17:10 – Pregabalin (Lyrica) for anxiety… anyone?

Sorry I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks, to be honest my head has been all over the place and I’ve been spending almost all my time self isolating recently. I still haven’t seen CPN#2 but I finally found some courage and phoned to request another appointment. I was only on the phone to her for about three minutes and all she talked about was how it would be beneficial if I could at least read the first chapter of the Compassionate Mind/Compassion Focused Therapy workbook thingy before I see her again. She said this is to prepare me for doing structured work with the psychologist but I have to admit I just sat here rolling my eyes thinking “what a load of bull” as she spoke. Anyway I said I would try and read some of it and the first appointment she could offer me won’t be until the 9th of August, so next Friday.

She didn’t ask why I haven’t been in touch with her for the best part of ten weeks; I did try to apologise but she just said “that’s your decision whether or not you want help” which kinda left me feeling like she thinks I’m not arsed about getting help from them. Of course there are some days when I’m not arsed, equally there are other days where I know that whether I like it or not I have to try this therapy stuff and just see what happens with it. The one thing that did confuse me though was the way she said I was working with her to prepare me for working with the psychologist – does this mean that when the psychologist finally starts working with me again that I’ll no longer have a CPN? I don’t know. It kinda sounded that way though. To be honest I obviously don’t feel much benefit from seeing her or I wouldn’t have let the past couple of months pass without getting in contact with her. So maybe that question answers itself.

Moving along to today and it was my second appointment with the new psychiatrist. I haven’t been sleeping great lately and looked like shit (felt like shit too with the combination of extreme tiredness and a bucket load of anxiety). My support worker came along to it with me which was a massive help because I felt more confident in talking about the points I raised with him in the letter I sent after meeting him for the first time. I told him about my concerns over stopping taking the daily Diazepam and how I understood that I cannot stay on it long term but at the moment it is doing something to help me and if he takes that away then there is nothing in it’s place to help me cope with the agoraphobic related anxiety and to a degree, social anxiety. I told him I’d also spoken to my GP about this whole coming off of the Diazepam stuff and how she agreed with me that it made much more sense for me to start the Compassionate Mind stuff and at least start learning the basics before withdrawing what is essentially my safety blanket. He didn’t say anything, in fact he barely looked at me. He scribbled some notes down and made the same comment as last time “you are only scared to withdraw from it because you are addicted” – well if I am addicted it’s the fucking fault of my old psychiatrist for leaving me on them for almost three years!!!

He asked about my social life (what social life??) and I told him I had been self isolating a lot lately and I told him I missed a few days of medication (twice) in the past couple of weeks and how disappointed it made me to realise that the voices were still there underneath the elastoplast band aid also known as Quetiapine.

I didn’t like my old psychiatrist much, I admit that, but at least he gave appointments that lasted around an hour not fifteen minutes. He would ask me about the voices, what they were saying, how they made me feel, how they affected me, what I thought they wanted, etc. But this new guy? He didn’t ask a single question.  He skimmed over my medications again then said he would agree to leave my Diazepam dose at the current level of 16mg a day for three more months before I have to start withdrawing and leave my Quetiapine at 750mg a day but he then said that he thought I was experiencing low moods and wanted to increase something to help me (Quetiapine is already maxed out) so he asked me if I’d like to move up from 30mg Mirtazapine a day to 45mg a day. I said I’d give it a go.

Then he said something which surprised me a little – he asked if I wanted something for the anxiety that I could take on a longer basis than any benzodiazapine? I asked him what he had in mind and the medication he recommended was Pregabalin. I told him I’d never heard of it before and he simply said just to try it and if I didn’t like it then I didn’t need to take it. This was another thing that annoyed me – the old psychiatrist would have taken five or ten minutes to explain what type of drug it was, what possible side effects there could be and answer any questions I had about it. This new psychiatrist, however, offered no information at all and simply told me to go to my GP next week and get a prescription for it, as well as for the extra dose of mirtazapine.

Of course as soon as I got home the first thing I did was consult Dr. Google about what the fuck Pregabalin actually is. It seems that it’s primarily a medicine for epilepsy, an anti-convulsant, which is also used for neuropathic pain (conditions like Fibromyalgia) but the more I read the more articles I came across for it also being an effective treatment for anxiety. I’m not sure what dose he is starting me on, I’m pretty sure he said 75mg but from all the reading I’ve done this afternoon it seems like most people need at least one if not two or three increases as a lot of people say it seems to lose effect after a while.

I’m apprehensive about trying it but if they are determined to wean me off the Diazepam starting October/November time then at least it gives a good period of time for the Pregabalin to build up in my system. I think the withdrawal off the Diazepam is going to take several months and I can’t lie, of course I would much rather stay on it, but I know I can’t, so if the Pregabalin works then that would be super.

I’m still experiencing bursts of laughter, uncontrollable giggles, and silly childish remarks off and on from little Berry but the voice of Sasha has well and truly gone. However I am still struggling a lot with urges to self harm. I’m on top of it at the moment but things do feel a lot like they are sliding backwards a lot of the time. Oh, that reminds me, I actually asked the new psychiatrist if he thought the voice hearing had come back almost like a rebound psychosis because I suddenly stopped taking my medications for a few days and he didn’t even answer me! I actually found him to be a little bit rude because I was talking about something personal and instead of listening to me he started writing me out another appointment card. At the moment I rate his communication skills as poor, his ability to display empathy or understanding as non-existent, and his 15 minute appointment sessions are just a joke. I know GP’s are limited to about 10 minute appointments but the ones with the psychiatrist are supposed to be anywhere from 30-60 minutes. Grrr.

I thought that by writing him a letter and explaining everything it would be beneficial to both him and me but now it sort of feels like a waste of time. Even though he wrote a short letter back thanking me and saying he understands my mental health better now. I don’t even think he remembered the letter until I mentioned it and even then I saw him flicking through my notes and speedily reading through it. Unfortunately I live in such a rural area that he is the ONLY psychiatrist I can see. I am very thankful that we have the NHS in the UK and receive free healthcare treatment but sometimes it’s extremely frustrating when you have to work with people who you feel no benefit from seeing but you carry on going to the appointments anyway because you know that if you don’t then you just won’t have a CPN/Psychiatrist/CMHT.

I think I have rambled on enough now but it would be great to hear from anyone who has tried Pregabalin for anxiety purposes (I believe it’s called Lyrica for my friends across the pond) and what you’re experiences of it have been – good or bad!

For now, I suppose I had better try and face the outside world and go buy some dinner for me and the doggies. Hope you’re all well xx

21:35 – Twelve hours to go

Guess what? I’m crying again. My eyes are red and puffy. I think all I have done all day is cry. I don’t mean a few tears down my cheeks, I mean crying hysterically like a toddler until I’m heaving and running to lean over the toilet to be sick. I can’t eat, I’ve barely slept the past couple of nights and today the urges to self harm have been awful.

I can’t quite believe that twelve hours from now it will all be confirmed and I will hear the news if I have tested positive or negative for HIV. I am still utterly convinced it will be positive.

If it is negative the relief will be absolutely immense, I cannot imagine how much of a weight it will feel like has been lifted from my shoulders.

I have been so worried about it all that it will just be a relief to know one way or the other for sure. I genuinely don’t know how I will cope if it’s a positive result, I really don’t. If I thought there was stigma surrounding having Bipolar Disorder well there’s a heck of a lot more surrounding people with HIV.

I don’t really know if I’m even ready to hear these results, to know one way or the other, but also I couldn’t put the test off any longer, it was seriously beginning to make me a bit crazy. This seven day wait since being tested has been horrendous at times, time has gone so slow some days every minute has felt like several hours, hours have felt like days. Then suddenly I have a little moment of awareness and realise that somehow I have gotten through these days and made it to the end of the wait (well almost).

I suspect I will spend more hours awake, in tears, staring at the ceiling, trying to read but getting nowhere, getting up and down all night, popping pills trying to buy some sleep only to finally fall asleep around 6am and wake up with a fright as the alarm goes off at 8am. I am then going to meet best friend at the clinic just after 9am and she is going to come in with me while I get the results which I’m very grateful for.

It’s kind of crazy when I think that my results will probably be sitting in the clinic right now waiting to be opened. Like I said in a previous post the clinic is only open on Tuesdays so there will be nobody there to open them until tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning my life will change one way or the other. That might sound dramatic to some people but I swear these last seven days have been a complete rollercoaster of emotions. Anyone who has a reason to think they may have been exposed to HIV I’m sure probably feels the same during the waiting period. I’ve lost count of the amount of emotions I have experienced this week.

I’ve thought a lot about how to react to a positive result but I think it’s one of these things that you simply just cannot prepare yourself for, you just need to deal with it if it happens.

9.30pm.

Exactly 12 hours to go.

I hope so much that someone has been looking down on me and is going to allow me a second chance at life tomorrow.

God, if you do exist, you know how much I have prayed to you these past few days. Please don’t make me face any more life challenges at the moment, I’m struggling so much with the ones that I’ve already got. I don’t know if I could cope with another, especially not a biggie like HIV. I need to start to recover from this sexual assault ten months ago. It’s worn me down so much. I need to find some strength again.

I hope so much that in twelve hours time I will feel as if I’ve just been given my life back.

 

22:02 – Busy day, absolutely shattered

I started writing this post this morning but had to go and meet my Mum for lunch before I got the chance to finish it so there’s a few [updates] added in!

Firstly a Charlie dog update: his condition is still “critical” and he is still extremely unwell but yesterday late afternoon when I went into the vets to see him he tried to pull himself forwards to cuddle into me and licked a tiny bit of food from the vets finger so things were looking as good as what could be expected so soon after such massive surgery. But then when I phoned this morning the vet said he’d had a bit of a dip during the night and been sick so that wasn’t such good news that he didn’t manage to keep even that tiny little bit of food down. So today is going to be another long day of hoping and praying he hangs on in there and I’ll go and see him about 5pm again so I can give him a cuddle and see how he’s doing.

[update – saw him at 5pm today and he managed to walk about for five minutes and ate a couple of spoonfuls of food – if he’s still doing well around 5pm tomorrow (72 hours post op) then I *might* be able to bring him home for a few hours on Saturday afternoon and see how he is but I told them I’d be too scared to keep him here overnight, even though I desperately want him home and even though there is a 24 hour on call service I just feel safer knowing he is being checked every few hours by the vet. But yes, for now things are going as well as we could hope for and he’s being such a little fighter] 🙂

Now… what’s been happening with me? Well I didn’t go to bed or get a wink of sleep on Tuesday night. I was extremely upset and couldn’t stop the tears. The voices were going on and on…

“you need to bare your soul to Christ”

“declare your sins!”

“pray for his forgiveness”

“lie on the floor and give yourself to God!”

And on it went. So when I went to my appointment with Mr Psychiatrist yesterday morning I was exhausted and functioning on auto-pilot. I asked him if CPN had been in contact about increasing my Quetiapine from 750mg to 800mg (she hadn’t surprise surprise) but he point blank refused anyway and said that in his eyes 750mg is the maximum dosage he ever prescribes. When I tried to argue back that 50mg more could just be the little bit extra I need he said I had to make a choice to either stick on the 750mg dose or come off the Quetiapine and try another anti-psychotic. I listed all the anti-psychotics he’d already tried and reminded him of the reasons as to why they hadn’t worked for me but there was no changing his mind so I gave up trying, I was too tired to argue.

I filled him in on how ill Charlie dog is, told him about how shit I feel that I can’t get to my cousin’s wedding this coming Saturday and the sadness I’m feeling as it’s my little man’s anniversary on Monday. He said that it’s because of these circumstances that I’m feeling low and not a mood fluctuation as part of the Bipolar. I said I agreed with him that circumstances were making me feel very low but that these circumstances weren’t here a few weeks ago when I self harmed badly enough to require stitches. In fact this depressive mood and these horrible voices have been going on since October and none of these circumstances were there then either. To be honest I was too tired to talk to him and the whole appointment felt like a total waste of time. I did however tell him about new CPN telling me I was selfish on Monday for talking about having suicidal thoughts, he didn’t comment on it and seemed to change the subject so it was a completely unproductive appointment and thankfully I don’t need to see him again until April.

I also had an appointment with lovely GP yesterday. When I went into the waiting room I had to really fight with myself not to run back out the door. There was a baby clinic on and at least six or seven small babies and everyone fussing over them and coo-ing and saying how beautiful they all were and my head felt like it was about to explode. I was absolutely shattered, desperately worried about my fur baby and it was making me so upset being surrounded by babies and proud parents and when I was called through to see lovely GP I was fighting back the tears. I hate it, I hate that almost six years on I still get so affected by being in an environment with lots of babies, I think that was the first thing I said to lovely GP as I went in. She said I looked really tired and asked what had been happening. I went on a five minute ramble about seeing Mr Psychiatrist and it being useless, about CPN calling me selfish and feeling like my appointments with her were making me feel worse not better, about Charlie dog, about the wedding I can’t get to, about the little one’s anniversary… it all poured out and I told her I was feeling so unsupported right now. I told her that the only two ‘professionals’ that I currently work with who I feel listen to me without judging are my support worker from Rape Crisis and herself, lovely GP. I rambled that this wasn’t right, I should feel supported most from the mental health professionals, especially from my CPN but I don’t and that doesn’t feel nice at all.

Lovely GP said she was a bit worried about how I was going to deal with the weekend especially knowing that I have no family around for support and the mental health team is closed at the weekends not that they are much use anyway and she said I really had to sleep. I told her I can’t sleep for worrying so she gave me a few days worth of Nitrazepam to take at bedtime. I took 10mg with my other meds last night and did manage to get some sleep but it was quite broken and I still feel shattered this morning. Before I left my appointment she said that if I needed someone to talk to on Monday I was welcome to give her a call and she’d have a little chat to me. I think she has quite a calming effect on me as I left the appointment feeling like I’d got stuff off my chest. New CPN could do with some lessons in empathy from her!

I don’t think I mentioned this before but I got a letter from the dreaded Atos and a work capability assessment questionnaire through a week or so ago. Am I the only one who sees the word Atos on a letter and just feels their entire body sinking? I hate the waiting time after you send it off where you worry yourself sick that they are going to send you a letter saying your benefits are going to be stopped or make you have one of their dreaded medical assessment’s. With everything that’s been happening with Charlie dog this week I haven’t had a chance to get someone to help me to fill it out and there was no way I was taking it for new CPN to fill out. So I’m going to phone the mental health team and see if lovely social worker who I used to work with is around and see if I could maybe get an appointment to go in and have her help me fill it out.

[update – spoke to lovely social worker and she is going to help me with the form] 🙂

I’ve got to go and meet my Mum shortly for lunch and then we’re going for a wander round the shops as I want to buy a wedding present for my cousin and my parents are driving down to England tomorrow so they will take it down for me. I have no idea what to buy for them, I’ve not got a lot of money and they didn’t want to have a wedding present list, they wrote on the invites that as most people would be travelling quite far and having to pay for hotels that all they wanted was their family and friends there and not to bother with gifts.

[update – couldn’t concentrate properly whilst wandering round the shops, was experiencing a lot of head noise and was just getting frustrated so Mum suggested I just buy some nice crystal champagne glasses and a bottle of champagne (a bit boring I know, but at least they’ll use them) and I also got a lovely card and wrote a little message apologising for not being there and wishing her a day as special as she is… aww that made me tear up a little bit there!] 😦

I also did something this morning which I guess you could call empowering. I decided to write my ex an email and tell him I wanted to do my own thing this year for the little one’s anniversary on Monday. Towards the end of our relationship I felt like I had absolutely no control over things due to him having two affairs within the last six months of being together. And despite splitting up almost four years ago now I have always met with him on the little man’s anniversary because I had this belief that our little boy would be looking down over us and happy to see Mummy and Daddy both by his stone together. But you know what? I realise now that all my little one would want is for us both to remember him but for us to be happy. And meeting my ex doesn’t make me happy, it usually ends up fucking with my head and I now feel like I don’t need that headfuck any more. It was time to cut the final thread and I did it. Me. I took control and I feel like something has lifted, I don’t have the feeling of dread about Monday any more because I know I’m going to try my best to celebrate his anniversary, to remember him with the people I love – my Mum and my best friend. And whilst I know there will be tears I’m sure there will be some smiles as well.

Anyway I better go now as I have five minutes before I need to meet my Mum. I’m tired and my head is a little bit noisy and to be honest I could do with going back to bed for a few hours but I’ve got a busy afternoon – lunch, finding a wedding present, going to visit Charlie dog at the vets, hoping lovely social worker phones back and says she can help with the work capability questionnaire, facing the supermarket as I have absolutely no food in the house and ugh I really am not in the mood right now for being awake today… maybe some fresh air will do me good.

[update – It’s now almost 10pm and I have just realised I forgot to post this earlier, oops! So I’ve added a few updates in for the things that have happened since this morning. It’s been a long day and I am ready to take a couple of Nitrazepam and try and get a better sleep tonight. Even the vet gave me a telling off today for not sleeping – but then admitted she hadn’t been doing much herself because she’s been so worried about my Charlie dog. She really is an amazing vet she looks after all the animals in her care with such genuine love for them all which makes going in there and seeing your pet really poorly that little bit easier 🙂 So I’m going to take my other little dog for his bedtime walk and get myself off to bed. Goodnight]  🙂

21:31 – And I finally lost the plot

Today has been a shit day. This post has talk of self harm just to let you know in advance.

I had a shit night’s sleep, I woke up in a horrible mood, I was crying within half an hour of being awake. Thoughts were just spiralling round and round in my head, I felt so many emotions, I felt so angry and so alone and so messed up. I tried to go back to sleep, it was only 7am but I couldn’t. I tried to distract myself watching TV but I was just blank. So I sat and wrote a letter, to no one in particular, about how I felt regarding my care team at the moment. Basically a lot of what I wrote in my last post – that I felt completely unsupported by them right now. Come 9am I knew that today was going to be the day I lost the plot and did something stupid. By 10.30am I had got a stanley knife blade (yes I went blade shopping again yesterday after getting rid of them all just a couple of weeks ago) and that stanley knife blade resulted in an angry slash right down over my calf muscle. I then put a bandage around it and tried to go back to sleep.

But the sleep didn’t happen. There was blood everywhere despite a tight bandage being on. So I got dressed and walked the dogs. Then around 11.45 I took myself to a&e and sat there depressed, saying very little, just showed them my leg without even looking at it myself and heard her saying it would definitely need stitches. She asked me to go back to the waiting room because the room where the stitches were was being used but by this point it was like 12.35 and I had my CPN at 1pm. So I phone my CPN and tell her I am in a&e waiting for stitches and might be a little bit late. She tells me I have until 1.20pm to get there or she won’t be able to see me until next week. How that is the case when our appointments last an hour I don’t know but anyway I went back to the a&e nurse and told her and she said she didn’t think I’d be stitched up by 1.20pm so she took me back into the room and put a dressing and another tight bandage around my leg and told me to go to my appointment – the mental health team building is in the same grounds as the hospital – and to come back straight after it to get stitched up.

So I went to the appointment with CPN and I read her the letter I had written earlier in the morning. I straight out told her that I thought she had dealt with the situation on Friday really badly, that she hadn’t followed my crisis plan and had just passed the buck to my GP. She said to me if I didn’t feel like she was supporting me properly then she would ask the manager to assign me to work with someone else. I told her I didn’t want that to happen, what I wanted was for her to admit that she didn’t follow my crisis plan correctly. She neither admitted nor denied it, she said she was sorry I felt that way and I carried on with my letter.

The next part of the letter spoke about the amount of time I spent working with the last CPN on composing the crisis plan and how I feel as though I’ve always stuck to my part – i.e. if I have put myself in any medical danger I don’t call the mental health team I take responsibility for what I have done and I go to a&e if the injury/overdose is serious enough. Yet their part of the crisis plan was to recognise that when I was in a crisis situation they would see me and make a plan to keep me safe for the next 24 hours for example. Has that happened when I’ve been expressing all these self harm and suicidal thoughts lately? No.

I then moved on to what the point of the CPA meetings were when the agreements made at them weren’t being kept by certain people. I told CPN I was angry that social worker had agreed to monthly contact and never followed through with it and was in fact, uncontactable in all ways. CPN agreed with me that was not good and she also said it was not good that a&e had been asked to tell them any time I attended there and they didn’t do that after the recent sexual assault, it was me who had to tell CPN then CPN apparently went up to a&e to ask what had gone on although I didn’t know that until today. So she wrote a letter to a&e telling them again that they must inform the mental health team of any of my visits.

CPN said to me she could see why I was feeling unsupported by them at the moment – well by my CPN and social worker. The woman from rape crisis and a&e and lovely GP have always been helpful and supportive. She said herself if it was her that was me she would probably be feeling quite rejected so she obviously realised that she didn’t follow the crisis plan correctly on Friday. She raised the issue about my social worker again and I said that I personally felt as though because 5 months has now passed where she hasn’t stuck to the monthly contact agreement that she no longer had an excuse and was just avoiding me because she wouldn’t know what to say to me any more if I asked her what was going on. CPN said this was very bad practice and asked me why I still wanted social worker in my care team if I felt this way. I had written down a list of reasons why I had wanted to keep social worker in my care team, like CPN asked me to on the phone yesterday and I gave her the list. She agreed with all my reasons and said they were all valid ones, but she still wondered why I wanted to keep someone in my care team when I felt so let down by them. She suggested it was out of some sort of loyalty and maybe she is right. When I was first going properly bonkers about 3 years ago my social worker was my rock. She was amazing. If I look back on posts way back when I first started writing this blog I talked so much about how lucky I was to have her in my care team and how much incredible support she gave me. And the thing is that despite the past 5 months, I still remember ‘back then’ I still remember her as the lovely social worker, the one who gave a damn about me. And no matter how frustrated and even angry I have felt/am feeling towards her at the moment I will never ever forget how much she made me feel like she cared. And that is something that is hard to let go of, I will still sing her praises even when I’m moaning about her and saying I think she is avoiding and ignoring me and that she no longer cares about me. What can I say? She spent a hell of a lot longer being a good person in my life than what she has spent as a not so good one and for some reason I hang onto that.

CPN then started to tell me that as she is leaving at the end of this month and going to be handing me over to the new permanent CPN that is starting, that there is going to be about a 4 week period where she will be busy with the new CPN and may not be able to see me much over that time while new CPN settles in. So her suggestion was that I work with social worker on a weekly basis for 4 weeks until I start working with new CPN properly and that this would also give the chance for me to feel supported by social worker again, for the bad feelings towards her to go away and then maybe at the end of the 4 weeks I would feel ready to say to social worker to go ahead and discharge me. I said I would like for that to happen but I knew it wouldn’t. I just know social worker will not see me again. CPN said that if she asks social worker to see me over those 4 weeks and thinks for any reason that social worker won’t stick to it then she will arrange for someone else to see me. She promised me she wouldn’t leave me with no contact person or appointments for a month.

Then… the most ‘pathetic?’ thing happens (I don’t want to call it that but that is genuinely how it looked and felt). CPN says she will walk me back to a&e to get my leg stitched up but needed to go to the toilet and put my notes away so she said to go and have a cigarette out the front and she’d be 5 minutes. So I’m standing outside having a smoke and I hear a car and naturally glance round. It is social worker. Now social worker ALWAYS parks right next to the mental health team building, then there is a kinda car park thing as well which only had maybe 4 cars in it. But social worker sees me standing there, we glance at each other for maybe a second, and she carries on driving right the way up to the furthest point she could get to where there are only two tiny little spaces. I turned my back and finished my cigarette. I glanced back round, she was still in her car away up the top. I almost laughed because I could be completely wrong but my head said to me – she has seen you and hopes you haven’t seen her and is actually hiding up there so you don’t speak to her – CPN then appears out the building and I say to her, “guess what social worker has just arrived back” so CPN says lets go and speak to her and see if we can sort this situation out. I say to CPN that she is in for a walk and point to where social worker has parked her car (and was STILL in her car). CPN looked genuinely puzzled and said she now didn’t know whether to agree with me that social worker was actually avoiding me, she said “I don’t understand why she has parked away up there, she always parks down here and there are plenty of spaces”. She said she would try and find an opportunity to speak to social worker and ask her if there was a reason why she wasn’t seeing me, and see if she could get some sort of answers for me. She also said she would give her the list that I wrote about why I wanted to keep her in my care team. And then came the magic moment, CPN says “why do you want to keep someone in your care team when they are ignoring you?” she ADMITTED it! She agreed with me! I’m not going bonkers, social worker really is avoiding me! And I have no idea why…

Gosh this post is getting long.

So we go back to a&e, CPN says she will see me next week and try and talk to social worker in the meantime, I sit in a&e for a while then the doctor came and got me – the same one who had seen me the day after the sexual assault. There was a nurse in the room as well who I have seen a couple of times after self harming and she is really nice. The doctor is nice as well, but was concerned about me. But then he asked to see the wound and there was a moment that was actually kind of amusing and made us all smile for a moment, he realised it was my calf muscle I had cut into and (sorry this is gross) but when I bent my leg you could see all the fat layers pushing right out of the cut, and the doctor’s face kinda went white just for a brief second and he said “I know I’m a doctor but there is something about calf muscles that has always made me feel a bit sick when I see them” and the nurse asked the poor guy if he wanted her to take over. We all giggled just for a second. But it took the horrible-ness of the situation away and relaxed things. The doctor took a breath and said no he would be brave and face his calf muscle fear lol. Between the two of them they got 4 sutures in, glue between all the sutures, steri-strips on top and then a dressing and bandage. I have to go back on Tuesday to have my stitches taken out.

He asked me why I did it and I told him my head has been really messed up since the assault, that I have had hard decisions to make regarding whether to make a formal police statement, that it has brought a lot of my childhood abuse memories back again and I was struggling with it all, but that I was getting good support from rape crisis. I told him we’d had a CPA meeting on Thursday last week and I’d told CPN and Mr Psychiatrist that I was having suicidal thoughts and had been self harming again, but I’d managed to keep the self harming quite shallow so it hadn’t needed medical attention. He said he knew this obviously wasn’t any kind of suicide attempt – after all who would cut their calf open to try and off themselves? But that he was concerned the suicidal thoughts were still there. I reassured him I didn’t want to walk down that path again and although the thoughts were present I had no plan to act on them. I told him I couldn’t put my family through that again and today I had cut out of anger and frustration and just feeling really utterly crappy and alone. He urged me to go back and see them if I thought I was going to act on the suicidal thoughts before I acted upon them and let them help me; but besides medicating me I don’t really know what they can do. I told him I’d been very low on Friday and had seen lovely GP and been given Nitrazepam to get me through the weekend but that I knew I couldn’t rely on medications to get me through all these emotions. Somehow I have to face them all and go through the hurt and the unpleasantness and not medicate my way through it all. He was glad to hear I had started my uni course on Monday and was managing to use that as some sort of a distraction.

And so, other than seeing my best friend and the kids for a little while and having dinner with them, that has been my day. I knew this day was coming, it was creeping up slowly over the past few weeks and I finally lost it and cut real bad, but I feel like something is out of my system now, I feel calmer now I have done it, I do of course have some regrets like that I have scarred myself again but I guess it’s much better I cut than swallowed a shitload of medication and tried to do myself in. I feel some sort of a relief from it, I hope now I have done it that I won’t feel the need to do it again. I will admit I do have a pack of blades back in the house and the doctor asked me if I would at least consider throwing them and all medications that I didn’t need in the bin. I told him I’d think about it.

I was supposed to be meeting with the woman from the charity I want to start doing voluntary work with tomorrow but my head isn’t in the right place for it just now so I phoned her (and she sounds so lovely) and just made up an excuse that I had a lot of uni stuff on this week and didn’t want to not attend when I’d only just started the course and could we postpone. Unfortunately her next available date when she is in my area isn’t until the 1st of October but that should hopefully give me enough time to straighten things out in my head again and be in a much better place to appear as a good person to work with their charity and the young people they work with. I can’t support others if I can’t support myself so I truly hope over the next couple of weeks things might start to feel better. That the suicidal thoughts will pass or at least become manageable and that I won’t self harm again before then.

I have nothing planned for tomorrow other than to do my weekly food shopping if I can face the supermarket. And I hope my textbooks I bought on amazon will start arriving so I can busy myself with doing some reading. On Friday I am seeing lovely GP just for a catch up and will have to tell her about the self harming, she will have the notes about it from a&e anyway. I hope I won’t be in a mess again asking for medication to get me through yet another weekend. I want to face this weekend head on, I just don’t know if I have the strength yet.

Well now that I have been writing for over an hour and almost 3000 words I think it’s time to log off, put my pj’s on and watch some TV, try and stay distracted and hope for a better night’s sleep tonight. Tomorrow can’t be any worse than today and that’s the only positive thought I am hanging onto for now.