Time will tell...

I have a lot to say. I've been through hell. I've given up again. More so than ever before, I look out into life and see one big disappointment. Nothing out there I want to waste my time on any more.

Last Saturday night, in the middle of the night, the night before I left out of town to get my brain scans done, I started losing it. Negative thoughts, angry, depressing, condemning thoughts circled in my head, with remembrances of visions in dreams I have had, half convinced I was some sort of Jesus who was put on this earth to be filled with all these painful emotions and carry the burden of them, I wanted to call my father and ask him to kill me like God left his only begotten child to die on the cross. But I didn't call him, I new he was sleeping and needed the sleep to come drive me and stay with me for my brain scans.

I started, compulsively, to crawl around the floor and up and down the stairs on all fours, giving myself something of a carpet burn on my elbows and knees. I compulsively pounded my head and my fists into the floor very rapidly, almost hyperventilating while I did it. I wanted to go into my medicine cabinet and down some extra meds, but I didn't; I knew if I took extra meds they would skew the test results. I called my therapist on his cell phone twice, barely able to catch my breath, but he didn't return my phone call until Tuesday and couldn't talk long. He told me when he did call me that I was getting better. I couldn't get enough of a word in edgewise to tell him he was full of crap.

My father and I stayed in a hotel along the coastal highway in Longbeach, California. Most people would have loved it; right there on the coast with the cliffs and the beaches and the fancy shops and the weird people. I hated it. I hated how crowded it was, I hated the smell, I hated the sun, those things always bothered me. Being stuck in a small hotel room with insomnia, pacing in a small corner with my insomnia while trying to allow my dad to sleep at night, my thoughts continued to circle and I kept reaffirming how disappointed I am in life and how much I would love for it all to end.

It was agonizing waiting until Thursday morning to talk with the doctor to find out the preliminary results of my brain scans. More than anything I wanted them to find evidence of a big fat cancerous tumor, to give me a reason to say I'm going to die and start saying my good-byes. But I feared the worst: that they would find a normal, healthy brain, and basically tell me I'm malingering or making this all up to get attention.

When we finally talked to the doctor about the results, he confirmed pretty much everything I had expected: there are signs of mild to moderate physical trauma to both sides of my temporal lobes, my frontal lobe, and my cerebellum. I have a complex set of conditions that will be very difficult and take a long time to treat. Sometime, if I get motivated enough, I'll put them all into a chart alongside my brain scans on this site. In case you are wondering what type of brain scans I had, they were SPECT scans, which look at brain activity via bloodflow in the brain. You can find out more at www.brainplace.com.

This complex mess of problems I have includes things or traits of: post-traumatic stress disorder, schizo-affective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, Asperger's and prefrontal cortical dysfuntion (which is similar to attention deficit disorder).

Problems arise, as we use medications to treat one aspect of all this we run the risk of making the other aspects worse. Treatment options include building up, in stages over a year or more, a cocktail of medications, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and electro shock treatment (ECT).

Basic consensus is to stay away from SSRI's. I'll probably stay on and increase my Xanax back to 8mg.

I'll get a formal report of the findings of the scan in 10-14 business days mailed to me, which I'll share with my psychiatrist and therapist.

Right now, I'm gung-ho for the electro shock approach. Just shock this depression out of me, because it is literally killing me.

I should be showing a lot of gratitude right now to my father and my family for all of their support and risking their financial health to get all this done for me. But I'm too down to show it.

So, time will tell and see how this ends. If it ends the way I want it to, death will wrap me in it's warm embrace. If my therapist is right, I'll go on to be happy and a genius in some career field.