As Promised…

As promised, I kept up with #3 on my “promise too” list. Which was to forget to update. And I really wouldn’t call it forgetting but being so damn busy that recreational time didn’t make the list of priorities. So here I am, sitting at the new job, starring out the door with nothing to do, and I think to myself, “When’s the last time I was at WordPress?” I looked. Yikes. September. So here we go, to cover the events since then.

• In October right before the giant Halloween party we were throwing and had been planning for almost a year, the entire family came down with H1N1. Fortunately, it didn’t happen all at once, and we each had it for a week one right after another. I got to be last and came down with it 2 days prior to the party. I made it through a few hours playing the proper hostess but then returned to my bed, which was my home for about 8 days.
• November was pretty uneventful except for the H1N1 flaring up my bronchitis and going off my meds because they made my heart race when combined with the steroids I was taking.
• December was as December always is, busy busy busy. I really do love the holiday season, but I could do without the craziness that goes along with it. I missed my eldest daughter’s first ever band concert because I was working and then was awake all day Christmas to do the family things after working all night the night prior. Makes for a pretty miserable me.
• January I turned in a resignation for one of my two jobs. Mostly because of the events of December and also for my own sanity. I decided to leave my regular job at the hospital and continue at the mental health center where I’m on-call and only have to work when I want to. A week after my resignation, I was asked to be a nurse manager for the facility while one of them was out on medical leave. I was flattered. I’ve only been out there for 9 months. Apparently, when you’re doing the thing you love, people notice.
• February is here now and my baby is 11. She tries to be so grown up, but still needs about 5 hugs a day from her momma. Of course those hugs come when she wants them and I can’t be an initiator. I’m also not allowed to add any kisses, and the “I love you’s” need to be kept to a minimum.

So, more on February. I sit in a lonely office with my new position, which I dislike very much, counting the unknown number of days I will have to do it before I can return to being a regular old staff nurse, dealing with the regular old mentally ill or intoxicated. I just keep telling myself, “It’s only temporary.” Being back on the meds (for about 3 weeks now) is making it more bearable. The meds are also putting the home life back where it needs to be. Things are great with the hubby and the kids, though I could do with less of their fighting. I understand that sisters fight, I have one of my own, but it just never stops.

‘K then, we’re all caught up. Hope to see you again soon.

(Insert Random Swear Words Here)

And now for a non-mental health related post (crazy huh? still can’t guarantee it won’t be confusing in my telling).

Yesterday:

So Jim and I decided to go to the basement last night (8:30ish) to play Rock Band together. It’s a regular habit of ours. We play for about an hour and I have to go upstairs to move laundry from the washer to the dryer (need sheets for bedtime) and to use the bathroom n(which I do first).

As I’m switching the laundry, Jim starts yelling up from the basement that we have a problem and I need to come quick. I come down and he tells me to look in the storage room (around the corner and through a door from the finished area where our movie/gaming set up is). What do I see? Water. Water covering the floor, it has even started to come under the wall into the finished area (yes, carpet). *swear*

Where is it coming from I ask, he says after he heard the flush of the toilet, he heard a blubing sound and when he went to check, he found it, coming up through the drain in the floor. *swear* I have stuff everywhere. I was actually planning to come down the next morning to start cleaning it up. Gift bags. Craft supplies. Dress up clothes (from the kids). Toys. Board games. And on, and on. Including a box filled with paper towel rolls from Jim’s work (yup, soaked up through the box). Plus more boxes of “stuff.”

Well, now what? Jim gets the shop vac to start sucking up the water. Oh, it looks like a good idea to dump it in the sump and have it drain outside instead of carrying up multiple buckets… Ya.., no. As soon as he dumps it, it starts coming up through the drain across the room *swear*. During the clean-up, we hear “flush.” *swear* One of the kids got up to use the bathroom. Blub blub. At least it’s mostly “grey water” from the washer.

So the next hour and a half are spent cleaning up and drying out. Just as we are bring up the last of the things (ruined things that have now become trash), we hear yelling and a thumping down the stairs… “Mom, mom, (child 1) is throwing up!” yells (child2). *swear* I don’t need to go into much detail here, but we ended up using a gravity flush with a bucket of water. No problems, but I’m certainly not going to be doing that a lot (just in case).

This morning:

I have put blue tape (actually did that last night) over every faucet and toilet handle. Good thing, several of them had forgotten.  Yes, I let them use the the bathroom, but no flushing aloud.

Here we are at 10:30 and still waiting on a call from the plumber (we had to be squeezed in between appointments).

11:00 Jim has called and the plumber has called him and they are on the way. Yay!.

So he’s here now (it’s going on noon) and I’ve gotten all of the furniture out of the way. The pipe we thought he would need is not what he needed. He actually needed the water main which has a cabinet built over it and speaker equipment stacked on it in the finished part of the basement. Oops, he dropped one of the components. *swear* We’ll see if it works and keep that to ourselves if it does…  :/

He asks if I have something to cover the floor, it will likely be messy he tells me and he only has one drop cloth *swear*.  So this is where we are right now, Jim is on his way home to deal with this, I hate having to be here with plumbers and electricians and such, they always ask me questions to which I have no *swear* what to answer and usually end up having to call him anyway. He’s also bringing me more Red Bull, the one I had in the house is not going to make it today.

So, fingers crossed I’ll be flushing toilets soon…

Just a few more to vent my frustration *swear* *swear* *swear*

As I’m proof reading this:

What is that burning smell?  And why do I hear sawing?  :/

Change

I  feel a change coming on. I can’t say where it stems from, or if it’s coming on its own or something I will initiate. It’s just a feeling I guess.

I looked in the mirror today and can see the signs of aging. There have been little snips of that here and there over the last year or so, but today I saw it all, at once, and didn’t like it.

Perhaps the change that is coming is to focus more on myself? Diet (not to go on, but to have a healthier one), exercise, skin care. Maybe to give myself enough quality time to shave my legs. Why do I sit around, watch TV, play online, and then complain about having no time for those other things? Ironic really, to sit here and say that while blogging…

Maybe the change is merely in the weather, as summer leaves and fall approaches?

Maybe it’s that I was asked to think about a new position at work that I would love and find personal AND professional satisfaction in? Though it would require more days/week, less flexibility, and less money.

Or maybe it’s not that it’s change coming at all, but a realization that this is who I am, and who I will always be. Now, I don’t mean this in a bad way, but in a way that brings me to accepting myself vs. looking for all the things I wish I could change but are in fact, not that important and have probably spent too much timing stressing about.

I do still see changes I want to make, I think everyone does. But still, this feeling… Only time will tell I guess.

In the end though, perhaps it’s just mercury in retrograde, and it will all pass.

I Told You So…

I believe one of my promises was to forget to update. And really, it’s not that I forget, I tend to get distracted. I have all these things that come to mind and have every intention of putting them in writing (typing?), but then, well, I get distracted.

First and foremost, however, and I’ve been thinking about this since the day after the last post, I make my better half sound awful I think. He’s not, he truly is my better half because without him, who knows where this crazy train would have dumped me by now… That said, I only called him He or Him to keep names out of my posts; and so, from this day forward He will be know as Jim. Not really sure where I got that from, but Jim will do nicely.

Thank you, that is all.

An Unquiet Mind

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison. I think this should be one of the handbooks for the bi-polar. It’s nice to read a book and say “exactly”; and whenever the mind starts to race again, the title pops into my head (along with hundreds of other things); an unquiet mind, like today for example:

Are you eating? Are you sleeping? These questions will be asked at every p-doc appointment I will ever go to. Why? Because the manic don’t eat, and the manic don’t sleep (usually).

It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m awake in bed. I shouldn’t be, I only just went to sleep at 1:30 (wish I didn’t have to look for that colon key every time I needed it). After laying there for half an hour, I decided to just get up and try to “document” what was going through my mind (racing thoughts?).

I need a notepad by the bed. There’s a pen, and a dream journal, but nothing close enough I can grab without getting up and hunting. I want to spew out the thoughts that just keep coming. I think about the backpacking trip tomorrow (neighbor’s alarm clock is going off). Logical thought process though; I’m excited for the trip. What the heck was that dream about? I make several attempts to fall back asleep and finish it to see where it was going, but no luck. Heart is racing and mind won’t stop. I take my pulse, it’s 65. That’s not racing, maybe I counted wrong. 70. Nope, guess not. Did notice a skipped beat though (but that’s usual). Why does it feel like its racing? Ha ha, I figured that out while laying there.

The answer: Red Bull and ADD meds. Pretty sure that’s also the cause for the lack of sleep (lack of eating is a common side effect). I should be incredibly tired after the 4 nights of work I just had (with very little sleep on the last two, like 8 hours combined). 14 hours from door to door usually AND it was very busy. Seems like the first week in August is a popular time to be admitted to the hospital. (Did you know that there are more admissions to the psych hospital on cold rainy days than warm sunny ones? Side thought though, right now I’m referring to the medical hospital.)

My cat is sitting here right now enjoying the fact that she can lay on the floor (neighbors must have hit the snooze, there it goes again), because the dogs are outside. They seem to think “oh look, a kitty,” as often as I do (that’s funny to me, I just thought that up, though I say that frequently when I do a 180 in my thought process. Hmm, like now?). Wow, not even sure what to with all that punctuation.

Ya though, I’ve come to realize that the Red Bull and ADD meds combined (and we’re talking too many cans a day for the last 5 days, at least), can give off a very similar reaction to cocaine. I just wanna move in fast forward, my hands are shaky, not eating, not sleeping, I feel like I’m talking a mile a minute, I know that my mind is racing, I feel like my heart is racing. God, 4 years sober and I still think about. I think maybe just one little line to remember that great feeling, but I don’t have too, I remember it like it was yesterday. I also remember the cravings and the coming down. I think I will stick to my new combo (stimulants either way).

Will I tell anyone? No. It would be taken away. He’d stop buying the Red Bull and she’d stop prescribing the VyVanse (I can see why ADD meds are one of the mostly highly abused prescribed medications, that and sleeping pills, mmm Ambien CR). Now let me clear something up, I’m not taking anything beyond what I’m prescribed (not saying I haven’t thought about it). But when you hit the peak of the med during the day with the increased activity, anorexia, and dry mouth, pouring a Red Bull (like within an hour) on top of that just gives you this high (for lack of a better word, though not like a mary jane high). Now we’re jittery and here are the racing thoughts that combined with the increased activity make it an interesting day (mowed the lawn on meth once, cut the time by more than half, then felt like my heart was gonna burst from my chest, I didn’t care much for that, no more meth). Need another can, hafta keep the feeling up.

(Alarm clock again, neighbor should be up by now, wait, that must be the spouses, it’s still going and I’m not there to kick him and tell him to shut it off, I should lay down right now here on the couch so he doesn’t notice and ask questions.)

I feel it now though; it’s the caffeine still pumping through me. (wow, a lot between that last parentheses, I like to use parenthesis, don’t even care if I use them right). How do I know it’s the caffeine? Started coming down from the ADD med around 10:00 last night (I had taken it late due to sleeping after work). I can tell when my stomach starts to rumble and reminds me that I haven’t eaten in 12 hours. Of course I didn’t actually get around to eating until 11:30 because every time I thought about it, well, too many kitties. (alarm is still going off, good thing my neighbors are early risers, I’d be pissed)

Where the hell was I in my story? I don’t think there’s even an outline here. So I decided to get out of bed at 6 (no paper and the gentle snoring next to me, oh and my won’t shut the fuck up mind make the decision for me). Coming down the steps (tip-toeing) the dogs look at me from their kennel with a WTF? look on their faces. Even they don’t get up this early (I know it’s not early to a lot of people, but it’s at least an hour early in this house). After I sit down and get comfortable, they decide they want to come out after all (tip-toe in to let them out, they make a lot of noise racing for the door). “Sshhh, you’ll wake him up and I’ll get caught,” (Apparently no need for the panic, alarm is still going off. I should go tell him, he wanted to get into work a little early today so he could sneak out a little early to start packing.) Which now reminds me of other thoughts while lying there, but I think it’s best to be off.

Lot’s to do today and already wondering if I can squeeze in a nap before long.

(Spell check sucks here, copied it into a word doc to check the spelling, wow, must be racing, that was bad.)

20 minutes later and the alarm is still going off…

My Dear Friend, I Hurt for You

“Girl”

From in the shadow she calls and in the shadow she finds a way
And in the shadow she crawls, clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes with a message for my heart
She’s been everybody else’s girl, maybe one day she’ll be her own
Everybody else’s girl
Maybe one day she’ll be her own

And in the doorway they stay and laugh
As violins fill with water screams from the bluebells
Can’t make them go away
We’ll I’m not seventeen but I’ve cuts on my knees
Falling down
As the winter takes one more cherry tree
Rushin’ rivers thread so thin limitation
Dreams with the flying pigs turbid blue
And the drugstores too safe in their coats
And in their do’s, yeah smother in our hearts, a pillow to my dots
One day maybe, one day
One day she’ll be her own

And in the mist there she rides
And castles are burning in my heart
And as I twist I hold tight
And I ride to work every morning wondering why
“Sit in the chair and be good now” And become all that they told you
The white coats enter her room
And I’m callin’ my baby
Callin’ everybody else’s girl
Maybe one day she’ll be her own

I Told You So…

…I did promise I would forget to update, did I not?  Well, it wasn’t on purpose, I have been meaning too for some time, and I’ve even composed notes in my head for when I had time to sit at the computer.  So, I’ll start with what has been happening:

I’ve had a change of the meds, about 6 weeks ago (wow has it really been that long since I was here? Lucky I remembered the password…).  It’s an ADD med. I’ve never been on an ADD med before, but I was willing to give it a shot if it could pull me out of the slump I was in.  It did.

I spent about 2 weeks being non-compliant before the med change/addition.  I won’t lie, I was pretty miserable but what was great about it, was that I was feeling something.  Too often since the 5 years ago I started being medicated I’ve felt like all feeling was muted.  I had the desire to feel (happy, sad, whatever) but just couldn’t. So I may have been miserable, but at least I felt it.

So… back on meds now with a few additions and a few drops.  Seems to be working, except my life is overwhelming right now.  I have too many things to do, and no where near enough time to get it all done.  There is literally something going on every single day since 2 weeks ago until the end of August.  I’m also dealing with some hard times a friend is having (very serious situation that I just can’t go into) and I’m not even sure I have the mental stability to keep up the support.  I feel myself falling…

The spouse is being nothing but supportive, which is great, but I really need school to start again so these kids (who can’t seem to get along this summer) can get away from each and I can have some peace and quiet.

That’s really about it for now, I’ll try to be back mush sooner next time.

Sad Really…

I was at the store and I finally saw some puddle boots that I liked (I’ve been looking for quite some time). I was very excited because they were even on sale. I took them off the shelf to see which size I needed, didn’t fit, fat calves.
Now there was a big kick to the head of my already weakened self-confidence.

One of Those Days

This wasn’t actually today, but a few days ago (6/4):

I’m tired today. I’m blah today. I’ve been sleeping on and off most of today. Is it a mood swing or just ‘one of those days?’ When you have bi-polar, you’re not entitled to have ‘one of those days‘ without everyone looking at you and questioning whether or not you’re about to have a major swing up or down. Today I think it’s just ‘one of those days‘.

I’ve got things I should be doing. By not doing them, the psychiatrist (from here p-doc) would say that I’m avoiding. Not her exact word, but the word she used escapes me right now. But can I not have ‘one of those days‘ where I don’t much feel like doing anything? If I didn’t have bi-polar I could.

Well, I can’t. Unfortunately it’s been that way for years. No matter how long you are stable as soon as you have a really good day or ‘one of those days,’ everything you may have done in the past comes flooding in to those around you. So go on, having no emotions and everyone will be happy. Everyone that is, except you.

Hello world!

It was so nice of WordPress to give me my first entry title…

For some time I’ve been thinking about starting a journal. You know, the kind with paper. I write for a day and then forget about it for a few months. I’m in front of the computer a lot, why not do this? I keep an LJ blog which I used to update heavily. The problem there is, everyone who follows there is someone I know personally. And you know, sometimes those “journals” are meant to cleanse the mind and soul and you do that with writing things you never expect anyone you know to ever see.

Enter the blog. I write this for me. Here are my promises:

1. To share myself.
2. To tell the truth.
3. To forget to update.
4. To offend without intent.

I do welcome comments, sometimes working through life just requires a second opinion.