Monthly Archives: July 2010

Freaky Friday

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Please be aware this post contains some pictures that some readers may find disturbing, or just down right gross.

I had to go to the emergency room yesterday.  Nothing major or life threatening, just something that really needed a doctor to take a look at it.  I had this very large bump, about three inches in diameter.  It was extremely painful and was looking worse and worse as time went on.  I figured it was a skin staph infection, the kind that are fairly easy to treat.  I did know that it would have to be drained and that would involve a scalpel. Draining it also would relieve the pain I was experiencing.

This is what it looked like before I went to the emergency room.  It is not the best picture I ever took, but it will give you an idea about how it looked.

Unfortunately, when the doctor sliced it open to allow it to drain, barely anything came out. She said that meant that the infection was still hard, I believe she called it a core, or a pus core. Since it could not be drained, it meant no relief from the pain. The doctor decided to give me an antibiotic to clear it up, and also some pain medication. I was also told that, even though the cultures had not come back yet, it appears to be MRSA. If the cultures say something different when they come back, then I was told the hospital would call me and let me know if I needed a different type of antibiotic.

In the 24 hours since the attempt at draining and the beginning of the course of antibiotics, I think it is starting to look better. The swelling has gone down some, and it is draining a little bit. Draining is good, it means the infection is getting out. However, it is still incredibly painful. Here is what it is looking like now. Again the picture is not that great, but it sort of gives you an idea.

I scared the emergency room people. When I got there my blood pressure was 175/125. I am sure it was because of the pain and the fact that I was freaking out a bit about the procedure I knew was going to happen. The Doctor insisted I take something for my my blood pressure. About thirty minutes after I took it, my blood pressure came down to acceptable ranges.

Fortunately, the doctor knew without me saying anything, that I was in a great deal of pain. Before I left, she had the nurse give me something for pain.

After I left the Emergency Room, and got my prescriptions filled, we headed down to Augusta to visit my parents. Farrol is helping dad complete a wooden fence so it is easier to keep up with my parent’s dogs.

I am hoping that by tomorrow, the infection looks even better than it does today and the pain is greatly reduced. I have pain medicine but it makes me very sleepy. I do not know how it is for anyone, things like pain medication that make me so sleepy, affect my mood as well. It sort of makes me feel down in the dumps or close to it. Does anyone else experience that with pain medication?

I Hate Restless Leg Syndrome

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Restless leg syndrome (RLS) is a neurological condition that causes someone to have an irresistible urge to move their legs (In some cases their arms as well).  Despite the fact that some people, including doctors, do not acknowledge it as a real condition, it is.

In my family we have what is called Primary RLS.  Basically that means the people in my family have RLS that is not caused by an injury or a medication.  The people in my family that we know for sure have it or had it are my great-grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my brother, possibly my son, myself, and my daughter has started exhibiting some symptoms.

Some symptoms of RLS are:

  • A strong urge (for me it is a horrible and irresistible urge) to move your legs (for some people it can include their arms).  The need to move your legs is often accompanied by extremely uncomfortable sensations, like feeling as if there are bugs crawling around in your legs, feeling as if you are being stuck with pins and needles (much different than having your foot fall asleep feeling),  pulling, tugging or and/or gnawing.
  • The symptoms are usually worse at night or when you are resting.  Some people find that they have symptoms when they are required to sit for long periods, like in a car. Symptoms are usually worse the more sleepy you are.
  • Your RLS symptoms get better with movement.  Either they go away for a short period of time or they are reduced. The relief usually begins shortly after your legs (or arms) become active, and will usually last the duration of the activity.

RLS can make it so you have an extremely difficult time falling asleep and/or staying asleep.  Lack of sleep is one of the chief complaints by people with this disorder. The lack of sleep caused by this disorder can have a huge negative impact on your physical and mental health.

When my RLS symptoms are out of control, it really affects my mental health, as well as my sleep and how I feel physically.  Just the symptoms alone are enough to affect my mental health because they feel so bad.  In fact, the final thing that pushed me into the act of suicide was the thought that since my husband and I had lost our health insurance I would not be able to obtain the medication I need to keep my symptoms controlled.

To me, the misunderstanding about how badly RLS can affect someone can be equated to the misunderstanding about people with mental health issues.  It is a horrible disorder than eats away at your life.  For me and my family, it is nothing like it is portrayed in the TV commercials where it is only slightly annoying.  My mother has probably not had a good night’s sleep in years because her symptoms are so bad. Her medications for it do not alleviate all of her symptoms.  I am caught in a catch 22 type of situation.  The medications I need to treat my depression make the symptoms worse, which means I have had to increase my dose of RLS medication twice in the last year.  My brother sometimes gets symptoms in his arms as well as his usual ones in his legs.

People who have Primary RLS cannot look forward to a time when their symptoms might go away, like people whose RLS is solely caused by a medication or injury can.  Instead, our symptoms almost always get worse as we get older.  Because so few doctors really understand how insidious this illness can be, they are often at a loss on how to treat us.  Often for us to get any relief from our symptoms, we have to take a higher dose of the RLS medications than is normally given out, and this tends to make most doctors a little wary about prescribing those higher doses.

I hate RLS with a passion.  I hate how it makes my arms and legs feel.  I hate how it takes away my sleep.  I hate how I see it affecting my mother.  I hate the fact that my children most likely have it.  I hate how it turns the simple act of taking a nap into a huge deal.  I hate that it often keeps me and my husband from sleeping in the same bed.

Absent This Week

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I  just wanted to let everyone know that the reason I have been absent this week is that I have not been feeling very well.  For most of the week I have not slept well, and last night not at all.  Anyone who has a sleep disorder can understand how so much lack of sleep can make you feel very rotten.  Obviously, today was the worst.  I am hoping to get back on top of things in a day or two.

Thankful Five

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Now is the time when I share with you a few of the things I am thankful for.  I hope you are also taking the time, to think about what you are thankful for.  I have found this a wonderful way to keep myself grounded and also to keep my mind focused on the positive.  Many thanks to Chere Michelle for inspiring me to do this.

  1. I am thankful for the air conditioning that is keeping me cool during this extremely hot summer.
  2. I am thankful for the idea to make gazpacho over the weekend.  It was so good.
  3. I am thankful for new internet friends.
  4. I am so thankful for the good sleep I got last night.  First time in weeks my legs have not bothered me.
  5. I am thankful for my local Walgreens, they figured out how to knock $150 off of the price of my leg medication.

What are you thankful for this week?

No Longer Old Before My Time

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My fortieth birthday, way back in February, passed uneventfully.  I was in the hospital for an asthma attack at the time.  There was a quiet celebration, my mother brought some things to decorate my room, and the hospital kitchen made me a special little cake.  All and all, I thought it was nice, even with being in the hospital.

I did not feel any older, unlike past birthdays.  I was thankful for making it to forty.  That time last year, I had been planning my suicide and had not anticipated even being alive by the time I was forty.  This was probably the first birthday that passed where I did not think about how old I was.

Since I am not focusing so much on my age anymore, I really seem to notice it when someone my age talks/posts about how old they are, or how old they feel.  I started thinking about how many of us make little jokes, that have some truth thrown in, about our age.  That is when something became apparent to me.  At the ripe old age of forty, I feel younger than I did at twenty-five.

How is this possible?  I believe I know the answer. Living most of my life filled with constant anxiety and worry, always expecting the worst to happen wore me out, all the way down to my soul. It made me feel much older than I really was. As each depressive episode came, the feeling that I was incredibly old grew.  The last depressive episode, the one that lasted the longest and almost cost me my life was the worst.  I was an old person trapped in a young person’s body. My body began to rapidly catch up with the old person living inside of me.

As my anxiety, worry and depression have begun to dissipate, I have felt less burdened, less worn out, and not nearly as old as I once did.  My soul is no longer weary.

Life with a mental illness can hard, tiring and cruel.  It makes me wonder how many people with a mental health issue have felt or feel like I used to.  Old before their time.

How Well Do You Accept Criticism?

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I was reading a blog post  by William Cody Bateman, titled How To Take Criticism.  I really like what he had to say in his post and it inspired me to do a little thinking about criticism and our reactions to it.

Back in the dark days, when my internal dialogue was filled with nothing nice about myself, when someone approached me with constructive criticism, I did not react well.  What I usually did was take what was said out of concern, and warp it in such a way that it turned out to be very negative.  I would add it to my internal dialogue as another way to torture myself. I would also become very resentful of the person who had said anything to me.

One thing I have learned in the last fourteen months, is that for me, depression recovery is full of constructive criticism.  From my counselor, my husband, my mother, and so on.  When they take the time to share constructive criticism with me, it is done out of concern for me, knowing that I want to be as healthy as possible.

Now that my mind set is a more positive one, I find that I can handle that type of criticism much better than before.  I can usually take what has been shared with me, think about it, and decide if it is something I believe would be helpful to change about myself.  Most of the time, I can do all of that without using the criticism to beat myself up.  There are times though, maybe when I am hormonal, or having a not great mental health day that such constructive criticism hits me like a slap in the face.  When that happens I fall back into the old pattern of behavior and end up feeling very upset and angry.

Because of the occasional back slide into old behaviors, I believe that I still have a great deal of work to do on how I accept constructive criticism.  I need to remember that when my counselor or a loved one approaches me with a desire to help me, they are doing it out of concern for my well being.  They are not doing it to give me something to beat myself up about.

How well do you accept constructive criticism?  Do you use it as a tool to help yourself grow in a positive direction?  Do you use it as a tool to beat yourself up with?

7 Link Post

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I read a really fun post and challenge over at Blogging For dot INFO.  The author,Thu Nguyen, posts about how she accepted The 7 Link Challenge and takes the time to explain what it is.

The basic concept is that you create a post with seven links.  The first link is to your very first post, the second link is the post you enjoyed writing the most, the third link is to a post that had a great discussion, the fourth link is to someone else’s blog post that you wish you had written, the fifth link is to your most helpful post, the sixth link is to a post that has a title that you are proud of, the seventh link is to a post you wish more people had read.

I decided to participate in this challenge so here are my seven links…


  1. My first post: Depression and Anxiety as Seen Through Glasses In my first post I talk about my glass is half empty view point (which I no longer have). I compare my thinking at the time, to how I would like to view things at some point in my future.  I really like it, because after looking at it again, I realized how far I have come since I wrote it.
  2. The post I most enjoyed writing: Super Cool Mom! I enjoyed writing this post so much, because it was about a wonderful day I had with my mother.  Looking back at our relationship, I honestly had not ever thought she and I would enjoy spending that much time alone together.  I do now.  Not only did I enjoy that day with her so much, I love the memory that day created.
  3. A post which had a great discussion: The Anonymous Blogger Although this is a fairly recent post, I really enjoyed the comments/conversation that took place on it.
  4. A post on someone else’s blog I wish I had written: Cravings I wish I had written this post.  It talks about food cravings and I like that it is from the perspective of a diabetic.
  5. My most helpful post: What Not To Say To Someone With Depression I think this was probably my most helpful post or one of the most helpful post I have written.  I am basing that purely on the feed back I got for it.
  6. A post whose title I am proud of: The Great Escape! I love the title to this post.  It totally describes what is going on in the post itself, great escape!
  7. This is a post I wish more people had read: Help with Psychiatric Medications, Part I and Part II I had written these two posts because I know many people struggle to pay for their medications.  I had hoped more people would have taken the time to read them, even if they did not need the advice offered in them.  If they had read it they could have passed the information along to someone else.

What 7 Links would you post for the 7 Link Challenge?  I would love to see what other people come up with.

Creative Depression

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I read a very thought provoking post by Ginger Breo at The Seamstress of Avalon today.  In it she talks about how in her experience that it seems depression and creative people go hand and hand.  While I have absolutely no scientific evidence to prove whether this is factual or not, I have to say that in my experience it does seem that the more creative people tend to have more mental health issues than maybe someone who prefers to deal with facts and figures.

I was certainly not an over achiever in school, I think it would not be a lie to say I was definitely an under achiever.  Not because I was not smart, or did drugs, or drank alcohol.  It was mostly because I preferred to do my own thing.  That means when the class was supposed to be reading out of the History text book, I would be reading a real book about a historical time period I was more interested in.  Or when the class was dissecting a piece of literature from the Literature text book, I would be doing a cross word puzzle, because I had already read the Literature text book from cover to cover when they were first given out.  I lived in my head.  Told myself stories and had conversations with myself.  Looking back, I can see that I was more creative than I gave myself credit for.

As an adult, I have to say my creativity blossomed, but in an easily distracted kind of way.  Cross stitch, fabric applique,  painting on shirts, painting, knitting, crochet, just on and on.  I loved them all, and was quite good at them all.  However, when my depression got bad, I could not even concentrate on even the most basic of these. My imagination never stopped working though. The things that I imagined were definitely not coming from a mind that was even close to being healthy.

Once a proper medication mix was found and my thoughts quit racing, I was able to concentrate again.  However, all those things I used to be so creative in, no longer were of any interest to me.  My creativity blossomed in a completely surprising direction for me.  Writing.

Out of this new found direction, this blog was born.  What I have noticed though is that when my mental health is struggling a bit I am less outwardly creative, spending more time being creative in my head.  The creativity never stops, and when the struggle eases up, I find that I have a whole bunch of ideas and thoughts to write about.  Due to my therapy and medications, when I am struggling with my mental health my thoughts do not go nearly as dark as they used to.  In fact, most of them are more about what might have triggered things and how can I prevent it from happening again or what can I learn from it.  So in a round about way, it is as if my mental health issues feed my creativity.

As my mind becomes more healthy, I am finding more of a balance and it is not always the struggles that set off a bout of creativity in me.  I find that I am more able to use my successes as a creative outlet.

I guess what I am trying to say is that, if I had not gone through such a dark and terrible time in my mind, I would not have discovered that writing could be a creative outlet for me.  I had always believed my creativity lay in my hands and with textile art.  Not once in all the years before I chose to start writing did I believe that writing could be a form of art for me.

What do you think?  Do believe that there could be a link between mental health issues and creativity?  Or do you think that is just way off base?

I Will Live My Life Fully…

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The other day, I realized I did not have a goal for my life. I have goals, but not a goal that defines how I want to live my life. Some people call it a motto, or a personal philosophy. That could explain this feeling that I have been having. There are days, where I feel like I am just floating along with no real purpose. Granted some of the floaty feeling could be from my medications…in general though it is like I have nothing to serve as a reminder to me of the many things I have learned in the last fourteen months. I decided that it was important for me to figure out what my goal (motto) for life is.

Why is it so important for me to have a goal for my life?  I believe that it will help me stay focused on moving forward.  It would also sustain me when my life and/or mental health take a detour. It would be a source of instant encouragement, and a reminder of what I am capable of.  In short, it would give me a sense of purpose.

I did not want to use someone else’s catchy phrase or quote, but I found it difficult to put what I wanted as a motto for my life into a concise format.  I wanted my motto to represent my new found love of life, and my new ability to take care of myself and use my voice.  I also wanted something that just represented me. I spent two days looking at other people’s mottos, and quotes by the famous, infamous, and the anonymous.  I must have written at least twenty different possible mottos for myself, but none of them connected with me.

I had gotten to a point where I thought I was not going to be successful at developing my own motto and would have to use someone else’s.  In a last ditch effort, I wrote down several mottos I saw on other websites.  They were ones that seemed to be close to what I was trying to create with my own.  Finally, I took a little idea from each one, until I came up with my motto.  The end result was a motto that represents everything I want it to, and inspires me as well.

I will live my life fully, and experience everything. I will take care of myself. I will have fun, be crazy and be weird.

I will live my life fully, and experience everything, means I will not let my fears and anxieties get in the way living my life.   I will take care of myself, means that I will keep doing the things I need to in order to achieve and maintain good mental health, I will do the same for my physical health.  I will make sure that I use my voice and set and keep appropriate boundaries.  I will have fun, be crazy and be weird, means that I will enjoy my life.

Do you have a motto for your life?  What is it?  If you do not have one, have you ever thought about creating one?

Good Samaritan Health and Wellness Center

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Good Samaritan Health and Wellness Center (Good Sams) is where I go for my medical care.  I have been using their services for a little over a year now.  It has probably been the best health care I have ever received and I have not had to pay for it.  Not only have they provided me with the vital health care I needed, they have also given me free medications, and arranged for the pharmaceutical companies to send me several of my medications for free.

I believe the all volunteer staff really enjoy what they are doing.  They are always cheerful, and treat each and every person who comes there for medical care with respect.  It is these volunteers, including the doctor I see there that I give partial credit to for saving my life. One of my sources of anxiety was not being able to obtain the medicine I needed to take on a daily basis.  They made sure I had every medication I needed.  My doctor there is just wonderful.  When he found out about my suicide attempt, he made me shake his hand and promise to not do that again.  It was his way of supporting me and showing me he cared.

I used to think that there were not many people in the world who truly cared about others.  The volunteers at Good Sams changed my thinking and showed me that there are many very caring people in the world.

The video below shows some of highlights of my visit to Good Sams yesterday.