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.