I am not honest with myself. I may be one of the few people that I lie to regularly. I am not trying to lie, but my brain just pulls one over on me and I believe it. I can be pretty sure that I am doing fine. I can be pretty sure that I tracked something or did something or wrote something-- but I didn't. And these lies become more pronounced the deeper the Depression. Then, of course, I get to beat myself up over all the forgotten things once I realize that I haven't done or tracked or written them. Follow? Which makes me feel worse. Which makes it harder to keep track of the things because my brain is slowly sizzling with exactly the wrong sort of chemicals. The beautiful thing about blogging is that I have readers who know me in real life and will notice if I don't post. And will bug me about it. If I were doing this on paper, I could lie to myself and believe that I was writing daily. But not. And who would call me on it? When I was an infertility patient I was the queen of good data. I had five years of basal body temperatures charted in a series of Excel spreadsheets. I brought them in to talk to my doctors. I knew exactly which medications we had tried and for how long. I knew which hormones needed to be active at any given moment in order to have the whole system function properly. I learned to give myself shots. Not just the subcutaneous ones, but ones that went into the muscle. The nurse training me was nervous because she had never trained a patient before-- only other nurses. I was so nervous that in order to give myself the shots I had to have everything laid out exactly as she had done. I needed five cotton balls on the far left. Then a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Then the glass ampules of powdered medication and distilled water. Then the long needles with their plastic caps. And finally the sharps away bottle where I put my discarded needles. As a Depression patient I have thus far had very crappy data. It is all vague and hearsay and relying on my terribly unreliable brain as a narrator. How can you ask someone whose brain is not working as it should whether their brain is working as it should? How can you track things over time if one of the things you lose is the ability to track things over time? How can you know which dosage of which medication works if you don't know when you started or stopped or what the dosage was or what symptoms you had at any given time? And great jumping josephine, who wants to keep track of all that information anyway. NOBODY. Oh, except me. Because I have tried everything else. And once you try everything else and it doesn't work, the only thing left is the thing you haven't tried. This may be something of an exaggeration. But I have tried the following things to remember to take my meds:
So I am collecting good data. Good narrative data. I will then be able to comb back through these entries before I go see my behavioral psych therapist and have some general idea of how the meds and the dosages correspond to my level of functioning. Grateful Crap: watching cousins playing and tackling and laughing. (Ages 1.875 through 10.6 or so) Daily Convexions: took meds (350mg bupropion; then later 150 more of bupropion and 150 mg sertraline) saw a friend met with family tidied up a bit (but not insanely) Comments are closed.
|
Archives
May 2020
Categories
All
K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |