Sunday into Monday
March 31, 2008
I made an appointment with my doctor. Thursday afternoon. Which is a day too late, since I have Seroquel to take tonight and Seroquel to take tomorrow, but none for Wednesday night. Maybe I’ll take a double dose of temazepam instead.
Not that either medication actually works. Last night it took me until 5am to get to sleep. The anti-depressant effects of the Seroquel seem to have vanished, which makes me think they were really just the anti-depressant effects of the fucked-up sleep patterns it causes if I take it when I’m tired instead of the at the same time each night.
I have headphones on most of the time, with music playing when I’m not watching episodes of the X-Files because every sound sounds like someone trying to get into my flat. When I’m away from my computer – when I have to force myself to wash up the dishes that are piled in the sink – I have my mp3 player on. It’s easier to pretend the world outside my flat doesn’t really exist.
The place where I’m still somehow technically employed payed me Statutory Sick Pay this month. This was unexpected because they stopped paying me SSP in the middle of last year and I went onto income support. I called them about this and also about the fact that since my benefits agency medical I no longer have to send sick notes to the JobCentre in order to get my income support – I wanted to know if my workplace was going to continue to demand that I be signed off by my doctor.
The manager I spoke to is going to get back to me tomorrow. My actual manager isn’t in this week. I don’t remember his name.
I’m watching downloaded episodes of the X-Files in order to distract myself. Every time I start to think about anything, every mistake and minor embarrassment of the past seems to get together to tell me all about my own abject ineptness. And no matter how much I know that the mistakes were mostly only noticable by me and the embarrassments were indeed minor, this doesn’t prevent me from feeling that I’ve fucked up my life.
Oh well.
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: depression, Quetiapine, Seroquel, sleep, temazepam.
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1.
Gabriel... | April 1, 2008 at 12:40 am
Dude… we’re supposed to be getting images in your head of those little failures and embarrassments. Everyone gets that.
What the therapy is supposed to be about is you learning how to cope with having been under the influence of a very dangerous and insidious disease. For a lot of years you have been too fucked up to deal with the normal day-to-day shit Everyone around you seems to manage with such ease and panache.
People in our situation will actually use the disease as a hiding place. So once we’re in recovery for the first time and Reality just gets too crazy, we unmedicate ourselves back into oblivion, just like a heroin addict going back to the syringe. Or sometimes we sabotage our treatment by adding new and possibly more dangerous obstacles.
The mp3 player and the codeine are your way of not-dealing with all this stuff, and that’s cool. You’re in a place we’ve all been in — you’re getting back into the known-womb of the pre-treated disease through self-medicating. It’s like you’re artificially recreating the isolation and numbing aspects of the disease. This will, without a doubt, get in the way of your recovery because you’re just switching crutches.
But the ability to handle the Shit will come through therapy, a lot of effort and a better regime of medications. Eventually you’ll feel comfortable enough to drop the codeine thing and take the headphones off. The first step, the most important thing right now is getting to a point where you can sleep for eight hours.
With the bad-memory thing… when I was getting them it was like being punched. Maybe it would be a good idea to start writing them down, to take the power away from them. It worked for me.
And the seroquel… if it’s not helping, at all, ask for a pure sleep aid. Fuck, if you need a mood stabilizer ask to replace the seroquel for Lithium.
2.
experimental chimp | April 1, 2008 at 3:09 am
My problem isn’t the amount of sleep I get, it’s that when and how long I sleep is very chaotic. The seroquel made this worse, and I ended up with my days and nights getting longer and longer. Seroquel doesn’t make me sleepy. It makes me clumsy and a little out of it, but it also makes me restless and edgy. So I was taking it when I felt sleepy, otherwise it would keep me awake and feeling drugged. So my psychiatrist prescribed temazepam and put me under instructions to take the seroquel at the same time each day in order to induce a regular sleep pattern for me. This has worked to a small extent. Initially the temazepam would knock me out fairly quickly. But at this point I’m finding it difficult to get to sleep before the seroquel starts wearing off, which is just fucked up.
I’m currently taking a break from therapy as my therapist’s on holiday. We start again in just over a week. I get to see my psychiatrist not long afterwards, so we’ll review my medications then I guess. My highs have always been fairly modest as far as these things go and my lows pretty fucking low. So the next choice of medication will probably be lamotrigine, which has a fairly good anti-depressant effect in addition to its mood-stabilisation. Seroquel’s supposed to do this too, but it doesn’t appear to be working that well for me at the moment and it’s screwing up my sleep.
I think you overestimate the impact of my codeine usage, though. It’s pretty much the equivalent of drinking a couple of beers at the weekend. Seriously, 100mg of codeine is pretty much nothing on the scale of opiate abuse.
I’m not calling this a recovery. I haven’t even started to recover yet. I’m still too fucked up to deal with everyday shit. Maybe once I start to get better I’ll feel like hiding from my own recovery, but that’s not something that can happen until the drugs start working.
3.
Gabriel... | April 1, 2008 at 4:09 am
You’re right, not sleep per se, but good sleep. Regenerative sleep.
Lamotrigine is another mood stabilizer… seriously you may want to ask about Lithium.
I don’t think I’m breaking any news here, but this whole blog is a Recovery Blog. You’ve been in recovery since understanding you have a problem which needs to be fixed. From what I’ve read of it, which is almost everything since J3remy, you’ve understood you have physical and clinical problems which will require a great deal of effort to overcome. You’ve also fought every day to get treatment, and literally struggled to get to appointments and to make those people understand what’s going on inside your body.
Finally getting the pills, getting to see a therapist and psychiatrist, is another stage of your recovery, not the start of it…
With the codeine/beers/hookers/crystal meth/GTA: San Andreas… I don’t want to suggest I think you’re hooked on The White, or that you’re taking it by the handful, but it does act as a crutch. And that may be okay at this point. Make sure, however, your therapist and psychiatrist know so they can make informed decisions.
I also don’t want you thinking I’m suggesting you live like a monk now that you’re certified. If you had asked I would have suggested you keep smoking when you decided you wanted to quit. But at a certain point I do think we have to recognize there are things we do in our lives which help in our recovery and things that don’t…
Last thing… with the fucked up shit. Yes, at this point you are basically functionally retarded when it comes to dealing with the memories and feelings being thrown at you, and you’re equally capable of dealing with the ongoing day-to-day minutia of Life. Not doing shit, right now, is a great survival plan. Don’t be applying to school, or sitting down with War & Peace or planning a friends wedding. Watching X-Files, some basic blogging and downloading music is all the activity you should be making right now. It took me pretty much year to get from my first Dose to where I felt comfortable walking in public. BUT… at the same time, accept that that’s your Life for now. Not forever, just for now.
4.
jaymur | April 1, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I dissociate when I want to distract myself, not that it’s good but I can’t help doing it since it is apart of my DNA fuck ups. If I listen to music like that I feel like I can’t be alert enough for those criminals wanting to break into the flat that you talked about.
Hope things settle down soon.
5.
Alison | April 1, 2008 at 9:28 pm
I am addicted and going crazy right now for Silent Witness and Peak Practice, I’ve lost count of the amount of hours I’ve watched them over and over for the past two weeks… I feel so happy sat there watching them over and over, I dream it, I sleep it (when I sleep) and I sit having lunch with my parents with the same images in my head, not to mention the many times I keep having conversations with myself like I am living a soap opera.
Music is my other love, I am rarely separated from my iPod and right now I am often found walking down the street singing to myself, it’s feels good, I’ve never felt so happy for the past 2 weeks but I know it won’t last…
Still the massive plans and ideas I am having right now is good, I guess this is what they call grandiose ideas the only downside is telling me what I am manically planning and then looking at fucking fool in a few weeks when the idea seems stupid.
By the way just to point out, Rollercoaster Within blog disappeared, I couldn’t keep up to blogs it bugged the hell out of me so for now Isabel has disappeared and Alison remains. Just thought I would mention it since it was my blog as well…
Take care…
Alison
6.
experimental chimp | April 3, 2008 at 3:09 am
Gabriel: Maybe the problem is I don’t see a point in the future where my life is any more than this. Which is, of course, part of the illness. I think the sleep problems add another layer to this. I’m not used to feeling OK at the same time as I’m getting enough sleep. So until the sleep thing gets sorted out I’m in a catch-22 where I’m screwed if I sleep enough and I’m screwed if I don’t…
jaymur: Thanks for commenting. It took me a while to get to the point where I could focus on the music rather than sounds I wasn’t able to fully hear. I still get worried when there are noises that I can’t quite make out above the music.
Allison: Thanks for the update on Rollercoaster Within. I think I’ve passed the 100 episode mark for the X-Files. Still no dreams about it yet, though.