Category Archives: me

Well, That Was Exhausting…

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Since I hadn’t been to the Psych department in so long, the Doctor took an entire history again.  Do they not realize how painful it is to go through everything that’s happened in the last 15 years all over again?  Of course they do.  Wankers.

The final decision was to not put me on any meds.  I am coping more or less okay, its better for the fetus if and when I get pregnant etc etc etc.  Of course, he told me to go to my GP for a new referral if I felt this wasn’t working for me.

Wasn’t my original Psychiatrist, which sort of pissed me off, as I was hoping it would be him so he’d know my history.  This guy hadn’t even read my chart before I got into his little room.  That annoyed me as well.

The other difficult part was the woman sitting behind me in the reception area, bitching about how she’d been betrayed and what the hell was she doing with all the crazy people? I really wanted to turn around and tell her to shut the fuck up, some of us crazy people need this shit.  But I bit my tongue.  And had to laugh when she commented that the reception area looks like a 1930s ward from some movie, because it does.

Why do they do that? Why do they put the ‘modern’ psych units into the creepiest building they can find?  KP, back in California, was the same way.  The Department of Psychology and Psychiatry was in the old Home for the Incurables (I kid you not) in Oakland California. It was such a creepy building.

Home now, enjoying my last day off before next weekend, when I have another four day weekend!

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

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No, I’ve not had any green beer. Or any beer. I had a lovely glass of wine last night, though.

Spent the morning cleaning the flat. Going to spend the afternoon putting together our new piece of furniture and putting things away. Maybe we’ll be unpacked by the time we have to decide if we’re moving again. That’ll be next January.

In other news, I see my psychiatrist tomorrow. I haven’t seen him in about 3 years. I think it was just after Simon and I got married that he released me back to my GP for meds monitoring.So very different here than in the US. In the US I would have seen him non-stop. And probably a psychologist also. I think I had one psychology session ages ago here in the UK.

I think about finding a private therapist, but its very expensive in order to just go and talk to someone. NHS won’t cover it. At least, not long term.

We’ll see what he says tomorrow. I think I do need to be back on meds, just not sure what kind. Too many ‘bad’ days lately. Better living through chemistry, indeed.

Of Course…

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I have the next four days off.  Saturday and Sunday are, of course, the weekend.  Monday is St Patrick’s Day (unless you are Catholic, then the Pope says its today, as there can’t be another holiday during Holy Week) and Tuesday I took as a holiday. So, Of Course… I woke up sneezing and sniffling.  No coughing yet, but I feel it is on the horizon.  Oh, and my eyes are tearing.

I am trying something new with this cold.  I usually carry around little packs of kleenex with me.  This time I have nicked one of Simon’s cotton hankies.  Its clean, I took it right out of the basket of laundry to be folded (and if someone has a way to get laundry to fold itself and put itself away, please stop hiding it from the rest of the world, kthxbai).  There is something comforting about a clean cotton hanky when you are sneezing your head off.

I am suppose to be going to get my haircut in about an hour and a half, but I contemplating canceling.  I do need to go out today as Simon and I want to buy a cabinet thingy for the living room so we can finish unpacking this weekend, but I am thinking an hour at the hairdresser might be pushing it.  I’ll decide in a bit.

Of course, it doesn’t help that it is freezing cold and raining today.  I wish the Lion part of March would end already so we can get to the Lamb part.

I am Absolutely Thrilled

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That people are reading this blog. But, would you mind commenting? Or at least sending me an email (tee AT leyser DOT org) (ya know with the @ and the . and no spaces!)? And tell me what you think? Or how you found me?

I do have a stats page, but it isn’t very good, I am looking for a new one.

Any bloggers out there have a favorite stats page that works with Word Press?

In other news, I’ve had a horrid week at work. I am very very good at my job. Except this week when everything I touched turned to crap. I ordered the wrong size envelopes. I gave my boss the wrong record sheet of returned information, three times. I know I did more bad stuff than that, but at the moment I can’t remember what it was.

Let’s put it this way, I was in such a foul mood earlier today, from all my screw ups this week, that Peter, our security guard from Reception, came in to talk to me, waving his hanky like a white flag. At least it was funny!

Hearing About Mr Betterly’s Passing

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and blogging about it yesterday, as led to me thinking about other teachers who inspired me.

I realized, as I thought back over the approximately 20 years of my education, from pre-school through University, that all of the teachers I can remember clearly, who inspired me, who helped lead me to where I am today, were from my 2 years at Emma Willard School.

There was Mr Betterly, who taught me History. And Mr Turner, who I never had in class, but was my adviser my Senior Year, who would sit me down in his office and make me tell him what I wanted to be ‘when I grew up’. And Mr Davidson and Mr Patterson (who I never actually called Mr Davidson and Mr Patterson, but Brian and Vaughn), who gave me my love of theatre.

There was Ms Carroll, who taught me to write well, and Ms Hamner, who was Acting Head Mistress and Senior Class Adviser while I was there, and who also made me sit in her office and tell me what I wanted to be ‘when I grew up’.

There was a French teacher, whose name escapes me, who managed to put up with me mangling the language and my antics with the girl who sat next me (whose name also escapes me) when he asked how you say chicken in French and we answered chickon!   Which of course became our swear word for the year.  OH CHICKON! (you have to say with a French accent. I swear its hysterically funny).  And he never once tried to separate us!

I am sure there were others, during those 2 years, and if I had unpacked my year books yet, I could tell you about them.

For The Most Part, I Love my Job

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I have a lot of autonomy, I do a variety of things all day long, I get along well with my co-workers, I adore my bosses.

And then there are days like today.  I think the whole office had PMS.  And I found out no one told me they had taken the last C5 envelope (business no. 10 to you US readers) or the last sheet of invoice paper.  I apologized to my boss, who said it wasn’t my fault if no one told me, but I still felt like I hadn’t done my job.

Luckily I have a great relationship with my supplier and he ran me over a box of invoice paper.  I’ll have the envelopes tomorrow.

And I am still writing the minutes from our Board meetings last week.  Which would go a lot faster if certain members of our staff didn’t keep interrupting me to tell me stupid things.  Like that his envelope won’t seal.  Use a piece of tape, for freakin’ sake.

The good thing I found out today is that most likely I won’t be running our PO system any more.  Its being handed over to another person, I hope.  It doesn’t take much time, but it does take some time, and everyone wants their POs NOW NOW NOW.  Um, sorry, I have 24 hours to issue it, and I’m doing something else right now.  Not to forget that THERE’S NO ONE HERE TO SIGN IT, WANKER!

Oh, and that you didn’t follow procedures and if you want a PO for over £500, I need some quotes.  Duh, RTFM.

Oh, how I don’t miss my tech/customer support days!

Rain, Always Rain

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Yup, raining again here in Belfast.  And cold.  Seems like spring is *never* going to come.

People ask me how I could possibly have moved from “sunny!” California to rainy Belfast.  Well, San Francisco isn’t exactly “sunny!” California.

Most people, when you say California, assume you mean Southern.  LA, in other words.  But I am not from LA.  I hate LA.  And, yes, I have been there.

In truth, the weather in Belfast isn’t all that different from Northern California.  Its colder, but both places are very very wet.  So I feel right at home.

Of course, in Northern California, it only rains in the winter.  In Belfast, it rains year round.

But its not really the rain that bothers me.  Its the cold.  I like rain.  I just don’t like cold rain.

Of course, if I could stay home while it rains, I’d like it just fine.  But no, I have to go to work.  In the rain.  And the cold. In the cold rain.

On Mental Illness and Reading About Mental Illness

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I am currently reading Folly by Laurie R King. It is about a mentally ill woman going to live on a private island, all by herself, to rebuild the house her great-uncle built years before.

I should note here the I adore Ms King’s writing.  I am a rabid fan of both her Beekeeper’s Apprentice series (a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes where he has retired to Sussex to raise bees and meets a young woman, Mary Russell, who becomes his apprentice) and her Kate Martinelli series (a series about a lesbian cop in San Francisco).  I have actually read the opening bits of Folly several times, as there have been excerpts of it at the end of other’s of Ms King’s work.  I have always avoided it, however.  I wasn’t ready to read about a mentally ill woman.  I guess now I was.  Also, I received $150 in Amazon.com vouchers between Christmas and my Birthday, and Ms King is hard to find here, as she is an American author, so I had a bit of a Laurie R King and Rita Mae Browne orgy with my vouchers!

Now, for the record, Rae, the protagonist, and I do not have exactly the same mental illness. She has hallucinations, which I never have had, and she’s tried to kill herself several times, which I have never done. But there are some similarities that make this a bit of a hard read for me.

Ms King’s descriptions of the way Rae feels, and thinks, could have been written by me. Descriptions of fog on the brain, of blackness surrounding everything.

There are two scenes so far, and I am about half way through the book, that hit me so hard I had to walk away from the book and read something stupid instead.

The first was when Rae was found, after her most recent mental break, curled up against a wall, shivering. Her daughter and grand-daughter walk into this, while Rae is surrounded by police officers. Rae sees her grand-daughter and starts whispering “I’m sorry.” over and over again.

I will never forget, and probably neither will Simon, the time I called him at oh so early in the morning Belfast time (I was still in California when this happened) and all I could say was “I’m sorry.” Over and over again. Sorry for waking you. Sorry that you have to hear/see this. Sorry that I’m sick. Sorry that I can’t be the way I am ‘suppose’ to be. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Even right now, it brings tears to my eyes. Even now, on occasion, that mantra goes through my head. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

The other scene that Ms King gets right on the money is one where Rae heads to the nearest populated island to do some shopping, make some phone calls and such.  Rae’s voyage from the dock to the newspaper office, where she is looking up the history of her little island and the fire that destroyed her great-uncle’s house, is so very realistic.  She stops in one shop for a bit, then literally forces herself out into the street, making it about half a street more before tucking herself into a coffee shop, near the back, against the wall, buying a sandwich and coffee she doesn’t want so she can stay where she feels safe for the moment.  Her feeling of inner triumph when she goes the rest of the way to the newspaper’s offices without pause after that is so very real.

I do that, when I’m shopping alone.  Stop into shops I have no interest in, if I see they aren’t crowded, to anchor myself for the next bit of crowd.  I also feel a bit of triumph when I make it without doing that.

I do not know if Ms King herself has a mental illness, but she writes it so well, I wouldn’t be surprised.  The book is, of course, about more than Rae’s illness.  It is actually a mystery and an intriguing one a that.  What really happened to her great-uncle?  And the even greater mystery of will Rae make it through without trying to kill herself again, out there on her island where it is a week between visits, so the likelihood of 59th minute of the 11th hour rescue is very slim.

As I said above I haven’t yet finished the book.  Bits of it are very hard going for me.  But I decided to write and post this before the end.  I’ll let you know if I make it through it and if there are any other parts that make me shudder with recognition of myself.

And do read any of Ms King’s work if you can find it.  She’s bloody brilliant.

A Look at the Past

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So this morning, while looking for scratch paper to write the grocery list, I found an old journal of mine. It only covered about 3 months, but it included my trip across the US from Iowa to California and a few months after that. It was painful to read.

Every page of that journal screams “chronic depression, anxiety disorder, agoraphobia” and yet my diagnosis didn’t occur until 2 years after that journal was written.

All of my old journals read that way, from the earliest one I can find, from when I was 16 and visiting London with my grandmother and cousin. And I certainly was seeing therapists at all of those points in my life.

So why did none of them *ever* say “Hey, there is something more going on here. Something other than a kid having a hard time growing up and being a total brat about it. Maybe its chemical. Maybe her brain is wired wrong.” But not one did until a GP when I was 28 or 29 who gave me prozac and told me to find a psychologist who could refer me to a psychiatrist.

It wasn’t too long after that that I had my first real mental breakdown. I ran away. I got in my car, with my cat, Kali, and started to drive back to Iowa, because I had never felt like that in Iowa. Yeah, right. I called my boss and quit my job (thank god he didn’t accept that), left a message for my brother so he wouldn’t worry if he couldn’t get me and started driving. I made it just past the Nevada border when I called my brother again, hysterical, having no idea what I was doing. He convinced me to come back to California and call my doctors. I was off work about 3 months that time.

The final break came about a year later, when I stopped going to work altogether. Hmm, mighty similar to when I quit going to school my junior year of High School. And no one thought to put me on meds then.

I asked my mother about that once. She said even if they had suggested it back then, she probably wouldn’t have let them medicate me. But no one suggested it.

I have scrolled through several Dxs. Bi-Polar Disorder. Chronic Depression. And, now, as I’ve said before, Anxiety Disorder and Borderline Agoraphobia. The last one seems to be right, although I do still suffer from depression at times. Mostly I am just incredibly anxious. All the time. Well, 80% of the time. The other 20% I’m asleep! (that’s a joke. There are long periods when I am not anxious at all.)

The attitude about medication in the UK is very different than it is in the US. In the US they put you on and you stay on. Probably forever. In the UK they do their damnedest to get you off meds. So I’ve had some very good treatment here in the UK. And I was off all meds for about a year until last November when I had a small bout of anxiety and was back on them for a month. I see my psychiatrist in two weeks and we’ll see if I’ll go back on them.

I fought very hard to go off of them, actually. You see, Simon and I are trying to have a baby. And most of the Mad Meds (TM Trepenny Peck) I was on make bad babies. But, since they can’t exactly get women preganant and feed them Mad Meds, there is really no way to know how bad those babies might be, if bad at all.

So in two weeks we’ll see what my old psych says. And if he thinks I need to go back on meds, back on them I go. And if he says I can’t have a baby while on them? Well, we’ll see. I don’t think I know a single completely sane pregnant woman anyway.