Finding HopeHello and Goodbye to Lithium
Posted on March 7, 2018
About a month ago, I went back to my psychiatrist. We discussed the Venlafaxine and since it hasn’t had the effect we’d hoped for, it was time to think about what to do next. The most obvious option, the one most likely to work in the shortest amount of time, was to add an ‘augmenting agent’ and so I started taking Lithium. I’m aware of the perception of Lithium but it didn’t worry me, not any more than any other medication anyway. I’m always hopeful that a new medication will work, and if that comes with the opportunity to defy expectations then it’s even better. So I was feeling optimistic and, as I did with the Venlafaxine, I took notes so that I could track any progress and/or side effects.
FIRST NIGHT AND NEXT DAY
As the first night and then day was pretty interesting, I thought I’d write this one up separately. I slept restlessly and woke up multiple times with night sweats. The first time I woke up was very surreal: I was overwhelmed by the physical sensations in my body. I remember thinking, “I can really feel my hands. I really have hands.” It was very strange. I struggled to get back to sleep and when I got up in the morning, I felt very nauseous. I had a headache all day and by the evening, I felt very spaced out and tired.
WEEK 1
The restless sleep and night sweats continued, joined by complicated and busy dreams. I found it very difficult to wake up and I was so sleepy that I was falling asleep multiple times during the day. When I was awake, I was tired and weak, like there was no strength stored in my body. It was frustrating and upsetting to struggle to do everything I would normally do. I was spaced out and nauseous and shaky; if I stood up for more than about thirty seconds, I got dizzy and nauseous and my vision went white. It was horrible.
WEEK 2
I was still having difficulty sleeping and was struggling with sleepiness during the day. I continued to struggle with nausea and feeling spaced out but I also felt low; I think I would’ve felt depressed if I was able to really feel anything. The shakiness and weakness also continued.
WEEK 3
And we STILL have difficulty sleeping. It was taking me hours to get to sleep and hours to wake up and in the few hours between, I slept very restlessly. Then when I was awake, I was very sleepy. The shakiness, weakness, and nausea combination was still around. I also started to struggle with almost constant anxiety; there were stressful things going on but I couldn’t seem to shake it off once I’d done those things so it was around all the time.
WEEK 4
Continued difficulty sleeping, especially staying asleep and then I was so tired that I fell asleep during the day. Those short sleeps were actually the best I’ve had in months, much better than the hours I got at night. I was also still struggling with the shakiness, dizziness, and nausea, as well as the anxiety.
WEEK 5
The restless sleep continued, as did the struggling to wake up. On several occasions, I fought to wake up only to fall asleep again; I also fell asleep during the day multiple times. I was constantly tired. The nausea and dizziness also continued, as did the anxiety.
I did not like taking Lithium. It didn’t actually help my depression – I’m still feeling very emotionally numb and the fatigue has only gotten worse – and the side effects were constant and actually got worse over time: the difficulty sleeping, the shakiness/dizziness/nausea combination as well as all of those as separate symptoms… I was struggling so much that I had multiple doctors’ appointments to make sure that nothing else was going on. I had blood tests and blood pressure tests and even an ECG. They didn’t show anything outside the normal ranges but the fact that it was bad enough to warrant those tests meant that I booked an appointment with my psychiatrist for as soon as possible to look at my medication.
I have now had that appointment and we’ve decided to stop the Lithium; he was surprised and impressed, I think, that I’d stuck with it so long considering how bad the side effects were. Since the Venlafaxine hasn’t done much for me, I’d like to try something else but given how much is happening in the next couple of months, I’m reluctant to put myself through the ordeal of getting off it, the period of no medication, and then getting onto something new. So for now, I’m trying a new augmenting agent and I guess we’ll see how that goes. I think the emotional numbness is preventing me from getting too low about anything but regardless of that, I’m still optimistic about medication, even with all the bad experiences I’ve had recently. I fully believe that it was Phenelzine that made going to university possible and even now, years later, I still remember so clearly how good I felt when I started taking it. It felt like I was flying. It was amazing. Searching for that will always be better than letting the depression take over, even if I have to let it take over to remember that.
Holding On And Letting Go
Posted on January 28, 2018
A while back, a friend shared this article on Facebook and I couldn’t not share it here. I’m currently in the process of going through everything I own in preparation to move house and so I’m coming across a lot of things that I have previously loved. I’m being constantly faced with the decision to hold onto something or to let it go. So I resonated with this piece very strongly.
I thoroughly recommend reading it but here’s a summary. The author describes feeling sympathy for inanimate objects, from “the guitar that doesn’t get played anymore” to “the once loved camera that has now been displaced by a newer one.” And the thought of an object being discarded causes great anxiety and sadness.
I’ve struggled with this all my life. As a child, all my toys had personalities and thoughts and emotions but that hasn’t faded as I’ve grown up even though I no longer play with them. They’re all still in my cupboard, neatly stored in boxes and bags. I feel guilty about that, that it must be uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but it’s better than throwing them away. That would be the ultimate betrayal. Imagining them in a bin or landfill fills me with such overwhelming anxiety and guilt that I can’t think properly. But it’s not just toys; it’s everything. I have a draw full of my old phones (how can I go from carrying them around twenty four seven to throwing them away?), a box of broken Christmas ornaments (it would be so callous to throw them out just because they’re not perfect anymore), my old school jumper, and so on and so on and so on.
Throwing things away is hard for me. I have this anxiety about letting things go, like I’ll lose parts of myself. Anything that has some meaning to me, I have to keep. It’s similar to how I write everything down and take a million photos. It goes with my difficulties around identity, a big part of BPD, and feeling like I have no idea who I really am. So I’m probably assigning aspects of my identity to physical objects in response to that. It certainly doesn’t help with all of this. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a link to the difficulty I have in managing the strength of my emotions. I’ve talked about this before: how strongly I feel emotions and how I sometimes feel other people’s emotions. I’d always assumed that it was another facet of that.
The article discusses some other potential causes:
“There is some evidence to suggest that OCD and Synaesthesia are possible causes. Put simply, Synaesthesia is a neurological condition where the senses are confused. So someone with it, may smell a taste, or see a particular colour when thinking of a specific number. Some people have a form of Synaesthesia known as Personification. This is when a personality or emotion is attributed to an object. It would appear that there is a higher tendency for those on the autistic spectrum to have Synaesthesia in one form or another.”
The link to Synaesthesia is an interesting one. I do have some Synaesthesia-like experiences: with some sounds, I experience specific tastes or sounds. The sound of 7 chords leaves a metallic taste in my mouth so strong that I avoid those chords as much as possible and working on the production of my songs can be a bit of a minefield: high frequencies, like cymbals, are yellow while lower frequencies are dark colours (different depending on the instrument) and the colours in the song need to be balanced for me to be happy with them. It’s hard work and often leaves me with a debilitating headache.
I don’t know what the answer is or whether there is one. But I think the more we talk about this stuff and the more normal it becomes, the less we struggle against it. That takes up so much energy and emotion when living with these things is hard enough. That’s kind of why I started writing all of this stuff down, to feel less alone and hopefully make other people feel less alone too.
(Left: me and my toys when I was about eleven. Right: confetti that I kept from an amazing concert.)
Stop Pulling My Hair Out (Attempt 2.0)
Posted on January 25, 2018
My first battle with hair pulling ended after about nine months when somehow, I managed to will myself to stop pulling. Finding my first bald patch, about the size of a 2p coin, had seriously freaked me out and so I’d been determined to stop. The first few days were absolute hell. It was like my fingers were magnetically attracted to my head and the longer I didn’t pull, the stronger it became. Have you ever held two magnets close enough that you can feel the pull between them? It was a bit like that but all through my body. I won’t lie, the thought of shutting my fingers in a door so that I physically wouldn’t be able to do it did occur to me more than once. I couldn’t concentrate on anything; my whole brain was focussed on not pulling out my hair. It becomes a habit and you do it without thinking about it so when you try to stop, you have to think about not doing it all the time, just in case you slip up. And then the need to do it just overwhelms everything.
I’m not sure that feeling exactly faded but I learned to compartmentalize: I managed to cram it into a box and think around it. That sounds impossible now. When I couldn’t do that, I tied my hair up in a ponytail and allowed myself to pull the hair out of that, the resistance from the elastic band fulfilling some of that need. But I wasn’t allowed to pull it out. It wasn’t perfect but it did keep me from relapsing. For a while, that is. I didn’t pull for over a year but then I started again. I’m not even sure why, if I’m honest. I think I was tired. I was tired of fighting it. The urge to pull hadn’t gone anywhere and suddenly I was back in that vicious cycle, pulling and pulling and pulling.
That was about eighteen months ago. I’ve tried all my old tricks: wearing a hat, playing with fidget toys, fiddling with my spinner ring. But so far nothing has really worked. The hat worked best but the anxiety of not being able to get to my hair almost sent me into a meltdown and at the moment, pulling out my hair is the lesser of those two evils. I guess it’s not surprising, considering the amount of anxiety I’ve been dealing with recently.
In the last couple of weeks, I tried (again, hence the 2.1) to stop. In some ways, I was lucky the first time round: when I was pulling, I tended to pull from a point that was hidden by my hair most of the time. I mean, it still sucked but at least I didn’t have to deal with anyone else’s reactions. But this time, I’m pulling from all over my head: my fringe, my parting, my hairline… Literally everywhere. I’m triggered by a change of texture in my hair, from smooth to almost crunchy (if you have any advice on ‘fixing’ this, please let me know!) and that’s not specific to one area. And that means it’s much more likely to be noticed. Maybe it’s vain but that’s my motivation for stopping and I figure any motivation is good motivation.
So last week I tried to redirect my pulling away from my parting and my fringe. I was ‘allowed’ to pull from other areas but not from those two. I thought I was doing okay until I realised that I was chewing the inside of my cheek, with the effort or the redirected urge I don’t know. I stopped as soon as I realised, although not before it had bled quite a bit. Again, I thought it was all okay until a day or so later when the inside of my cheek started to hurt. I figured it was just healing but within a few hours, the pain was blinding. I’m writing this out and thinking, “This is ridiculous. You’re exaggerating. It was just a little gash inside your cheek.” I’ve always been sensitive to pain and easily overwhelmed by it but I don’t think that matters. In all seriousness, it was so bad that it made me cry (which only made it worse because, obviously, you move your mouth when you cry). It was that strong. For three days, it was so bad that I wasn’t able to do anything. I was barely able to eat, or drink, or talk. I almost cancelled an event I was looking forward to because the thought of having to talk and smile all evening was unthinkable. I woke up on that morning feeling a little bit better so I did decide to go but it was still very painful.
A few days on and I’m mostly pain free. That was not something I’d expected when I made the decision to try this again and it was really upsetting. I’m not sure when or what I’ll try next but I’m sure I’ll find something.
Conclusion: Failure.
Lesson learned: Be careful of where you redirect the urge and/or the effect that your attempt is having.
Finding Hope 