Feeling better

Doing better today. My sense of time is still a little off, but everything else seems to be going better. My therapist, like my old therapist, is urging me to look into going back to college. I'm scared about doing that, because it would mean asking my family for even more support, but after talking to my dad and my aunt, they're at least supportive of me trying to give it a shot. So, unless my mood tanks, I'll try to get an appointment with an admissions counselor next week.

paranoid... why?

After posting that my thoughts seem better last night, today has been hell for me. I slept most of the day. I was just so tired and out of it. I knew I couldn't drive so I canceled my music lessons. While I was sleeping I kept hearing my phone ring which sits on my bed stand, but it wasn't actually ringing. And I kept hearing someone knock on the door, but that just scared me more and sent my hiding deeper under the covers. I started feeling completely hopeless and helpless and worthless, so I decided to fight these feelings, get up and take a shower, and the whole time I was taking a shower I kept feeling like someone was going to come in and scare me. Where is all this coming from? Is it a type of mood swing? Is it because I haven't been able to eat properly and my meds aren't being metabolized right? I'm not sure. I'm glad my aunt is home now, I'm going to try and relax and not let all this paranoia continue to overwhelm me. I just had some dinner so that should hopefully help. I think I'll watch some TV, maybe play some games too.

insert title here ;-)

I'm having some problems with my internet service provider so it's a little more difficult to post frequently. I'm trying to get it sorted out but it may take some days.

Anyway, not sure if I've already mentioned this, but on the Lamictal, even at this low starting dosage, I notice that my stomach constantly feels full; I'm supposed to be eating many small meals a day to keep my hypoglycemia in balance but it makes me sick to even think about eating. I'm still sleeping a lot, and it's difficult for me to keep track of time or the days. I'm thankfully not as depressed as I was, I'm not down thinking suicidal thoughts or anything anymore, but most of my emotions seem to be a little dulled, probably due to the Lamictal. It does seem to help with the intrussive, obsessive thoughts, I'm able to get off the "train" of thoughts a little bit easier. So that's all good and well I guess. With most meds, you have to take the good with the bad. I'm glad a lot of the dark thoughts are gone, but I'm a little distressed that it's harder for me to keep track of my commitments and such.

I received the formal report from my brain scans yesterday, and when I read them I did get depressed for a while, as the treatment plan they suggest sounds a lot like what I've already been doing for years. But, at least it's a plan.

One of the questions I have in therapy is how do I learn to love myself, nurture myself, and really care about my well being and hygeine? I've been through Bradshaw's books, which I think are good, but some of the stuff he suggested backfired on me as I tried working on my "inner child". A friend and my therapist think I need that someone special in my life to help provide me... I'm not sure how to put it... I guess you could say somehow use the love they give me to learn how to love myself? I'm not sure. I've been through a lot of self esteem books and worked on positive dialog a lot, but my therapist refers to most of that as "band aids".

Seems like there was something else I wanted to post about, but I can't remember what, if anything.

Back down again

I've missed my morning dose of Xanax two days in a row now, I think it's causing a little bit of withdrawals, I'm feeling more agitated, depressed, lack of energy and motivation. I went out to a nice dinner and saw a movie with some of my family yesterday, but I was just too grumpy and tired to enjoy it much. Not sure what I'm going to do today. Or tomorrow for that matter. Probably just sleep a lot, these past few days I've been sleeping a whole lot.

Better Attitude

I'm doing better with my overall attitude these past few days. I think a lot of it has to do with hanging out with my internet friends, trying to force myself to go out and use the swimming pool, and the increase in Xanax. Also helping is knowing I'm going on new meds I think. I haven't had any delusional thoughts since I started taking the Lamictal and increased my Xanax this Monday night.

We'll keep an eye on me over the next week or so to see if my mood swings back down into deep depression again. I'll have to make sure I understand as much as I can about Lithium before I go on it when I talk to my psychiatrist again a week from Monday.

My aunt bought me a milkshake maker to help cheer me up. God knows I love a good milkshake :)

Feeling a little better tonight after depressing morning

I woke up feeling still really depressed, woke up, as seems usual lately, with memories of past failed relationships and broken heart. Saw my therapist, he told me all the things I know I'm supposed to do, mostly to do with positive and negative thinking. I still have a lot of resentment and anger deep within me about some traumatic events in my life, and those negative thoughts are controlling my life and my behavior. I'm obsessing on them.

I like to use computer analogies. Think of positive thinking as a software program running on a computer, and negative thinking as a virus. Think of my physiological brain problems as the computer hardware. It's hard to get the software running right when the hardware is buggy. I saw my psychiatrist, he upped my Xanax back to where it was at, at 8mg a day, and started me on the slow rise to 250mg or more of Lamictal, starting out at 25mg for the first two weeks, it'll probably take me up to two months before I notice a difference and get to the target dosage, which could be as high as 400mg. I've been on this med before, but only as high as 125mg. He also sent me to get my testosterone and LH hormones tested, as well as a full blood panel in preparation for going on Lithium, which I may start in two weeks when I see him again and have the full results of both my brain scans and my blood tests.

I was feeling a little better, but still anti-social. I've been very sick to my stomach with all the constant worrying. My family has also been very supportive too. I finally made myself get online and play some games with my internet friends, and that helped cheer up my mood as we had some fun.

I know what my therapist is trying to do. He's trying to get me to shuck these attitudes I still carry from my childhood, and let my true self shine through. But I get stuck on thinking negatively as well as delusionally and it seems to take more and more to get me out of that rut. Hopefully, over the coming months the meds will help me actively use positive self talk and approach life with a new attitude.

I'm trying to get my hands on a good supplier of Omega3 supplements, which are shown to really help with stabilizing mood without side effects. It's harder to find a good supplier than it seems. I'm supposed to take 1000 mg 4 times a day or more, but when I really look at the labels of the supplements I find, I find that 1000mg really isn't 1000mg, with brand X it's really like 300, and brand Y it's like 600. The Amen clinic, which is the clinic I went to for my scans, sells pharmaceutical grade Omega-3, I'm going to try and order some from them so I can be sure I'm getting the right thing. I'll be taking vitamins C and E as well, they are anti-oxidants which help the body properly make use of Omega 3. I'm still taking a multivitamin, protein shakes and chromium to help stabilize my blood sugar levels, and melatonin at night to help me sleep.

I think that's all for now.

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.

Agoraphobia - Suite101.com

Link:Agoraphobia - Suite101.com: "Agoraphobics live in a prison with glass walls and an invisible jailor. In some ways it is as though some fairy tale witch has cast a mysterious spell which locks us into our homes and makes every venture 'out into the world' into a terrifying and herculean task. It is frustrating and confusing for us and for those who know and love us. And it's virtually impossible for us to explain our feelings, our terror, because we ourselves don't understand."

The above quote is the welcome message to the website linked above, I haven't read through the whole website but the paragraph really describes things well.

More mood swings and racing thoughts

After seeing my therapist this afternoon, I crashed further into a deep depression, not seeing any point in the whole life thing, and my thoughts were racing in random circles faster than I could keep track of them. I tried sleeping, but that evaded me as well. So, I decided to try and focus on something and pay my bills and balance my check book. Then something weird happened. I found a charge to my debit card that didn't make sense. So I called the bank, and they tracked it down for me, turns out somehow someone made a duplicate of my debit card and physically used it in Turkey to by dinner or something. But instead of freaking me out further, for some reason dealing with that distracted me from all my depressing thoughts and after I got through canceling my card and ordering a new one with a different number, I felt a lot better, took a shower, got something to eat, then played some online games with some friends I have on the internet.

Am I weird or what? Feel worse after the therapist but better after my debit card was fraudulently used? Figure that one out, Mr. Freud ;-)

Ugh, feel blah

I'm feeling pretty bad right now, my lungs are a mess, wheezing and coughing up phlegm, probably because I've been smoking too much. I've been smoking a lot since I've been up pretty much constantly for about two days. I finally got a couple hours of sleep, but still feel really tired and my lungs still hurt, so at the moment I'm convinced I'm going to the drugstore tomorrow to pick up some nicotine patches and quit smoking. I know this goes against the advice my doctors have been giving me, they've told me I should work out my anxiety and depression problems before trying to quit smoking, but right now I feel I should quit. Besides, I won't be able to smoke before each of my brain scans next week anyway. I don't know, maybe this is just me complaining and rambling late at night, but if I'm lucky I'll still be serious about it in the morning.

On another note, my therapist seems to be in favor of me diving back into music. He specifically told me to "put the therapist in me on vacation, there's only room for one therapist" and go with my dreams and goals and what's making me feel good. So I might be getting me an electric bass and amp and putting up a sign on the bulletin board at the local music stores after I get back from my scans.

I'm geeked and ready to rock

I just got back from my vocal and bass guitar lessons and practicing, my fingers are hurting, I'm starting to develop my calluses again on my finger tips (in case you're not a bass player, that's a good thing :). While at the music store I played on a really nice electric bass and amp that was cheap and sounded great, I'm geeked about trying to find a way to afford it (I'm using an acoustic right now) and thereby have a way to get into one of the many bands that are advertising the need for a bass player. I think getting into a band would be great therapy, and if we started gigging, that would be good supplemental income as well. But the therapist inside of me is telling me I have to take one thing at a time and not get too carried away or I'll just be wasting money on a pipe dream. But it's hard to think that way, because I'm geeked at the moment.

Stressful holiday weekend

This weekend, while at times was fun and great to see some family, was really a pressure cooker in terms of my anxiety, as usual I started to depersonalize and have panic attacks right when the fun was really starting to get going. At times I just curled up on the floor in a bedroom with a Teddy bear or one of the cats. There was another party for the family Monday, but I couldn't go to that becuase my anxiety level was so high and I was having irritable bowell symptoms as well (just gotta love that). Tomorrow is my last day for my mood-stabilizing drug Zyprexa, and I go down another half miligram on my Xanax as well. So, I'm not quite sure what to expect, but I'm hoping that going off the Zyprexa will cause my weight to go down and my attention to improve. Got another week to go until my brain scans, it's going to be tough waiting until then to see what they prescribe for me, but I hope it's all good.