Better Living Through Chemistry
Sep. 11th, 2016 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeI've been back at work since last Tuesday. I'm doing a gradual return to work, which means three-day weeks for three weeks, then a four day week, then a five day week, and then back to my usual rotating shifts. Last week was four hours a day, this coming week will be six hours, then eight hours a day until I'm back on shift for my usual twelve hours.
For those of you who are confused, I normally work twelve-hour rotating shifts, on a schedule that repeats every four weeks. I've found a blank calendar template online, because sometimes seeing it on "paper" is more helpful. So when I start whining about my work schedule, this is what I'm talking about. Shifts start at 5:30 and finish at 5:30 regardless of whether it's a night shift or a day shift.
The day after I went back to work, I finally got the appointment my GP wanted me to have with a bona fide psychiatrist, to see if there was something I could take for my mild-but-constant anxiety. I'm honestly not sure how it went. The psychiatrist was a very nice, but she got very stuck on my previous diagnosis of Type II Bipolar. She asked me lots of questions about what my mood swings were like, seemingly doubting the diagnosis of my previous psychiatrist (who was the head of fucking psychiatry at the Montreal General Hospital, thank you), but she eventually concluded that, no, he was right. She then plowed over my assurances that I had had no relapses in over ten years, and started talking mood stabilisers. I feel like I spent a long time insisting that no, I didn't need mood stabilisers, that I am doing fine regulating myself these days. What I was there for, I repeated, was a constant low-grade anxiety that was making it increasingly difficult to manage my day-to-day life. I insisted, was assertive (because years of being a mental health advocate, albeit a low-profile one, has taught me a few tricks), and I still ended up with three prescriptions, only one of which is particularly geared toward anxiety. Another is for anxiety *and* a mood stabiliser, and the other is pretty much just a mood stabiliser.
So, I'm torn. I'm willing to give the cocktail a try for now, to see if it does help. After all, the goal is to help the anxiety while not fucking up the emotional balance I worked really hard to get, so maybe the other meds are to make sure the balance stays there. I'm not sure. What I am sure about is that the side effects finally came home to roost today, and I feel like five kinds of warmed over shit. The worst side effects are nausea and dizziness, and those are the two symptoms in life that turn me into the biggest whiny baby. I can deal with brain-splitting migraines and broken bones, but nausea? No, thank you. Bleah.
Apart from the side effects, I don't feel any different. It's early days yet, so time will tell. This is new territory for me, to be honest. Since the bipolar diagnosis, I've always known how to manage mood changes, and I know how to recognise the signs. Anxiety, on the other hand, has been my faithful companion for a lot longer than that. In fact, I can trace it back to when I was a pre-teen, at the very least. I just always assumed that people constantly had a million thoughts in their mind at any given time, and that at least half of those were self-critical thoughts, judging everything you did wrong and providing constant feedback about what a loser you were, and second-guessing everything you did at all times. It never occurred to me that this wasn't normal.
At no time in my life, medicated or otherwise, have I not experienced this. It never even occurred to me that this was anxiety, because everyone I knew who had anxiety described it entirely in terms of physical sensations: increased heartrate, sweatiness, tightness or pain in the chest, difficulty breathing, feeling a lump in your throat, difficulty swallowing, etc. I've rarely had physical symptoms, and I've never had a panic attack in the classic sense. It's literally all in my head. That doesn't mean it makes things any easier to deal with, it just means that when doctors ask me what my symptoms are, I don't have a good answer for them. "Okay, I understand that you're having some anxious thoughts, but how do you feel physically?" It's as if, since I don't have drastic physical symptoms of some kind, there's nothing actually wrong with me. Or, rather, they think that I'm completely out of touch with my physical body, which is inaccurate. Am I 100% in tune with it? No. But I do try to pay attention to its signals. For instance, when the burnout from work happened, I had what was basically a permanent headache, constant light sensitivity, and my shoulders and back muscles ached all the time from tension. After my time off work, all of these symptoms dissipated over time. The headache went first, the light sensitivity second, and after a while all my muscles relaxed. But none of these were due to anxiety, or rather, the anxiety was not the main contributing factor: it was exhaustion, sheer physical burnout from trying to keep too many plates in the air at one time. I had the same problem talking to the social worker who's doing my adoption case study: "You're describing it in clinical terms," she reproached me. "I want to know how it felt." Well, fuck you, lady, I use the words I have at my disposal. Anyway, I have a lot of feelings about people not believing/invalidating when I tell them what my experience is, as you can see. ;)
I had a really full week, apart from work and the psychiatry appointment. It was my father's 75th birthday on Thursday, and we had two parties for him. The first was here at my house, where it was just me, him, and my mother. A low-key affair, where we went to see the exhibit of Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, which was a really fascinating peek into the politics of the time, as told through portraits. The woman had an extraordinary talent, and because she was a favourite of Marie Antoinette, she was able, like no other woman of her time, to gain acceptance to the Académie Royale de peinture et sculpture. It's most notable because the Académie was both super stuffy and conservative, and being a woman made you automatically ineligible. Because patriarchy.
I made my parents dinner on my new-to-me barbecue, and I wowed them. It's sometimes really heartwarming to see how my parents think that every little thing I do is magic. I did, however, make a fan-fucking-tastic meal. I'm a novice barbecuer, so I was rather worried about how things would turn out, but everything cooked to perfection, including the t-bone steaks I had bought and very lightly seasoned for the occasion. I also grilled portobello mushrooms, which had been marinaded for a few minutes in garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (next time I am going to halve the amount of vinegar, because I felt it overwhelmed the delicate taste of the mushrooms), corn on the cob, green and yellow zucchini, and a variety of peppers. It was a feast, and we capped it off with a homemade chocolate cake.
The chocolate cake was a bit of an adventure. I am not a skilled baker, and I nearly broke one of the cake layers while cooling it, and the icing (which should be a simple process) had more drama than I would have liked. The first thing I did wrong was ignore my instincts, which told me to melt the chocolate in a double boiler, and tried to melt it in the microwave. BIG mistake. Chocoloate is super delicate, burns like a motherfucker, and smells terrible. So I started over with a double boiler, then dumped the ingredients into a bowl before realising that I was supposed to do them in a specific order. Oops. Not to worry, I thought, it's just buttercream icing, I'm sure it'll be fine if I blend it as is. I then tried to add 1 tsp of vanilla extract from my brand-new bottle. It had a convenient squeezy-top thing to allow me to carefully measure out the vanilla without spilling, which was a great idea—right up until the squeezy-top thing popped off and literally 3/4 of a cup of vanilla gushed into the bowl. I quickly donned my superhero cape and managed to drain most of the vanilla into the sink without sacrificing the other ingredients, and managed to salvage the whole mess, but let's just say that the icing tasted way more of vanilla than it did of chocolate.
Luckily the cake still turned out okay, if slightly lopsided, because I still don't know how to level or tort a cake.
When I'm done with my dog training course, I may sign up for a Wilton cake decorating class. It would be nice to know how to make a cake that doesn't look like it narrowly escaped a harrowing death. ;)
For posterity, here are a few other highlights of that evening's dinner:
The veggies, before I cooked them. Very photogenic, veggies are.
A slightly blurry photo of my father looking triumphant after blowing out the candles.
My parents being adorable.
My father further proving how much he dislikes cats.
On Friday I drove to Montreal for the second party, which was a surprise party. My party was a decoy, so that my father wouldn't know there was a surprise party for him. He was, for the record, very surprised, and quite touched. All but one of his brothers and sisters were there (one sister lives in France and is having health issues), and we had a sumptuous dinner that my mother cooked (I went up early and helped her). I don't particularly like my father's family (they range from bigots to self-important blowhards to unpleasant cynics), but I can put a good game face on and so can they, and so we all made an effort and it went really well overall. My father is incredibly loyal to his family (and slightly blind to their faults), so he was incredibly moved that we'd all gone to such lengths for his birthday.
In short, a really busy, but good week.
Oh, and before I forget, today was also my first day of dog training classes. I was late because I misunderstood the time, but as it was the first course I didn't miss much. It was all introductions and whatnot. I'll have a better idea of things next week, I think.SaveSaveSaveSave
For those of you who are confused, I normally work twelve-hour rotating shifts, on a schedule that repeats every four weeks. I've found a blank calendar template online, because sometimes seeing it on "paper" is more helpful. So when I start whining about my work schedule, this is what I'm talking about. Shifts start at 5:30 and finish at 5:30 regardless of whether it's a night shift or a day shift.
The day after I went back to work, I finally got the appointment my GP wanted me to have with a bona fide psychiatrist, to see if there was something I could take for my mild-but-constant anxiety. I'm honestly not sure how it went. The psychiatrist was a very nice, but she got very stuck on my previous diagnosis of Type II Bipolar. She asked me lots of questions about what my mood swings were like, seemingly doubting the diagnosis of my previous psychiatrist (who was the head of fucking psychiatry at the Montreal General Hospital, thank you), but she eventually concluded that, no, he was right. She then plowed over my assurances that I had had no relapses in over ten years, and started talking mood stabilisers. I feel like I spent a long time insisting that no, I didn't need mood stabilisers, that I am doing fine regulating myself these days. What I was there for, I repeated, was a constant low-grade anxiety that was making it increasingly difficult to manage my day-to-day life. I insisted, was assertive (because years of being a mental health advocate, albeit a low-profile one, has taught me a few tricks), and I still ended up with three prescriptions, only one of which is particularly geared toward anxiety. Another is for anxiety *and* a mood stabiliser, and the other is pretty much just a mood stabiliser.
So, I'm torn. I'm willing to give the cocktail a try for now, to see if it does help. After all, the goal is to help the anxiety while not fucking up the emotional balance I worked really hard to get, so maybe the other meds are to make sure the balance stays there. I'm not sure. What I am sure about is that the side effects finally came home to roost today, and I feel like five kinds of warmed over shit. The worst side effects are nausea and dizziness, and those are the two symptoms in life that turn me into the biggest whiny baby. I can deal with brain-splitting migraines and broken bones, but nausea? No, thank you. Bleah.
Apart from the side effects, I don't feel any different. It's early days yet, so time will tell. This is new territory for me, to be honest. Since the bipolar diagnosis, I've always known how to manage mood changes, and I know how to recognise the signs. Anxiety, on the other hand, has been my faithful companion for a lot longer than that. In fact, I can trace it back to when I was a pre-teen, at the very least. I just always assumed that people constantly had a million thoughts in their mind at any given time, and that at least half of those were self-critical thoughts, judging everything you did wrong and providing constant feedback about what a loser you were, and second-guessing everything you did at all times. It never occurred to me that this wasn't normal.
At no time in my life, medicated or otherwise, have I not experienced this. It never even occurred to me that this was anxiety, because everyone I knew who had anxiety described it entirely in terms of physical sensations: increased heartrate, sweatiness, tightness or pain in the chest, difficulty breathing, feeling a lump in your throat, difficulty swallowing, etc. I've rarely had physical symptoms, and I've never had a panic attack in the classic sense. It's literally all in my head. That doesn't mean it makes things any easier to deal with, it just means that when doctors ask me what my symptoms are, I don't have a good answer for them. "Okay, I understand that you're having some anxious thoughts, but how do you feel physically?" It's as if, since I don't have drastic physical symptoms of some kind, there's nothing actually wrong with me. Or, rather, they think that I'm completely out of touch with my physical body, which is inaccurate. Am I 100% in tune with it? No. But I do try to pay attention to its signals. For instance, when the burnout from work happened, I had what was basically a permanent headache, constant light sensitivity, and my shoulders and back muscles ached all the time from tension. After my time off work, all of these symptoms dissipated over time. The headache went first, the light sensitivity second, and after a while all my muscles relaxed. But none of these were due to anxiety, or rather, the anxiety was not the main contributing factor: it was exhaustion, sheer physical burnout from trying to keep too many plates in the air at one time. I had the same problem talking to the social worker who's doing my adoption case study: "You're describing it in clinical terms," she reproached me. "I want to know how it felt." Well, fuck you, lady, I use the words I have at my disposal. Anyway, I have a lot of feelings about people not believing/invalidating when I tell them what my experience is, as you can see. ;)
I had a really full week, apart from work and the psychiatry appointment. It was my father's 75th birthday on Thursday, and we had two parties for him. The first was here at my house, where it was just me, him, and my mother. A low-key affair, where we went to see the exhibit of Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun, which was a really fascinating peek into the politics of the time, as told through portraits. The woman had an extraordinary talent, and because she was a favourite of Marie Antoinette, she was able, like no other woman of her time, to gain acceptance to the Académie Royale de peinture et sculpture. It's most notable because the Académie was both super stuffy and conservative, and being a woman made you automatically ineligible. Because patriarchy.
I made my parents dinner on my new-to-me barbecue, and I wowed them. It's sometimes really heartwarming to see how my parents think that every little thing I do is magic. I did, however, make a fan-fucking-tastic meal. I'm a novice barbecuer, so I was rather worried about how things would turn out, but everything cooked to perfection, including the t-bone steaks I had bought and very lightly seasoned for the occasion. I also grilled portobello mushrooms, which had been marinaded for a few minutes in garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (next time I am going to halve the amount of vinegar, because I felt it overwhelmed the delicate taste of the mushrooms), corn on the cob, green and yellow zucchini, and a variety of peppers. It was a feast, and we capped it off with a homemade chocolate cake.
The chocolate cake was a bit of an adventure. I am not a skilled baker, and I nearly broke one of the cake layers while cooling it, and the icing (which should be a simple process) had more drama than I would have liked. The first thing I did wrong was ignore my instincts, which told me to melt the chocolate in a double boiler, and tried to melt it in the microwave. BIG mistake. Chocoloate is super delicate, burns like a motherfucker, and smells terrible. So I started over with a double boiler, then dumped the ingredients into a bowl before realising that I was supposed to do them in a specific order. Oops. Not to worry, I thought, it's just buttercream icing, I'm sure it'll be fine if I blend it as is. I then tried to add 1 tsp of vanilla extract from my brand-new bottle. It had a convenient squeezy-top thing to allow me to carefully measure out the vanilla without spilling, which was a great idea—right up until the squeezy-top thing popped off and literally 3/4 of a cup of vanilla gushed into the bowl. I quickly donned my superhero cape and managed to drain most of the vanilla into the sink without sacrificing the other ingredients, and managed to salvage the whole mess, but let's just say that the icing tasted way more of vanilla than it did of chocolate.
Luckily the cake still turned out okay, if slightly lopsided, because I still don't know how to level or tort a cake.
When I'm done with my dog training course, I may sign up for a Wilton cake decorating class. It would be nice to know how to make a cake that doesn't look like it narrowly escaped a harrowing death. ;)
For posterity, here are a few other highlights of that evening's dinner:
The veggies, before I cooked them. Very photogenic, veggies are. A slightly blurry photo of my father looking triumphant after blowing out the candles. My parents being adorable. My father further proving how much he dislikes cats.On Friday I drove to Montreal for the second party, which was a surprise party. My party was a decoy, so that my father wouldn't know there was a surprise party for him. He was, for the record, very surprised, and quite touched. All but one of his brothers and sisters were there (one sister lives in France and is having health issues), and we had a sumptuous dinner that my mother cooked (I went up early and helped her). I don't particularly like my father's family (they range from bigots to self-important blowhards to unpleasant cynics), but I can put a good game face on and so can they, and so we all made an effort and it went really well overall. My father is incredibly loyal to his family (and slightly blind to their faults), so he was incredibly moved that we'd all gone to such lengths for his birthday.
In short, a really busy, but good week.
Oh, and before I forget, today was also my first day of dog training classes. I was late because I misunderstood the time, but as it was the first course I didn't miss much. It was all introductions and whatnot. I'll have a better idea of things next week, I think.
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no subject
Date: 2016-09-12 12:02 am (UTC)When I get anxiety (which is rare), it definitely is a physical sensation, mainly because I can't tell what the heck my brain is doing when it happens. It's like walking into a crowded cacophonous coffee shop, where there are fifty conversations going on and you can't hear a single word from any of them. But then, along with that, I get the low-grade panic feeling that I can describe as "tightness in the chest" or "increased heart-rate" even though I'm sure sometimes the increased heart-rate is actually just in my head, because I HAVE taken my pulse before and it's seemed normal. So, it could actually be that you're so in tune with your body that THAT's why you know there are a no ACTUAL physical sensations to go with your anxiety.
Anyway, yeah, I hope it goes well.
I'm glad your dad's birthday went well! That cake looks delicious!
no subject
Date: 2016-09-12 05:06 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you managed to advocate for yourself in that appointment, and that you're willing to give the combo a try. But ugh, trying to handle a new cocktail on top of re-entry at work, even if it is a gradual re-entry. Not ideal.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-12 06:11 pm (UTC)I'm glad both of your dad's birthday parties went well. He seems a bit like my dad with cats, lol. When I was in high school my mom adopted a cat from the shelter, much to his dismay as he allegedly hated cats. After about 6 months with us, that cat was his best friend ;)