00:02 – More messed up thoughts

Over the last week I’ve started and stopped writing a load of posts. Some I’ve kept as drafts to come back to and finish them off some other time and some I’ve thrown to the trash bin.

My head seems to be all over the place. I seem to be constantly swinging from so depressed I don’t shower for days, to painting on that fake smile when I know I have to make family etc think I’m doing OK, to feeling like maybe I am OK and getting some course work done, then back to these really low moods with intense urges to self harm or worse to then thinking about death and realising how much it scares the shit out of me. Not of myself dying, but of some time in the future when those I love and care about do and me being left completely on my own. My head then becomes completely full of intrusive thoughts about what will happen when my precious doggies go to doggy heaven, to losing my parents and I end up in an absolute anxious mess. Why can’t I just think about today or this week? Why does my head keep catapulting into the future and thinking about these horrible things?

I’m also in a daily/hourly battle with myself about self harming. I’m not sure what triggered it off… whether it was the talk of the ECT and possible memory loss that can accompany it…

Maybe I started thinking about the memory loss and knowing the only real time I have had a complete black out that I’ve never ever been able to remember was when I was spiked with PCP and assaulted in August last year…

Maybe it was the channel 4 documentary that was on last week about ending female genital mutilation acts carried out on children of an African background which broke my heart for those poor little girls having to go through that kind of cruel torture (especially the fact it was woman carrying out the act on them)…

But then there was this part of me thinking “that’s what I fucking deserve”… so something (maybe a mix of all of that) has thrown me into this place where my head is full of thoughts and urges to self harm ‘down there’. I think of my genitalia as being disgusting and all I want to do is hurt myself there.

If I didn’t have female parts maybe my cousin would never have abused me, maybe the guy who spiked me wouldn’t have assaulted me, maybe I would never have lost my precious baby… and yes I do realise I would never have conceived him in the first place had I not had female reproductive parts but still… the thought of my ‘bits’ make me feel sick to my stomach and I want to damage them so badly and I seem to be quite stuck with those urges… they won’t pass and I wonder if I will be able to keep fighting or if I’ll just give in to them and do it. I have self harmed in my genital area before when my head has been messed up with flashbacks of myself as a child and my cousin abusing me, never severe enough to need medical attention, but the urges that I think/hear in my head really want me to do severe damage this time. I emailed lovely support worker earlier and sort of told her I was having thoughts along those lines and she said I need to try and direct my anger at my cousin and those who’ve hurt me not at my own body but the urges are so so strong. I know I probably sound fucked up and I’m sorry if I do but this is my place to be honest and spill out all my innermost thoughts and feelings even if it doesn’t make for very comfortable reading.

I was supposed to see CPN#2 this week on Tuesday but she is off sick which suited me fine anyway as I find the sessions with her next to useless as you all know. I did however go to see lovely GP yesterday and she had received a letter from new psychiatrist and he mentioned on it that he had suggested I try ECT as we are fast running out of medications and my mood just won’t lift for more than a few hours here and there. I told lovely GP that I am going to try a few months of therapy with the psychologist who should hopefully be sending me an appointment some time in the next few weeks and see if that helps me to deal with or lift my mood a little before I go getting my brain zapped. Lovely GP agreed that was a good idea so we’ll see where I’m at in a few months time.

Well I have to be up early tomorrow so I’m going to head to bed. Sorry for a pretty messed up ramble tonight but sometimes it helps a little to write  all the shit down and try to make sense of all the craziness in my head. I’ll probably regret posting something where I’ve talked about such intimate stuff, but no matter how messed up it might sound I can’t be the only person in the world whose had such thoughts…

Maybe a more positive post next time?

Goodnight folks x

 

18:00 – The sexual assault: one year on

*Talk of sexual assault/abuse that might be triggering*

Today marks one year exactly since the sexual assault happened. It was probably around this same time of day that I’m writing this as well. A full year has gone by and still I’m left with all these gaps in memory as to what exactly happened that day/night. I thought over time memories would come back but they haven’t, I don’t really remember anything more now than what I did the day after it all happened, when I took myself off to A&E to have them test my urine for presence of drugs. So I learned one fact that day and that was that I had indeed been spiked and with PCP. The day after it happened I had a select few flashbacks of being with a stranger and flashes of seeing his body on top of mine, that feeling of power over me, the familiarity of that feeling of power, taking me back to the days of being sexually abused as a child.

But really I have learned nothing more than that. I think what happened was that there was a guy I liked and had met a couple of times in the weeks before the assault happened. I ended up liking him more than he liked me and whilst a little part of me hoped some kind of relationship might have blossomed instead he told me he didn’t think we should take things any further. So yes, I felt rejected by him and I guess I wanted to feel that feeling of someone wanting me again after it had been so short lived. So I think I was stupid and I think I arranged to meet a guy I’d got talking to online. I’ll never know for sure as my browser is set to delete all browsing history when I close the page so there was nothing there to go on. There also weren’t any strange numbers on my phone that I’d text or called that day so I have to assume our full conversation took place online. I also can’t make sense of the fact that I don’t remember meeting him at all – presumably I spent some amount of time with him before he got me to consume the PCP?? So why can’t I remember that bit? Why in fact can’t I clearly remember anything about that day… it only really becomes clear late at night when I was coming back to reality and very sick and unwell. PCP if you don’t already know makes you strongly dissociate and is basically just a horrible horrible drug.

So all I can go by are the facts and the only actual facts I have are the medical ones: PCP was found in my urine and there was a fair bit of blood in my urine with a lot of irritation inside my lady parts. Those facts back up the few flashbacks I experience. Sometimes I wish that I had taken the police up on their offer to try and investigate by looking into my computer and seeing if there were deleted conversations that they could locate, but the evidence was so little that they were honest enough to say that it was likely I’d put myself through months and months of stress and still get no solid outcome. And just like when I was 13/14 years old sitting in the police station after reporting my cousin for all the years he abused me I was given the choice to take things further or just try to draw a line under them and try to forget about it. The same way that as a teenager I couldn’t face putting my family through what could be months and months of building a case against my cousin, I couldn’t face putting myself through it all as an adult either.

So for almost a year I have attended rape crisis support appointments. I still can’t fill in the blanks of the 16th of August 2012 and mostly I’m relieved by that as it’s easier not to know. But it still left me waking up this morning feeling disgusting, wondering who ‘he’ was, wondering why I was sitting crying into my pillows when he probably hasn’t ever given me a second thought. Feeling so disgusting so I went into the shower and repeatedly washed myself… and cried… and cried some more. Sometimes I wonder if there are any other girls crying over what he has done to them… then all I feel is guilt… huge amounts of guilt that if any other girls have been hurt by him I could have done something more to have prevented it… I could have gone back to the police and given a detailed statement… but then I also know that I did tell them everything and that was very little… and it was them who told me that with so little to go on it would most likely not result in a prosecution… and I really didn’t believe that I would have the strength to go through something as stressful as a court case… and I still don’t think I could go through it now.

One thing I didn’t expect to happen was to find that any time I think of the assault I am catapulted back in time to a flashback of my cousin abusing me and I really thought I had dealt with all of that stuff some 17/18 years ago when I was 14 and seeing a CAMHS therapist about it all. But I guess it was just too hard to talk about when I was 14 plus I was scared that the therapist would tell my parents everything I told her so I spent about a year going to see her but told her very little. It wasn’t until the assault happened that I realised I had a tonne of memories that I still hadn’t dealt with as a 31 year old woman, memories I’ve kept suppressed for years that all suddenly sprung out like a jack in a box. There are so many memories and experiences that confuse me and stir up all sorts of emotions in my head. So if anything good has come out of this whole situation it’s that I’m finally getting the help I need to deal with some of those memories at last… even if I do still believe 99.9% of the time that I am the one to blame for everything bad that’s ever happened in my life.

Besides talking about this shitty anniversary I also wanted to write a little bit about my experience with taking the Pregabalin (Lyrica) tablets that new psychiatrist had decided to start me on for anxiety for long term use as he tries to get me to start reducing my diazepam dose. As you know from the posts I wrote about it I wasn’t very keen on the idea of trying it. This was mainly because I had tried a similar drug to it (Gabapentin) a few years ago and had a horrible time with it. Also I read about a lot of people having a really hard time getting back off of it, some people finding it even worse than a benzodiazapine withdrawal. I also didn’t fancy risking the weight gain side effect when it is already one of the most common side effects for the Mirtazapine and Quetiapine both of which I’m now on the max dose of. So I got the prescription from lovely GP last Wednesday then sat and stared at them each time I took my other meds for a few days. It wasn’t until Sunday that I finally found the courage to try them.

A few hours after taking my first little capsule I got that same feeling the Gabapentin gave me – I can only describe it like your body being on some sort of amphetamine stimulant whilst your head can only think about wanting to either cut or kill yourself. Completely flat mood with very depressing suicidal type thoughts slowly seeping through your brain. Yet at the same time there is this rush going through your body which makes you feel all jumpy and then the heart palpitations started which of course make me start to think I’m about to have a panic attack. Which I did indeed end up having… a huge massive one which was just awful. But I persevered and took the three a day I’d been prescribed all of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and yesterday mornings before deciding I could not handle them any more. And that was me only at 75mg a day when the starting dose is normally 75mg twice a day. There seems to be something in these types of drugs that I’m overly sensitive too because for those 5 days of taking them I was a complete mess, so uncomfortable in my own skin that I’ve scratched so much I’ve made my skin bleed… not been able to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time… constantly feeling on edge and ‘stimulated’ but in a very unpleasant way… like my body and my mind were feeling two completely different things at once… blah… I haven’t taken any for around 30 hours now and it’s only now that I’m starting to feel the last of it leaving my system.

I had another appointment this afternoon with lovely GP and felt like I was having a panic attack in the waiting room. I was still really anxious when she called me through and I rambled all of the above to her, how the Pregabalin made me feel, how I tried them for 5 days but just couldn’t cope with the side effects any longer… I rambled about not knowing which was worse the horrible rushy anxiety provoking body feelings or the sudden onset of suicidal/self harm type thoughts. She agreed that I’d made the right decision stopping them and asked how the thoughts of hurting myself were now. I told her I am still having some urges to self harm but when I saw her face starting to look a bit worried I added in that I would do my best not to act on them which made her look a little less worried. She gave me another appointment for two weeks time as she wants to review things again then and check that all of the side effects I had from the Pregabalin have completely gone by then. She said just as some people would have difficulty in tolerating even small doses of Quetiapine and Mirtazapine that I take at maximum dose, it seems I just can’t tolerate the side effects that come from the Pregabalin/Gabapentin family of drugs even at small doses.

So I’m now hoping that I can try and keep myself distracted from the thoughts of the assault that keep flashing into my head and have a peaceful Friday night and hopefully catch up on some sleep this weekend as well. But I feel pretty meh and the self harmy thoughts are still swirling round my brain. I haven’t cut since April? I think and I don’t want to do it to mark this shitty anniversary yet at the same time I feel more disgusting than ever and like I probably deserve a few more ugly scars.

Anyway on that cheery note I shall wish you all a good weekend… and as I have two sets of puppy-dog eyes staring at me I think that’s my hint that the doggies would like to go for a walk now. Hopefully that walk will be distraction enough to get through the next hour or two without self harming and I think it’s going to be one of those nights where all I can do is take things hour by hour and just wait and see how they turn out, whilst doing my best to try and gently steer things in the right direction.

15:04 – Results time…

So… I met best friend at the sexual health clinic at 9.30am. I was in a bit of a mess, my stomach was in knots, I felt sick with nerves and we arrived to find a full waiting room of young people. I went to the reception desk and handed over my “priority pass” card I’d been given last week so that I could queue jump and we were told to take a seat. As we sat down I really started to panic, thinking that I was going to have to sit and wait for all these people to be seen before they would call me through. Best friend could see the anxiety in my face and started chatting away about all sorts of random things, I guess to try and distract me a bit.

Thankfully they didn’t leave us waiting for too long – maybe ten or fifteen minutes before the doctor called me through. She didn’t give me any eye contact and went over to the other side of the room to get a second chair for best friend to sit on. This of course made me start thinking “shit, shit, shit, she is getting us all sat down to gently break it to me”. I tried looking at her computer screen but it was tilted just enough that all I could see was ‘tive‘ all the way down the page. I couldn’t see if they started with ‘posi‘ or ‘nega‘.

The doctor asked if I was OK as I was clearly panicking a fair bit and I rambled about not having slept properly, about how scary and stressful the past seven days have been and how I knew “my result is positive, I just know it”. She looked at me and smiled gently then turned the computer screen round to face me and my eyes read down the screen:

Chlamydia – Negative

Gonorrhoea – Negative

Syphilis – Negative

Hepatitis B – Negative

….

….

And finally…

HIV – NEGATIVE

I almost cried with relief. It took me a few minutes to take in what she was saying, it was as though my head was refusing to believe her at first. I could hear her saying something about how I could go home and catch up on some sleep now and how it must be such a weight off my shoulders. She said she was so happy for me that we now know 100% that the damage left behind from that bastard who spiked and assaulted me is purely emotional scarring and no physical ones. I thanked her repeatedly and as we left and walked along the corridor to leave the hospital best friend gave me a big hug. I told her I felt like I had been given a second chance (at life) and I really do mean that. I would have posted before now but best friend and I went out for a nice lunch and then I went out to see the kids for a little while.

In hindsight I wish I had never waited so long to have the blood tests done. That’s been ten long months since the assault and I could have put my mind to rest and spared myself a lot of worry and anxiety if I had just done it six months ago. I will never ever put myself in that situation again – if I have a worry I will not consult Dr Google – I’ll just bloody go and get myself checked!

One last thing I wanted to say. As you all know these past 7 days have been hellish. But during the last week I did make some plans. If the result had come back positive for HIV there is a very high chance I would have done something stupid to myself. I think I would have just completely freaked and went absolutely bonkers. However I also made a plan for what I would do if I was lucky enough for the results to come back negative. Some people may think my plans sound a bit stupid so I’m not going to talk about them on here just yet (partly because I haven’t made up my mind for definite) but more so because today – the 18th of June 2013 is a HAPPY DAY and I don’t want to have to get into any debates over whether my next set of plans are a good or bad idea.

For now… the relief is indescribable… totally immense… I can breathe again 😀

And thank you to all of you who have offered messages of support on here, facebook and of course twitter over the past week… you all helped get me through a seriously tough week. Huge virtual hugs and kisses for anyone who wants them! Thank you all xxxxx

14:58 – The HIV test

Today I finally did something that I have been putting off for several months. As some of you may remember, back in August last year I was spiked with a drug known as PCP by an unknown male and then sexually assaulted. A week or two after it happened I went to the local sexual health clinic and had baseline bloods taken for the HIV/Hepatitis/Syphilis tests but I was told I would need to wait for three months before the HIV test could confirm whether or not I had become infected as a result of the assault. All of my initial blood tests and STD checks at that stage came back negative (so as of August 2012 I had all negative results) and then I was supposed to return to the sexual health clinic for the HIV test to be repeated, three months later, in December.

I didn’t go.

I have regularly had the thought pop into my head that I needed to get my bloods taken again but for some reason I just kept ignoring the thoughts. January, February, March, April and May all went by and I still didn’t go back to the clinic. In fact, any time I have found myself thinking about it recently I work myself up into such a state, convincing myself that these results are going to tell me I am HIV positive. I know the chances are extremely low but it only takes one time and if he is the sort of guy to drug rape a girl who knows what his sexual history is? I can only hope that he might have thought ahead about what kind of trouble he could get into and have used a condom at least so he didn’t leave his DNA trail behind.

Our sexual health clinic is only open on a Tuesday morning and for the last three Tuesday’s I have had my alarm go off at 8am, got ready to leave the house by 9am and then had the panic set in… I’d then change my mind about going and end up staying at home. This morning however I finally went. The doctor was really nice and I explained I hadn’t been back at the three month mark because I have utterly terrified myself that the test is going to be positive. She calmed me down by explaining that I was relatively low risk as all my tests done in August 2012 were negative and as I haven’t slept with anyone since the assault then there is only one person who I have been exposed to. And even if he did have something nasty it still doesn’t mean it would definitely have been passed onto me. Then she explained a bit about the HIV virus and told me that even when people do get a positive result it no longer means a ‘life sentence’ for them, that it can be managed very well with actually quite a small amount of medications and people still lead long and fulfilling lives.

So my bloods have been taken and I get the results at 9.30am next Tuesday. I am absolutely terrified, I can’t lie. Don’t get me wrong when I was younger I have had a few one night stands which weren’t always protected and then took myself off to the sexual health clinics in a panic in the days following it but my worries were never about things so serious as HIV or Hepatitis, I was more concerned about catching Chlamydia or something equally as treatable. The couple of times in my teens and early twenties where I had HIV tests done as part of a sexual health screening I never even gave those results a second thought, I always just (ignorantly) assumed they would be negative. Now, into my thirties, everything is the other way around. I’m terrified of the big ones and don’t give a second thought to anything which would be symptomatic because I know I don’t have any ‘symptoms’. But then it’s the quiet ones that have the potential to be the deadly ones…

I have a feeling it’s going to be a long seven days until I go for the results. I’m trying so hard not to think about it but I am thinking about it on every level and I can’t seem to stop. Even when I don’t think I’m thinking about it, somewhere at a subconscious level I am because I drift back into reality and there will be yet another article/story/video/forum to do with HIV or Hepatitis open on my laptop. It’s the ones that talk about their diagnosis coming as such a massive shock that really get to me. Their diagnoses shocked them so much because they were feeling so well and so healthy and had only exposed themselves by having unprotected sex just a couple of times. It just goes to show that it really can happen to anyone at any age and at any time in their life.

So now I guess I just have to wait and hope. I have debated whether or not to tell anyone that I’ve had the test done, I never imagined it to feel like such a massive weight on my shoulders and I fear I might drive myself crazy if I keep it all bottled up. Yet at the same time I don’t want to tell best friend or my Mum or anyone close to me. Maybe I will tell my Rape Crisis support worker when I see her on Thursday, I have talked about my fears of having the test done and she knows I’ve been putting it off for the past 5/6 months. She has offered in the past to come with me to get it done so maybe she’s the best person to get it all off my chest with. I might ask her if she can come with me next Tuesday morning to get the results as I kinda don’t want to be on my own even if there is a 99% chance of them coming back negative… I’ve convinced myself in every way possible that I will be that 1% who gets a positive result 😦

Anyway… I guess there is nothing I can do to change things now, the results will be what they will be…

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…

 

23:23 – Seeing new social worker & rape crisis support worker

Today I had two appointments. The first was at 1pm where I had my first appointment with the new social worker but she hasn’t replaced other social worker she is just working with me temporarily for a few weeks until the new permanent CPN starts. So she asked how I was doing and I told her about going with other social worker to advocacy on Tuesday and how hard I actually find it to express why I want to move out of this flat so badly. Somehow this led on to me telling her my life story. I didn’t plan on doing that but it just kind of happened, not in masses of detail but kind of significant events along the way and when diagnoses were made etc. I didn’t get hugely positive vibes from her when we first met the other week but she actually turned out to be quite nice and I think I’ll be OK working with her for a few weeks, she seems easy enough to talk to, so that’s good.

I then had an appointment with the support worker from rape crisis. I haven’t seen her in two weeks as she was off on holidays so it was nice to see her and have a bit of a catch up, tell her how I got on with my child befrienders interview and how I had got my first uni essay in… then onto the bad stuff about the self harming and how I’d done it again in the time she’d been away. It seems that self harm often goes hand in hand with rape/sexual abuse so she is pretty understanding about it all and asked what I thought would help me at the moment and I said I didn’t know, just trying to keep myself distracted I guess. She said she was more than happy to see me once a week and after me rambling away for over an hour we arranged to meet up again next Thursday. She said today that as I enjoy writing and feel like I can express myself better when I write things down then she might give me a writing exercise to do next week which I assume will be writing about my feelings about the recent assault or perhaps writing a letter to him or something…. I remember when I was a young teenager and getting help from a CAMHS psychologist she got me to write a letter to my childhood abuser telling him how it made me feel, what I thought of him for doing that to me and a whole load of other stuff… and then we took it outside and took a match to it and watched it burn. I guess it was supposed to be symbolic somehow, like as though I was watching all those bad feelings just burn away.

This time though everything just confuses the hell out of me when I think about it. Maybe because I still have no real recollection of what happened other than knowing it did happen from the PCP drug found in my tests and the intense flashbacks that are still face-less. I was actually thinking about it a lot yesterday. This is going to be way too much information for some of you so you may wish to look away now…but… I had recently taken a course of Provera (the tablet that I use to induce a period seeing as I don’t have them on my own thanks to the condition PCOS)… I finished the course on Tuesday and was expecting my period to show Friday/Saturday (usually 3-5 days after I take the last tablet). However it caught me off guard and came yesterday, Thursday, and full heavy flow at that. And suddenly I felt very weird about it being there and the first thing I did was go straight into the shower to clean and clean and clean as I felt like I was dirty.

I tried speaking about this with rape crisis woman today and she said it made sense. I told her it was like the first time since the assault where I’d been aware of my ‘girly bits’ and all these flashbacks started happening and I felt so dirty at the sight of the blood and just had to repeatedly clean myself in the shower until my head adjusted and calmed down to the realisation it was OK, it was just a period. So yeah, that wasn’t particularly pleasant.

Anyway no more period talk I promise. Don’t want the guys who read this to get too squeamish!

I think I’m going to spend a few hours with my Mum tomorrow as she has the day off work. Usually we would go for a bite to eat but seeing as this bloody diet is so restrictive it will probably just be a cuppa for her and a water for me, and maybe take the dogs along the beach or something if it stays dry. Last night we had a crazy thunder and lightening storm, the whole sky was lighting right up for hours. It was pretty cool to watch but one of my dogs is terrified of thunder (and fireworks) so I had to close the curtains, turn the TV up loud and wrap him up in a duvet next to me, even then I could still feel him shaking, poor thing. My little dog didn’t bat an eyelid, he just did his silly little barks each time the sky roared!

Speaking of the dogs it’s time for their bedtime walk and it’s time for me to do some reading before I try and get off to sleep as well. I hate the weekends, drunk people passing by my house til like 3am and the noise makes the dogs bark which in turn wakes me up and I end up frustrated and very tired. Hopefully tonight they won’t be as bad and I can sleep right through but that hasn’t happened in weeks and weeks so I doubt very much it will now. I seem to be firmly set in a pattern this past week of sleeping between the hours of 1am and 3am and between 5am and 8am and that’s it. So averaging out at about 5 hours of broken sleep a night. Pretty blah.

Anyway time to take these doggies out.

Goodnight folks x

22:16 – Seeing Mr Psychiatrist and CPN

I went to my appointments yesterday, one in the morning with Mr Psychiatrist and one at lunch time with CPN.

Let’s start with the one with Mr Psychiatrist. I went in having barely slept, feeling very low, told him about the self harming last week (which he already knew about from GP) and about handing all the stockpiled tablets over. I told him that deep down I know I don’t want to die so am managing not to act on the suicidal thoughts even when I think it would be the best option for everyone. But that I was very much struggling with the self harming, I can’t seem to stop myself. I’m constantly making scratches trying to get the urges out without doing it really badly again. But I feel the next “bad” cut isn’t going to be far away even though I am genuinely battling against it.

Mr Psychiatrist said that last time he saw me I was in a more positive frame of mind and looking forward to my uni course starting. He said the only thing that had happened between then and now was the sexual assault, therefore all these feelings must be related to it. I said yes some of them are, it has certainly triggered a lot of bad feelings, but I’m not sitting thinking about it 24/7 – I just feel so fucking low all the time, thoughts racing around my head again about having bad blood and needing to release some of it. I told him I thought I was bad, that I felt like I had the devil in me, not in a psychotic sense, I don’t mean I think the devil is living inside me, not like when I truly believed Satan had taken over me…nothing like that… I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. He said that what I had to do was recognise the events that had taken place i.e. the assault (and for some reason he brought my little man up to which I angrily responded what did he have to do with anything??) and that I must work through the feelings these events have stirred up inside me with the relevant person/people.

He said I only felt like I was bad because bad things had happened to me. I told him this was not true, it wouldn’t matter if they had happened or not, I know I am bad, there is just this complete badness about me, inside me, controlling me. Again he said I needed to talk it out with the right person. I was just getting annoyed and frustrated with him, I was overtired and pretty much spent the whole appointment staring at the floor. I changed the subject and asked for my mirtazapine to be increased so I’m on 30mg a day now. He said I can increase it to 45mg after a couple of weeks if I’m still not feeling any benefit from it and if I continue to feel no benefit from it at 45mg we would need to try something else.

Then he came out with something which really pissed me off. I told him that I felt really paranoid about telling people I had self harmed and that paranoia was now worse because GP said last Friday if I didn’t hand the tablets over then she would be “looking at putting me in a place of safety”. He said to me what did I expect? Of course she couldn’t leave me with that amount of tablets in my house when I was in an unstable frame of mind. Then he said the thing that pissed me off…. “I don’t say this often MCBL, but, in a sense you are game playing”… I was like wtf?? What are you talking about?? He said he was saying that because I am saying that I don’t know if I should tell people when I self harm any more and yet I had told everyone who ‘mattered’ I guess. I tried to explain it wasn’t like that. GP only knew because a&e sent her the notes, CPN only knew because I was running late for my appointment with her when I was in a&e the day I did the self harming and had to tell her why I was going to be late. Anyway, CPN has already written to a&e and requested they send her the notes of every attendance I make there. So I tried to say to him I didn’t go off saying to everyone oh I’ve cut myself pretty bad, they all found out in their own ways. He said it’s like I am saying “OK it’s safe to tell person a, but I won’t tell person b because I’m not sure how they will react, and I will deny it if person c asks because I don’t want them knowing at all” and this is why he called it game playing because I wasn’t being straight up and honest with everyone, instead picking and choosing how much I tell to each person. Isn’t that a normal thing to do? We tell the people who we trust, we maybe don’t say so much to those we don’t?

By this point Mr Psychiatrist was really just doing my head in. He was telling me it was because of the assault I felt so low and I was game playing with whom I was telling information to. I told him I disagreed with all of that and he continued to talk over me and tell me I just needed to talk it all out with the right people who can help me feel better. By this point I had nothing else to say to him and just sat looking at the door, not responding to him, so he said “I take it you would like the session to end now?” and gave me an appointment for the 16th of October.

I had a very quick lunch with best friend and the kids then went to see CPN. I had totally forgotten that last time I saw her she said we would do a pretend interview for my upcoming interview to start voluntary work with the child befrienders charity. I totally forgot about it though so when I went in to see CPN she had set the room up like an interview with a desk between us and a glass of water each and a big notepad and she started talking to me interview style… At first I was like what the fuck is going on? (in my head) then I remembered and somehow blagged my way through the questions til she said I had done really well and asked me if I’d been preparing my answers and then I admitted I had totally forgotten about it… but she said that was kind of a good thing that I had forgotten about it yet still managed to express all the reasons why I wanted to become a volunteer with them and she said I interviewed really well, so hopefully when I have my proper interview on October 1st it will go just as smoothly!

I then told her all about appointment with Mr Psychiatrist and his shit about game playing and she was like ‘I totally disagree with him and don’t know why he is saying that and if you want I will phone him and tell him’ but I was like, no it’s OK, I was in a foul mood and don’t want to fall out with another member of my care team. Which then moved her onto the subject of the lack of contact for the past 5 months with social worker. Next Wednesday when I go to see CPN apparently social worker is going to be there as well so we can have a chance to talk and for me to get stuff off my chest and basically ask her where she has been for the last 5 months and why she hasn’t kept to the monthly contact agreement made at April’s CPA meeting. CPN says she will stay in the room in case it gets “heated” – I’m assuming she means in case *I* get heated, but I have no intention of doing that, I don’t want to argue or fall out with my social worker, I just want to ask her why she hasn’t kept her side of the agreement and hear what she has to say… that’s it really. I have a feeling that for some reason or another she won’t actually be there, something will come up, I just know it will. I think I may just have to accept that I’m never going to get an answer, but I really hope she does turn up, I want to be able to walk past her and say hello and not feel like she is avoiding me or that there is any kind of tension between us any longer, I want that all to go, I know things are never going to go back to the way they were but just to be friendly again is what I’d like to come out of next week’s meeting.

So I will wait and see what happens next Wednesday.

CPN has arranged for me to see another social worker on a weekly basis for 4 weeks whilst she leaves and does the handover to the new CPN that I will be working with. So it’s going to be a bit of a mix of new people over the coming weeks until this new CPN settles in and I start getting regular appointments with her. I really hope she is nice and easy to talk to.

Today I spent the day with best friend and the kids, we went out for the day, went for lunch and stuff. It rained all day long so was pretty miserable but was better than sitting around the house doing nothing I guess. The guys are finally finished with my bathroom and I now have a lovely new shower and shower cubicle fitted that I’m not allowed to use until tomorrow as stuff is still drying out, I can’t wait to try it out tomorrow!

I have an appointment to see lovely GP tomorrow for another catch up. I am going to ask her about taking Melatonin to help me with my sleeping as something I can take on a more long term basis. I asked Mr Psychiatrist and he said straight out it was not what he would consider to be a medication relevant to psychiatry and therefore he could only say he wouldn’t recommend it because I don’t know how it will react with the other drugs I am taking and to give the increased dose of Mirtazapine a chance as it often makes people sleepy but it didn’t do bugger all last night. I can buy melatonin from health shops or I believe you can also get it prescribed – I asked the pharmacist about it when I was picking up my prescription yesterday – she said it was definitely worth discussing with my GP and if I was to take it then it would be much better if I took it prescribed and monitored for any interactions. I don’t even know if it would do anything, but I have such a tolerance to benzodiazapines now that they really don’t do much to help at all.

Tomorrow I don’t need to set my alarm for the workmen coming in so I’m hoping that I might actually sleep through til a decent hour but it’s unlikely going by my recent sleep patterns. Don’t really know if I want to go and see lovely GP tomorrow, I don’t want to admit to her that the bad thoughts are still there and don’t want to say anything that might risk her feeling concerned about me and how I’d cope over the weekend again. Sort of considering cancelling it but she said she wanted to see me so I guess it’s best just to go.

And that big long ramble has pretty much been yesterday and today. It’s now 10.15pm and I think it’s time to take my meds and see if I can settle down for the night and with any luck get some sleep tonight.

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.

12:45 – I let them down, I am shit. They let me down, they are shit.

Yesterday I saw best friend for a while. We made plans to spend the day together today which I was more than happy to do. However then she started saying she wanted to go to a place that my agoraphobia has prevented me from going to for at least five years. I told her yesterday I didn’t think I would be able to get there but that I would think about it and look on google maps to see if there was a way I could go that would be least stressful. Anyway I woke up this morning feeling crappy, with no confidence in myself that I would be able to get there. I phoned her and apologised and explained that I didn’t want to try and fail, that I didn’t want to get half way there and freak out and have to come back and ruin the day. Her 3 year old was in the background crying his eyes out because he wanted to go to McDonalds (I haven’t had one of them in years as there is none anywhere near where I live) and was throwing a tantrum that Aunty E promised him she’d take him today and now he wasn’t getting to go. It made me feel absolutely awful. I didn’t promise, his Mum promised, despite me saying last night that I really didn’t think I would manage to travel that far today (two hour drive there and two hours back). It was just too far and the place is a busy industrial area with lots of cars, busy roads, roundabouts, people, fast roads, everything I’m scared of. So in the end she text me to say her other friend had offered to go with her instead so I told her she was probably best just to do that, then the little one is happy, she is happy and I’ll just have to deal with the fact that my fucking stupid agoraphobia prevented me from having a nice day out.

My CPN phoned me this morning to say she couldn’t make our appointment today. We didn’t even have an appointment today, on the appointment card the next one is for Sept 19th. Anyway she realised she’d made a mistake but said did I want to see her tomorrow at 1pm. So I said yeah OK. Then she asked me to write some sort of list about why my social worker shouldn’t work with me anymore or something. I asked her had my social worker asked for me to do this, she denied it and said she hadn’t even spoken to my social worker, but if that were the case then why would she be asking me in quite a strong and insistent manner to find reasons why my social worker shouldn’t discharge me off her caseload. I know my social worker wants to discharge me and I keep saying no because I want to keep the one person who has been there from day 1 really involved in my care team.

I’m actually pretty pissed off about all of it. At the last CPA I expressed my wishes for my social worker to stay involved in my care team. The psychiatrist asked my social worker what she thought and she agreed to continue to see me but just on a monthly basis. Now that was about five months ago I think and she never stuck to it, and I have never seen her since then, despite trying to make contact with her on several occasions. Then this new CPN appears into the picture and seems determined to break my care team completely apart even though she is leaving at the end of the month, it’s like she wants to get me off as many peoples caseloads as she can before she leaves.

She keeps going on about how I’m not the same person I was a year or two years ago. And to an extent she is right. Yes I can now think of consequences before acting on urges. I do not act impulsively so much any more and just deal with the consequences afterwards. I am not in and out of psychosis any more. However, with regards to recent events, i.e. the sexual assault, it has put me back into a really bad and dark place lately and I have been cutting and self medicating and battling with suicidal thoughts again. And they know this, I haven’t kept it a secret, I’ve told them straight out how I’m feeling and behaving. I feel at the moment like I need more support not less and yet CPN seems to want to leave me with just her as the only person I see on a regular basis. She is excellent when it comes to encouraging me to do positive things in my life, but she is useless when it comes to needing to talk about the bad stuff. Just last week for example on Friday when I told her on the phone I felt so extremely low, she was the CPN on duty that day, but she didn’t seem interested in talking to me about things. Instead she passed the buck to my GP, didn’t even have the decency to phone me back and tell me an appointment had been made for me with GP, she left the receptionist at the surgery to do that.

My CPN is always chopping and changing our appointments and it’s always because “there’s a lot going on today”, “I need to attend an emergency”, “there is something that is a priority for me to deal with”…. But I am never one of those people needing dealt with. My self harming and suicidal thoughts/intentions do not matter in her eyes. Maybe because I have been doing it for so long she thinks I won’t really act on things and that I am well enough now to weigh up the consequences of my actions so she doesn’t need to see me when I feel so low. It just feels like she has come along out of nowhere and when I feel suicidal her words to me are “if you decide to act on those thoughts then that is your decision and only you can make that decision” – what happened to, “use the duty system, see whoever is on duty, go over the crisis plan and make plans to keep me safe over the next 24 hours”???

I actually feel like writing a letter, not of complaint but just to make the manager of the mental health team aware that my social worker has never stuck to her agreement made at the last CPA, my CPN offers me no help when I have recently been through a traumatic event, one which has put me back into suicidal thinking mode and when I asked for help from her she simply told me it was my decision whether or not I acted on my thoughts and to see my GP. She never uses my crisis plan so what the fuck is the point of it? What was the point in spending the entire time with the previous temporary CPN making a crisis plan for it never to be used? What is the point to these CPA meetings when members of my care team don’t stick to what they are supposed to do?

I’m feeling in a horrible place today. I have let my best friend down and her little boy. The 3 year old currently hates me for not taking him to get his bloody McDonalds. My CPN is phoning me asking me to find reasons as to why I shouldn’t be discharged from my social worker’s caseload. My CPN doesn’t give a flying fuck about the fact I’m self harming again or expressing suicidal desires. I have let myself down by not trying to have the day out that best friend wanted. I am sitting here alone and feeling rotten. In tears. With the only thoughts in my head to do something bad. I keep trying to force my head to think no I won’t do anything bad, instead I will see what uni work I can do today, but the bad thoughts are just outweighing all other thoughts.

I am sick of all this crying and cutting but it’s the only thing keeping me going. That and really not wanting to end up in the place I was in a year or 2 years ago. But that also scares me, because I know I don’t want to end up back in that place – psych hospital – so I know that if I do act on the suicidal thoughts I will do my damn best to make sure it actually works. And then that brings me onto the thoughts of how that would affect my lovely parents and then I just end up in tears again.

Why is it that the only person who can see that I am a bloody mess right now is me?

23:57 – I’m back… And not in a good place

After putting my blog on private for a couple of weeks whilst I got my head back together I am now back with bloggy back on public viewing.

The last couple of weeks have been hard. Very hard. I still cannot quite process the information in my head that I was sexually assaulted. However I have had good support from the woman at the rape crisis centre and from my family. I’d be lying if I said I’d had the same from the CMHT.

Today was another CPA meeting however the only people at it were me, my Mum, my CPN and my psychiatrist. My social worker had “a priority to deal with”, don’t know what happened with an a&e member of staff being there, the drugs addiction nurse is on annual leave and woman from rape crisis was out of the area today unfortunately.

I told them the truth. I have been self harming again. I have been experiencing suicidal thoughts. On my way to the CPA meeting I bought blades. I’m pleased to say I haven’t as yet used them.

I have decided not to proceed with my police statement due to lack of evidence and me not being in a good place in my head. I can’t cope with it at the moment. I am struggling, and I mean seriously struggling just to get through each day. I’m extremely emotional and randomly keep bursting into tears. Nothing makes sense at all.

I had my uni course induction day on Tuesday. It went well. The course officially starts on Monday 10th. I am just doing it part time and have got all my online logins set up so I’m ready to roll. I do want to do the course but part of me can’t help but feel my CPN pushed me into it and now I keep feeling like I’m doing it for everyone else not myself. I was so happy when I got accepted onto the course but what with everything that’s happened my excitement and enthusiasm for it has gone rapidly downhill. But I will do it, I need something to do to that engages my brain for a few hours each day or I’m going to end up going mad – as in crazy bad – again.

I was pretty gutted my social worker didn’t come to the CPA. When I sat and thought about it I realised I have only seen her once, for ten minutes, in five months. Back when we had the last CPA meeting it was agreed I’d see her on a monthly basis for a catch up on how things were going on. I no longer feel like she cares, she’s not made any contact me even though she knows about the assault. That never used to be the way things were, she was a huge part of my care team and now it’s all just fizzled out to nothing. And it makes me sad because she still remains the person I am closest to out of everyone. My CPN is leaving soon although a permanent CPN has finally been recruited so I will be working with her instead. But I was so close to my social worker and now she’s just gone. I have tried so many ways of contacting her but I get no reply. I’m beginning to feel like she is deliberately ignoring me. Perhaps I shall go and stand by her car tomorrow at CMHT closing time and stand there until she appears and ask her straight out what’s going on. I’m confused and upset by it all. All I want is what was agreed, monthly contact, and the person I trust and have always been able to confide in. I don’t have that with current CPN. I don’t really have it with anyone.

I am beginning to open up more to rape crisis woman, she has been a good source of support lately. I see her on Monday but then she is off on holidays for two weeks. My parents are also going away on holiday for a week on the 17th. I wasn’t due to see psychiatrist again until November but after today he has arranged for me to see him again on the 19th and I see CPN again on the 19th as well. Therefore, from the 10th-19th I have no support at all. I am still keeping my fingers crossed that my social worker might actually get in touch and see me at some point between those dates.

I worry I am sliding back downhill again. And yet I am trying to force myself to keep on going. I’ve got the uni course, I’m meeting a woman next week about voluntary work but it’s going to take a few months to get set up as I need to have my PVG Disclosure Check done and it can take up to about 12 weeks. But I need to be in the right head space to see her and convince her I’d be a good volunteer, how can I support others if my own head is fucked? I can’t so somehow I need to sort it out. If I don’t sort it out and let things continue as they are I am going to end up back in hospital, plain and simple. I have stocked up a cupboard full of medication and am getting closer and closer to just swallowing the lot. I have bought more blades, I want to hurt myself badly again.

Yet I don’t want to go back to square one. My Mum phoned me tonight as she had been worried sick all afternoon when back at work that I would do something to harm myself. She said she was proud of me for not doing anything. She is trying her hardest to get me to look at the positives in my life but the whole phone call (90 mins of it) all I did was cry off and on.

I may be back but I am not in a good place. The weekend is going to be very long. The nine days of no appointments is going to be even longer. I don’t even know right now if I will still be here (in my flat) by then or if I will be lying in a hospital bed or mortuary by then.

I’ve been on the Mirtazapine for a couple of weeks now. I don’t even notice that I’m taking anything, so no side effects and no increase in appetite. I don’t know if it’s because my head is so screwed up from the assault that I just feel nothing. Blank, empty, alone, lost, and not wanting to be here for much longer.

This time I really don’t know if I can fight it out. All CPN says is to go to a&e if I am going to/have hurt myself. Maybe this time I just want to hurt myself and not get any help and just go wherever it is that we end up when we don’t wake up again.