13:40 – Quetiapine at max dose, praying it works

This morning I got up early and decided to make an appointment to see lovely GP rather than just handing in a prescription request form. Now that I no longer see lovely social worker, the only person apart from Mr Psychiatrist who has been there consistently over the past few years is lovely GP. I was feeling really anxious when I went in to see her and told her that I don’t know if it’s just because I don’t really know new CPN yet, but that I’m not finding the appointments helpful because new CPN always wants to talk about the positives and whether she likes it or not I need to talk about the negatives as well. I need to talk about them to make sense of them and I need to talk about them because they are likely to affect my mood and destabilise me.

So lovely GP sat down her pen, turned her chair round and asked me what was making me feel so anxious. I rambled about the self harm urges being very very much at the forefront of my mind and I rambled about the persistent giggle and mocking comments I hear in my head. I told her how scared I was that this may not be my thoughts that I was hearing but that I was hearing a voice again. She said that Mr Psychiatrist had written in his last letter that my Quetiapine (Seroquel) could be increased from 600mg to 750mg a day if needed. Four weeks ago I jumped from 600 to 700 and today she said she is increasing it to 750mg. So that is me back on the maximum dosage. She also arranged for me to have routine bloods done on Monday morning.

I have been on the maximum dose before but whilst I’d had fairly good results from Quetiapine at around the 500mg mark it stopped working and so we increased and increased but it would only work for a very short amount of time and then the voices would come back. The voices got stronger and 750mg still wasn’t enough to stop them so we tried three other anti-psychotics: olanzapine (zyprexa) then haloperidol (haldol) and then amisulpride. None of them worked. And all of them apart from Quetiapine gave me horrible side effects.

So here I am back on the max dose and I have to go back and see her in 4 weeks time on the 6th of Feb which also happens to be the day of my next appointment with Mr Psychiatrist so I guess that will work out quite well if any medication changes are needed. I know the mocking voice and giggle are contributing to me feeling anxious and a bit paranoid. This in turn makes me distressed. So if I go and see Mr Psychiatrist and tell him I’m still feeling anxious and distressed but am now on the maximum dosage then he is likely to say he wants to try something else. I am hoping and praying that this extra 50mg is enough to quieten my head back down to a bearable level.

Anyway, lovely GP gave me prescriptions and then made a point of telling me that things will get better, things can get better and that it’s important to be aware that I have taken on something positive – my university course – and even though it’s part time and it’s from home it’s a good start. She encouraged me to try and remember the positives when I was feel low, but then she also looked at things from the other angle and acknowledged that I have been self harming for a very long time and it’s been my coping mechanism for so long that it’s such a hard thing to stop doing. But most importantly (to me) she didn’t sit and offer me praise for going 3-4 months without doing it, instead she said she could see why the urges to do it would be strong at the moment, 3 months is a long time to go without doing something that was (at times) a daily habit.

She told me to think of it a bit like quitting smoking. I’ve smoked daily for years. I smoke more when I’m stressed and less when I’m calmer. Just like self harming. When I’m not smoking I can be sure it won’t be long before the bells start ringing in my head telling me I need another cigarette. If I was quitting the first few days would be very hard. The first few weeks I would probably have the worst cravings and even though I had gone a few weeks without a cigarette I would be thinking about having one a lot of the time. I’d battle back and forth with myself and try to convince myself if I just had one cigarette then it would satisfy the cravings but it would make the battle to quit even harder for myself. However if I managed to get through it, deal with the cravings but not give in to them, then I would get to a place where six months down the line the cravings would be a lot less intense. And a year down the line they would be even less. The cravings would probably last for a very long time and may never go away completely, but I would have learned and developed the skills to cope with them and let them pass without acting on them.

So it remains to be seen whether I can carry on battling against them or whether the urges end up winning. But as new CPN continually reminds me, it is only me who can stop it from happening again… If only it were that easy…

I only had about 10 or 15 minutes with lovely GP but I felt like I had got a lot off my chest. She let me talk, calmed me down, looked for a solution and just generally made me feel like I’d been listened too. After leaving the doctors surgery I went to the pharmacy and sat for the usual half an hour that it takes them to make up my 4 weekly prescriptions (I only get a week at a time, I guess they still don’t see me as being stable enough to get a month’s worth of tablets at a time).

I also remembered I have an appointment with my support worker from Rape Crisis today. I get on with her a lot better than new CPN and although when I’m there it’s to talk about both childhood abuse and the assault back in August, topics such as self harm come up quite a lot and she is very knowledgeable about it and completely non-judgemental which is nice. Self harm and abuse seem to go hand in hand quite a lot, probably because the abuse memories make you feel so vile and disgusting and confused and messed up and then the self harm is like this magic wand that just seems to release all of those feelings and offer a temporary break from it all.

So I hope that tonight I will feel a little calmer, the mix of the increased dose of Quetiapine and having a good appointment with lovely GP and (hopefully) a proper good chat with support worker should all leave me feeling like I’ve got a lot off my chest today.

I might write another little update later if anything comes up at my appointment with support worker that I need to have a ramble about.

22:38 – When you just can’t find the words

I feel as though the increase in Quetiapine has made me a bit stupid. I get half way through sentences and completely forget what I’m rambling on about. So then I look double as crazy because not only was I rambling about something nonsensical to begin with I can’t even make my nonsense have a point to it.

Tonight it would seem I can’t find the words to write about what I want to write about. I actually wanted to write a somewhat intelligent post about a question I have swirling around my brain but I don’t know the right words tonight.

Additional to that thought I am also thinking a lot about my angel baby, about heaven, about Christmas without him again… These thoughts are making me feel lonely and sad. Lonely and sad inject themselves into the already ridiculously strong self harm urges. Visually I can picture graphic wounds and I want them so badly. Not the scars, I fucking hate the scars, I always feel ashamed of them and jealous of people who can view them as their ‘war wounds’ – then – maybe they view them that way because they’re winning their war and I’m still stuck right in the middle of mine. At war with myself, that sounds pretty apt. So the scars I know I don’t want, but the release… I need the release… I need to bleed and bleed and feel some of this badness leaving my body. I need that so much, I don’t know the words to express how badly I need this.

So why do I keep saying it but not doing it? Simple. I don’t want anyone to see or know. And I know I would have no control over the severity of the wound if I were to cut with the head crazies present. I have tried letting myself do very very shallow cuts over the past few weeks, barely more than scratches, as I thought by doing this it would calm the more severe thoughts down a bit. But it hasn’t, they are worse than ever.

Sorry, I just can’t find the words tonight to write anything else. My head isn’t in a very good place this evening. I have my weekly appointment with new CPN tomorrow morning at 10am, I have no idea what we are going to talk about. I’m having one of my ‘I don’t want to go to the appointment’ moments and can’t see the point to it at all, maybe I will feel different in the morning.

Then at some point during the day tomorrow the carpet fitter is coming to deliver all the new flooring which he is coming back to lay on Tuesday and Wednesday. So I need to get everything out of the living room tomorrow night and put it in the bedroom so he can lay the flooring in the living room on Tuesday and then somehow move everything back into the living room and all of my bedroom furniture into the living room so he can lay the bedroom carpet on Wednesday. And then move all the bedroom stuff back in there. So it’s going to be a busy few days which I probably need even though it means having strangers in my flat for a couple of days which I sincerely don’t like. It’s most anxiety provoking and horrible. But it will be some kind of distraction I guess. I have also bought new bedding and have decided to move the bedroom stuff around so that it all looks different, and put some nice wall art up as well.

And maybe one day I’ll manage to sleep in that room again. You would think after 10 months of sleeping on a two seater sofa I’d be desperate to get into a nice big double bed again… But no… That bedroom is a total head and mind fuck.

So yeah, I guess I can sum up by saying I’m not feeling too great mentally although I’m starting to feel slightly physically better. I took my 5th tablet (out of 28) today to heal the suspected stomach ulcer and was only nauseous in the morning, an hour or two after taking the tablet I began to feel better and kept my dinner down this evening so I’m glad that the amount of time spent with my head down the toilet is now on the decrease.

Even though it’s only 10.30pm I’m going to bed (to wrap a duvet around me on the sofa)… turn the lights out… watch a couple of new stand up comedy DVD’s that have just come out… and hope I laugh until I fall asleep. If I don’t laugh I fear I may cry and I can’t handle tears tonight.

Goodnight folks xx

15:58 – Quetiapine increase and seeing lovely GP

On Wednesday I went to see lovely GP as I needed a new prescription and also I haven’t been feeling too great (mentally or physically) either.

As mentioned quite a lot on here I’ve been experiencing high levels of anxiety over the past 6 weeks or so. It has calmed down slightly over the past week or two, well when I say calmed down I mean it’s coming in waves at the moment as opposed to being there constantly. So it’s slightly more bearable. Anyway… *I should probably say if talk about poo offends you, then you may wish to look away now*… when I become very anxious one of my first sensations is pain and churning in my lower tummy… this is quickly followed by the need to get to my safe place (i.e. my house) and use a toilet ASAP. During the anxiety attack I will almost definitely get hot flushes (especially if I’m around other people), my heart will feel like it’s beating too fast and sometimes out of sync, my thoughts will start to race and give me the feeling like something really bad is going to happen, I can’t think rationally, I pace around trying to calm myself down… You get the picture.

So when I started to get another sort of stomach pain – this time at the very top of my stomach, just below where my ribs meet – I first thought it was something anxiety related and tried to ignore it. Then that night (I think it was Sunday night) I woke up in the early hours with this horrible pain that was making me really nauseous and I struggled to get back to sleep. After a couple of hours of tossing and turning I went to the bathroom and bent over the toilet to see if I was actually going to vomit. I didn’t but the nausea was awful and in the end I had to use my fingers to force myself to be sick just to get that feeling to stop but once I started being sick I couldn’t stop again, everything had to come out.

Eventually I tried to go back to sleep but was in general discomfort the rest of the night. When it reached late morning the nausea seemed to have passed so I went to my appointment with new CPN on Monday at 2pm and then my appetite came back a couple of hours later so I had a light dinner. Within a couple of hours of eating it the nausea was back full force and with no forcing needed I again vomited repeatedly.

So Sunday night, then off and on throughout Monday, during the night into Tuesday, all day Tuesday, during the night into Wednesday, Wednesday morning this same pattern of pain/nausea/vomiting/eating/pain/vomiting continued and I decided to mention it to lovely GP during my appointment with her on Wednesday afternoon. She got me to lie up on the bed thingy and had a prod around my stomach – until she pressed down on the tender spot and I nearly hit her hand away – it really hurt! 😦

Lovely GP’s diagnosis was that she thinks I have a stomach ulcer. She said to diagnose it for definite would mean sending me to big scary hospital for what I presume would be an endoscopy but she knows such a referral is pointless because I just can’t get to big scary hospital yet. But she decided to treat me for a stomach ulcer anyway so she must have been pretty sure and I have to take a course of tablets for 4 weeks and see if the nausea and vomiting stop and if I can start to eat normally again. I’m only on my second day of them and unfortunately still quite nauseous but hopefully they will begin to work soon.

Whilst at my appointment with GP she said she had a letter from Mr Psychiatrist and after seeing me last week he was recommending my Quetiapine (Seroquel) be increased from 600mg to 700mg a day. GP asked what I thought about this and I said it would probably be a good idea. She asked if I wasn’t feeling so good and I confided in her that I had massive urges to self harm and felt like I was sitting in a pressure cooker just waiting to blow because I’m not letting myself do it to the level I want and need to 😦

With regards to the increase, I’ve been up to 750mg before so I knew I would tolerate 700mg OK, I just hate thinking how close I am to the maximum dosage again and whilst it doesn’t work 100%, it is the most effective of all the anti-psychotics we’ve tried and has the least side effects for me. So now I just hope that the extra 100mg is just enough to help keep things manageable and not let the head crazies get any worse. My hope is that once we are through the Winter months I might be able to drop back down to 600mg but we’ll see how things go.

I do still have the opportunity to increase my Mirtazapine (Remeron) dose, I can go up one last 15mg increase before hitting the max dose. And I guess there is still always the opportunity to add a ‘mood stabiliser’ back in. Sometimes I wonder if quitting the Lamotrigine was a good idea, it didn’t give me any bad side effects at all but equally after two years of taking it I didn’t think it had done anything to help so stopping it seemed like the right move. I assumed we would just start another one but I also told Mr Psychiatrist back then that I had been on the same anti-depressant for about five years and asked him if he thought it would be worth changing it as well. Unfortunately I’ve already tried just about every anti-depressant there is without success so we decided to give Mirtazapine a try. Then when I had been on it for a month or so I thought we would introduce a new mood stabiliser but instead we increased the Mirtazapine. Then when I suggested it again after another couple of months it was recommended that the Quetiapine was increased as well. So I’m still just on the three medications but at higher doses: Mirtazapine, Quetiapine and Diazepam.

I keep thinking that I want to ask lovely GP if I could maybe go back onto monthly prescriptions instead of weekly ones and I was planning to ask her on Wednesday, but then I ended up telling her about these horrible urges to self harm and I knew there would be no point in asking her then, I know they only do it to keep me safer but that must be two or three years of weekly prescriptions now and I want to be *trusted* again. The only problem I can think she might have is prescribing me a month’s worth of Diazepam at a time as, I’m currently down to 16 mg a day (4 x 4mg doses) so although the tablets I get are only 2mg in strength I take 8 of them a day which is 56 I’m prescribed every Wednesday, which would be 224 (or 8 boxes of 28) per monthly prescription and I don’t know if they would ever be happy to give me 8 boxes worth at a time when they’ve made it clear they’re not particularly happy giving me 2 boxes each week, but they do it anyway.

Who knows, maybe one day they will be able to trust me again… maybe I need to show somehow that I trust myself first… and yeah if I’m honest I don’t trust myself much at all at the moment so I guess, realistically, it’s going to take quite some time yet to be trusted again by ‘t3h professi0nalz’.

Well I suppose I better go out in the wind and rain, walk my little dogs, go to the shop and then decide what I’m going to do with myself this evening. I don’t envisage much of a fun Friday night ahead, probably a boring one on my own in front of the TV (although, to be fair, that is about all I can be bothered with at the moment). I am also going to be on a very tight budget over the next couple of weeks as I finished off my Christmas shopping yesterday and paid some bills and have left myself with next to nothing to live off for the next two weeks. Maybe it’s just as well the only thing I can stomach is plain cereal or toast at the moment, at least it’s cheap!

18:36 – Seeing new CPN and a visit to Mr Psychiatrist

Yesterday I actually went to my appointment with new CPN. This was the third time we had met but the first proper ‘session’ together. I found myself falling into a very anxious state of mind as I entered the mental health building and spent the first half of our session together pacing around the small room and apologising for it, trying to explain I was just very anxious. My stomach is always one of the first things to start going funny and is usually my first sign that I’m becoming very anxious or panicking about something. So as I pace I tend to rub my stomach to try and somehow settle it down. New CPN asks me what is wrong with my stomach – I say again it’s just the anxiety making me feel half like I’m going to be sick and half like I need to run to a toilet – it’s a horrible feeling especially when it’s combined with a very anxious mental state of just needing to escape, to run home and close the door on the world, the feeling that something awful is going to happen if I stay there. Eventually I did begin to calm down and sit for a little while.

As expected she asked about the house swap and I nervously told her that I wasn’t going ahead with it. I was trying to explain my reasons but the anxiety in me was still high enough that it was mostly irrelevant rambles that came out my mouth. Somehow we got onto the subject of weight and dieting and how I had been doing so well (lost 20lbs… then put it all back on again) and this somehow led onto me telling her about why I choose to low-carb when I diet because cutting sugar out of my body completely works best especially for people like myself who have PCOS which usually messes with your insulin levels, weight, etc. From there I remember her talking about the contraceptive pill and how there were a couple of good ones for women with PCOS and then she asked me if I wanted her to phone my GP and say I’d like to try one of them and I was like “erm, I don’t even know if I do want to try one of them, I’ll just think about it for now thanks”. I told her I’d be going to see my GP next week anyway and we left it at that.

I have total mind-blank going on at the moment and can’t remember what else we filled the hour talking about. I mentioned the stresses of studying at the moment, I mentioned the self harm urges that seem to increase in intensity with every hour that passes. She responded by simply telling me that if I cut myself then I cut myself, that it wasn’t a new behaviour and basically not something that would worry her. I sort of felt a bit like I was trying to ask for a little bit of help, like I was trying to tell her that I haven’t done it in a couple of months now and I would actually really like it to stay that way but the words just didn’t seem to come out so we left it at that. Before I left the building she gave me an appointment for next week and a copy of my latest care plan that she’d typed up. She encouraged me to attend my appointment with Mr Psychiatrist (which was today) and said bye. I don’t know if I’m going to get on with her, I still haven’t warmed to her and when I’m severely lacking in motivation and have pretty much no interest in anything, making a new ‘relationship’ is the last thing I can be bothered with doing.

So I wake up this morning and think I really should shower before going to see Mr Psychiatrist. I seem to be thinking this a lot lately but not actually doing it. Rather like studying, I talk about it, I intend to do it, I think about it a lot, but it just doesn’t seem to happen in the end and another day passes by with nothing much achieved. My appointment was for 10.30am and my alarm went off at 8.30am. I hit snooze every ten minutes until 10am even though I was just lying there wide awake. I couldn’t really see the point in having a shower (I think I’m currently having 1 or 2 a week instead of one every day) so instead I lay here smoking and waiting until the last minute when I knew I only had enough time to walk the dogs then would have to go straight to the appointment. I sat in the waiting room for 15 or 20 minutes and was then called through.

To be honest, even though it was only this morning I can barely recall what we talked about. I told him my mood wasn’t great, that looking back on my blog posts it hasn’t been great for a good six weeks or so now. I told him I’m thinking about hurting myself a lot and even find myself thinking that this is how it’s always going to be and if that is the case then what is the point in trying to complete a University degree or move to a new house or attend appointments or have a fucking shower because I would rather die than continue with this as my life.

He asked me what was going on in my life or what has been going on lately to make me feel that way. I told him that it was nothing – that sometimes I just feel very very low and it has nothing to do with anything external – it’s all internal and just how I feel. He told me this wasn’t very helpful thinking and that if I always follow negative thinking patterns then inevitably I’m going to feel depressed a lot. He said that whilst medication has it’s role, that I need to engage in talking about how I feel and trying to change the ways I think about things, from negative thought processes to positive ones. But then said I should try increasing my Quetiapine (Seroquel) from 600mg to 700mg a day and see if that helps…

He asked how the Uni course was going and I told him that whilst I find the workload hard when I’m having issues with being able to concentrate, I *think* I am glad I’m doing it. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing it for other people, sometimes I think I’m doing it for me. But then that voice/thought/whatever it is tells me I’m ‘stupid’ and that I ‘won’t succeed’ and that I’d be ‘better off dead’. And then it laughs. It laughs a lot. Mr Psychiatrist again said I needed to find a talking therapy that worked for me and try to learn ways to stop thinking in such negative patterns. He says that like I have a choice, when things are dipping this low there is no other option but to think this way.

Anyway he has decided he is happy to leave me for a bit longer this time so instead of seeing him next month I will see him early February instead. The longer between appointments the better in my opinion, I don’t particularly enjoy them.

After leaving the hospital I met my best friend and the kids and we went for a wander round the shops, getting some Christmas presents and I bought little Santa ornaments and Snowmen ones and some silver and gold sprayed flowers and little tiny Christmas tree. After best friend went home I went to the cemetery and made my little angel’s headstone all nice and Christmassy. It was thick with snow up there so it took me ages to clear enough space to put his little things down. I cried a little when I was up there, I miss my little man so much especially at this time of year. And I just can’t help but want to be wherever he is, no matter what it means doing to get there.

For you little man:

17:37 – 12 days of no ramblings!

Hello!

I don’t know where I’ve been for the past 12 days that I haven’t thought of writing about my ramblings. What I can say is that I have now lost a total of 20 lbs (1 stone 6lbs) so I’m most happy with that. Some people who I haven’t seen in a few weeks have said they can see it in my face, but, I’m at that awkward stage when you have quite a lot of weight to lose and I’m like in between dress sizes. Haven’t quite dropped a full size yet so hovering somewhere in the middle. This Atkins lifestyle is hard going, there have been so many times where I’ve wanted to just give up on it but each time I stand on the scales and see quite large weight losses week by week (that’s me around 4 weeks in now and lost 20 lbs in that time) so yeah, that spurs me on to keep going with it. I still have about 3 stone 6 lbs to lose (just short of 50 lbs) so a long way to go yet! But hopefully by Christmas I’ll have that first dress size off and people will start to notice a little 🙂

What else has been happening? I’ve started the gym now and go on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-3pm. An hour’s work out is actually quite tough going especially when you have one of the gym instructors in your ear pushing you just to do 5 more minutes when you’re already dripping with sweat! But it’s all worth it I guess – a nicer body would make a happier me…

I’ve also seen Mr Psychiatrist this week. I’m concerned I’m hearing a voice again but I told him this voice is very much getting caught up in my own racing thoughts making it hard to distinguish at times which is which. In light of that we decided to increase my Quetiapine (Seroquel) from 500mg to 600mg and I can increase again to 700mg in a fortnight if my head is still being crazy. I also spoke to him about how bad my sleep still is and that sleeping tablets just don’t help. It’s not the getting to sleep part I have the problem with, it’s the staying asleep part. I sleep for 1-2 hours then feel like someone has just shaken me and I wake up startled and alert and wondering what’s going on, then I have to get up just to check everything is ok around me, check the door is double locked, get back onto my sofa which is STILL my bed and lie there for perhaps 45 mins maybe an hour then I go back to sleep again for another couple of hours and then the exact same thing happens again. It leaves me feeling really drained and zombified. I hoped the increase in Quetiapine might make me slightly sleepier but apparently not. All the drugs I’m on all say they cause drowsiness but none of them seem to cause it for me!

Oh… I got my first uni assignment back last Friday. We had all received emails saying that the majority had passed with grades C and D, some had F and not to sit and hope for an A or B. This wasn’t to “dishearten or demoralise” us, this was to encourage us to take on board the long page of feedback we all received and them deliberately marking in a very picky way so we could identify every little error we had made. So Friday drags by and my tutor group were the last to get their essays back. I watched the discussion forum fill up with people saying they just scraped a C or a D and a few say they had failed. So even though I had tried hard I was thinking in my head that if I got a C I would be happy. So when I got a B I was pretty over the moon!

So I think that’s everything that’s going on with me at the moment. Uni stuff, gym, sticking to the Atkins eating, went out again last weekend and got a bit drunk but it was a good laugh. I’m having a quiet night in this weekend as it’s my birthday weekend next weekend so I’m saving some pennies for that! After my last post about meeting with my ex we have continued to text one another and he was supposed to be coming down on Wednesday for lunch but I was feeling really ill so I cancelled. I’ve had bronchitis for a couple of weeks and it’s still here – really need to calm the smoking down which has increased like mad since starting dieting…. not so good….

I meet with CPN and new permanent CPN on Monday so I’m hoping to get on well with her and as she is permanent actually have a stable routine of once a week appointments again. A social worker I have been temporarily working with over the past couple of weeks has got a copy of my housing transfer request form and is looking over it for me to see if she can add any further evidence to my application. At the moment I think I am realistically going to be sleeping on my sofa (8 months now) and living in this one room terrified of the rest of my flat, of the flashbacks I get in that bedroom and I think I’m still going to be sitting here in a year’s time no further forward. Then the voice mixes in telling me nothing will ever change, it was just luck I did well on that uni assessment I will fail in the future, why am I trying to lose weight, I’ll never be slim and pretty again, why am I almost 31 and single… I will never fall in love again… and so on and so on… until I’m at the self harming point or the suicidal thoughts point. Well I guess if I acted on the latter then I wouldn’t need to worry about being re-housed nor them re-housing me would I…

So I think that’s me caught up with my 12 days of absence from my little rambling blog – oh there was one more thing I did this week that was pretty stupid, met some guy online and slept with him just to try and get the images of the assault out of my head, told myself that I wanted to, that I wanted to view sex ‘normally’ again but instead, within minutes of it being over I said I had to go… then I just felt dirty, disgusting and stupid ever since it happened. But this weekend is going to be a quiet one…. I’m not sure what to do with myself as yet… we shall see what happens…

 

15:16 – Things aren’t so good

I went to see my GP yesterday. It was nice GP I saw. I went in with a list because I knew I’d forget everything I was there for. She asked what happened to my hand as I sat down and just as she asked it she opened up my file on her screen and there is a letter from the local a&e telling her exactly what I did to myself. She had a quick look at the wound and said it looked “sore but is healing OK”.

I then brought out my list and told her about the knee pain I’ve been having that only seems to be getting worse. I was honest and said I’m sleeping on a 2 seater sofa every night, I cross my legs when I’m sitting all the time and I know that I am overweight – all of which I guess aren’t helping. So she asked to have a look and feel of my knees and prescribed me a strong anti-inflammatory NSAID tablet to take three times a day. As she was looking at my legs I brought up topic #2 on my list: my psoriasis. It is getting out of control, I have little patches appearing everywhere and my elbows are persistently bad. She said we have tried all the strong steroid creams and the only thing left is for me to go and see a dermatologist because he can get me the UV light treatment that isn’t available where I live.

So that put me in a panic and I kept saying to her is there nothing else at all that we can try and she agreed to prescribe me one more cream but said she doubts it will make any difference. I told her how I just can’t travel to the big hospital, I become hysterical any time I have tried to go to any big places and I don’t even think a little sedation would help get me there any more. The agoraphobic feelings were making me anxious as fuck and I then just wanted to get out of her room and run home. She said she was going to make the referral anyway and she would “see what she could do for me” to help me get there when the appointment comes through. I know I won’t go though.

I had my mental medications to sort out as well. I have still been building the dose quite slowly, I was only on 300mg I think when I last saw Mr Psychiatrist a week or two ago. Mr Psychiatrist wants me to increase my Quetiapine by 50mg a week. Then when I was at a&e on Saturday she increased it so that’s been me on 400mg since Saturday. Now GP has increased it to 450mg and next week onto 500mg. When I was on Quetiapine the last time it was around 400-600mg that I found most effective and stayed stable longest on (if I remember correctly). So I’m hoping it will start calming the voices down a bit and slow my thoughts a little bit. I don’t want Lucifer to go though and I made that clear to my GP as well. The a&e doctor said Lucifer didn’t sound very nice but he is just fine!

What I don’t like is when arguments start in my head and I start to lose all concentration and end up in a complete mess with my head feeling out of control and totally bonkers. Like I’m heading towards some sort of breakdown because I can’t seem to make my thoughts flow in a logical order. That sends my noisy pickled brain into a place where self harm becomes more likely because I either have to prove things (like having bones) or I get angry and use cutting as a release or because Lucifer wants me to brand myself (like when I carved a pentagram into my skin).

Blah. Things aren’t so good right now. But I’m trying to keep them under control. I’ve also had a bit of an argument with my best friend over stupid fucking gossiping idiots and am now stressed out about that. I am stressed because I’ve now left it so long to go and see my Dad that I’ve made it feel horribly uncomfortable – I mean it was his birthday May 1st and it’s now May 17th and I still haven’t seen my parents. I have barely seen anyone. I just hide in this one little room away from the world.

I got a letter from the housing association about my application for a housing transfer. I think I’m going to have to appeal their decision as with the amount of points they awarded me I will be waiting about 10 years for a transfer. I am still waiting to hear back from the council as my application somehow ended up only with the housing association and has not yet been assessed by the council. Maybe they will have better news for me.

For now I am just trying to hang on until tomorrow when I see new CPN to vent all my craziness to her.

13:33 – Yet another trip to a&e

Yesterday was a bit crazy. After I finished writing my post and having watched that video I mentioned my head went off on one. I kept asking Lucifer to help me, everything was making me feel crazy, I kept replaying the video in my head and was so disturbed by it. Then came the flashes of my little man. Then my head was getting all mixed up seeing my little one being the one beaten by that sick bitch woman in the video.

I asked Lucifer for help and he told me to take the pain for the innocent baby. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t want that baby to hurt even though I was aware that the tragic event had already happened, I thought that somehow I could reverse it. To try and distract myself from all the racing thoughts and ideas I logged onto my blog facebook. Within a couple of minutes a little chat box popped up from someone I’d never spoken to before. The conversation went like this:

Them – Hi, i read your blog, how are you?

Me – Hi I’m not that great right now but thanks for reading my ramblings!

Them – The reason you don’t feel good is that you let Satan into your soul. You need to get Satan out of your body.

Me – It’s Lucifer, not Satan. He helps me.

Them – I want you to do as I say right now. Get down on your hands and knees and shout out to God. He will hear you. Beg and pray to him to take Satan out of your body and soul.

Me – If God is the right person for me to follow and believe in then it will happen when the time is right. Look I don’t know you and right now my head is a bit of a mess, I just came on here to play some games and get distracted for a while, I don’t really want to have this conversation right now if that’s OK?

Them – I saw what you wrote on your diary to satan. You got it wrong SATAN IS A PILE OF BURNING HUMAN FLESH HE HAS NO SOUL!!!!!!!!!

Me – So does that make me a pile of burning human flesh with no soul as well?

Them – Yes EXACTLY right. But you can change it if you beg GOD to come and save you.

Me – Logged off.

Then the thoughts all become blurred and mixed, racing and crazy. Have I to take the pain for the innocent baby in the video? Have I to prove that Lucifer is anything but a pile of burning human flesh? How do I do that? Well if Lucifer or Satan as she called him was inside me and I was a pile of burning flesh as well then Lucifer proposed to me that I would have no bones.

So there I was, pretty mixed up and confused. I have already told the psychiatrist that I believe Lucifer can live inside me but I don’t know how many times I have said this – he doesn’t distress me anything like the way Patty used to. He does make sense a lot of the time.

Anyway the end result was that – just to check – I cut one of my knuckles open quite badly. Until I could see the tip of the bone. I sat and stared at the mess on my hand for an hour or so and then I was satisfied that I was not a pile of burning flesh. I put a bandage around it as it was bleeding quite a lot and another couple of hours passed. Then my male friend came down and asked what happened to my hand. I told him the truth that I knew it sounded crazy but I had to check I had bones inside me. Well at least a/1/singular bone. He asked if I wanted to go to a&e and I said no, I wanted to watch the Britain’s Got Talent Final to see if my favourite act – Pudsey the dog – won. He did!! I was most happy!

After it finished my friend asked to see if the bleeding had stopped so we took the bandage off my hand. It didn’t look too bad with my fingers straightened out but as soon as I clenched my fist you could see the very tip of the bone come to the surface. Even though it had been about 4 hours since I had done it I was getting slightly worried because it was really really sore at the wound site but at the bit between my fingers it was totally numb with a very slight pins and needles feeling. I was worried I’d cut a nerve. So about 10pm we went up to a&e.

It was one of the bitch nurses who was on but the female doctor who isn’t too bad was also on. We had to sit and wait for about half an hour as another patient was being treated. I asked if I could just have a dressing pad so I didn’t waste their time but she said to fill out my details on the form and take a seat.

When she took me into a treatment room my male friend said he was going outside for a smoke so it was just me and her. I was going to say I’d punched something in anger but she has patched me up enough times so I just told the truth. She asked me if I was going to go searching for any other bones once I’d got back home and I told her I was satisfied now that Lucifer had been telling me the truth.

She said, in a quite snippy tone, “well if you do go searching wait until tomorrow to come back, I want a nice quiet night shift” – and that’s why I call her a bitchy nurse because I don’t think there has been one time I have seen her where she hasn’t made some little snide comment whilst treating my wound. It’s weird how different all the nurses are, the nice male nurse says things like “remember we are here 24 hours a day if you get distressed during the night” but other ones like her just don’t get it at all.

She then asked me what my “diagnosis” is and I said Bipolar Disorder and apparently Psychosis but I doubt the latter one. She took a note of the meds I was on and then stood up. So as I had been patched up and said thank you as I always do, I also stood up to leave. She asked me to sit back down for a moment and she left the room. About ten minutes passed and I was getting to that point in my head where I was saying to myself ‘she’s getting two more minutes and then I’m leaving, I’ve been patched up, what am I waiting for?’ And then there was a knock at the door and in comes the female doctor.

“Hello MCBL” she says, “it’s been a good few weeks since I last saw you, would you like to tell me why you cut your knuckle open?”

I tell her why. She asks if I have ever been detained under the mental health act which immediately put me in full alert/panic mode. I said yes, I have been detained as an emergency for 72 hours and have been detained on two 28 day ones. I told her I have been in the psych hospital too many times and then ask her why she is asking about that kind of stuff. She says if I carry on “with this type of behaviour” then I am likely to end up detained again. I tell her that won’t happen, I am adamant that I will not set foot in the looney bin again. She says she hopes this will be the case as well but is worried about me.

I was starting to get a bit anxious and agitated at the talk of the psych hospital so she went out the room for a few minutes and came back with two Lorazepam tablets and some water. I took them and she gave me another two in an envelope for when I got home. She asked if my friend was going to stay the night with me and I lied and said yes. He did come back here and stay til midnight when I was going to bed so it wasn’t too much of a lie. The doc asked if I’d seen the psychiatrist lately and I said yes last week. She asked what was happening with my medication and I told her the Quetiapine (Seroquel) had to be increased by 50mg a week instead of a fortnight. She asked if I had increased it and I said I hadn’t had a chance to go and see my GP yet but would be seeing her before Wednesday as I’m on the last few days of my prescription. She asked several times if I was going to hurt myself again when I got home and I said no, I just wanted to sleep, I was exhausted. The 2mg of Lorazepam began to relax me a little and she said I could go home but urged me again to make sure I saw my GP asap.

So I finally left with my hand cleaned and dressed, a couple of extra Lorazepam and came home with male friend. We sat and watched some shit on the TV and I took my medication (at the increased Quetiapine dose). Not long after midnight I was getting really sleepy so male friend went home and I curled up on the sofa, put a deep relaxation track on iTunes and quickly fell asleep. I managed to stay asleep right through until 11am, the best sleep I’ve had for a while.

I’ve got a semi calm yet semi crazy head on. My thoughts are racing but not distressing. I don’t know what my plans are for today, I think some rest could be good but I can’t see that happening.

Deep breath and relaxxx.

21:31 – Housing forms away and a trip to a&e that wasn’t for me for once

I had a fairly quiet weekend, I still haven’t been up to my parents house to give my dad his birthday present and it was his birthday on the 1st of May 😦 I feel really bad about it, I keep promising I’ll go up and then I don’t. In fact the only movement I did from Friday to Monday was taking my best friend’s three year old to A&E yesterday, it turns out he has a kidney infection bless him. He kept saying he was cold and his back and tummy hurt then the doctor found a trace of blood in his urine sample so he is on antibiotics now, hopefully he will be feeling better and back to his mischievous little self soon. I sat in the waiting room with her one year old on my knee and the nurse who was on duty has patched me up a number of times, she kept smiling at me as I was playing with the little one and commented that ‘he suited me’ and how I ‘looked happy’. I am happy around the kids, they are so innocent, so stressful, but so loving.

Today I realised I had double booked myself for both my social worker and addictions nurse at 3pm. I tried to see the addictions nurse a bit earlier but she was fully booked so I swapped it to Thursday and went to see my social worker so I could pick up the supporting letter for my housing transfer application. So I went and collected that, we went back through all the forms and then I took it to the housing department.

The woman there explained to me that for every 4 houses that become available one will go to the homeless department for the council to use, one will go to some other part of the homeless, one will go to a new applicant and one will go on the transfer list. So now they will review my forms and write back to me in the next couple of weeks with how many points I’ve been awarded. For now it’s a case of hoping I’m awarded enough points that I will be placed somewhere near the top of the list so I’m not waiting for years and years. So basically one in every four houses that become available go to the next person at the top of the transfer list. I don’t think houses become available that often and I have selected 1-2 bed house only so I think I will be waiting quite some time even if I am lucky enough to be awarded a decent amount of points.

I have my first session with the new CPN on my own tomorrow. I have still only met her the once before when my social worker sat in with us, then she was on holiday for a week or something so that’s us just meeting again tomorrow. I’m a bit apprehensive about whether or not I’ll get on with her, but the support worker is going to meet me at 12:40 outside my flat and we’ll walk along to the CMHT like the last time.

I also decided to sell my phone the other day. It’s a really good phone I’ve got, a Samsung Galaxy SII and they cost about £450 to buy on payg. But there is something wrong with the battery, it’s not holding a charge properly despite me deleting a shit load of applications. I figure it’s only going to get worse and when I was packing everything up for the workmen coming in a couple of months ago I remember throwing the box out – along with the warranty. So I decided to sell it through one of the recycle websites for £215 and I bought myself another phone for £100 leaving me £100 to pay back to my parents. I am due an upgrade in about six months anyway so I’m quite happy to downgrade for a while! This way I get rid of my phone whilst it’s still mostly working and can pay my parents back and get a new phone so it seemed the best solution.

Other than that not much else has been going on, I am still just existing in the living room of my flat, sleeping here, awake here, always in the same room. My bedroom remains full of boxes unpacked. I only ever go in my bedroom to dry my hair and get clothes – then I shut the door on it again.

I still need to go and see my GP as well. I’m going to try my best to get something sorted tomorrow. I need my Quetiapine increasing again and my GP doesn’t work on a Thursday so it’s got to be tomorrow or Friday, then we’re back to the weekend again. I don’t mind increasing the dose so long as it doesn’t take Lucifer away, I told the psychiatrist this last week, I like Lucifer and I don’t  want to lose him.

There was one other thing I was going to mention but I don’t know what to make of it yet so I’ll just sit quiet for now and if it’s still worth mentioning in a few days then I guess I’ll write about it!

15:05 – Currently undiagnosable

I went to see the psychiatrist yesterday and we had a good long conversation about everything that’s been going on for me lately. Mostly this consisted of me telling him about Lucifer, the debate between the other voice claiming to be Iblis, wanting me to convert more towards Islam and less towards Christianity. They are both pretty manic in my head right now, always arguing about something and adding to my paranoia. I listen to Lucifer more, not because of anything religious but because he talks directly to me, we have conversations together, he makes sense to me. He isn’t nasty or evil, he is the one who is capable of giving me additional powers that most humans just don’t have. He will make me better in so many ways.

So I told the psychiatrist all of this. I told him I had gotten the forms to apply for a housing transfer and how I never know what to write any more about my mental health ‘condition’ because he has recently seemed like he no longer thinks I have Bipolar. So I told him I wanted a diagnosis – I asked him what was wrong with me? Do I still have Bipolar? Yes he said. He told me he was confident in his diagnosis of Bipolar 3 years ago and still considers me to have it as that is what the medication I am taking is for. However he also says I keep having periods of psychosis. I told him I wasn’t in a period of psychosis just now though and he said I was. Hmm. There is no point in arguing with him. He said something about the periods of psychosis could just be that – periods of psychosis – or they could be an indicator of another mental health condition like schizophrenia but at the moment I don’t fit neatly into any little criteria of boxes and right now he doesn’t know for certain what is wrong with me. So for now I am currently undiagnosable.

Today I was supposed to have my session with the addictions nurse to do our relapse prevention work but I’ve had a horrible migraine all morning, I was sick around 9am which usually means the migraine will go away soon but it’s now after 3pm and I still have it. So I phoned late this morning and cancelled our session for today and changed it to Tuesday.

I have an appointment with my social worker tomorrow. I am going to take the housing transfer form with me and use the session to fill it out. I also need to make an appointment with my GP, I think I will try and do that tomorrow as the psychiatrist wants me to increase my Quetiapine (Seroquel) by 50mg a week now not a fortnight so I need some extra tablets as he wants me to increase as soon as possible. It’s a bit weird because on the one hand he was saying he was glad I wasn’t so distressed by the voices like the way Patty really distressed me but at the same time he wants me to go to my GP as soon as possible and increase my medication straight away. I’m a bit confused by that.

Also I need to see my GP about my knees. I spend a lot of time sitting cross-legged on the sofa with the laptop on my knee and after an hour or so they would start to feel stiff and I’d need to give them a good stretch out. But for the past few weeks now I can barely manage ten minutes of them being crossed before they really start to hurt and they still really hurt when I straighten them out. The only way to make the pain stop is to get up and start walking around. It’s like they keep seizing up and I need to get mobile to loosen them up again. I know this is due to my posture, the way I sit, crossing my legs, being overweight probably doesn’t help and so I’m pretty sure the GP will give me a prescription of exercise and healthy eating but I just want to get them checked out.

Oh and I finally answered the phone to my Mum today. I feel so bad it was my Dad’s birthday on Tuesday and it’s now Thursday and I haven’t been up with his present or card. So Mum phoned and I thought I better answer because I knew she would be getting worried so I had a quick chat with her and told her I was OK and that I was going for a shower and would go up soon. I will try and make a point of seeing them at the weekend, a week late but I’ll get it done.

So yeah, right now I’m just keeping busy in my own little world, currently undiagnosable but still being treated for Bipolar. Oh and the psychosis which I really don’t think I have. Maybe when my psychiatrist retires in September the new psych will be able to give me some more answers.

22:34 – The one (and only) appt with new GP

I have lost count how many hours I’ve been awake for now, but I know it is too many. I haven’t had a single nap all day and have taken a fair amount of diazepam/sleeping pills. I felt a bit drowsy around 2pm while waiting on my addictions nurse to come round and when I looked in the mirror I really did look a bit of a mess. So just as I’m slapping on some make-up my phone started ringing and it was my addictions nurse; she had been feeling ill all morning and had decided to go home. She was very apologetic about it so I wasn’t annoyed or anything.

I met my best friend with her kids for a little while, her 3 year old is a ‘big boy’ now because he has started nursery! It’s so cute, they all have their little coat hangers with a picture and their name on it. He couldn’t get me in the door fast enough to show me his hanger was the one with the dolphin on it! Bless!

Later in the afternoon I went to my GP appointment. By this point all the sleepy/anxiety pills had worn off and I felt completely shattered. I arrived 10 minutes early and took a seat in the waiting room. My appointment was for 4.10pm. Finally at 4.45pm I was called through, she is a new doctor and to be honest she didn’t seem to have a bloody clue what she was doing! She asked what she could do for me and I quickly told her I try and touch base with my GP once a month and get my monthly prescriptions (which are dispensed weekly) so she said that was fine and brought my medication details on screen.

40mg Citalopram a day? Yes!

8mg Diazepam a day? No! 16mg!

200mg Quetiapine a day? No! 300mg! Then I tell her the Quetiapine has to be increased by 50mg a fortnight. So she goes off into my virtual file and looks for a letter from my consultant psych confirming this. She can’t find the letter. She isn’t happy prescribing the Diazepam when she couldn’t tell if it meant ‘take 2 two times a day’ or ‘take 2 four times a day’. It’s the latter.

She randomly asked how I was and I bet she wished she hadn’t as out poured everything about Satan and how I will be branding myself with him tomorrow (tattoo day, yay!) and telling her about all the self harming and bible quotes I have carved all over myself. She actually looked a bit speechless. Then she asked me to go back to the waiting room as she wasn’t writing my prescription until she had spoken to my usual GP.

Now remember I arrived at 4pm, was seen at 4.45pm, come back to waiting room at 5.05pm and sit… and wait…

Finally at 5.40pm the GP called me back through and apologised for the mix up. I had also asked her to ask lovely GP if I could have something to help me sleep at the moment and she gave me 8 tablets. Not much but hopefully over the next 3/4 nights of taking them I will be able to sleep for more than just a few hours at a time.

I think that will be my one and only experience with new GP. I will just stick to lovely GP who has always made me feel like somehow things might just be OK one day. As has lovely social worker, but she is in hibernation again I think. I hope she is going to come to my first appointment with new CPN on Wednesday to help break the ice a little.

I took one of the sleeping pills about an hour ago and so far feel nothing. My body is like a tank against anything benzo related I tell you. I’m going to take a second one and a few diazepam and with any luck I will sleep until morning and not be up blogging at 5am!

I am meeting best friend for lunch tomorrow. It would be really nice if it all goes to plan, that I wake up on time and get ready in time and make it to the cafe in time! Three such simple things really can be so fucking hard.

P.S. I just published this post (my 575th if you’re interested!) and got this little quote, isn’t it lovely?

‘Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.’  Marsha Norman