16:54 – In a pretty crappy place right now

So yeah, I spent the weekend getting drunk by myself. Sitting here pouring glass after glass of wine and drinking it at a ridiculous speed. I don’t know what I hoped to achieve by doing that, I guess I was trying to block shit out. However the reality was that I just got more and more depressed, my mood dropped a little further down with every gulp I took. I did a lot of crying which maybe wasn’t such a bad thing, maybe those emotions had to come out of me, but I’m still having emotional outbursts with no warning signs today.

I continued to self harm Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Despite being under the influence I seemed to manage to have some control over it as the cuts are reasonably superficial. I think I just kept reminding myself that if I just pushed down that little bit harder then it would be time to go back off to A&E again and I’m still sticking to my story with them that the stitches I’ve got were as a result of an accident and not self harming.

I am supposed to be going to get my stitches taken out today but I just feel so low and so miserable that I can’t face going out. I don’t suppose an extra day will make much difference, I’ve had times in the past where I just couldn’t face going to A&E and left stitches in a few more days than they were supposed to be in for. I was also supposed to go to an appointment with CPN#2 at 12:30 today – I got up at 9am and forced myself to go in for a shower, got dressed, sat and watched some TV, let the dogs out to do the toilet, then around 11am took my clothes back off and put my pj’s back on. Sat and watched 12:30 come and go, knowing that I should phone and least concoct some excuse for missing yet another appointment but my brain just seemed incapable of thinking so I didn’t attend and didn’t phone to apologise either.

I think I have come to the conclusion that I don’t find that I get any benefit from my appointments with CPN#2. In fact, I have worked with a number of CPN’s over the years and I’ve never really achieved much with any of them. The ones who have been good are the ones that haven’t stuck around for long. Typical really. So now I don’t know what to do – do I phone and leave a message for CPN#2 and make yet another appointment, drag myself along to it, sit there finding it no help whatsoever, make another appointment, repeat the process over and over again? Or do I somehow try to find the strength to be honest with her? I don’t know if I could do it face to face but the thought has crossed my mind that it might be an idea to write her a letter explaining why I’m not finding these sessions useful, therefore I either cancel them or just don’t attend.

My main problem with them is that CPN#2 likes to work in a very structured sort of way. I go in and she takes a sheet of paper that she calls the ‘agenda’ then asks me to pick two or three topics that I’d like to discuss during our session. If I go off at a little bit of a tangent she quickly pulls me straight back on topic by saying “this isn’t on our agenda, please stick to the agenda” which leaves me feeling like I’m being told off for trying to explain something. I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well? It’s like she wants our sessions to be like business meetings – have an agenda with a few bullet points – discuss them very specifically without really allowing any emotions to come into the conversation. Sometimes you need to go off at a little bit of a tangent to explain things better and when someone is sitting tapping their pen against their notebook it is extremely off putting. Then add to that her latest thing of propping her phone up on the middle of the table with the stopwatch app counting the minutes, constantly flashing, distracting me… yeah… it’s just not helpful.

I understand that she wants to use the sessions to get me to cover the basics of Compassion Focused Therapy until such time that I can see the psychologist again to learn it all in more detail, but surely I should be able/allowed to talk about how I’m feeling as well? Like if I had gone today there is just no way I could have told her about the self harming or about how low my mood has been/still is. We have absolutely no bond/no relationship/no therapeutic relationship/nothing. I cannot open up to her because I’m scared to mention anything that isn’t set on her little business agenda. So I end up not going to my appointments, not engaging with the mental health team, sitting and waiting for a letter to appear in my mail one day telling me she has discharged me as I don’t attend and she could be seeing someone else in my place. Part of me wishes she would just do that, but I carry on clinging to this little bit of hope that it won’t be too much longer now until I see the psychologist again and at least I know I can get along with her and work with her.

So here I am hiding indoors again. It’s now week three of my part time uni course and I haven’t even finished week one’s work. I sit and try to read, try to absorb it, try to understand it but it’s like there is an invisible mental block getting in the way and nothing sinks in. So I give up and tell myself I’ll try again tomorrow. But tomorrow comes and goes and I’m no further forward. At the moment there is still a chance I could catch up but for that to happen I need motivation. Right now I have no motivation at all. I just sit here and cry, cut myself a few more times, cry some more, never really getting anywhere. I can’t even go and sit on my (personal) facebook because I just cannot handle all these pregnancy announcements, baby announcements, baby talk in any way shape or form. Of course I know it’s something I can’t hide from forever but right now it’s all just too triggering for me. My mental state feels pretty fragile like the slightest thing will cause it to fall apart.

Although I fully intended to get drunk on Friday night I actually didn’t plan on repeating it on Saturday night. However, I popped up to see my parents to wish them a nice holiday (they left on Sunday morning and get back Monday next week) and just as I was leaving their phone started to ring. I saw on the caller display that it was my Aunt that I have nothing to do with these days (this is my Aunt who was the mother of my older cousin that abused me for years – he’s dead now for any new readers) and as soon as I saw her name flash up on the caller display I knew instantly what she was phoning for. My abuser cousin has a daughter who has been brought up by my Aunt as he couldn’t provide for her due to either being in prison or when he was out of prison he’d go straight back to his life of heroin and crack addiction. The mother of his daughter was also an addict. Despite who her parents were I still just looked at her like a little cousin and we used to be quite close until a couple of years ago when my stupid Aunt told her about the abuse. I had never wanted her to know about it but my Aunt is an alcoholic and doesn’t think about what she is saying half the time. So, the girl was about 14 at this point and of course she reacted to the news in a very angry way. She splattered messages all over my facebook and I made the decision to write her a long email explaining everything. I wrote about it on here and it was quite controversial to say the least – some people commented to say they thought I’d done the right thing – others said she was too young to have been told about it and that I shouldn’t have sent the email. But that’s all in the past now and sadly I haven’t spoken to her since.

My Mum told me several months ago that the girl is now 16 and pregnant. Firstly the fact that yet another person just accidentally got pregnant at the drop of a hat upset me. Secondly I convinced myself that she would have a little boy and name him after her father (as I think there is a bit of childhood idolising of him on her part even though he was never around as a father to her). I knew the baby was due in September and sure enough that was what my Aunt was phoning to tell my Mum. Thankfully she had a little girl. Even though I don’t see her any more or have any contact with her, I think it would have really got to me if she’d named an innocent little baby after the monster my abusing cousin was. But yeah, just hearing about yet another baby started making my head feel all bonkers so on the way back from my parents house I went and bought three bottles of wine and drank the lot over Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.

So that’s where I am at the moment. Alone, lonely, self isolating, unable to study, crying a hell of a lot, cutting myself, missing appointments and generally feeling extremely low. I have an appointment with my rape crisis support worker tomorrow which I’m going to make an effort to go to as she is pretty much the only person that I can just sit and be honest with at the moment. And if I make it to that appointment and get out of the house then maybe I’ll manage to get to A&E as well to have these stitches taken out. As for the rest of today and tonight I have absolutely no idea how they are going to pan out. If my mood stays like this then it looks like it’ll be yet another shitty night to try and get through. Truthfully I don’t feel 100% safe at the moment and I do feel a little bit worried about where this is all heading. But if I can just get through tonight in one piece then maybe tomorrow’s appointment with lovely support worker will help to calm my crazy brain down again.

23:33 – Telling lies to A&E doctor :(

In the past week I haven’t posted because I’ve been feeling so low and if I had written anything it would have made for some pretty depressing reading. Not that this post won’t be but it feels like time to ‘check in’ with my little blog again. One nice thing I noticed was that in the week I’ve been gone my little blog hit the 100,000 views mark, which I know isn’t a huge amount compared to some of the wonderfully written blogs out there but it did give me a little smile to see that nearly four years on people still pop over and read my rambles!

So yeah… this past week I feel as though I’ve been triggered left, right and centre. I know that it’s been over six years now since I lost my little angel but when I see people announcing pregnancies, birth announcements, even just random posts on Facebook that people make about their kids still seem to have the ability to upset me.

I went to see the gynaecologist last Wednesday and she was actually really nice, we decided on a treatment plan of Metformin and Provera (a tablet that is used for a variety of menstrual problems and given to me to induce a bleed as I don’t have periods by myself). She had actually taken the time to read some of my file and she chatted about my loss for a little while and was really gentle and empathic about it. She asked me if I was in a position at the moment to want to try and conceive again but I told her quite truthfully that I’m not even in a relationship let alone a sexual one and that the idea of ever trying again absolutely terrifies me. But she said if a time does come where I’d like to try again she would be more than happy to see me again and go through my fertility treatment options with me. In the meantime she’d like me to try and lose a bit of weight, get my body a bit healthier and see how I get on with the metformin this time round.

Even though she was really nice and helpful, I still left with thoughts of my angel, my limited fertility and my very real and very scary fears for the future. I was literally out of the appointment all of ten minutes when I got a text message from my cousin telling me she is three months pregnant with her second baby. Of course I replied saying it was wonderful news and how I was “delighted for her”… but as I typed the words tears rolled down my face. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy for people that they have happiness in their lives and I would never ever wish a loss/stillbirth upon anyone, but sometimes it just all hurts so much. It’s tiring always having to bite back tears and swallow down the lumps in my throat to put on a smile and congratulate people. Then the following day best friend innocently wrote on Facebook something like “my life is perfect, I have two beautiful little boys and the best boyfriend in the world, life just couldn’t get any better” and that set me off again… all the thoughts of why is everyone else so happy with their perfect lives and I’m so miserable with mine. I’ve practically got no confidence at all, I’m overweight, I’ve permanently scarred my body to quite extreme levels, I barely have any friends and the thought of ever being intimate with someone again absolutely terrifies me. I’m 32 next month and none of this shit was part of my life plans 😦

So I spent the weekend near constantly in tears. I hid away from the world. I refused to look on Facebook (my own personal one not my blog one). My head has been full of thoughts and urges and niggling voices telling me just to cut… cutting would make things all better again. But I know what I am like with self harming these days… I find it almost impossible to stop at a ‘superficial’ level… once I start it has to go deeper and deeper until I’ve made an absolute mess of another bit of flesh. And of course this results in a trip to A&E. I haven’t had to attend A&E since April and I’ve been really determined for things to continue that way. But then other things started to trigger me… stupid things like the fact my parents are going on holiday this coming weekend and this resulted in me having to beat myself up over the fact I can barely travel anywhere. Then on Monday I was supposed to have an appointment with CPN#2 and even though I really cannot stand the woman and find her worse than useless, I dragged myself out of bed and walked in the pouring rain to where the mental health team is located. A male CPN showed me through to a room then appeared back about ten minutes later to say that CPN#2 had actually called in sick and wasn’t there so that was a wasted trip and off I went back out into the rain. Would a phonecall to have let me know really have been that hard? I know I have a cheek to talk when I miss so many of my appointments with her but she’s supposed to be the ‘professional’ after all…

I walked home with the only thoughts in my mind that no one gives a fuck about me. I can go 10 or 12 weeks not attending a single appointment and no one ever asks why… no one phones to check if I’m OK… I’m just left on my own… which to be fair is what I always say that I want.

So yeah, the thoughts about cutting just seemed to get stronger and stronger every day from last Wednesday. My part time uni course that I do from home started back last week and I have barely looked at any of the course materials yet. I don’t know if I can do it, I don’t know if I want to do it, I just have no belief in myself right now nor any motivation. I just feel completely and utterly shit.

Now that I’ve rambled on for 1000 words I should maybe get back to the title of this post: I lied to the doctor. Actually I will correct that… I lied to the nurse, to the doctor and to my Mum. Today was meant to be a good day – my new phone arrived and I had been looking forward to getting my upgrade. I decided to get the Samsung Galaxy S4 in red as I loved my S3 and before that my S2. I have to say however that the S4 really isn’t that much different from the S3 and I’ve only had it one day and so far the battery life is proving to be pretty bad, even after disabling all applications and stuff that I didn’t need. I’m not really sure if it was worth the upgrade but maybe I just feel completely blah about everything right now. I can’t seem to get excited/happy about anything. Sorry… I’ve gone all off topic again… my head is just all mixed up and everything I’m writing is all coming out all mixed up as well.

This afternoon I just couldn’t take the constant urges to self harm any longer. Everything came to a head and I was having a complete and utter meltdown. The tears wouldn’t stop, the need to feel pain wouldn’t stop, the memories and flashbacks of so many things wouldn’t stop and I felt like I was starting to seriously lose the plot. I tried taking some Diazepam to calm down a bit but it did nothing to help. I forced myself to take the dogs a walk because I was becoming scared of what I was going to do to myself if I allowed myself to sit and think for one minute longer. The walk didn’t help either though, as soon as I got outside I began to feel extremely anxious and just wanted to run back indoors and hide again. I think that was the point that I realised I couldn’t fight it any longer, I had to cut, it was the only thing that was going to bring me back to reality and ground me again. But I also knew that if I started then I really didn’t believe I’d have the control to stop.

I’m not going to say where I cut but it was somewhere that I’ve never cut before and I will be honest from the start with you guys – I did it that way because I wanted to make it look like an accident. At the back of my mind that was the lesser of two evils if you will… I had to know that if I lost control and went too deep that I could pass it off as an accident and not admit that after going five months without cutting I ended up doing it again. Trust me when I say that the scarring I have on my body… all over my body… is horrendous. I wouldn’t want to trigger anyone but sometimes I think about posting some photos of scars that are several years old – not to try and shock anyone – but to educate them that this is what your body will look like if you walk down the path of self harming. Sorry, I’m going off at a tangent again, back to the point…

I cut. I started and I couldn’t stop. I didn’t make lots of cuts I only made one. One in a place that would be one of the most unlikely places that someone would cut. I went over it and over it and over it until there was a real mess staring back at me. And then I cried. A lot. And then I panicked. This was going to need medical treatment and I had to come up with a story to tell the nurse/doctor at A&E to convince them that an accident had happened… I couldn’t tell them the truth. A couple of hours after I’d cut I decided I had a story to explain my wound that seemed plausible. So I forced myself to go to A&E around 7pm and the nurse who took me through to the treatment room was one I’ve seen a couple of times before (for self harming). The first thing she said was “have you cut yourself?” and somehow I managed to keep my voice steady and replied “yes, but it was an accident”… she replied with “an accident that you went too deep or an accident that caused the wound?” and I lied… “I haven’t self harmed… honestly… it was an accident”. She looked at the wound and said she’d need to call the doctor as it needed stitches. Where I live is a very rural area, the hospital is small, there aren’t a huge amount of staff there, and in A&E pretty much every doctor and nurse knows me. Most of them greet me by my first name and they all know I will just tell them straight out if I’ve cut myself. But tonight something was different, I just could not say those words. So I stuck to my story and when the doctor came in the room I lied to him about what happened as well. He straight out asked me if I was 100% sure I hadn’t self harmed and I looked him in the eye and said “yes, I’m 100% sure”. I felt awful, really awful and really paranoid that somehow he would just know that I was lying. And maybe he did because whilst he accepted my story of how I got the wound he continued to ask me at least another dozen times about my self harming behaviours… when had I last done it… how often am I doing it these days.., what kind of things trigger me off to make me do it… all that kinda stuff. And when he wasn’t asking then the nurse was asking. I kept thinking maybe he could tell from looking at the wound that it didn’t look like an accidental injury and he spent far more time talking about self harming than he did about ‘the accident’. At one point I started to feel like I was going to break down and just admit the truth but I excused myself to the toilet and took a couple more diazepam out my bag then returned to the treatment room and carried on with my bullshit lies.

After an hour or so I was cleaned up, stitched up, bandaged up and quickly jumped up and thanked them then went to leave. The doctor asked me to wait for a minute so he could tell me when I’ve to return to have the stitches taken out. They want me back on Friday for a wound check and dressing change then back on Tuesday for the stitches to come out. I really don’t think either of them believed my made up story but neither of them came straight out and said it, but there were far too many ‘mental health assessment’ type questions going on for an ‘accidental injury’. Hmmm. Then again, it could be possible that the doctor remembered me from the night where I really did almost die after taking a massive overdose and very nearly ending up intubated… maybe that was why he asked so many questions about my mental health and state of mind because he knows what I’ve been capable of in the past. Oh… I don’t know… maybe they did believe me or maybe they didn’t… I’ll probably never find out for sure what they really thought unless I ask to see my notes which realistically I’d never ask to do as I think it would be a total head fuck to see what some people have said about me on paper.

So there we go… after five months of only very superficial self harming I have again done it badly enough to require stitches. I’ve lied to a doctor and nurse. I lied to my Mum when I spoke to her earlier and told her the same ‘accidental injury’ story.

Do I regret cutting? No.

Do I feel better for cutting? No.

Do I think I’m going to do it again? I really don’t know.

Is my head still a fucked up mess? Unfortunately yes. Very much so in fact.

😦

21:09 – CPN appointment and a ramble

Today has been pretty busy and it’s only 8.30pm but I’m already thinking about going to bed. My sleep last night was ridiculously bad again and I felt like a zombie when I got to my appointment with CPN#2 at 1pm. I can’t even remember what we spoke about as my brain was like mush. I do remember her filling out a sheet for the front of my file with details of allergies and stuff on it. And she said something about meeting with my psychologist before we next meet to find out from the psychologist what kind of therapy she will be planning to do with me and then use the sessions with CPN#2 to get me into the right headspace for the more structured psychological therapy. Also she mentioned arranging another CPA meeting for me as I’m well overdue one but right now half the people who should attend it are off for one reason or another so I think we’ll probably wait until June or July before the next one, which is fine by me as I don’t particularly enjoy them.

After my appointment with CPN#2 I met my Mum and we went for a look at washing machines. I’ve narrowed it down to three, they are all pretty expensive so I’m now just trying to work out what the best payment method for me would be. My Mum said she will put it on her credit card and I can pay her in instalments until the balance is cleared. The alternative is that I could buy it from my catalogue and pay it off over 52 weeks interest free or the third possibility is getting it from a local electrical store who offer the same 52 weeks interest free for payment. There are a couple of offers I saw that were quite good as they included the cost of delivery, disconnecting and removing your old appliance then connecting up your new one so it saves a lot of hassle – especially when you live two floors up. Mum said I should have a think about which one I want tonight and we can meet up at some point tomorrow to get it ordered.

Tomorrow is going to be another busy day as I have to go to a&e to have the rest of my stitches taken out (which as usual I am dreading), attempt to get a repeat prescription when my normal GP is off on holiday and as this was my first time in years getting a monthly prescription instead of a weekly one I don’t know if I’ll get put back on weeklies until my GP is back. I also have an hour of tattooing booked in the afternoon and have to buy a birthday card for my Dad then go to my parents as we’re having a little birthday dinner for him. I’m not sure how he’s going to react to his present – usually it’s a boring bottle of aftershave or something like that – but this year my brother decided it would be fun to get him a flying lesson – yes – to fly a small plane! It was pretty expensive so I hope he likes it! I wasn’t planning to get him a big present this year as next year it’s his 60th but before I could have much input into it my brother had already gone and booked it!

Anyway, I don’t really have much more to say for myself, I really am trying not to write about all the bad thoughts in my head. I told CPN#2 today that I just feel numb at the moment, I don’t feel happy or sad, I don’t feel quite as desperate about hitting the self destruct button but still want to hit it. I told her I’d pulled a couple of my stitches out myself in some sort of anger/frustration the other day – she asked what stopped me from pulling them all out and I’m not sure of the answer – probably because I knew if I pulled them all out I’d be back at a&e again and I just don’t think I could face going in there for more treatment – just going to get my stitches out tomorrow makes me feel anxious enough. Why? Because I don’t know how long I’m going to go before my next trip for more stitches. I don’t know if it will be days, weeks or months. The urge to self harm again is extremely strong but with having an hour’s tattooing done on Friday, another hour tomorrow and another hour booked for this coming Friday I’m trying my hardest to somehow trick my head into believing that the pain that comes with tattooing will be enough to stave off the urges to cut for another little while.

Well it’s now gone 9pm and I’m going to watch a little television, take the dogs a walk then medication and bed. I’m totally shattered and need some proper sleep tonight. I can’t even do a bit of self medicating as I only have one night’s medication left. So hopefully the sleep fairy will come along and be nice to me tonight.

Goodnight folks xx

 

01:36 – A confused and messed up girl

My head is still pretty messed up and sadly the regrets over self harming so severely on Sunday night still haven’t kicked in. Last night was pretty horrendous,  I became extremely emotional and sat with my little angel’s memory box on the bed and cried for what seemed like hours. After putting his memory box away I became really angry, angry that this is my life, that the most precious thing in my life has been lost.

My behaviour after that became ridiculous. I started pulling all the bandages off my legs and sat with a blade in my hand, shaking and desperately wanting to cut out all twenty something stitches. I shook, I cried, I threw the blade angrily on the floor then picked up the TV remote control and began smacking it off my face, whacking my cheeks with it over and over again. Then I was down on the floor and  hitting my head off the wall like an angry child. Then the blade was back in my hand again and I was going to cut but I truly could not have faced more stitches. So I repeatedly lit my lighter until the metal was red hot then pushed it down deep onto my skin all round my ankle. And then ended up in tears again.

I was really starting to get quite terrified of where this was all heading. My thoughts were so negative that I began to feel quite suicidal. Then I cried some more when I remembered yet again I can’t commit suicide because I can’t put my parents through the pain I carry about every day of having to bury your child. So whether I like it or not I have to keep on going and that made me angry and upset and frustrated that I felt in the moment like I was only alive to spare others pain. But then of course there is always that little evil laugh inside my head saying “they wouldn’t care anyway, they’d be glad you were gone” even though rationally I know that is completely untrue and that my parents love me very much. I don’t deserve their love, sometimes I wish they loved me less so it would be easier to put an end to things 😦

Everything was just going bonkers. I couldn’t hold myself together any longer and ended up phoning the mental health helpline breathing space and spent the next hour on a non stop ramble about how I just want to completely self destruct, how much I deserved to be in this pain, I deserved to suffer, I was/am a bad person who doesn’t deserve good things in life. I told the call handler I wanted to rip all my stitches out, that I couldn’t stop thinking about hurting myself more and more. After about an hour I finally got so tired from everything and broke down in tears on the phone, I couldn’t keep talking and just hung up. I felt a bit bad for not even saying thank you or goodbye to the person who had sat and listened to me all that time but I was completely mentally exhausted. With a slight bit of self medicating I did finally manage to semi-sedate myself and fall asleep only to wake up every couple of hours in a state of panic. I think I was having nightmares, I’m not sure.

I sent lovely support worker from rape crisis a text message yesterday telling her I’d had a bad night on Sunday and she messaged me this morning to ask if I wanted to see her today instead of waiting until tomorrow. So I said yes and we had a long chat together. I was honest with her about everything I did over Sunday and Monday night, I was honest with her about feeling like I just want to make myself hurt and hurt and not stop hurting. I told her I was scared about where this was all heading and that I didn’t know when or how to make it stop. I don’t think it can stop until I do something really bad to myself. And that I was terrified I was going to end up in the psychiatric hospital again if I keep going like this. She asked if that might be a good place for me right now and I very firmly said no. There is no way I am ever going back to that place, it is awful, truly awful. It would make the sanest of people feel like they’d gone bonkers in just one week of being there. The thought of that place makes me feel anxious as hell and physically sick.

Oh I forgot to mention that for the first time since this whole arrangement was made with A&E a year ago that they would let the CMHT know when I had attended – well yesterday for the first time I actually got a phone call from the duty CPN (albeit it was just before they were closing) but yes someone did actually phone and ask if I was OK as she’d read the A&E notes. I told her I wasn’t sure how I felt and she asked if I thought I could keep myself safe. I said I’d try my best, I said the same when I was leaving my support appointment this afternoon.

I went to the A&E department this afternoon to have a wound check and dressing change done. I was supposed to be going back again tomorrow to get last Wednesday’s stitches out but I asked her if they could just come out a day early. That wound looked like it is starting to heal well so the nurse took those stitches out. Now I have to wait until a week tomorrow before I can get all these other ones out. I don’t honestly know if I can go through the next 8 days without doing it again. I don’t even know if I can go through the next 8 hours without doing it again at the moment. My head is well and truly pickled it really is.

Tomorrow I have promised to spend some time with best friend and her kids. I haven’t told her about Sunday’s self harming and don’t plan on telling her. I don’t know why, I just don’t want to talk about it with anyone close like friends or family. I haven’t mentioned it again to the friend who came with me to A&E either. It almost feels a bit like a can of worms being opened if I tell them, if I admit to those nearest and dearest to me that I’m not coping and constantly trying to hurt myself then it makes it that little bit more real that I really am falling apart. It’s easier for them not to know. For now anyway. Even with all these stitches in I still don’t feel like I’ve done enough damage and I have no idea how long that state of mind is going to continue for.

I haven’t felt this much of a mess in a long time and I can’t seem to make it stop. Maybe I don’t want it to stop. Maybe I need to feel this level of self loathing at the moment. I don’t know why… but maybe I just do. Nothing really makes a great deal of sense at the moment. I’m one very confused and messed up girl.

00:34 – Just back from A&E

It’s just after midnight and I’ve just got home. I text a friend and asked if they could come to A&E with me. I was hugely anxious and couldn’t stop shaking, I couldn’t even write my name on the form, my friend had to fill it out for me.

The nurse on duty was really nice and the doctor was one I hadn’t seen before. He asked me the 101 questions to determine how crazy I was then once he was satisfied I wasn’t suicidal they took a look at the damage. By this point the blood had soaked through all of the bandages and through my jeans, it was everywhere. Thankfully they kept the curtain round me so my friend didn’t see the actual damage.

It was the worst self harming I have ever done. Including Wednesday’s stitches I now have a total of 24 stitches in which is more than I ever have had in before. The A&E experience was one of the more positive ones, they were non-judgemental and friendly but also professional. I did accidentally almost hit the nurse at one point as she was trying to control the bleeding whilst the doctor was putting the stitches in but he went to put a stitch into a bit that he hadn’t injected with lidocaine and I almost shot off the bed, hands flapping. He was really apologetic though. After being stitched up and cleaned up and dressings and bandages on the doctor could see I was still really anxious and still really shaky. He checked my pulse and then asked to get the machine through that does the pulse, sats and blood pressure. My pulse was 126, BP 153/103 and o2 sats 97. So they could see I was really genuinely very anxious and the doctor went and got me 2mg of Lorazepam. [That same lorazepam that the doctor who stitched me up on Wednesday told me they didn’t give out to people, despite me having had it on multiple occasions there before – so that confirmed he was talking shit].

I was treated really well, gentle and empathic. I have to go back to A&E on Tuesday for a wound check and dressing change, then back on Wednesday back for the last week’s stitches out and these new stitches have to be in for a minimum of 10 days due to the depth of the wounds.

I did tell a little lie to the doctor that my friend was going to stay with me tonight – anything to avoid being kept in hospital – and I am now home alone and the lorazepam combined with all my other nightly meds are all starting to kick in. I’m starting to feel quite drowsy so I think I’ll get a good sleep tonight.

At last I feel regret again. I do feel better for doing it but I wish I hadn’t done it so badly. I regret knowing they are going to be quite nasty scars. But it’s done now. I’ve been to hospital, it was horrible, I felt hugely anxious despite them being really nice to me, I’m ready to sleep but not looking forward to the pain I’m going to be in tomorrow. I can already feel the lidocaine local anaesthetic wearing off and the pain starting.

Do I have any more plans to do it again? No. Not at the moment anyway. Not even if it’s given to me as a command. I am bandaged from ankle to knee on each leg so I’m kind of running out of places to cut as well. I think the urge might finally be out my system.

Goodnight folks x

15:15 – Last appt with Mr Psychiatrist and a trip to A&E

Trigger Warning – graphic talk of self harm in this post

All I have been able to think about for days now is cutting. Cutting, cutting and more cutting. The more I try to distract myself the more graphic the images in my head become. The more I try to ignore, the louder male voice gets and that triggers him to start spewing out vile evil instructions in my head. What hasn’t been helping is the lack of sleep. What also hasn’t been helping is all the pressure I feel that everyone thinks I’m doing so well and coping so well and I am shitting myself that everything is going to fall apart and I am going to let down every person I care about. I’m terrified of being back in that place where you feel so worthless and then can’t even manage to take your own life properly… got to fail at that too just to rub that extra bit of salt into the wounds.

Last night I fell asleep on the sofa around 1am. I quickly woke back up just after 2am as it was freezing. But instead of putting the heating on or getting into bed I just covered myself in a blanket and lay on the sofa thinking about things. Wondering why my life turned out this way. I had a bit of a cry for a while, they were sad tears, tears of all the times in my life where things actually looked like they were going well then ultimately they all fell apart. Why do they all fall apart? Why can’t something nice just remain consistent in my life? I don’t want this life. I wanted to try and better it by doing the part time uni course and not even a year into it and I don’t think I can do it any more. I have no belief in myself whatsoever. I want to run and hide and curl away. I don’t want to speak to anyone. I don’t want anyone to see me… but this morning I had no choice.

Around 6am I was still awake and was starting to feel very anxious and sort of like I wasn’t fully in control. My thoughts felt like they had been taken over, I was so tired I just went with it. The voices told me to cut, told me it would fix things… male voice told me to just “fucking make yourself uglier you fat slag”… again I tried distraction techniques but just got nowhere.

By 8am I was pacing, anxious, heart racing, feeling sick, tired, emotional, feeling really bonkers crazy, seeing flashes of me going outside and just attacking any random object or any random person. THAT IS NOT ME. I DO NOT DO THAT! EVER! I don’t know where all these violent urges are coming from but they are so fucking terrifying. It’s not even as though I’m angry at anyone or about anything… angry with myself that I can’t bounce back to being the fun person I once was once upon a time… but that’s more of a sad angry than a violent one. Needless to say I ended up getting out everything required for self harming – a pack of clean stanley knife blades, a towel, some dressings and sat down cross-legged on the bathroom floor. I made a deal with myself that I could cut once then I would clean it up, cover it up and go no further. But of course that didn’t happen… those little cuts looked too much like scratches… those visuals flashed in front of my eyes again wanting to see gaping wounds… I felt like I couldn’t even do that right. In the end I got a fresh blade from the packet, closed my eyes and just pressed down and dragged it through my skin. It felt like my skin was burning from the pain and I expected to see a much worse wound than what I did see… however it was pretty gaping so I decided it would be OK to stop cutting then. I got myself patched up and tried to stay distracted through til 10.30am when I had to leave to go to my last ever appointment with Mr Psychiatrist.

The reason it’s my last appointment is that he is retiring and he explained he didn’t know who would be taking over from him yet but there would be a locum in place for a while until someone permanent takes over. I swear no one with a professional mental health background seems to want to work for our NHS trust, all these permanent positions never seem to get filled for what seems like forever. I told Mr Psychiatrist about self harming this morning and told him that when I left my appointment with him that I would go along to the A&E department and have them check me over. He asked what had led to me cutting and I told him all the shit I rambled about at the start of this post – these feelings of pressure and these horrible horrendous images I keep seeing. He knows it is a coping mechanism of mine and he’s told me a million times it isn’t a helpful one but I think he’s come to realise there is no point in telling me that any more.

We didn’t talk about a lot of things in detail today, I think when he realised I was sitting there with a wound needing medical attention he tried to just whizz through everything as quickly as possible. He said that he still feels that even though male voice is male (and I am female) that the things male voice says to me are things which I actually feel about myself deep down. Almost like it’s my thoughts and beliefs but being heard in a male tone. I kinda see his point but I also know it’s not as simple as that, male voice can come out with things that have never even crossed my mind before. Plus there is a big difference between a voice and a thought (even racing horrible thoughts) and I think you can only know this and understand this if you have actually experienced it.

What else did we talk about… cutting – voices – male voice – pressure – images – violence – lack of support – and a referral which I requested to another psychiatrist, one who specialises in trauma therapy and who told me a couple of years ago that he believed the EMDR treatment could be beneficial to me but at that time I was considered too unwell and too unstable to try it out. Mr Psychiatrist said he didn’t want me working with lots of different people and lots of different approaches (he said this because psychologist is supposed to be coming back at some point over the next few weeks and she is likely to want to do the compassionate mind and mindfulness program with me). However he agreed to write to the other psychiatrist and see if he would be willing to give me an appointment to assess my suitability for EMDR.

Before I left the appointment he asked me what help I was getting through the CMHT (mental health team) at the moment and I told him pretty much none. That I had 3 CPN’s who have all left now and that I was supposed to have lovely social worker as someone to see until psychologist returns back to work but that we’ve only met up once, so that bit isn’t going so great. In fairness I haven’t tried to make a great deal of contact with her but I had hoped we would have been able to stick out the once a fortnight meetings just for a month or two until psychologist returns… but it hasn’t worked out that way. Instead I’ve just been seeing my support worker through rape crisis pretty much on a weekly basis but at least I am actually trying to deal with some of my issues with her – the childhood abuse/the assault/the self harming/the feelings of worthlessness. But she shouldn’t have to deal with all my mentalness stuff as well, that should be someone from the CMHT but it never seems to work out that way.

God this post is getting long…

I said my goodbyes to Mr Psychiatrist and muttered thank you to him for the support he’s given me over the past 4 years or so (even though he’s also been a total wanker to me in that time!) but it’s just what you do isn’t it? Say thanks, smile, make them think they have helped you get a bit better when really what they have done is remove power and control from you, detain you, make you like a human guinea pig with all the varieties of medications they insist will make you better, tell you that even voices are still a product of your own mind, try to make you believe things will get better if you just have good sleep patterns and distract yourself 24/7. But still, I was brought up to be polite and so it was only right to just say thank you to him as I left.

I walked along to the A&E department and thankfully it was two of the nice nurses on, the female charge nurse who has come to a couple of my CPA meetings and a male nurse who is very gentle and non-judgemental. Even though I knew in my head that I had met the male nurse before and knew he was always nice and knew he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me it still felt weird being in a room alone with him. I was in a room alone with Mr Psychiatrist but the whole appointment kept my coat on and sat in the chair pointing the door (always got to have my escape route planned out as soon as I enter a room)… so yeah it had felt safe enough with Mr Psych. And I did feel safe with male nurse but more exposed and vulnerable I guess as the coat had to come off and the shoes off and one leg out of my trousers…. like I couldn’t just jump to my feet and leg it out the door if I wanted to… so that was making me pretty anxious.

He took a look at the wound and decided it definitely needed stitches so he went to get the doctor. It was a doctor I hadn’t seen before and I didn’t like him very much, he had a bit of a patronising tone and I just wanted him to fuck off back out the room. Plus having two men at either side of me while I lay on the trolley bed was making me very very uncomfortable. I asked the doctor if he could please get me some Lorazepam and he said “we don’t keep lorazepam at this hospital” – BULLSHIT!! – I have probably been given a couple of lorazepam on at least 20 occasions from that A&E either for anxiety that’s led to self harm or to get me into the ambulance if they have been moving me to another hospital or the psych hospital. So I asked again if I could have Lorazepam because I needed to calm down and he very firmly said “you cannot have Lorazepam” – argh I hate when I know people are lying to me. Had he said something like they didn’t have any left or something then I would’ve dealt with that, but I knew fine they had it and knew fine that if it was one of the doctors who have seen me before then they would have given it to me asap to calm me down so they could put the stitches in. He said I could have a Diazepam if I wanted (despite me telling him I’ve been on daily prescription Diazepam for years and it does FUCK ALL when I feel as anxious as I did then, but he went and got me one anyway and like a good mental I shut up and took it.

I got seven stitches put in and a little glue and steri-strips on the non-gaping cuts and have to go back in 2 days, so Friday, for a wound check and dressing change. I told male nurse that usually I would be feeling regret pretty much immediately after cutting but today I don’t. I don’t regret it, I don’t care that I’ve got more scars on my body now, I don’t care that the one bit of leg that I had kept scar free is now mutilated as well. He said to me if I felt like cutting again to go up and see them and they would try and get someone to sit and talk to me which I was very grateful for, but I don’t want to talk, I just don’t fucking care about anything. I feel so low and so emotional and so tired and all I want is to have a few hours of feeling normal…whatever the hell that is… and I would much rather not do anything which may leave me having to see that doctor again as I really didn’t like him much at all. It was something about the way he spoke to me… there was an obvious power balance thing going on and he spoke to me the way I speak to best friend’s four year old.

Anyways….

My Mum phoned me as I was leaving the hospital and said my Grandma is staying with them for a couple of days and they were all going out for dinner tonight so she was phoning to ask if I wanted to go. As the restaurant they are going to is directly opposite my flat I couldn’t really say no but I am so tired and am really not in the mood at all to sit through a long meal and listen to all the chitter chatter at the table… plus it’s a kinda posh restaurant and I hate trying to get dressed up when I feel so fucking ugly and awful. However, I love my little Gran and don’t see anywhere near enough of her so I will go. The table is booked for 7pm… ugh that’s less than 3 hours away… I just realised I started writing this at 15:15 and we are now on 16:18 … an hour of ramblings… no wonder this post is going on forever.

And on that note I suppose I had better go and find something to wear tonight. Hope you’re all having a bit of a better day than me xx

20:01 – The plotting and planning continues…

Yesterday I was supposed to go back to A&E to have my stitches removed but I couldn’t face it. I told myself one extra day wouldn’t matter and I would definitely go today as I had an appointment with new CPN this morning and the mental health team is in the same grounds as the hospital.

However I woke up this morning alarm beeping at 8am and just lay there thinking for the next hour or so. My appointment was for 10am and as the clock ticked on I continued just lying there, telling myself I would get up and start getting ready soon, but just like yesterday it didn’t happen. I didn’t go to the appointment and didn’t go to A&E to have the stitches out either. I can’t really see how an extra few days would cause any problems with the healing of the wounds…

To be honest I was thinking of just taking them out myself but they are very tight against the skin and I can’t really get into them properly even with tweezers and just a little blade, so I guess I’m going to have to go and have them taken out at some point.

So what have I done for the last two days? More planning. More plotting. Pretty much every minute I’ve been awake in the last couple of days I’ve either been completely caught up in dealing with voices – comments, instructions, filling up my head with the crazy laughter – and when the voices haven’t been distracting me I’ve still been gathering ideas “just in case”.

I’m supposed to be starting my next two university modules on Monday. I’ve received confirmation that I’m enrolled onto them but I just don’t see how I’m going to manage to do the work. My head is so so busy, fast moving thoughts, disruptions to my thoughts when the chitter chatter starts up… how the fuck am I supposed to find the concentration to study? But at the same time I don’t want to drop out of something again or fail at something again. But I can’t lie, things aren’t good just now. In fact they’re very very hard. And I am struggling a lot.

Sorry for such a negative post, I’m away to see if a couple of bottles of wine are enough to let me escape, at least for this evening. I just can’t help but wonder if this is always going to be it, if I’m just going to be this mess for the rest of my life. The periods of stability vs instability are so unpredictable, I hate never knowing how long a depressive episode is going to last or how many different medications I will need to swallow down to try and have a head free from hearing voices.

I refuse point blank to even consider a hospital admission because it doesn’t provide any form of therapy that might help me to feel better, the shocking lack of compassion of the nurses in our acute psychiatric ward is enough to make anyone go from feeling low to full blown suicidal. And don’t even get me started on the boredom, the fellow patients, the arguments, the way you can walk in voluntarily and told it’s just to keep you safe for a few days then as soon as you want to leave you are suddenly detained under the mental health act.

No. Hospital is a definite no no. Never again. And I can’t even go and have some stitches taken out at the hospital because I’m so convinced they will see right through my lies when I say I’m OK and I don’t trust them not to take control away from me. So I have to just hang on and hang on until I get a moment where I feel like I can paint on a fake smile, breathe calmly and just go in and get the bloody things out.

Hmmz. I’m confused. Very confused. I keep hearing the words “choose this path” and I’m not sure where “that” path will take me. Anyway, I’m sure whatever path I’m destined to walk along will be the one I’ll take. For now I need to drink think long and hard about what direction to start walking in and pray for some strength to get through this or find a way to make it all go away… permanently.

20:06 – Planning and plotting again

It’s been a few days since I last had a ramble and I can’t say I’ve done a great deal in that time. I admitted the self harming from last Thursday to best friend when I saw her this morning and then I spent the afternoon with my Mum and admitted it to her as well. I don’t like seeing them upset and I tried to just mention it then brush over it but I also had to admit the voices are back and really troubling me at the moment. I didn’t want them to know but they had probably already guessed something wasn’t quite right when I told them my Quetiapine (Seroquel) had been put back up to the max dosage again.

I have only had one appointment so far this week and that was yesterday (Tuesday) with my support worker from rape crisis. I cannot express how supportive that woman has been and with every week that passes the more and more I realise that a hell of a lot of my opinions about myself and some of the behaviours I do are all interlinked with the various types of sexual abuse I’ve experienced at different parts of my life. She really seems to understand the whole self harm thing and at the moment she is probably the person I am opening up to the most and feeling most benefit from seeing.

Today has been a fairly busy day. Best friend appeared at my door around 11am and we just sat and chatted for about an hour. She saw my appointment card for A&E sitting there with “Please attend to have your sutures/staples removed on: 24th January 2013” so obviously I had to admit to cutting. She asked why I hadn’t told her until now and all I could tell was the truth – I hadn’t wanted anyone to find out. I wanted them to think I was doing well. I didn’t want to disappoint them. She said she wasn’t disappointed in me and we chatted a while longer then she went home whilst I got dressed.

I met up with my Mum who treated me to lunch and we were going to go a big long walk with the dogs but it was so so cold that I was shivering like mad so Mum said we’d just take the dogs up to her house and let them run around the garden while we had a cuppa and warmed up. I ended up staying at Mum’s until 5.30pm when I realised I had 30 minutes to get to the pharmacy to pick up my weekly medication. So it was a bit of a mad rush to get there before they closed but we made it!

It was nice to spend time with my Mum and even though I kinda opened up about the voices, the cutting, and my head struggling a bit, I didn’t want to depress her or worry her so I tried to balance it by telling her I’d passed my first university exam and was starting back on Monday so I would try and use it as a distraction tool again as much as possible. Unfortunately they were just words to stop her from worrying… In reality I’m wondering what the point is to spending a total of 8 years of my life doing this course… I don’t even know if I will still be here in 8 years!

Tomorrow I have to go back to A&E at some point and have my stitches removed but I kinda don’t want to go. Then I have new CPN on Friday (who still hasn’t made any contact with me since A&E left her a message last Thursday) and well… it just all feels pointless… does it really matter if I leave the stitches in another couple of days? Does it really matter if I go and see new CPN this week? Does it really matter if I cut again?

I told support worker yesterday that I’m becoming aware of the fact that I’m “planning” again. I’m thinking up plans and deciding on ways and acquiring the means. I know this isn’t good but I’m feeling very troubled with what I’m hearing and it is distressing me a fair bit. I don’t want to admit this because I’m on the max dose of Quetiapine and every other anti-psychotic I have tried have had horrible side effects. I don’t want Mr Psychiatrist to say the Quetiapine isn’t working and that I need to try something else. I feel like the Quetiapine is really trying to help but there is just something missing, it feels more like I need something else (maybe a new mood stabiliser or something) added into the mix than to have the Quetiapine taken away. I still have two weeks exactly until my next appointment with Mr Psychiatrist and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to move onto the next section of my university course whilst my head is so noisy.

Blah… I’m not sure what to do… My head is just a playground for all these people and their voices… I don’t want to hear them any more… They are slowly starting to break me and quickly turning me into a completely paranoid wreck BUT this time I have recognised all of this in advance… therefore I can make my plans (purely as a safety blanket) just in case I’m unable to outrun/escape/hide from the head crazies.

Sometimes you just need to know you have options and sometimes I just need to remind myself that the off switch is an option which is right there waiting to be pressed.

(For the moment, however, I don’t think I need to press it just yet)

19:12 – The lid finally blew… and resulted in a trip to A&E…

[Warning – talk of self harm in this post]

 

Sorry this might be a bit of a rant and probably a really long post but my head is going crazy and I’m still shaking and crying. Today has been a day from hell and the pressure cooker lid finally blew off. It started off when I got up this morning and there was a letter there for me from the housing association from whom I rent my flat. They sent everyone a letter a couple of weeks ago saying there was evidence of dog fouling in the communal garden area and that they were going through a “process of elimination in order to find out who was responsible”. Out of the 12 flats in my block there are only four dog owners so I threw the letter in the bin and didn’t think any more about it knowing that I wasn’t responsible.

Until I got the letter this morning. The letter says:

Dear MCBL,

After a process of elimination I am led to believe that you are allowing your 2 dogs to foul in the communal areas at [my address]. Please note that dog fouling is an offence and, as a responsible owner, you can be prosecuted. The Dog Fouling Act makes it an offence for a person in charge of a dog who fails to immediately remove the faeces the dog makes guilty of an offence under the Act. The offence carries a fixed penalty fine of £40 rising to £500.

Yours sincerely,

Nasty Housing Association Woman.

 

I sat there reading it and burst into tears. Why the fuck am I being blamed for it? And it’s most definitely aimed at me as I’m the only person who has 2 dogs. I kept reading those words “process of elimination” and “led to believe you are…” and got so anxious. All I could think was that everyone in all the other flats must have been talking about me. Then I remembered back to a few weeks ago and all I could think about was this little ball thing that had appeared on the ceiling, just next to where the door is that opens into the communal area, I even pointed it out to my Mum and asked her what she thought it was. I said to her that I thought it was a camera spying on who was coming in and out of that door and it made me feel really paranoid every time I had to go past it to put my rubbish out. Mum said that as it was outside an elderly disabled man’s house it was maybe some sort of sensor if he had one of those personal alarm things. She told me I was just being paranoid. So I tried to believe her and then after a few days I noticed it had disappeared again so I just kinda forgot about it.

But when I got the letter today the same question kept going round and round in my mind. What was this “process of elimination” they had used? It couldn’t have been by going round and talking to each resident one by one because they never came to speak to me. And the whole thing feels horribly personal because my dogs are my babies and if anyone says anything bad about them I do get offended (and angry) 😦

So I kept thinking back to that thing on the ceiling and tried typing into google phrases like “ceiling cameras” “ball shaped cameras” etc until I finally found a whole page of what I was looking for. Dome cameras they are apparently called and they look like this:

 

 

You can see the camera inside that one but because it was on the ceiling and the ceilings are around 10 feet high it just looked like a little dark ball thing. So now I am convinced that they secretly filmed everyone coming in and out of the communal area for a while and I do use that door quite a lot because it leads to a little path that is a short cut to the shops. Have they been filming me, spying on me, watching me, talking about me? Have I been the person (with dogs) who has come in and out of that door the most? I don’t know. I took some Diazepam because I was getting myself into a real mess and then composed an email to the person who sent me the letter. This is the email that I sent:

Dear [nasty woman who made me cry]

I’ve just received your letter about dog fouling at [my address]. You say in this letter that after a “process of elimination” you believe that I am responsible for allowing my two little dogs to “foul the communal areas”. I am sitting here in tears with anger as quite simply you are putting the blame onto me for something I haven’t even done.

[A ramble about the other dog owning neighbours who could be responsible but it goes on for about 1000 words then ends with…]

I have lived in this flat for over six years and in that time there have been many letters about dog fouling, people dumping rubbish and furniture and stuff and I can assure you that I am well aware of all of the rules. I am an honest person and if I was responsible I would be emailing you just now to apologise and assure you it wouldn’t happen again. But I am not the person responsible and your letter has now made me incredibly anxious that if future dog fouling is discovered then I am going to be the person blamed. You already know from previous emails (when I was making my application for a housing transfer) that I suffer from severe mental health problems and receiving a letter telling me that I’m responsible for something that I could be prosecuted for, has left me in quite an emotional mess.

I’m sorry this email is so long but I want to know (a) how you reached the decision that I was responsible (b) if there is further dog fouling in the future will I automatically be blamed? and (c) how do I prove to you that I am not the person responsible for this?

Thank you,

MCBL

So now I wait to see if she writes back and tells me they put up a hidden camera and have been watching me. I didn’t mention anything about the possible camera in my email to her because I want to see what reason they come back with to tell me how they reached the decision that I am responsible for this. I don’t think they have done anything wrong by putting a camera up to monitor who was coming in and out of that area, but it didn’t look like a camera and there was no warning notice about CCTV being used, and it was in my opinion a camera that was disguised. Again, they are probably allowed to do this as they own the building, but wouldn’t anyone who suffers from paranoia probably start freaking out a bit if they thought they had been being filmed without knowing?

So basically that was the final straw. I sent the email then kept looking at the letter over and over getting more and more wound up that everyone is talking about me behind my back; about how desperately I wanted to move out of here then became too anxious about it all and decided to redecorate to try and make this feel like some sort of home again and just as things were starting to settle a tiny little bit, here I am feeling terrified to walk out my front door in case I bump into any of my neighbours and I keep thinking what if they have all been told that they are holding me responsible for it…

By the time it got to about 3pm I was just a mess. I kept bursting into tears, cuddling my little dogs and telling them that they were still my babies even if nasty housing woman is saying bad things about them, the paranoid thoughts that they have been filming me and talking about me were spinning round and round and round…and… I just lost it.

Before I knew what I was doing I had a blade in my hand and had carved deep angry cuts into my skin. There was blood everywhere and two of the cuts were very deep and gaping open wide. I knew it had gone too far and I was going to need stitches so I just kept cutting and cutting until I finally dropped the blade, sat back and burst into tears again.

I tied a bandage around the wounds and the reality of what I’d just done began to set in. I knew that if I went up to A&E around 4pm then there would be a good chance they would phone the mental health team and I didn’t want to see any CPN’s or anything. So I waited until almost 5pm when the mental health team close and then went to the hospital. I couldn’t stop shaking as I went into A&E, scared of which nurses/doctors would be on shift yet desperately hoping it would be one of the nurses who knows me and would just treat the wound and let me go.

A man who I haven’t seen before (he turned out to be the doctor on shift) asked me to fill out a form then he took me through to the treatment room with a nurse. I have met the nurse a couple of times before and she has always been really nice and non-judgemental. The doctor was asking me what I’d done to myself to have ended up with cuts on my leg and I completely froze with anxiety. I didn’t know where to look and just wanted to run out of the door. The nurse asked me if I’d self harmed and I nodded and stared at the floor feeling so ashamed of myself. She asked me to lie up on the bed and let her have a look. I couldn’t even look as I exposed inch by inch of flesh with words written all over me with a knife… and then we got to the bandage and out the corner of my eye I watched the doctor’s face change as he saw the two worst wounds. He kept asking me questions and I just couldn’t answer him. He said he was going to phone the mental health team even though I shook my head and said no when he asked if that would be OK. But he came back five minutes later to say nobody was answering the phone at the mental health team so they left a voicemail or something instead.

He started cleaning me up and the nurse went out the room. He said he wanted to have a little chat with me whilst he stitched me up. This consisted of him asking a lot of questions and me staring at the floor and not answering. I only opened my mouth when I heard the “assessment questions” starting – “do you feel better now you’ve cut? Are you going to do it again? Do we need to keep you here to keep an eye on you? Are you feeling like you want to end your life?” etc etc etc… I shook my head and said no, I wouldn’t do it again tonight. The nurse came back and gave me 2 mg Lorazepam to calm me down a bit, even though the doctor kept saying that 2 mg would “knock me out”… Erm… No… They calm the anxiety a lot better than Diazepam but don’t make me sleepy. Anyway he gave me an appointment card to go back up to A&E on Saturday for a wound check and dressing change and then the stitches will come out in 7-10 days. He wished me good luck and reminded me I could go up there and see them if I began to feel like hurting myself again. I tried my hardest to force a little smile and say thank you.

From there it was just me and the nurse. She put some glue and steri-strips on the cuts that weren’t bad enough to need stitched and she talked and talked and talked. Maybe the doctor asked her to because I wouldn’t speak to him or maybe she was just trying to be nice. I don’t know. But I sat there in silence and she kept asking me how I was feeling, what I was going to do when I got home, was there anyone I could go and spend some time with, was there anything they could do for me and after me not replying to any of that she gave me a kinda sympathetic smile and said that she knew that I wasn’t OK and asked me if I’d like to just sit and have a chat to her. I said thank you but I’d be fine.

Then when I had all my clothes back on and was about to leave she said “are you 100% sure you don’t want a chat?” and out of nowhere my mouth opened and the words started coming out… the letter… the paranoia… the voices… the dogs and how they are my babies… the pressure cooker… the disappointment people would feel if they found out I’d cut again after all this time of not doing it… this time of year just being really hard as the weeks lead up to my little man’s anniversary…

It all poured out but quietly and with very little eye contact. Standing staring at my feet and just rambling on to her. It was only for a few minutes but then I started thinking “what the fuck am I doing?! don’t tell her about all the head crazies… just get out of here!” and so I went from rambling quietly to leaving the hospital in a bit of a hurry.

How do I feel now that the lid has finally blown and I’ve given myself another few scars to hate? I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. In one way I feel a little calmer but that could well be the Lorazepam, I still feel extremely paranoid and the head crazies are coming out with all sorts of random quotes but I’m trying really really hard to ignore them and just hope that my head can quieten down enough so that I can get through this evening with no further damage. To be honest I just feel both scared and relieved. Relieved that the lid finally blew and I got the huge urges to self harm out of my system… but scared that I’m now going to start sliding towards the slippery slope again… scared that I’m losing control… scared that I am so adamant that no one will find out about this except from my GP and CPN…

Sorry, this was one very long ramble, guess I had a lot to get off my chest. It’s now almost 7 pm and I’m going to try and just watch TV or something for a couple of hours then take my medication early and then lie down in a dark room until I finally sleep.

I hope tomorrow will be a better day but I will no doubt receive an email back from the housing association woman and regardless of what it says I know seeing the words of why she believes I am responsible are sure to upset me again.

I don’t know what else to say…

[/end of rant]

 

13:42 – Off to a&e shortly

I’m off to a&e shortly to get my stitches taken out. I don’t know if they will definitely take them out as the little bit of the wound that I looked at still didn’t look as though it was very healed, so maybe they will say to leave them in for another few days.

I was bad last night and cut again. Very shallow though. The stupid thing is that I did it on the same leg where my stitches are but higher up and round a bit so now I’m hoping and praying that the a&e doctor or nurse doesn’t see it, or maybe it will be a different nurse on anyway so they won’t realise it’s a new cut. Actually it isn’t even a cut. I wrote I have the devil inside me with a blade.

Did it give me the release I needed? For a little while yes and I managed to get some sleep after it. I think it was around 2am that I did it. The night time is so bad for the crazies. I still have a couple of Nitrazepam left but am hanging onto them until I really really need them because GP said she would only give me them very short term as I’m already on Diazepam and that’s the second time she has given me them and I’m not sure that there will be a third. So yeah, I am hanging onto my last two tablets until or in case I hit utter desperation with my sleep. I’m going to ask either Mr Psychiatrist tomorrow or GP on Friday if I can take something like Melatonin in combination with my meds because my sleeping is ridiculous at the moment. It is so broken and I don’t know how much longer I can survive on 2-4 hours a night – and those 2-4 hours are all broken up. I did get six hours I think it was on Saturday night but I really need a good eight hours every night of unbroken sleep to help keep my mood stable.

I’ve had the guys in all day doing the shower again, they actually appeared at 8am on the dot this morning. But they have been coming and going all day and I said would it still all be finished tomorrow and the guy said he doubts it, it will probably be Thursday until it’s completely finished.

I also made contact with Advocacy this morning. CPN had suggested I get in touch with them to help add more weight to my housing transfer application and as she is leaving soon I thought I’d give them a phone today and see if it’s something they can help me with. The woman was very helpful and it turned out she works within the same team as the advocacy woman I worked with whilst I was sectioned to help get me out of the psych hospital. So she said that she could get me set up with a volunteer, go through the letters that have already been sent to the housing association, and then see what they could write that hasn’t already been said or that needs saying again. So the plan is that when I see CPN tomorrow afternoon I’ve to ask her if she wants to come to the initial meeting and bring the letters that she has sent or whether she just wants me to get a copy of them and go myself, then I’ve to phone the woman back tomorrow after I get home and let her know what date suits best.

I was supposed to go to the sexual health clinic this morning to pick up my results from the tests I had following the assault but I completely forgot. I didn’t have an appointment anyway it was just the drop in bit I was going to go to, unfortunately they are only open on a Tuesday morning so I will need to wait til next week now.

I’m kind of debating in my head whether or not to go to a&e today. I just can’t be bothered with them asking questions if it’s the doctor who is usually on during the week (the one that put the stitches in) he will start asking me a load of questions about why I cut again even though it’s barely more than a scratch. But also the urges to do it badly are so strong and I don’t want to admit that if I’m asked. At the same time I don’t want to have to go back tomorrow because I lose the plot tonight/during the night… I can’t when I have both Mr Psychiatrist and CPN tomorrow and now all my notes of attending a&e are being sent to CPN and then on Friday GP would see I had done it again and I don’t know how any of them would react to it if it was another bad one.

I keep getting flashbacks where I’m a little child and being abused, it’s making me want to self harm ‘down there’. I did that once before but not badly enough to need medical attention and anyway I would have been too embarrassed/ashamed to have shown it to anyone. But I keep getting these thoughts to do it in that area and do it badly enough that it will all be permanently scarred and disfigured and no guy will ever want to touch it or go near it again.

It’s now 2.10pm and my card for a&e says to go in at 2.30pm I really really don’t want to go. I need to take the dogs a walk anyway and I need to go and buy a pack of cigarettes so I need to go out the house… But I need to go to the hospital twice tomorrow for my two appointments and I could just go to get my stitches seen to then when I’m already up there.

Ah I will go and take the dogs out and see if I can face going along to the hospital once I’m outside. I’ll probably post back later…

Ok I just took some diazepam… it’s now 2.25pm so by the time I have walked the dogs and been to the shop I should hopefully not be feeling so anxious and can just go to a&e and get the stitches dealt with…