going the way I planned. I don’t know why I bother with making a plan or have some idea of how I want the day to go because it never really ends up going the way I want it to. Like today, I got all the way down to my work just to realized I left my keys at home. I had taken the T because I left my car in the garage at work because my brother in law has become a snow driveway nazi. Car needs to be out so he can snowblowing/shovel and then has to know if I am going out or not so as to not move vehicles after all the snowblowing.  No keys means I can’t have access to my office, nor could I move my car to the front garages at work, nor get into my house after work so I go home. I so wanted to STAY home but I had samples to do.

I get to doing my research job and then work in the clinical lab because I agreed to cover someone. That’s all well and good except today most of Boston and surrounding areas were covered in fricken snow so no one went to the doctors, which means no samples. Today felt like a holiday as there was no work but I couldn’t leave cause I had already called out on Monday and needed to make up those hours.

I’ve come to realize that the worse time for me is right when I wake up, because I am still alive and the time it is right before going to my room for the night. I hate my room. I know it’s a huge mess but I don’t have time to clean it. Course, half of the mess is clothing which I have no place for so it just sits any place I can find it. One area of my room has paper stuff, old research articles and the like. I wish I could get another bureau and bookcase for it or some shelves, but I don’t have the time to shop. Even if I did, there is no way I can take it in my little car and carry it anywhere.  My alcoves will be blocked and I wouldn’t have access to them.  I keep saying one day I will do something but I never do.  Even in my midnight madness, I hardly touch. I think in my head where they will go or what to do with them but then I fall asleep or think of something else and poof, idea gone.  I dread coming home because mostly I know the psychache will return like it always does and I will once again be thinking of how to end my life.  The past few years I have become really creative in the lethal methods of ending my life.  I have not thought of a way to get a gun only because I would have to cross state lines and I am not sure I can do that. But knowing about chemicals have helped me.   My only regret is that I have not been able to find a place that sells hemlock juice. I found a place that makes the tablets but the amount is so small I doubt it would be lethal enough.

So I was supposed to have session with my idiotic therapist tonight but because of the snow storm she had to cancel. Still pisses me off that SHE can cancel but I can’t. I felt like calling her at home but not sure if she would answer or her daughter. I could have fun if her daughter answered or maybe not. I always toy with these ideas but never fall through on any of them. Guess I am not aggressive enough.  She reads these blogs because I no longer write in my journals anymore, which is a shame because I spent quite a bit of money getting these fancy journals that now are just collecting dust in my room.  My latest journal that I bought was one of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s purple and leather bound.  I had an idea to start a new one with the new year but it hasn’t happened yet. Just this blog.  Guess writing is writing whether it is electronic or with pen and paper,huh?

I really want to die. I just hate my life so much and there really isn’t much reason for it. I have a job, a family that somewhat cares, nieces and nephew that I mean the world to, friends that supposedly care about me, co-workers that like me at. My health is ok despite the chronic pain that I deal with, whether it’s physical like tonight or mental.  My foot is throbbing like there is no tomorrow and my toes are completely straight, which is weird cause they usually are curled up.  CES entered my life almost ten years ago. My anniversary date is Feb 8^th. Yet despite all this, I just have no desire, whatsoever to live. I just go about the act of living because I don’t want to cause anyone any pain.  So I suffer so everyone else doesn’t have to. Yet I wonder how they would feel if I were suffering from cancer or some other terminal illness. Would they still want me to go on, knowing full well that with each breath causes me pain?  Nothing I do causes me to think differently. All my life I never had some drive to live. I’m just not worth it. I am nothing and will always be nothing.

And today I finally called South Africa (warning may be offensive to some readers)

I woke up this morning and my mood was absolutely rock bottom. It took forever for me to wake up. I felt like I was walking in mud and by the time I actually made it out the door for therapy, I was exhausted.  So I had this session with a crazy therapist that wants me to live despite feeling like an asswipe.  I don’t know really what happened today. We were sitting there talking and I was overwhelmed with all that I have to do for my research job and then go into my clinical job and I just felt the intense urge to die and told her so. She says no which pissed me off more and I told her I wasn’t going to see her again. The exhaustion I have been feeling the past three weeks, overwhelmed as I was sitting there pondering what to do.  Should I call out knowing that my supervisors are going to say something as this is the 3^rd time I have called out on a Monday or go in and tread the mud and anguish of a 4 hour shift.  I chose to call out and went home.   Didn’t do a thing but couldn’t really sleep as I felt guilty about not working. Then to make matters worse, my boss called me around 5:30pm for something I do not know about.  I totally forgot about the lab meeting this morning but getting up early is always hard for me, especially when I work till midnight and stay up till about 2 am to get to sleep, if I can.

I also tried to call my friend in South Africa as he is having a difficult time right now with his nerve injury. He is the bravest man I know who has a good heart.  He is from Scotland and grew up in England. I love his accent though sometimes it is difficult to understand when he talks fast (sorry Guy). I was finally able to reach him and text him to let him know I am there for him.  For some reason whenever I am in this hell of psychache, reaching out to someone helps ease the pain. I know my friend is worried sick about his future. I had helped him years ago through a crisis and he is grateful that I was able to help him. He calls me his therapist, which I get freaked out about because I am not licensed or trained. I just have enough experience with this bullshit to get to the heart of the matter without talking a lot of jargon.  I have always like the word jargon…it makes things sound more complicated than it is yet that is the true meaning of the word.

Anyways, it’s 1:30 am now and my meds still have not knocked me out. I hope I am not going through cycling, where I am hypomanic and then depressed and then hypomanic and then crash deeper into depression. That will fricken kill me.

Tomorrow I really don’t know what I am going to do. I might take another off day but I don’t really know that I can.I just want to get these projects done yet I am so fricken overwhelmed by them it freaks me out and I can’t prioritized, focus, or get the motivation to do what I have to do. I am stuck in limbo with my feet in cement trying to walk and talk and appear all happy to others because if anyone knew just how suicidal I truly am, they most likely would laugh or not take me seriously.  All the more reason why I should make an attempt. I just want to get it out of my system. If it works then fine, my worries are over but if not, then I am truly a failure.

One of the members of the support group that I have talk today about how suicide wrecks families. But would the feelings be the same if the sufferer were dying of cancer? Would you want that person to continue suffering just so YOU don’t have to because they are going to die?  People with serious painful depressions don’t have the luxury of their own bodies to say ok heart muscles, I have had enough stop working. Or to tell the brain stem to stop the lungs working because they have had enough pain, anguish, and despair to keep forcing air into their lungs when all they want is to stop it.  You want to know why a person kills themselves, I’ll tell you, it is because they are in so much friggen mental pain, anguish, shame, guilt, despair, and agony that they just cannot go on anymore. Maybe someone left them, maybe they lost their job and so they are losing their house. Or maybe things appear to be going well in their lives but it is all built around the façade that if they truly knew what was going on in their heads, they would be locked up.  President Lincoln was a good example of this. Most of his closest friends, which were few, knew that he had a darkness that he couldn’t control. In one of the books I read, it said that he often thought of hanging himself on a tree outside the white house because the war was going to badly, his Union was dissipating into nothing and people were dying because of the separation.  Yet he didn’t go through with it. But, unfortunately or maybe fortunately, John Wilkes Booth was able to end his life.  That was tragic, but would it have been more tragic to see a man suffer all his life with this illness and see no possible end to it. To be forced to live against one’s will just so other people not feel sad at their death??  Death is a part of life. It might come natural, tragic, or self inflicted.  Every time I hear about a suicide, I feel a little but happy for that person because I KNOW they are no longer in pain. They are free.

Life of the Midnight Demon

 something I wrote a year or two ago:

Every morning is a struggle.  I wake up and the first that goes through my mind is damn, I am alive.  The urge to cut is ever present at these moments and I have to fight the urge not to do it.  I then hear the voices argue that I might as well get up as I am awake and what is taking me so long.  Thankfully for today, it is not 3 am but instead noon time.  It has to be the first time in a long time, that I slept this late. 

So the routine starts. I get up and the first thing that I do is check facebook to see what my friends are doing for the day.  Then the ordeal of what to wear today starts.  Half the time it is the same pants I wore yesterday because I don’t have the inclination to change pants.  It takes too much effort to decide of the 10 pairs of jeans, in various colors and styles, which one to choose.  Some times I have decided I want to wear a particular style, but not today.  I don’t need the voices commenting on why I am choosing the blue jeans with the side pockets over the gray pants with cargo pockets.  I already don’t want to get up but have to because it is expected of me.  By whom, I am not sure.  But I know that if I don’t get up now, I will be late for work by the time I finish with facebook gaming and maybe getting a few hands of poker in.  I am really surprised I have been able to sustain my $200k chips for the past several weeks.  I must be getting better or just caring whether I win or lose.

After taking care of something called personal hygiene, I am back to my room to get dressed, when sure enough the fights begin in my head over what I am doing and how I am doing it.  Then the fight of what kind of socks to wear begins.  Short or crew, ankle or the shorter kind.  Man, life is full of decisions and you haven’t even stepped out the door yet!  And of course there is the argument of why this one over that one.  You would think that I could decide on my own which socks to wear but these voices have taken over and I don’t think any pill can stop them.

 I then take my meds, a tiny rectangular pill that is supposed to bring me sanity.  It might bring me sanity but it does not bring me joy. More like cause me to be impotent in regards to my writing and reading processes.  Luckily just the reading is affected as I have been able to journal write for the past several weeks.  That too has become a ritual.  After I get dressed and maybe squeeze in another hand of poker while doing so, the real reason why I get up in the morning, Starbucks.  Their mocha is the real reason why I am here and go through these battles just to face the day.  It is the perfect blend of chocolate and espresso that gets me through the day.  Sometimes I need two (especially if I have to be up before 9 am and work till 10pm).  This is where my journaling gets done, the only “me” time that I have during the days of when the noonday demon bears its ugly head and my mood becomes a roller coaster of sorts. 

The fun part of going there is that I am a frequent flyer there so know most of the staff.  This location is the friendliest one that I have been to in the Boston area.  I get my mocha and find a table to sit and enjoy my mocha while writing about the events of the previous day or how I am feeling, though I never seem to go into much detail about that.  Mostly the dialog is what to let my therapist know about what is transpiring.  Right now I am still stumped on my “analysis of a song” paper.  It started off as a fun paper but now it kind of grew serious.  I still have thoughts of getting it published somewhere but not sure if it is publishable.  I am still waiting for my psychiatrist to have her in put on if it is or isn’t.  But none of that matters if I can’t get it finished.  The conclusion of any paper is the hardest (in my opinion) but this one I just can’t seem to get going.  It’s all there in my head but the damn meds won’t let it flow freely.  I could stop the meds for a while and see where that takes me but the voices already cause havoc when the rectangular pill wears off late at night.  I am walking a fine line of sanity each day; do I really want to risk that for a paper that probably won’t go anywhere?

Day 2

The morning struggles of the day before are again facing me today.  Doesn’t matter if it is a beautiful sunny day or a dark, rainy day, my mood is always in the gloomy pit of despair.  I have become so jaded that I hardly even notice that I am in it; I just know that I don’t want to be here to face the day.  The start of the new day is always a strange feeling.  I think I have become immune to my meds as they no longer allow me to sleep as late as I would like.  I wake up before 6 am and damn the day with all my might. I will sometimes take something to allow myself to go back to sleep if I cannot do so on my own.  It’s always a balancing act to juggle.

Today I wake up not as pain free as I would like.  Since 2001, I suffered a nerve injury that causes my left leg to be in spasm and have horrific nerve pain that is best described as electric shocks or a hot poker being stuck in my lower leg.  Or my favorite, a knife in my upper leg where I had the same nerve injury in 2006.  This injury is a supposed rarity called Cauda Equina Syndrome (CES for short).  It is caused by nerves in the back called the cauda equina (literally, the horse’s tail) that become injured due to disc material from the spine or from the vertebrae. Usually the main culprit is some time of trauma or just a bad movement in an already injured back.  When I first joined my support group, there were only 80 members. Now almost ten years later there are over 500 members from around the world.  Each person is affected differently and although our symptoms are the same, it varies in the severity.  Some people do not walk again, some do but have something called foot drop.  Others have bowel and bladder problems that go one for years.  The most common emotional complaint is the loss of dignity and the loss in the use of the lower part of the body.

I have managed to live through this nerve injury but the pain on top of psychological pain sometimes gets to be too much.  Sustained physical pain does lead to depression which then leads to a possible suicide and thanks to drug users who abuse our narcotics; we often have to fight to get our pain under control. Most docs think that this is all in our head which only helps to fuel the depression.  Most of us can’t work full-time any more and can barely function.  Luckily I can function; it’s because of my mental illness that I cannot.  Often times I ignore the pain only to deal with it right before I go to sleep.  I don’t know why people just can’t let me be and allow me to end this existence.  I just want total cessation, a loss of consciousness forever, to cease to be.  It’s my life and I think I can do what I want but people tell me I have some good to do in this world so I must go on, despite this pain I must live with.

So I put one baby step in front of another baby step to get through the day.  Sometimes it gets better when I get out of the house and get my mocha, other times I really just want to go back and hide under the covers.  But I don’t have time for that.

Day 3:

Another day has come that I don’t want to face. I wake up at 7 and have to force myself to go back to sleep.  I wake up a few hours later and now have to rush to get to work.  I don’t have the time to sit at my Starbucks table and write in my journal for a bit while drinking my mocha.  I don’t have the time to sit and write about today and that stresses me out.  I have found and research supports this, that writing is a cathartic way of expressing oneself when in the gloom of despair.  I also find that if I don’t write, I get into the suicidal thinking all too quickly and it is very difficult to get out of that thinking once you are in it.

I have made it to work today but don’t have the mindset to really focus like I do when I have my “me” time.  I have been out of the house since noon and just noticed it is a sunny day.  How funny is that?

The voices have been quiet the last few days, which is both good and bad.  I don’t have them harping on what clothes to wear, what socks to wear, what shirt.  It is still a struggle to find that shirt that I need to wear other than my t-shirt.  Today I pick a gray scrub top.

Nerve pain was not so bad last night.  But then the temperature in Boston has not been fluctuating between hot and cold the last few days.  It has stayed within 40-60 degrees, with no drastic drops or highs.  It has been a steady temp that my back likes.

I still don’t know why I am still around.  To think that yesterday was supposed to be the day I was to end my life and I didn’t, makes me kind of sad.  I am getting closer to the end.  This time I gave myself the end of the week.  Next time I might give myself till tomorrow.  But one thing I found was that it is not easy to plan your death.  There are too many variables to account for.  One is obviously the when and where and how, but then the aftermath of after you are dead still strikes me.  Should I leave a note of how to dispose of this body, why I did this, how I felt that no one could help me get through this?  No, that is not true, there are plenty of people I can call to talk to but I chose not to because I know they do not want me to die, to end this existence, to end my life.  Most likely, they will try and stop me from ending my pain and I don’t want that.  But then I think of the little people in my life and realize I have to be there for them no matter what.  Why I don’t know.  I still would like to believe that they will be better off without me.  They don’t need this depressed, psychotic being to be in their lives.  The littlest one told me the other day that I have cooties.  I’m glad the voices didn’t get wind of that or I might have gone through with my plan.

What is my plan, exactly?  I don’t think I really know.  It is as temperamental as my moods.  Thoughts of hanging fly by and also of overdosing.  It is a toss up of these two, a flip of a coin.  I would love to entertain these thoughts but the hold it has over me when I go into this kind of thinking is none that can be described.  It is like a hypnotic drug that takes possession of your soul and because you feel like crap, takes you to a place you know you are not going to get out of anytime soon.  It gives you a high because you cannot go lower than what you are right now and it relieves your pain because you so want to escape this pain of living.  That is all that the noonday demon really lives for, to find an escape for the emotions that hold it in great despair and anguish.

A day of pain:

I wake up one morning and I can’t move.  I am in pain, a ten on a scale of 1-10.  I didn’t do anything, just got out of bed and my back decides it is going to hurt.  The worse part is that I am out of my pain meds.  I have to grin and bare this type of pain for the next several days until my doctor’s office and the pharmacy duke it out over who has the prescription.

It’s awful being in this amount of pain.  Forget about the indecision of what to wear.  It’s painful to put on your socks, painful to put one pant leg on and then the other. Then try to finagle how to get your shoes on, all while grinning and sweating.  During these bouts of pain, you can’t think of anything else but death.  Unfortunately, it won’t be showing up any time soon.

I haven’t been to work all week because I just can’t move without serious pain.  I did manage at least three hours the latter part of the week but only to torture myself.  Luckily I was able to get my pain meds before the start of the weekend or things would have been horrible. It’s almost a week later and I still have sciatica, which in layman’s terms is irritation of the butt nerves.  In the medical world, it’s the irritation of the sciatic nerve, which is potentially, my L5 nerve root.  Sciatica was the beginning of my CES journey.  It started out like that only to get much worse about a year later.  Funny how before that time, I would have been afraid to take a narcotic medication.  Now I don’t give it a second thought.  I don’t abuse my medication; I only take them when I need them and as prescribed.  We all think of how bad it is to be on narcotic medication but when you have pain that makes you think of killing yourself, you need to find relief.  It just makes your quality of life that much better.  To be a little less in pain is all that I am asking for.  I’m not an addict; I don’t sell my drugs for money.  I’m just a person in chronic pain that needs relief.

Since this new pain has arrived, I have noticed that my left leg will become numb if I sit too long without shifting my weight.  It doesn’t fall asleep or have the pins and needles sensation; I just lose feeling from my knee down to my toes.  Luckily, I have not had any bowel or bladder issues that would cause me to go running to the emergency room ASAP.  I know that if I do, my L5-S1 disc has finally snapped and I will have CES for the third time.  It is weird knowing your back is a time bomb waiting to go off at the slightest movement it doesn’t like.  I am hoping that with all the vitamin D that I have been taking, it has slowed the progression of degeneration I have.  I am only thirty-three yet have the spine of a ninety year old.

The Zone:

The consciousness is a curious thing. You may seem to act in a normal manner yet your friends and family may see and what you actually feel can be very different.  Recently, I became aware of the “zone” this suicidal mind set that all I think about is suicide and the means to get there.  It is caused by a hormone imbalance of the menses but it doesn’t feel hormonal while you are going through it.  All you feel is dead inside.  Your world is dark and gray, no color touches you. You feel you have no future. Every thing is bleak and hopelessness is prevalent.  Psychological pain is ever present and all you can think about is taking it away, permanently.

Today I started the day meeting my psychiatrist as a check in as I am quite afraid of the reality that my next cycle might end up taking my life with my own hand.  I have put into place that I should be hospitalized against my will if my mood gets to be that bad again.  The thought of taking my life does make me happy because I no longer have to deal with the struggle of juggling bills, juggling meds, juggling my pain and what to take for it, and the struggle of my sanity with the voices harping on me on my every move.  I catch myself talking to myself more, though right now I have a migraine and it is difficult to think at the moment.  Migraines so suck. Having one for a few days really does you in.

Through all of this, I have been dealing with tremendous grief. Having lost three people in the last three weeks has been difficult.  One was a co-worker who died of pancreatic cancer.  The second was my mentor in the field of suicidology, Dr. Edwin Shneidman.  I had the pleasure of talking with him one day after I wrote him a letter about how much his work means to me.  He also liked my paper that I presented at the annual conference of the American Association of Suicidology last spring.  The third person was my ex-landlord who was an amazing lady who worked up until the age of 90.  I feel their loss every day, but most especially, of Dr. Shneidman because I know that I will never have that unexpected phone call again.  He was 91.  He believed in something he called the postself, which is what you have when you are gone. Like me, he did not believe in life after death, it was through the postself that one lives on.  It is what is in the works of a person (books, letters) and also the memory of oneself that lives on after someone has passed away.

Constriction and moods of death

Another plan has been set into motion.  Around the 21^st of August I decided that I would give myself a month of living to sort things out and see if I was going to end my life.  The month has come and gone and I am still thinking of ending this existence.  It is not because I am depressed or hopeless. It is because I just don’t see the point in living when I just feel so dead inside.  I talked with a dear friend who kind of got through to me and was very afraid of losing me.  My therapist felt the same way last week.  She had said that she wants me “back”. We have been having phone sessions all week because I just don’t want to see her.  Actually the plan was to see her on Monday and Tuesday and then not see her for a while.  She was not ok with this plan while I was “suicidal”.  I do not feel suicidal.  I just want to die and am making plans on making that happen.  Monday I did not see her and was forced to have a phone session because of pain and spasms in my foot and ankle.  The increase in physical pain and loss of sleep this week has forced my hand to think more of my plan.  I had thought of gassing with a mixture of household chemicals with a sedative of benedryl.  But seeing that my therapist might get the “Mounties” after me if I do not see her today I am thinking of a less lethal plan, one that will put me in a coma for a day or so. As the lyrics of away from the sun go, it’s down to this, I’ve got to make this life make sense.  Tonight after my chem Shift, I will make a decision about what I am going to do to end this existence.  I really don’t have a reason. I do have pressures but they are nothing compared to the pain that I deal with everyday. Nothing seems to help that. The strongest pain killers cannot help psychache.  I have given therapy ten years to work for me and it hasn’t. I keep coming back to this place of constriction where all I see is plans to die. I have yet to act but the time for that is now even though I feel like why bother.  I don’t even know if it will work.  My friend thinks that I might not wake up. I don’t really think that will happen. I know I will, just don’t know when.

11-5-10

Lots have happened since this last post.  This year has been a whirlwind of sorts. Depression hasn’t gotten any better and I have convinced myself that I will die by the end of the month.  I have had it with pain, physical and mental, debt issues, knowing that it’s hopeless to think that my life could possibly get better when every night I have pain of some sort.  Nothing seems to help. Therapy has become a joke.  A few months ago I have tried to quit therapy and still try but my therapist knows that if I do not continue, suicide is all but inevitable.  But lately I feel that I am more of a burden to her and my psychiatrist. Both want to help but it’s fruitless as their efforts do not help and I plunge deeper into the abyss every day.  Work keeps me going but as Shneidman once posted about a case, this guy did work and go through everyday business right up till the end of when he ended his life.  It’s pretty much what I am doing.  My therapist knows that I am in that state of mind that I can end my life at moment but there is not much she can actually do to stop me, no one can. Even if I were to be in the hospital, unless I am committed for the rest of my life, there is no chance that once I get out I will not try.