| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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it's been raining in texas. one fun thing about that is that the snails come out. mostly the young garden snails that are, as far as i can tell, trying to get to higher ground from the saturated earth. it's kind of zen to sit on the back patio and watch snails slowly glide up the walls. |
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panic attack. anxiety. my entire body was shaking. i could hardly walk. girlfriend's brother-in-law had to drive me the 2 blocks. they ran every test they could think of. catscan, brain mri, x-rays, sucked all kinds of blood out of me. got there around 5:30pm, they saw my condition and didn't even give a second thought to admitting me immediately. finally got a room at about 4am. shared it with an incontinent geezer who shit himself twice within an hour of my arrival, and another old dude who seemed to express himself entirely through flatulence. they gave me massive doses of librium, which brought my blood pressure down from the stratosphere to normal. now i'm told librium is supposed to be majorly addictive but i've had no desire to take another pill. they wanted to keep me there a 3rd night but i whined my way out of that. i was actually happy to be there. this had been building up for 2 or 3 weeks, or maybe even longer, going back to the day i almost fell into traffic on that drawbridge connecting queens and brooklyn. now i'm not shaky at all. it's the only time in my life i've stayed overnight at a hospital. looking forward to that never happening again. blood pressure yesterday was a perfect 130/80 |
dave. now there's a blast from the past. |
y'all need to pick it up. :) |
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something. |
easement of our property drops down into shoal creek. which means we pay retarded amounts of money for flood insurance. fucking hell i hate talking about weather! but anyway, the creek turned into a river, gushing all the way downtown to where i used to live when i first moved to austin. and on the front page of the paper a few days ago was a photo of a man stranded across the street from that apartment building being rescued by uniformed men in inflatable rescue rafts. sirens all day long, all night long, all day the next day. we have a very large piece of land considering where we live well inside city limits, and the creek was about four feet from coming up into our yard - a safe distance. but the rain pooled in our yard, making it a large pond, and the water rose so high that it was only about 4" away from coming up and over our foundation into our newly remodeled bathroom. it's rained so much and been so cloudy for so long that the tomatoes and cucumber plants in my garden have grown so high, presumably reaching up for sunlight. it rained last night. it's just rain rain rain. for the first time ever - back in early april - i bought a first class rain jacket, rain boots, and a serious looking umbrella. the 1/3 full lake travis reportedly is now 2/3+ full, but the upper lakes still not so much. |
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in non-weather related news, we are taking a 2 week vacation to northern california in july and august. we're staying in a beach house in small town on the santa cruz bay called aptos. we'll also be taking a short side trip to yosemite. and when i was on priceline trying to find lodging, well first of all, it was nearly impossible because i'm late to that game. but interestingly, one of the places that came up in my search was an incredibly shitty looking "bed and breakfast" in Coulterville. i don't know if you remember, but i've been to Coulterville before, back in 199?, where Sheila drove down to meet me and my friend - we were travelling. we all ate something, and then we followed sheila way up the mountain, on crazy windy roads with drop offs on either side, all the way to her house, where i met Lucy, and other characters, and her husband Paul. we are not staying at that bed and breakfast, but i would if i could get a hold of sheila. senor's niece is going to stay at the beach house with the monkeys while he and i take another side trip to napa, sweet jesus i really need a break from mothering. |
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lastly, mark. jesus h. what was going on the 2-3 before you landed in the hospital? stop that. |
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sorry, one more thing. mark, upon recommendation from her psychiatrist, i am giving my eldest 1 gram of inositol twice per day to treat her anxiety and ocd. it's a totally tasteless, textureless powder that completely dissolves in liquid. i put it in her apple juice. get it on amazon. or pay cash for it $20 at whole foods or vitamin cottage or whatever they have out there. the psych says it's been effective in treating both disorders in double blind studies yada yada. but whatever, it works. i put her on it, symptoms diminished. took her off it, symptoms worsened. put her back on, symptoms diminished. just saying. |
waiting room when i saw this. i asked the doc if he had an opinion on inositol but he'd never heard of it. that doesn't necessarily mean anything. i'm willing to give it a go, though it wasn't on the shelves at Walgreens or Rite-Aid, so I'll look at a fuller vitamin shop. i have a stock of Lorezapam, which is said to be the exact same thing as Librium. i have not had to take one yet, though a few episodes this week caused feelings of panic and chest pain. the whole sorry emergency room episode and what led up to it is too much to type, and there are people out there i would not want reading it, even though they do not know about this place. i had blood test results from 10 days ago read back to me today and everything is normal, even the liver, which was surprising considering my alcohol intake these days. it really was all in my head, the panic attack. next stop: Bellevue. |
pharmaceuticals and professional therapy can't prolong. i don't mean to be flippant. if you all truly knew me you'd be shocked i'm still alive at all. yet i even outlasted my doctor; lost him to kidney disease. my secret: the park. any park that's handy. just wandering around whatever patch of nature is handy to me, whenever i can get to it. and wine: a 750ml bottle a day. though i could stand to cut back a little. no guarantees, but i'd still take it over isotoner or whatever. |
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i don't go about announcing to the world that my daughter has psychiatric diagnoses, but most everything i write here isn't relevant in the outside world. it's safe here because in the internet universe nobody's got a telescope trying to find it. and if anyone should find any of the classified information i've shared here, by that time the idea of privacy will be moot. and i'll be too old to care. it's hard to believe that there's something more personal than so much of what's been written in dreamland, or other places that used to be front page. anyway, it's easy for a psychiatrist to give you meds and send you on your way, with interval check-ins to see if dosages need tweaking. my daughter's psychiatrist handed us a packet with specific things checked off: more sleep relaxation exercises meditation (specifically Indigo Dreams by Lori Lite) inositol nourishment cognitive behavior therapy sometimes we pay doctors to point out what we already know, what's obvious, but we forget in the day to day. and so putting the matter of psychiatric health into our own hands, instead of the hands of a pharmaceutical company, is a great start to discovering if you can manage yourself - but holy hell it's a lot of work. and i love and pharmaceuticals and respect their power to save lives! but like droop said, it could be right in front of you, as simple as frequent walks in the park. or getting more sleep. eating more nourishing meals at regular intervals. for years now my girls have a color chart in their room with colors representing emotional states. green = happy yellow = starting to get agitated, sad, worried orange = super frustrated, angry, scared red = tantrum purple = emotions out of control, seizure-like symptoms and the key is to learn to recognize when you're in yellow, approaching orange, and being able steer back to green. both girls have their own way of doing it, and i used to have to help them a lot. once they're in the red or purple, they aren't reachable, we have to let the thing ride itself out. the thing about having kids is that they teach you everything you need to know about yourself. and it's a lot simpler than we make it out to be. |
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If the rain comes they run and hide their heads They might as well be dead If the rain comes, if the rain comes When the sun shines they slip into the shade When the sun shines down And drink their lemonade When the sun shines down When the sun shines, when the sun shines Rain, I don't mind Shine, the weather's fine I can show you that when it starts to rain When the rain comes down Everything's the same When the rain comes down I can show you, I can show you Rain, I don't mind Shine, the weather's fine Can you hear me, that when it rains and shines When it rains and shines It's just a state of mind When it rains and shines Can you hear me, can you hear me? |
been iconic in my mind, for reasons I cannot necessarily articulate. I've met a surprising number of perfectly respectable people who have woken up at Bellevue, unaware how they got there until someone explained that they were found unconscious on the exit ramp of the FDR, that they had been pulled from a burning building, or some other circumstance beyond their control. But the psychiatric services division in particular stands apart from the medical facility. I read of it in high school, when (if i remember correctly) the director of the place called it a "wastebasket" of society. They have to screen and evaluate all the people that other social agencies turn away, and on account of that they are forced to be highly selective about who they admit. That fact was not anywhere in my mind when I made this appointment or when I showed up. Why would it be? I knew I was in. Still, thinking about it now, I don't know if I should be satisfied or alarmed that they admitted me without any inkling of second thought. The screener said up front that "most of these interviews take about 10 minutes." we talked for a half hour, which i'm told is considered epic for this sort of thing. i kept coming back to the shrink i saw 18 years ago, and how i felt bad about ending the sessions with her, but that at the time i felt i had to. she kept ripping my mother a new one, calling her a bad parent and even a bad person. i was offended, and did not appreciate the comments, but i've come to realize in the years since that i was afraid that listening to this therapist repeat these things over and over would inevitably poison what love i had for my mother. more threateningly i feared that the opposite would occur should i inevitably let slip what was going on between that therapist and me. now that my mother is gone i think it does not matter any more what we say about her. we talked about dad's suicide, which comes back to haunt me at unexpected times. we talked about the drinking, the suicide attempt, the emergency room visit. i came to this session better armed than other times i sought therapy to guide this process the direction i want it to go. i am in control of this as much as they are. i did not feel that way in the past. I left feeling more positive than I have in a long time. A miscommunication with the girlfriend quickly soured that feeling, as it so often does. Today I'm back to remembering how Bellevue felt like home the moment I walked through its doors. It's an amazing complex, like a cross between a shopping center and a monstrous castle. I promptly got lost, requiring the assistance of a nurse to help me figure out where the hell they put the lobby of the building. I was so fucking nervous, not on account of that selectivity thing but because this was real, and this was really happening, and that if another chapter of my life is really opening then i should temper my enthusiasm with the discipline to do the hard work that lies ahead. i tried Inositol. it seemed to have no effect, and i also read that it can worsen symptoms for bipolar and depressed individuals, of which i am a classic example. I might try it again but I think I am going to see about getting Librium. i popped an Ativan last week and it decidedly disagreed with me, even if i think it actually worked in the end. at the ER they fed me monstrous dosages of Librium but prescribed Ativan because Librium is not covered by my insurance. i got the impression that Librium is wildly expensive without insurance but a 60 day supply is like $12. i guess that's considered expensive when a 30 day supply of Ativan, with insurance, was about $1. of course the insurance runs me $400+/month, so do that math... initially i resented having to fire all my doctors and the dentist and specialists by switching to an ACA plan but now i'm starting to forget about the change. i liked my PCP a lot as a human being but now that i think of it a majority of his prescriptions and diagnoses were way off base. the dentist i also liked a lot but my teeth are as close to perfect as you'll ever see. i do not exaggerate when i say that my jaw is thing of wonder to every dentist i've ever seen. so unless i get into a bar brawl or something i can probably get away with another 10-year gap between dentist visits, as happened between roughly 1995-2005. and all that. |
But never had the chance to talk to the specialist. I was abused when I was young, I mean, I was sexually abused by a boy who was two years old than me in bed naked. Over burden mother and absent minded father is what I blamed for my problem and never told them. When a guy who did that to me in bed made me feel like I am a girl. I don't know how to comes out to make a express my feeling and guilt. |
of people care for you and wish you well. This may seem a touch trite, but you might consider eliminating (most or all) carbohydrates from your diet and eating more fat. I've been doing that for the last two years and it's had fantastic cognitive effects. Your body starts producing beta hydroxybutyrate (ketones) and your brain switches over to using mostly that for energy instead of glucose. That ends up being pretty good for bipolar: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary- psychiatry/201110/dietary-treatment-bipolar-disorder Of course I wouldn't suggest ditching any meds to do this, but you might think of doing it on top of any therapy you might get. |
and-low-carb-diets/ |
If you were in Baltimore you could come to my support group. Though at the moment I'm pretty low. See post elsewhere. |