September 2011
267 posts
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So I had to set up some official goals in the last...
They call it “relapse prevention” and it’s a dedicated time to review your progress, identify things that might challenge you before the first group of the next day, and establish reasonable expectations for yourself between the end of one session and the beginning of the next.
Today’s written schedule, as part of the planning for the evening:
3:30-5:15 - at work...
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Talked to J, and others
Talked to J just now. She’s glad I am not traumatized (I’m all like, yeah, me too.) She already got a fax from my case manager, which is very impressive. We’re putting my appointment on the 12th in a holding pattern for now - keeping it on the schedule, knowing it might have to be cancelled. A, the case manager, will be in charge of deciding that question, I believe.
I also...
August 2011
228 posts
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I survived!
It was not as bad as my anxiety would have had me believe. Actually it was mostly OK. I didn’t talk for about the first two hours, and the program director kept coming up and telling me to relax and take a deep breath (no, seriously, he did it like nine times in four hours,) and I think about 2/3rds of the staff thinks I’m there primarily for the AvPD, which is freakishly amusing...
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“And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn...”
– Mosiah 2:17
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“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of...”
– Leo Buscaglia
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Well, I feel lousy
Had an enormous amount of trouble sleeping, and I’m easily made physically ill by anxiety, and yeah. I will do this. I have to do this. Glrgh. Now would be a great time to have a time machine. I don’t even know what I would change, but I’m sure I could come up with something if the opportunity presented itself.
At least this place has good air conditioning. It’s...
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Wishful thinking
So it’s almost 5am, and what with the everything that happened yesterday (including the accidental stimulant at 9pm) I’m awake and jittery. And I totally just caught myself saying “hey, maybe that means this episode is over and I don’t have to go to this thing after all!”.
Because that’s so how it works, self. Just forget the nine hours of suffering and the...
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Another one bites the dust
I just emailed my stepdad. He already kind of knows about stuff (after all, he was paying my medical bills for a long time.) I think my “who I tell and who I don’t” plan would be significantly more coherent if I’d known for sure I was going in sooner than 4pm today.
By the way, I kind of own the “partial hospitalization” tag right now. I don’t know...
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Oh, my poor followers
I don’t know how you stand me. I just keep spewing forth with the words and the posting and the so on and so forth. It’s like a bunch of tiny mood swings one right after another and you all get to be witness to the parts that aren’t the “Demeter crying in her cup of milk” bit. What’s kind of alarming is the very high percentage of time I spent crying and the...
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I am kind of miserable right now.
I realized my anxiety was running away with me as I sat at my keyboard and tried to pretend my world isn’t brutally messed up right now. So I’m in bed, where feeling scared and ill and unhappy and overwhelmed is more OK. Yes, it’s only 6pm, but I might just go to sleep now. I don’t have the energy to get a glass of water or take off my socks or anything except lie here and...
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Scratch that...
$30 in copays for this month of therapy count towards the out of pocket maximum but haven’t been reported yet. I’m so crazy, it’s free now (except for my pricey, pricey medications, sigh.)
My EAP counselor swears I am not single-handedly increasing the premiums for my entire insured group, but sometimes I’m not so sure.
(Then again, an MRI is like, four days of partial...
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One piece of good news, I guess...
Thanks to me being such a freaking dedicated consumer of mental health services, I think the whole PHP thing (assuming my insurance deems it “medically necessary,” and my EAP counselor says they should) may cost me about $25.
This is because, of course, I’m within $25 of hitting my annual out-of-pocket maximum. And I wonder why I never have enough cash on hand to buy new...
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Stupid ADHD Tricks, part B
And so crying for like, three hours and being under all kinds of stress and not eating and stuff leads to headaches.
So I go to my backpack to pull out the Advil, but I pick up my Vyvanse bottle (which is absolutely in no sense like an Advil bottle) and I pull out a 20mg Vyvanse pill and I swallow it. And it’s pretty much ten minutes later, when I contemplate how long it’s going to...
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Empirical
I just realized, tomorrow I’m getting empirical evidence, for the first time, of just how well I hide how I’m feeling. How? My supervisor will be getting my FMLA paperwork, which has my diagnosis and reason for my absence on it. As far as I know, she thinks I’m just kind of odd (until about 3:30pm today, anyhow.) This should be interesting, in a “are you sure the world...
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Oh, BTW
I have to cancel all my therapy and psychiatrist appointments for the duration of the program. Insurance won’t cover both, and I kind of think the PHP people are against it on principle.
BUT my therapist is happy to email or talk on the phone, and insurance doesn’t pay for EAP. So neener, neener, medical establishment.
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And then there were, like, 103.
So, the list of people who know I’m doing this PHP thing continues to grow.
M, my friend from way back.
J, not to be confused with therapist J, also a friend from even further back.
M, my last visiting teacher.
C, my sister.
J, my therapist.
L, my EAP counselor.
C, my direct supervisor. (Maybe - she knows I’m doing SOMEthing that’s keeping me from work, and she heard it...
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Giving myself a pass on the "nice girl" front...
So, I just (a minute ago) found out that a person (older adult/authority figure) who made my life really awful from the ages of 16 to 19 and kept me from doing something I loved to do for the decade after that, has passed away. And not only am I not feeling sad for her or her family, I am not letting myself feel guilty for that.
Now, the only reason I can do that is because I dislike her so much...
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I'm going in.
I start tomorrow at 8:45am. I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, and I’m not thrilled at all about having to start right away, but I really, really need to change something so starting now it is.
And I was a complete mess at the intake session. Every last anxiety thing, right down to the difficulty breathing and inability to speak fluently, came out to party at the same...
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“Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them...”
– 2 Nephi 2:27
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My whinage
I am heading for lunch before this intake session and I am incredibly queasy and nervous and because it isn’t socially acceptable to freak out in public or at work, I just need to do it here. GLLLEEERRRRRGGHHH. (Hopefully that will keep me from puking for real.)
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“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running...”
– Gordon B. Hinckley (via askamormon)
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“Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite...”
– C.S. Lewis
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I forgot to mention
J was super, super pleased that I talked to L at EAP and to my home teacher about the Partial Hospitalization thing. I forget too easily how much progress I really have made - it’s too easy to see the stuff I haven’t done yet, or what I just screwed up. Any level of taking action, of self-advocacy, is a huge achievement compared with where I was in 2009. So before I sleep - yay me!
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Excerpt from tonight's journal entry:
I have NO IDEA at this point whether I hope they say I need full-on day partial hospitalization or that I don’t meet their criteria or whatever. I just want to be better.
Is that so much to ask?
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An interesting therapy session, for sure.
Just got back from my session with J (yes, I do therapy at night, and yes, it really is excellent that I have the opportunity to do so.)
She was in the “I was like, whoa” camp with regard to this partial hospitalization thing. Her exact phrase was “that is not what my first suggestion would have been.” But I think by the end of the appointment she was maybe in a...
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Juliette Mathis Memorial Fund →
Juliette Olea Mathis was born August 7, 2011 at 1lb 9oz and 32 cm long. Jason and Karissa were able to spend 19 beautiful days with their sweet little daughter before she returned to her Father in Heaven Friday August 26, 2011. Their sweet little Juliette now waits for her parents in heaven. The family now faces unexpected funeral and hospital expenses. This page was created by friends...
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“Do not suppose, because it has been spoken concerning restoration, that ye shall...”
– Alma 41:10
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“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
– John Muir
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And so it begins!
The week of Demeter Talking About Her Problems With Different People Every Single Day starts tomorrow with therapy with J. I have no idea what kind of week this is going to be. The closest thing I’ve done to this was when I had therapy and my psychiatrist’s appointments one right after another on the same day, and that was exhausting. And I didn’t have enough time to really...
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So, my home teacher asked how he could help...
… and I have no idea. I’ve been so isolated for so long, I’m still in “it’s really good to have home teachers” land. It feels like a major achievement to have contacted him on my own (that is, initiating a conversation.) I do that maybe twice a month with people outside of my family, and never, ever in an “asking for help” or even “vaguely...
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Why it isn't narcolepsy or mono
Mostly because I always have to look this up when someone mentions it, I’m just going to put it out here and that way save time in the future. Plus, it’s kind of an interesting question that used to make me wonder a lot as a teen.
My hypersomnia is a symptom of atypical depressive episodes (as part of bipolar II affective disorder, whee.) “Hypersomnia” a fancy name for...
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I feel kind of proud of myself
Because right now there are several posts about the actual Book of Mormon that show up on the first page when you search for the tag “book of mormon,” and like, two of them are from me.
At least I did one thing worth doing this weekend.
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The fascinating thing about atypical depression
And hypersomnia is that quite literally, I can never get enough sleep. I don’t ever reach the point where my mind and body are like “yep, now I’m well-rested, let’s do stuff.” The yawning doesn’t go away. The desire for a warm, soft, dark corner to curl up in varies from a loud roar to a minor rumble, but never silence. I don’t know how this is...
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“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask...”
– Moroni 10:4-5
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MormonWiki - Book of Mormon →
Latter-day Saints believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God and a companion testament to the Holy Bible. Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon into English in the 1820s, and others have since translated the English version into dozens of languages. The book contains a promise that whoever reads it sincerely, ponders its contents and asks God if it is true will receive that...
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And here I thought yesterday was bad...
Up at 1pm. Still want very much to be asleep. Took twenty minutes to put on my socks. In other news: oif.
Two days left till the intake session. One day (really 32 hours or so) till therapy. This won’t go on much longer.
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“We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”
– Ronald Reagan
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Random complaint
I just finished my pill/meds regimen for the evening (three and a half pills, 10ml of liquid, plus two vitamins if I feel up to it.) I had to add Advil tonight because of muscle soreness from… nothing at all. This doesn’t happen every day I’m in a depressed episode, but it almost never happens outside of the depressed episodes. And it’s happened a TON this month and...
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I got up around 11am,
And I’m going to bed at 10pm. Atypical depression got 13 hours today, and I got the other 11.
I am working on ways to make this better. Very very soon.
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I just told my home teacher...
About the partial hospitalization program intake session (I told him via a Facebook message.) I struggle with getting to church (as in, I think I’ve been three times this year) and I’m pretty sure that if it weren’t for Facebook he wouldn’t know what I look like, because that’s actually all the contact we have with each other. But my visiting teachers (who are two...
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Suicide: Read This First →
If you are feeling suicidal now, please stop long enough to read this. It will only take about five minutes. I do not want to talk you out of your bad feelings. I am not a therapist or other mental health professional - only someone who knows what it is like to be in pain.
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Psyching myself up...
I am trying, as best I can, to get myself in an open, flexible, self-confident mindset for this PHP intake session on Tuesday. I want to get better, I want to do whatever it takes to get better, to get things done, to put myself on a road that leads to success. That is good and important.
What’s not important is whether I deserve the help, or whether I’m really that sick, or if...
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All About Mormons - The Basics →
Writing about an unfamiliar religion may be daunting, and so we’d like to offer this quick list of very basic facts. Additional issues are covered in much greater detail in other MDL posts.
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“And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the...”
– 1 Nephi 3:7
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I have been in bed for 12 hours...
And a part of me wants to get up but most of me is saying “put down your phone and close your eyes the world is difficult and boring and your bed is safe and comfortable.” Glrgh.
