Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Throw Out a Lifeline

The last I wrote here I'd had a breakdown. A pretty good one. I didn't take my meds for a week. I wasn't eating. I had hit apathy so hard that nothing mattered at all to me. Part of this, Jb and I am sure is that I lost my therapist for about three weeks while she was nursing her son who'd shattered his foot and had to have multiple surgeries. I don't think I understood how very important therapy had become for me. How balanced it helped to keep me.

My dose has changed again. 100MG of Zoloft, 300MG of Lamictal twice a day, and Klonopin 3 times a day. We're winnowing the meds down, which is one of the reasons I like this psych. He had tried me on Lithium, and I couldn't stay hydrated enough to keep up with the shakes and disoriented, vertigo-like sensations. So we dropped as not a good drug for me.

In between, I've been moving along as well as I'm able. I had a week and a half after the major depression where I couldn't sleep. I'd be up until 5 am and running on 4 hours of sleep a day. I was restless in bed, could not fall asleep, thinking and thinking and thinking. I think I might have swung up into a bit of a hypo mode. Anyway, now that's gone, as if hypo episodes burn my body out, and now I'm feeling exhausted and unmotivated and all around... feh.

An amazing thing happened last night, though. Jb came with me to therapy. He actually wanted to. How many guys would do that for you? My therapist thinks he's the best thing on two legs. It was a productive session. I think he got to say a lot of things that were on his mind, and none of them exactly hurt or were negative toward me, but I couldn't help feeling guilty, and ashamed, and humbled by how much he truly cares for me, regardless of my condition. There was so much love and worry there that it really made me tear up.

So. Apparently, I have the best boyfriend in the world.

Last tidbit about what I've been dealing with. Balance issues. I'm still having them. In fact, right after the therapy appoint when we got home, I literally fell on my ass when I got out of the car and rolled down the grassy slope. I'm always tottering. I almost fell on Jb while he was lying on the bed, and when I was cleaning the other week, I feel smack on the metal garbage can we keep in the front room. I've bruises on my arm, bruises on my foot where I dropped a fan on it, and I've fallen into the closet door in the bathroom more times than I can count.

What else. I've a DHHS appointment to review my foodstamps and temporary disability. It's at 8am, and there's really no way we can work the single car situation with Jb working. I've called to see if they'll reschedule, but I had to leave a message. I'll try again later because frankly, I don't trust them to get back to me.

And the SSDI. I got the info about my doctors, though I couldn't get all the dates of tests and visits. I had to fudge and guess years of when I saw some of them. Best I could do. But I can't seem to get further than that. I brought up the online application page and just sat there looking at it for an hour, overwhelmed and unable to start it.