#after being in one that drugged me up on Ativan and took me off my heart meds to the point where I didn’t remember it

[jellypawss]

I’m going to be very transparent for a sec. I’ve had two alcohol induced psychosis events happen to me in the past week where I attempted to harm myself and ended up talking to police officers. I’m a recovering alcoholic that tries really really hard but keeps relapsing. I’ve tried AA and therapy and nothing is helping because they keep telling me to look for “my higher power” and I’m not gonna lie, in my opinion, that shit is wack. I’m struggling a lot and faith is the last thing on my mind. Anyways, I wanted to make this post to thank y’all for being one of the main sources of happiness and support for me. I don’t get a lot of people outside of this community that reach out to me when im hurting so im very grateful to have y’all in my silly little phone. I promise I will be back to making mods and what not soon but I’ve been really enjoying making music, it feels almost therapeutic. But yeah, thanks for being here for me y’all. I love you guys.

[whump-tr0pes]

Feel free not to answer this since it’s not writing related but I just thought I would ask. I think at some point you said you are a paramedic. I was just wondering what your favorite part of your job is? And if you had any advice for someone looking at EMS as a career. I hope you are well and I really love your writing!

Hello!

Yup, I’m a paramedic by day. Or at least I play one on TV. Tw for discussion of PTSD, alcoholism, general bad people, death

holy fuck this got long

I’d say my favorite part of the job is when I get to make deep emotional connections with people and make them feel safe during a crisis. Granted, most of my job is not that. Most of my job is the same as any first responder: handling people who cannot handle their own shit. It’s glorified babysitting with needles. It’s exhausting.

One of my favorite memories (that never fails to make me tear up) was maybe a year and a half ago. We got called to an auto parts store for difficulty breathing. When I got there, there was an employee outside having a full-blown panic attack, with all the people already on scene crowding him and making it worse. When I got to him, I tried to figure out what was going on, but at that point he was completely nonverbal. So I leaned in and asked him if he was nonverbal because of a panic attack. He nodded. I said I wanted to give him something to break it. Not to knock him out, just a little bump of ativan to help break the attack. He nodded and I gave him the shot and got him into the ambulance. The ativan took about 5 mins to take effect but once it did, the attack broke, and he was able to talk to me. 

He told me he was a firefighter in Albuquerque. (For those who don’t know, Albuquerque is one of the few places in the country where people shoot at the fire trucks, not just the ambulances and police cars. It’s a rough place to be a first responder and honestly you could not pay me enough, and they probably wouldn’t try to pay me enough anyway.) I asked him if he had PTSD, and he did, from, ya know, the being shot at and stuff. And just the usual first responder stuff that I won’t go into here. He said he didn’t know what set him off, but that he was really embarrassed and sorry it happened. I passed him off to the nurse at the hospital and made very fucking sure she understood what he was going through. He shook my hand and told me he thought I was his angel that day, because I made him feel safe and cared for. Then I went to the ambulance and bawled like a kid. 

If you’re looking to go into EMS as a career, prepare for it to not fulfill you. I’m serious. Find something else that makes you happy, too. I was depressed for *checks watch* oh, say about four years because my made my life EMS. I worked hospital transfers. I went to school. I volunteered 911 in Commerce City, the glorified slum just north of Denver. I went to medic school. I picked up overtime. I joined their Spec Ops and Rescue Team. The only people I saw were my partner, and my coworkers. 

It’s no life. It’s a job. Yes, there are parts of it that are unlike anything else, so much so that I have no idea what I’m going to do when my body gives out and I can’t be on the street anymore. There’s nothing in the world like it. But those moments only happen maybe a few times a month, and I’m in one hell of a dry spell. 

In between those moments are the drunk assholes who are out of jail after their fifth assault on a woman, who want a ride to the hospital so they don’t have to wipe their own ass. There are the people who literally just don’t feel like making an appointment with their doctor for the sniffles. There are the old ladies who fell and just need a hand up. There are the parents who call because their kid fell off the couch and landed on their feet, but they just need the kid “checked out” because they’re a first time parent and don’t know any better. There are the accidents where people fake neck pain for an insurance payout. There are the people who are lonely because their spouse of 60 years just died and they’d rather go to the hospital with you than spend one more night in an empty bed. There are dead people who shouldn’t have died, of every age. There are people who call you for help, but try to punch you in the face for not giving them dilaudid. There are months where no matter what you do, your patients just keep dying and you have to wonder if you’ll ever get better at telling people their loved ones are gone. Then there are the people who call right after that to bitch about their sore toe that’s been hurting for a week.

(Yes, I’ve had every single one of these calls. Most of them way more than once.)

Find something else that fuels you. Otherwise you’ll depend on that validation from your job. And when it doesn’t come, you’ll resent it. You’ll burn out. 

But in the actual job, learn as much as you can. Be curious. Look up medications. Ask people about their scars. If something doesn’t feel right, investigate, or else you’ll have one pissed-off nurse asking you why the hell you didn’t think to ask why the patient woke up with narcan when you swear they haven’t done drugs. Be humble. 

Remember, it’s not your emergency. 

Don’t be scared of it. It’s a job. I can tell you with confidence that I was a shit EMT with shit training in a shit system when I first started out. I became a pretty decent medic. Find people who are successful and compassionate, and study them. Take the pearls of wisdom that suit you. Forget the rest. Learn your protocols. 

Don’t fucking trust your leadership until you’ve watched them take a risk for you. EMS leadership is notoriously, hilariously ineffective and they will stab you in the back with a smile on their face while you’re getting paid $13/hr. 

Thank you so much for asking this. I’m feeling good about my job for the first time in literal years and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to share it. And bless you for not asking me what the worst thing I’ve ever seen is. It makes me want to throttle someone.

[jenna-jayde-the-renagade]

So my life has gone to shit.. I dont trust anybody anymore, and honest to god I cant help but keep thinking of ways to end it. My mom keeps telling me how to feel about this whole thing, that I should be grateful that i got in finally to see a specialist. Reality is I dont even trust those subhuman animals anymore, and frankly they're gonna have to earn my trust. After 4 fucking years, my life, my future being ruined. My mental health going downhill, all for the second time now. Add on to that, I dont get any meds for the pain so this has pushed me into addiction now for a second time. I've been dehumanized and humiliated, treated with nothing but the utmost disrespect while being stigmatized for being mentally ill, transgender and a recovering addict for most of it. They ignored me for 4 years, my body is damaged, and frankly help just might have came too little too late. I wont just suffer through the next one, the next time this happens I'm gonna end my life, my suffering on my own god damn terms. Atleast I still have control over that..

Fuck the canadian healthcare system. Some days I honestly just want to start selling drugs, and fly to a country where I can just pay to play and get the best care in the god damn world. Cause 4 years now I've been telling them to refer me to a specialist, I've been telling them that it's probably crohns or some other GI issue. They need to do a colonoscopy and a scope to find it, so that's what I would ask for. I would never get it, so i more or less gave up on the healthcare system. They would leave me on the floor thrashing in pain for hours. Treating me like a drug addict in withdrawal when I didnt even have any opioids in my system. I would be lucky if I got an IV for fluids, and even more lucky if they pumped me full of a bunch of over the counter drugs and others that didnt work like gravol, tauridol, buscopan, zofran, and haliperidol. I would tell them each time, that this was the hundredth time they tried gravol, and it doesnt help people when they're screaming in pain. They treat the nausea. Its bullshit because I am in so much pain that its making me nauseous and until they get rid of the pain, the vomiting is just gonna continue. They always treat me like I'm full of shit, and when I turn out to be right and continue puking, thrashing and screaming in pain, they just get angry at the fact they were wrong. Our doctors and nurses are a bunch of sociopathic, apathetic adult children who in my experience take pleasure in watching you suffer. The worse I get the more they smile. They are so stupid, blind almost because if their stupid fucking machine says I'm ok then I guess it's all in my head. They only think that theres nothing wrong with me because theyve only ever done a blood test or an xray. Never ever once have they done a single test that would have found the issue, crohns cant be found just on a blood test. The emergency room doctors think it can be, my family doctor and everybody else I've talked to says otherwise.

On January 1st I was having another flare up, and they shoved me in the psych observation room because they genuinely didnt want to deal with me. They ignore me, and I keep going in because I want help. I dont want to end up relapsing again cause I cant take the god damn pain! But nope, I get treated like a crazy person now.. they did it against my will. And they even tried to take my phone and my keys. I was puking constantly, I needed water to keep hydrated and they left me for 4 hours, locked in, no meds, no help or nothing. So I just cracked.. I had nothing to barf in, to wipe my nose with, or to wipe the cold sweat off me. So I puked in every corner of that room, I puked beside the bed especially because a mop wouldnt fit in there. I pissed in the corner, I would hack up some phlegm and spit it all over the floors and walls, I blew snot rockets on every surface too! After a while some nurse came in and gave me a barf bag. I threw it on the floor and just continued to puke over every hard surface in the place. I was puking every 5 seconds I swear, and the doctor finally came in at 3 hours and 15 minutes. At 3.5 hrs they give me two pills. I straight up tell them there is no point in even taking them. I couldnt even keep water down and these people are stupid enough to make me take pills? Come on. You need to hold it in for atleast an hour to see even the most minimal affects. I was puking every 5 seconds, to the point that I puked before I took the pills, and I puked them out the moment after I swallowed. They had given me a fucking gravol tab, and some Ativan, the latter of which I couldnt even hold under my tongue long enough. I barfed it onto the floor when it was half dissolved. They come back with this clear liquid shit in a shot glass. I swallowed it right after I puked. The liquid burned my insides, and i puked that shit out even quicker. I asked them to give me IV medications for that exact reason, I always ask for IV medications cause its literally a waste of your time and mine to just pump me full of pills when I can't keep them down and they hurt my tummy as they dissolve. They tell me to just "breathe deeply and relax" and to "just try jayden, you gotta try", so then I try, and when they end up being wrong, and I can't take shit. They end up saying that I'm manipulating, that I'm drug seeking or I'm not trying hard enough to make it work. Absolute bullshit, over the course of 4 years I have quite literally told them what to do. I have multiple family members with this disease, and my grandmother was ignored like this too. She told me to ask them for a colonoscopy and a scope, and to ask them to treat the pain, not the nausea cause the pain literally causes the nausea. The sooner the pain is gone the sooner I can be normal and tell them what's going on. Instead I'm left to suffer in the worst pain a human being can feel. I get treated like shit and told it's all in my head. I gave up on getting a diagnosis in year two. I just want to shoot dope whenever the pain comes. Dope atleast takes it away, after all they would be giving me some of the strongest shit they have at the hospital if I was some boomer with a sprained ankle. It would take the pain away. Thats for sure. Being a mentally ill, drug using, autistic tranny they just see that. I get nothing. No help, no answers, not even some relief when my screaming can be heard far and wide.

I want to die right now, and I keep trying to think of a painless way to do it.. buying $400 worth of street fentanyl and slipping into a nice, peaceful opioid coma seems like a wonderful idea right now.. that would end the fucking suffering atleast..

I wont be wearing a colostomy bag. Colostomy bags arent sexy, they are fucking disgusting and you cant just be body positive when you have a fucking bag full of your own shit hanging off you, and your only way of having penetrative sex sewed up permanently and taken away from me. Not like I could even be a decent fuck for anybody at this point anyways. Its painful to shit, let alone anything else. I dont want to give up food either. I love food, food is literally my life and the only way I have to bond with certain people! Like my family for example. Nothing makes me just want to slip.into that coma more then the worry of the future.

Will I be sitting at a family gathering eating bland gluten free, dairy free, all organic 100% vegan fair trade horse shit on a plate while my family actually gets to enjoy the food I used to be able to eat? Moms spaghetti, grandmas meat pies, the baked goods, fresh tomatoes out of my garden and others. A good fucking steak even? Cause honestly a birthday isnt a birthday if I dont have my birthday meal.

I know for a fact my body is damaged from 4 years of suffering. I used to bounce back, now it takes the wind out of my sails for a month.

Needless to say, I just want to fucking die more then anything else. Positivity and anything I love is gone, and all that I have left is knowing that Alberta health services, coast mountain health services, providence health services, and interior health services have all fucked me in the biggest way humanely possible. So thankful for free fucking healthcare!!

You get what you bloody well pay for!!

[darkminddeadsoul]

I have completely forgotten about this and my motivation to do anything creative, be it investing time to blog, painting, playing drums, has disappeared these first few months of 2021. I’ve been doing a lot of introspection, strengthening bonds with my friends, breaking down walls I had up for so long and learning to be vulnerable and worthy of love (still working on this one) which leads to my first update of 2021. Buckle up kids!

TW: SA, Death, SH, drugs

I started 2021 with a self harm relapse episode, and lots of crying that I think was lacking in 2020. I have been in therapy trying to work out my diagnoses, my prognosis along with *deep breath* dealing with my r*pe that happened in November of 2019. For the longest time, I couldn’t even talk about it, I only told my best friends months later. To this day I’m still dealing with it and kind of stuck in the “should’ve, could’ve, would’ve” phase, I still believe I could’ve done something different to change the outcome of that night. Nonetheless, I believe I’m in a place now where I can talk about it publicly(not so public, no one knows I have a blog.) I think writing it somewhere in the open will help me, to be able to return to this moment when I hit a depressive episode or am dealing with troubles in my life, it’ll be a moment where my courage came through and I wrote about it sans censorship.

It started out as a regular day, I had just finished work and went to meet up with a friend when we decided to hit up a bar for their trivia nights, fun right? At this point in my life I had just started abusing anti-anxiety medication and slowly going down a spiral I’m all too familiar with. That day I took 7 pills and then decided to go out drinking, I obviously didn’t have much value for my well-being but ironically I did later that night. Trivia night was fun, had a couple of drinks and we were heading back to my friend’s place to crash for the night. I ended up not wanting to stay as I remembered my mom was out of town and I had to watch her pets. It was late, I didn’t want to risk taking public transportation or an Uber in the state I was in (Ativan and vodka not a good mix) for fear that something would happening to me, so what did I do? Like any logical person, called a friend acquaintance to give me a lift home. Some details about this acquaintance, it was someone I had known for 3 years, someone my best friend dated and who never mistreated me in any way I can consider mistreatment, all to say it was someone I knew and could somewhat trust. Again someone I knew.

Anyway, he answered my text and was more than happy to come pick me up, he was genuinely worried something was wrong, oh the irony. Now we’re driving back to my moms and he jokingly tells me that I now own him a drink and then suggested we go have one right now on our way home. Fine, I agreed and that was probably stupid of me but hey! I didn’t care. We got to a bar I’m pretty familiar with and what was supposed to be one drink, ended up being a few more and I ended up grabbing the tab because he forgot his wallet *eyeroll*. It’s 3 am at this point and I work in 4 hours so I said okay time to go home and he asked if he can stay over since he drank too much to drive now and he was too tired, I was hesitant but agreed, seeing as I saw no red flags, and he did come pick me up in the middle of the night. I let take my bed since I’d be awake anyway and probably just watching TV while he slept.

Here I am, a good 30 minutes into my show and he was snoring so it was chill, until I felt him shifting and turning and then placing his hand on thigh, and making a comment that I was wearing boxers under my shorts and it was dumb. I should try to at least take one off, I’d be more comfortable.

Do you know how much it fucking sucks to be able to remember every tiny detail of a very traumatic night??? It sucks big time. I won’t delve into the specific details, it was just very violent, I still ask people to never startle me or grab me by my shoulders/arms from behind. I was hoping it would be over quickly but it felt like eternity. He finally finished and asked if he can go smoke. He left and I was left alone with a body I wanted to abandon and the feeling of I was the most filthiest person. I quickly got dressed and joined him on the balcony to smoke when I told him he had to leave. He tried to make excuses, jokes and even tried to forcefully get back into my house, I told him once more if he didn’t leave he was gonna leave by way of flight over the balcony banister. He proceeded to call me all the names under the sun and finally left when he saw I wasn’t playing around. I had the sense at that point that I needed to get to a pharmacy to take plan B. The experience at the pharmacy was anything but pleasant and the pharmacist was even a little judgemental when I asked for the pill, he told me that I should’ve been careful, while I was crying. Moving on, I ended up crying so much that I puked and I wasn’t sure if I puked up the pill or not. This led me to thinking I was pregnant for a month after that cause I was late (I wasn’t pregnant, test confirmed). Now since then, I’ve told my best friends and seemed therapy but can I say I’ve made any improvements, I don’t think so and I’m hoping writing this will help me make an improvement.

The other reason I chose to be public now, is with all that’s been happening in the world against women. The victim shaming and victim blaming has to stop. We need to stop saying protect your daughter, and instead say teach your sons. We need to stop asking about what they were wearing and if they said no, and how much they drank. We need to stop making excuses for men, oh he was just drunk, he’s her boyfriend. We need to stop making it so fucking difficult to press charges for rape. Please, for our future daughters, we need to stop and just listen for once.

I know this is very different than my regular content about my health but it’s been something I’ve wanted to do so I can try to heal.

Goodnight my babies 💙

[leigh-kelly]

On the Inside

Just sharing a little piece I did for my non-fiction class about my first time in a psychiatric hospital.

It’s probably a bad idea to go three nights without sleeping. It’s probably a worse idea to do so while withdrawing from two SSRIs and an antipsychotic. But anyone who has ever been in college knows that sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures and in my sophomore year of college, I had reached those desperate times. If you do either of the two things about, it’s probably a good idea to at least take a nap before you drive two-hundred-fifty miles, but as is apparent, I wasn’t exactly the queen of good ideas in those days.

I drove. It was four days before Christmas and the holiday lights blurred together outside of my window. I had had enough Starbucks double shots to drink that I wasn’t tired, not even in the slightest. I won’t lie to you and say I remember any more than that. The truth was, I shouldn’t have even been driving. As the drugs left my system, I was shaking, jittering, trying to stay afloat in the real world, even as circumstances tried to bring me somewhere else. It wasn’t until I was in my childhood bed at my parents’ house that I started to cry. There was nothing in particular to cry about, my mom had made my favorite dinner as a homecoming surprise and she kept talking about going to get a Christmas tree. But suddenly, after feeling like I was perfectly fine in the car—you know, minus all of the blurry Christmas lights—I couldn’t function in the slightest. 

The last thing I remember before going up to the bedroom was my mother telling me that I was an idiot for going days without sleep and existing solely on espresso. In hindsight, she was right, but at the time, it made me extremely angry. I was twenty years old, I could make decisions about my body for myself. The last thing I needed was her meddling and trying to control me. 

That’s another thing; control. While the primary reason I stopped taking all of my pills was because it was impossible for me to take them and still stay up for three consecutive nights, the secondary reason was control. From the time I was born, I wanted to be in control of everything. As a child, my grandfather called me Sammy Breakstone—from the cream cheese commercial, “the most demanding girl alive”—and it had only gotten worse as I got older. The problem was, as much as I wanted to control my body and not be reliant on medication to exist, it was the only thing that gave me some sense of control. With all of that lost, I could do nothing but cry.

I cried until everyone else went to sleep. I was thrashing and moaning in my bed and after hours of not knowing what was wrong with me, I finally came to recognize that what I was going through was withdrawal—made worse by lack of sleep. For a brief moment, I thought about waking up my mom, but that good old control thing reared her ugly head and I knew I had to deal with it myself. I didn’t even bother to put a bra on, I just crept down the stairs to my car, almost falling like I’d done so many times when I’d gone downstairs to smoke a cigarette after my family had fallen asleep. I was still crying as I got in the car and the Christmas lights were all still blurry, but somehow, miraculously, I made it to the hospital and found my way to the psychiatric emergency room.

Did you know that when you check into a psychiatric facility, they take away your shoes and your cellphone. I guess they don’t want you to hang yourself with your shoelaces or try to call anyone the moment you regret your decision. And trust me, the moment they took away my things, I regretted it. I screamed for a good twenty-minutes about my shoes, begging them to give me them back. I didn’t care as much about the cell-phone. I’d reached the point in my life where I had very few, if any, friends to turn to and I knew that my mom would have lost her mind if I called her at one-o’clock in the morning to tell her I’d checked myself into a hospital without telling her. But the shoes, the shoes were something that really got to me. 

Have you ever seen Girl, Interrupted? I had, probably a hundred times, and read the book at least half as many as that. During that period of my life, I was obsessed with it. It seventeen, I’d been given the same diagnosis as Susanna Kaysen and I thought that watching her be healed would somehow heal me. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. But that being said, watching the movie almost every night did nothing to prepare me for what it was really like on the inside. It was both loud and quiet at the same time. The sound is almost impossible to explain, but that’s what it was. For a while, I was alone in a big room with a dozen stretchers, just sitting, waiting, waiting, waiting. I thought the loneliness was the worst. I was wrong.

If I thought I was making a racket about the shoes, I wasn’t prepared for the next patient they brought in. He was wailing and shrieking and I curled my legs to my chest, trying to shield myself from his presence. While I was alone in my corner, still crying, hours later, doctors surrounded the screamer and someone pulled out the biggest needle I had ever seen and shot him in the arm. What came next, I wasn’t prepared for, and honestly, I thought it was a myth from the movies, but a nurse came running in with a straight jacket and strapped him down to the stretcher that matched mine. 

You’ve probably never seen anyone strapped down with a strait jacket. I’ll tell you this, it’s exactly what you’d think it would be like. As if I wasn’t already afraid before, I was terrified. I kept thinking about how I’d yelled about the shoes and how maybe I was close to being in the same situation. For a control freak, the thought of having my entire upper body restricted sounded like a total nightmare and even though I couldn’t stop crying, the impeding threat of that straight jacket put me on my best behavior.

As it turns out, being on your best behavior in a psychiatric hospital means you get ignored. Of course, I have no idea how long I was ignored for because without a cellphone and without clocks on the wall, I had absolutely no sense of time. All I can say is that with me and the man in the strait jacket trapped in a room with no windows, it felt like an eternity. At some point, my body started twitching and I knew that the detox I was going through was happening in full force, but still, I was left alone.

However many hours later, the doctor came for me. She took me out of the room and into an office, apparently presuming that I could be around pens and picture frames without threatening to off myself with something. I stared at the doctor, she stared at me. It was my turn to talk, I guess, but how do you open up to a stranger when you feel like the world is spinning out of control? I had absolutely no idea, so I took a second option.

They don’t tell you this in the movies, but the easiest person in the world to lie to is a strange doctor in a psychiatric hospital. It would have been easy enough to tell the truth, tell the kind-eyed doctor that I’d stopped taking my medication because I wanted to be in control of my own body for once in my life, that I didn’t want medication influence every single thing I thought and felt. But I didn’t. Instead, I told her that I had stopped taking my prescriptions because I was studying for finals and the pills made me tired. I told her that I was going to start taking them again, I just needed to come to the hospital because I was having a rough time until I started taking them again.

When you lie, they don’t commit you. After however many hours I was in that room, I knew that I didn’t want to spend days and weeks there. All I wanted to do was feel better, just for a minute, and go home to get a Christmas tree with my family. Even with the doctor in the room, the loneliness was suffocating and I just wanted my life to get back to normal. If it meant I had to take the pills again, if it meant I had to give up some of my own control to get some of the chemical control, I was willing to do it.

After I talked to the doctor, she brought me back into the big room. The man was still strait jacketed to his bed, but he was sleeping. The fear of having to spend the rest of the night there set me into a panic and I started crying again. The doctor didn’t say anything when she let me out, so what if that meant she was working on paperwork to make me stay as long as she wanted. I had no idea of the laws of involuntary commitment in New York State and didn’t even know if they applied to me, since I had brought myself there. What if the called my mom? What if she wouldn’t get me out?

I had worked myself into such a state by the time a nurse came in that it was probably more likely that they would have committed me. Instead, the nurse gave me a shot of Ativan and told me to sit back and relax. Easy for her to say, when she got to go home at the end of her shift. Easy for her to say, when she didn’t have to sit on a bed next to a guy who actually had to be restrained for whatever reason.

Once the shot worked its way into my system, I was calmer than I had been in as long as I could remember. I laid back on the stretcher and closed my eyes. Everything in the room faded away and I fell into a deep sleep. Before I knew it, I was being shaken awake and when I opened my eyes, the doctor was standing above me. I took a deep breath and pushed myself up, sitting at eye level with her. I looked down and noticed the papers in her hand and knew what time it was. I was going home.

Of course, in order to go home, I had to lie again. Looking back now, twelve years from the future, lying the second time was a bad idea. The nurse who did my discharge paperwork asked me if I had someone to drive me home. I figured since I’d already driven for four hours while withdrawing and on no sleep, a twenty minute drive with some Ativan in my system wouldn’t be a big deal. So I took back my shoes—finally, I had my shoes again—and I walked out to my car. The Christmas lights were there again, sparkling outside of the hospital, and in my drug induced calm, I took a deep breath. For the first time in days, I felt like everything was going to be okay. 

I drove home, blinded by the lights on the side of the road and sinking into the deepest calm. If only I could actually feel calm like that, without a shot of a benzodiazepine running through my system, I would be great. But maybe I would never be normal, maybe my life would be punctuated by emergency trips to the psychiatric ward because I kept believing that I didn’t need to take my pills. The fact that this wouldn’t be my only time rushing to the emergency room—or in the case two years later, being rushed by my parents who drove into the city where I was living, pulled me from work and forced me into their car because they believed I was absolutely losing my mind—loomed heavily over me as I drove. I thought of Susanna Kaysen again, the book that shadowed me constantly; “Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.” 

It was five o’clock in the morning when I pulled into my parents’ driveway. It was night four without sleep and I tried to remember how long you were allowed to stay up without totally losing your mind. I guessed that I didn’t have to worry about that much, since I already had, but the Ativan had started to grow heavy in my blood stream, my bones felt like they were carrying the weight of a giant. I clumsily crept back up the stairs to my bedroom and stripped out of the clothes that were tainted by the hospital. I found clean pajamas, left on my dresser by my mom who must have done my laundry—the prodigal first born returns from college, if only she knew I wasn’t such a prodigy but an actual disaster. I crawled into bed and finally, the exhaustion that had creeped into every crevice of my body engulfed me. I fell into a deep, dark, dreamless sleep.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, my mom came in to wake me up. When she left the room, I reached for my purse and listened for the rattle of pills given to me by the hospital. I wanted to fight, I didn’t want to take them, I wanted to be stronger than the need for something to control my psyche. I was a writer, writers needed to feel their feelings in order to express their vision to the world. But then, I thought about the man in the straight jacket, I thought of how I never wanted to go back there, and I swallowed four pills dry. A large part of me felt like I was giving up, but fear won, fear got me in the shower, fear helped me dress and walk back down the stairs.

We were going to get a Christmas tree. It was snowing outside and in any other set of circumstances, it would seem like the perfect day. My mother had her four kids together again. It was Saturday, my father didn’t have to work. We could pretend to be the picture perfect family, even if one of us was still falling apart inside. I went along with it, I got in the back seat of my mother’s SUV and I plastered a smile on my face. I was home, I was supposed to be happy. I had grown so accustomed to playing a part that it wasn’t a challenge for me.

As much as I had always wanted to cut down my own Christmas tree, we never did that. We selected from a bunch of pre-cut evergreens and my sister complained that every single one wasn’t perfect. But what was perfect? I was supposed to be the perfect child, the one my parents pinned their hopes and dreams on, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know then that my mental illness would become so severe that I would have to drop out of school. That I would try dozens of pills to make me better over the next decade before I finally found a combination that worked. All I knew then was that we had to pick out a Christmas tree and that I had to keep my late night visit to the hospital a secret. There was a part I had to play, and I was going to play it for as long as I possibly could. It was probably another one of my bad ideas, to suffer in silence, as you’ve probably guessed, I was never very good at ideas, was I?

[oldladydatin]

Second Chances...

I’m going to share this because well this is a pretty anonymous blog for one so I feel comfortable and two every year at this time it’s something I think a lot about, it’s a part of who I am. I realize this is going to be some hokey shit. If someone shared this story with me I would think it was some hokey shit they made up to justify their beliefs. It doesn’t really matter to me, even if I hallucinated it, it made a huge impact in my life. Eight years ago today I was laying in a hospital bed, all alone, with Sepsis, not responding to antibiotics, and I was worried I was about to die..... 

A lot of things led up to this day. I had been struggling with depression and anxiety since middle school. I mostly self medicated, I’d been on antidepressants, I’d been to therapists, none of that helped. When I met my ex husband I was a drunk, honestly. I drank a fifth of gin in front of him and then we went driving on trails in the woods and I was barely buzzed, he kept asking if I was okay to drive and I was because I drank like that a lot. On top of struggling with depression and anxiety, I was raped when I was 17 by a friend I trusted and I just sort went off the deep end. I took drugs at parties and didn’t even ask what they were, I was okay with dying. I was angry at the whole fucking world. I never talked about being raped, I told my husband about it later in our marriage, but that was it until I was in my 30′s. I was embarrassed more than anything, I worried I brought it on, like how messed up is that? I worried it was somehow my fault that when I said no 12+ times he didn’t understand it, I didn’t want people to see me like that. All my bad behaviors escalated after that, I went from sort of caring to not caring at all. I used to cut myself and hide them with the like three dozen bracelets I wore all the time, that got worse and I didn’t even necessarily try to hide it. I went from partying once a week to whenever I could. I drank more, I did more drugs, I drank and drove all the time. I got in more trouble. I tried to drop out of school, I wasn’t necessarily struggling academically, I was smart, but I barely went because I’d have panic attacks and I had migraines all the time. I just quit caring. I wasn’t sexually active, I sort of hated being touched after that. I started seeing someone and I never had sex with him, I was too messed up and it was hard being intimate. My ex husband and I were intimate because I felt safe with him, I trusted him. However I wasn’t ever very affectionate towards him, I really struggled with that. My family wasn’t very affectionate, so I didn’t grow up with a lot of touching to begin with, it’s something I’ve struggled with as an adult and oddly being a nurse has helped me get past this, I hug patients all the time, and hold their hands. I was very affectionate with the Mark’s and I loved that feeling, they always made me feel safe and I trusted them, I think those things are important to me in a relationship. 

One day I got a speech from someone I really didn’t even realized cared about me, but he cornered me and lectured me at a party and he meant it, like it was heart felt and I listened. So at some point I was trying to fix myself, I wasn’t doing a great job but I was trying. I had just quit smoking and doing drugs when I met my husband, I was very slowly working on myself. By the time I met my husband our friends were getting into meth. I didn’t have a lot of sense but I had enough to know I didn’t want to do meth. We made the decision to move about an hour away from our friends to a town with more work, where I was already in school studying art. We got engaged and moved into together, yes in that order, I’m old fashioned. I struggled with depression more after we moved, I was very clingy and dependent. I struggled with being sober all the time. I was a mess. I tried different medications, I tried therapy, I tried being a workaholic, I tried any and everything. I never talked about being raped in therapy, I just tried pretend it didn’t happen and it wasn’t apart of me. I graduated with my art degree and we decided to start a family. It took years to get pregnant but I got pregnant. I was the worst pregnant woman on the face of the planet. I had hyperemesis gravida, it’s a real thing. I threw up so much I was chronically dehydrated, the people in the emergency room knew me by first name. I continually visited them for dehydration, migraines, UTI’s and for episodes of vomitting that didn’t stop for hours. By the third trimester I had quit school and I just laid on the couch and cried all day, I was so depressed it was unreal. We talked to the OB doctors about it and they started me on antidepressants that were safe during pregnancy. They tried to schedule a c-section because of my anatomy they already knew I wouldn’t be able to have her naturally. I insistent on a natural birth, I went 24 hours in labor after my water broke, no drugs, trying every damn thing I could and still ended up with a c-section. I felt like a disappointment as a woman, c-sections are viewed by some women as the “easy” way out. It was a major abdominal surgery, that took weeks to recover from and the experience emotionally damaging and I was already struggling. 

I had severe post-pardum depression, possibly psychosis, also a thing. I had panic attacks, I had a hard time even grocery shopping because I’d walk in the store and it would almost warp and seem so endless that I thought I wasn’t getting out. I was trying to load a trailer at one point to move things to our storage unit and I started hallucinating that bugs were crawling all over me. I never slept, when I did I had nightmares. Everything people said to me was blown out of proportion. If someone nitpicked the way I was holding her I felt like they were criticizing me as mother. I decided to kill myself. I picked a date, wrote a letter, it wasn’t me thinking about it, I had a very well thought out plan. My husband found out and we went to the ER and I spent 3 weeks in a half way house for psych patients, doing group and seeing doctors, the whole thing. After that it was psychiatrists and more pills and more diagnosis. My ex husband got laid off from his job and decided it would be best to try to live in another state. I was excited to go one an adventure, but for my health it was probably the worst thing we did. I needed what little support I had at home. In other states this just got worse until I was in another hospital, 3 more weeks I had gained almost 100 lbs between the side effects of the medications and stress eating, At times I barely got out of bed. I was actually in the process of trying to get disability because the panic attacks were so bad I was barely able to hold down a part time job. I was so desperate to feel better I even went to a therapist about the rape but talking about it was so overwhelming I only went to three sessions and quit. I was addicted to drugs that I was prescribed. They prescribed me ambien and ativan. I would pop ativan all day. I would get in an argument with my husband and just pop some ativan during the argument. I started out taking 5 mg of ambien and eventually I was taking 30 mg, I’d run out of pills and barter for more at the job I had. I would take them and black out and go do stuff. It was all very scary. 

I got what I thought was the stomach flu, I was throwing up all week. My ex husband brought home a pregnancy test and asked me to take it. At this point this man never touched me. I didn’t even remember having sex with him in the year before that. Partially that was my fault, because we had sex and I was on ambien and ativan and I didn’t remember it and that made him feel like he took advantage of me so he wouldn’t touch me. As it turned out I was pregnant, We had, had sex when we went home for Christmas, I was drunk and on drugs and I didn’t remember it. This pregnancy was worse, it started with detox. I called my psychiatrist multiple times to try to find out what to do about the medications because they weren’t safe to take during pregnancy. They never returned my calls, so I just quit taking them. I was so sick, I couldn’t sleep, I was sweating so much I was repeatedly changing my clothes, when I did sleep I was having nightmares. I was throwing up all the time. It lasted a few weeks. When I had my first OB appointment I was honest with them about this and they told me I was very lucky that I hadn’t miscarried because of withdrawals. I had the hyperemesis crap again. Migraines, anxiety, I struggled to breath because of my weight, UTI’s, I’m just not good at being pregnant. 

We made the decision for me to go home because I was too sick to take care of my daughter and my ex husband worked. My ex again decided we were moving to another state and I was already so stressed out and I just wanted to go home. But my Dad is extremely critical of me, especially about the weight. I had lost about 45 lbs during the pregnancy at that point and when I told him that he said good for you, you’re not supposed to lose a bunch of weight during pregnancy. We met my family half way because I was too sick to sit in a car for 12 hours, so we stayed the night and drove the rest the next day. I wore jeans that were too tight for this trip because I didn’t want my Dad to make fun of me for wearing sweat pants. They dug into my stomach and I was uncomfortable, I was sweating a lot during the trip. Within the next few weeks the area around the button where they dug in the most became red and started to hurt, and hurt a lot. It just kept spreading and swelling and I was too uncomfortable to sleep. It felt really hot so I’d put ice packs on it at night trying to get comfortable. At my first OB appointment there she diagnosed me with cellulitis and started me on antibiotics. It continued to spread. My parents kept down playing it they didn’t really think I was sick or that it was anything serious. My Dad made comments about how I was just fat and needed to get up and move more. They even took me to a mall because I needed to walk around and then they were going to take me to Apple Bees for my birthday, even though I didn’t like Apple Bees, because they had a lower fat menu. I could barely move I was so uncomfortable, I told them I didn’t want to go and after the mall we just went home. The next day I went to the ER with my daughter, I borrowed a car and lied about where I was going. Within 3 minutes they admitted me, they had medical students in and out of my room to see this infection. Within two weeks I had my son 5 weeks early, he was immediately put on bipap and shipped off to the nearest NICU. I didn’t see him for 4 days and then they transferred me to the same hospital because I had gained 70 lbs from swelling and the infection continued to spread. What started out as a nickel sized red area now wrapped around my entire abdomen to my back. They tried not to do a c-section because it was close to the infection by then but I ended up with an emergency c-section anyways and they were afraid of it spreading to the incision, so they transferred me. I continued to not improve at the other hospital. It wasn’t until I was transferred that I ever heard the term sepsis. I freaked out, I didn’t know anything about it but I knew it could kill you. I had sepsis and I was not responding to antibiotics and they would discuss this in the hallway outside my room. I still insisted on getting up to shower everyday but I couldn’t do it by myself. My ex husband would help me shower and I would stand there and cry. I couldn’t wipe when I went to the bathroom. The entire thing was embarrassing. Eventually I was on oxygen and they were discussing survival odds outside my room, I had no idea what any of it meant. 

One night I was awake in my room alone in the dark, I was worrying because it had been like 4 weeks and I was just getting worse. This light came on in my room and I was able to relax. I felt better, even the burning, throbbing feeling in my stomach felt better. I felt like I was being comforted. I don’t know how to explain it but I felt like I could just go in that moment. I felt like all the pain and suffering could be gone if I wanted it to be. I considered it. I considered leaving the world behind for a split second, just letting everything go. Then I started to imagine this whole life, where I was happy, where I was a good mom, where I didn’t hurt and not just the hurt from the infection, but the hurt in my heart that I had been struggling with my whole life. I thought about my daughter and my baby who I was so in love with already. He was let out of the NICU after only 7 days and he was doing great. He would smile and laugh everytime he heard my voice, nobody in the NICU had ever heard a baby that little laugh. We had a really strong bond from day one. I missed my daughter, I missed cuddling with her on the couch and listening to her stories. I felt like I had so much to live for and I wasn’t ready to die. I made a promise that if I lived I was going to live. I wasn’t going to run from life anymore. I was going to make better choices and work towards being happy. I made a promise to change. The light faded and I was alone in my room again. But I felt hopeful, I wasn’t worried I was going to die anymore. Within 2 days with no explanation at all the swelling improved, the infection was going away and I was responding to antibiotics and they didn’t change them. My labs were coming back better. They started me on lasiks and the weight was coming off and I wasn’t on oxygen. Within four days I was going home after a month long nightmare, I was taking my baby home. I just continued to improve. 

I wake up everyday and chose to be happy. I make better choices, I started working on myself. My ex husband hated that, I think he actually liked me being codependent. and suddenly I wasn’t, suddenly I was going out and doing things alone, or with the kids. I was painting and drawing, when we got settled I started taking art classes. The instructor wasn’t sure why I was taking her class and convinced me to help teach painting at this community center. We moved again and we ended up homeless. I had such a good attitude about this I was like well we’ll just camp until we figure it out. My kids and I lived in a tent for an entire summer, and it was fun. My ex worked and they provided him with hotel rooms. The kids and I hiked, swam, rode bikes, made art, we did all kinds of cool things. To this day my kids think we were on vacation. I changed my whole attitude and when we got settled I went back to school for nursing. I wanted to help people the way people helped me. I wanted to make a difference and I am. I still struggle sometimes but I think about that one moment and the promises I made and I shake myself out of it and get moving. I don’t take drugs, I’ve been offered Vicodin, or ativan by doctors but I’d rather struggle. I drink socially maybe once a month and never when I’m struggling. I’ve been struggling the past month and went to three metal shows and only had water. Every year around this time I think about where I was at 8 years ago and I count my blessings. I think about my life and the promises I made that day and take a look back and try to decided if I’m living up to them. If I’m not I try to decide how I can do better the next year. Some of the best things can come out of the worse days, and that’s what happened 8 years ago. 8 years ago today, I got a second chance. 

[ivysdigitalstory]

You and Me and Mental Illness makes three

Depression, Anxiety, and Paranoia. In my mind, every single one of these mental illnesses has to do with trust. Mental Illness is the purgatory between what’s real and what’s not.

The first of these illnesses that I noticed was anxiety. I remember first feeling it in a middle school math class- all of a sudden being unable to breathe, my skin starting to feel numb and running out of the class, my heart beating faster than I’ve ever felt. I didn’t know what it was until a few years later when I finally started going to therapy. Anxiety makes you second guess yourself and you’re convinced you can’t breathe. It almost feels like you’re transported to a plane of existence where everything is coming at full speed towards you and it takes your breath away. Anxiety really crippled me for a while. It is like that relationship where every time you see the other person there’s a rush of energy, but you know that it’s not good. Every time he shows up I’m excited to see him again but then the wave of negative crashes over me, drowning me, stopping me in my tracks. I couldn’t figure out how to calm myself while having an anxiety attack regardless of how many methods and tricks people suggested. Once I was 18 I got Ativan.

I have the worst love/hate relationship with Ativan. I feel blessed to have found it because it has two perks.

It slows my heart rate when I’m having an anxiety attack and calms me down very quickly.

I so desperately don’t want to take Ativan that the threat of having to take it stops my anxiety attack, I hate the side effects so much that my anxiety is forced to go away because, I’m going to need to take that pill and suffer the consequences.

Ativan has really helped me. For the longest time people would tell me to take deep breaths, and count in my head, or remind myself where I am and name things around me. All of these are great tips for anxiety but they just didn’t work for me. Ativan is a blessing and a threat which is perfect for my anxiety because either I calm down or…. He takes me out on a ride, he asks me if I want to get coffee, if I want to just sit in silence with him while I calm down.

Time to talk about the side effects of Ativan. They SUCK. So Ativan is a drug that medically slows down your heart rate when you’re having an anxiety attack, stopping the anxiety attack in its tracks. HOWEVER- Ativan stays in your blood for almost 2 days. It slows down your heart rate but also the world around you. It almost makes it feel like you’re drunk. You start slurring your words and your eyelids are heavy. Your hands are half numb and really heavy all of the sudden. You can’t walk straight, you stumble around. Often after taking an Ativan, I fall asleep- which is almost worse because then you wake up slurring your words and stumbling around and DROOLING. Yes, drooling. It’s honestly like losing control of your body. However, when I’m having an anxiety attack it’s usually not on the weekend when I can just do nothing for two days. It’s like the middle of a workday. I’m in the middle of doing something, so drooling isn’t ideal. But Ativan also saved me and for that I’m grateful. I can’t stop thinking about our ride, our coffee our silence.

The second illness I finally picked up on was depression. I’m not going to talk extensively about it because it’s something that I really struggled with and I don’t want to dwell on it for too long. Right now I’m in a very positive place. But depression is so dark. In the commercials for antidepressants they never really explain it well. When I was in high school my pediatrician gave me a depression test and I was in the risk range but they didn’t take it seriously, and that sucks. The thing is I’m blessed, I am so blessed and lucky in my life. It’s full of love and blessings and I’m grateful, and I think that’s why everyone didn’t take my depression seriously because they were like “everything’s great what would you be depressed about”. The answer is that I’m not depressed about “anything” per se but that’s how depression is. It doesn’t need a source to motivate it, it works without motivation. Nothing is wrong in my life I’m so happy with my family, my friends, my life, but depression doesn’t care. Depression is like being so cloaked in darkest that the light that is in your life that you recognize normally and are grateful for- is covered. It’s blacked out it’s as if it wasn’t there, no matter how hard you try you can’t see it. It doesn’t matter how many blessings are in your life you can’t see them when you’re depressed and it’s disturbing. I miss you, do you hate me? Do you love me? Why did you run away? Why am I alone right now thinking about you? Was it all for nothing, because it didn’t look like nothing, remember when you and I jumped up and down together listening to our favorite songs, in front of everyone, why am I crying in bed right now instead?

How can you trust there’s light when you can’t see it? When I’m depressed I try my hardest not to trust the cloak of darkness, but I’ve definitely mistakenly trusted it before. Apollo will come in a year, but I can’t wait a year without you.

*in the tune of Melanoia by MGMT*

Paranoia! Paranoia is the most recent of my identified illnesses. Honestly, it’s been around for a while I just didn’t know how to name it until recently. Paranoia is honestly when your brain is jumbled. I find it goes hand in hand with anxiety. To me, paranoia is the silliest of my three mental illnesses/trust issues. Paranoia is absolutely NEVER funny while it’s happening, but after it happens it’s pretty fucking funny. Of course, paranoia is the loss of rational thinking, and it’s fucking terrifying when it’s happening but it produces quite odd/sometimes funny outcomes.

Remember that night when you didn’t talk to me? Oh my god, I bet you don’t remember you were so drunk, it was the first time I had seen you in 3 months. I didn’t know you were coming, you scared me when you first walked in. I was mad because you didn’t answer all my recent texts even though you started some of the conversations. I went out with you, and you know I don’t drink, you didn’t talk to me all night, I tried to bring back what we used to have, me pushing past you. I pushed you, on you, slowly wearing my favorite body oil, the one that smells so good men just fall in line. I did EVERYTHING to get your attention. You wouldn’t give me any, and that’s my only weakness with you: when you fucking ignore me. I went back to where I was sitting, and right across from him blocked him on Instagram. All of a sudden I felt better. So I was happy with my stupid self. Of course about 15 mins later after leaving everyone I realized that I made a MISTAKE. I felt SO stupid after I did it.

The thing is that I find that all these trust issues/mental illnesses somehow come together a lot. It’s so weird how when these things happen it’s almost like your brain just gives up, and you need to just deal with that happening to you. It’s a bit scary when you really think about it. Your own brain just does it’s own thing when it feels like it. It’s not something you can just turn off or stop.

As debilitating as these three can be. I still feel some sort of familial love for them. I wouldn’t be me without them. If you don’t love me at my worst, how can you love me at my best, that’s why I fell for you. You took care of me when I was in so much pain, you packed my things for me when I was shaking so much I couldn't do it myself. You told me to sit down and you packed for me in front of everyone. They suck a lot but they also shaped me as a person and I think it’s important to at least give them credit for being a part of me. Even when they SUCK. Just like you sometimes.

[caffinatedconfusion]

On today’s episode of “what the fuck is she rambling about” I’m gonna tell my journey with getting medicated.

4 years ago I got a big kid job that came with my very own health insurance. I thought maybe it was time to talk to my doctor about my sadness and anxieties. So I made an appointment with my general practitioner who diagnosed me with minor depression and generalized anxiety. He prescribed me celexa and told me that I must be sad because I moved across the country and don’t know anyone here yet. So I took it religiously. I was numb. I didn’t care about anything. When I drank alcohol I became severely depressed to the point that I would lock myself in the bathroom and cut my wrists. When I was sober I just didn’t feel. It was like an out of body experience, I was just watching myself.

I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. I explained my feelings and side effects of the celexa. She diagnosed me with major depression and generalized anxiety. She prescribed a different SSRI - you guessed it - Zoloft. I went up in doses over the course of two and a half years. In those two and a half years, I still had severe anxiety all of the time. At work, when I should be relaxing at home, out with friends. It felt like when you drink too much caffeine and your heart races, you sweat and are jittery. The PA prescribed buspar. It was barely touching the anxiety. Mind you, I was still drinking at the time, so that likely didn’t help.

When I got sober, I went back to my PA and told her I still couldn’t manage the anxieties I was having. So, because of my history with addiction, I was given propranolol. Which yes, is a hypertension (high blood pressure) medication but it can be used off label at low doses to reduce the physical effects of anxiety. My addict brain was kicking myself for telling her the truth about my addiction because maybe she would have given me Ativan or Xanax. But my sober brain was glad I was honest because I didn’t want to go back down that road.

So now I’m up to 3 medications but I was still depressed. I was less anxious but it was not enough. I was still full of rage and irritability. I didn’t understand why I’d have 1 good day and the next 7 I couldn’t even bring myself to shower. Or why I’d be in a good mood and one little thing said or minor inconvenience would send me into a tailspin. One day my boyfriend (now husband) said something jokingly and it set me off. We fought for hours. I blacked out with rage. I’d never done that before. I said a lot of mean things that I don’t even actually think. It was terrifying after the fact because nothing like that ever happened to me before. I don’t even remember what he said that set me off. I was also having terrible sexual side effects on Zoloft. As in, I never wanted to have sex anymore. That was not good for my relationship.

I went back to the PA and told her about the sexual side effects and my blackout rage. I wanted to try a different medication. An SNRI, serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. She gave me cymbalta. While it helped with the sexual side effects I still didn’t feel entirely normal. Still depressed. Still only having maybe 1 day of actual happiness. Where I’d blow all my money and figure out which bills I could float to the next month. It was tomorrow’s problem. I still knew something wasn’t right.

I finally made an appointment with the MD. I gave a quick synopsis and he was able to read the notes from his PA that I was seeing previously. Doc told me I have bipolar II, as previously discussed in another post. He prescribed lamictal. I think that was the magic pill. The missing piece in my drug cocktail. It’s helped me level out my emotions and instead of being super high or super low, I’m in the middle. Very little irritation and frustration. Which is fantastic. This is what normal people without mental disorders feel like.

4 prescriptions. Once daily. I hate my brain and just wish it would make the things that it’s supposed to. I hate taking all those pills. Relying on them to even have a morsel of normalcy and happiness. I’m glad they do the stuff n things but I hate that I have to rely on them.

I know I know. Someone out there suggests the holistic approach, but my employer does random drug testing. Someone is probably thinking “it’s just Big pharma trying to control us”. But without big pharma I’d be in big trouble. I’d probably give back into my addictions. that is not the move.

I’ll leave y’all with this in mind, everyone is different and some meds work better for others than they do for me. Medication is NOT a one size fits all. Also, medication isn’t for everyone - and that’s okay too.

-xoxo

DD

[hollygopossumlovesj2]

Come Back Down, Part 21

Title: Come Back Down, Part 21

Warning/Rating: NC-17; For graphic smut, hand job (male receiving), cussing, description of mental illness.

Word Count: 4,879

Summary: Recovery is not easy for Jensen. It involves sitting still and ‘resting’ which pretty much adds up to anxiety and feelings of failure. Depression weighs heavily on him as he contemplates the past month.

A/N: Thank you, @tas898, for reading through this and reassuring me that it wasn’t complete crap! Also for pushing me to post the damn thing. I super appreciate your support, Twinsie!

Hollygopossum’s Master List ~ If you’d like to read more of my work, click this link 

Come Back Down Master List ~ Just incase you’d like to catch up, click this link here!

Cbd21

I’d been home for about 2 weeks now and had barely even left this room. Despite being drugged up to the gills for most of it, I was starting to lose patience with everyone. Mom had, of course, been insufferable and over attentive which was both annoying and guilt inducing. I knew there were preparations for her favorite holiday to be done but she was too busy checking on me every thirty minutes. Which, was an improvement because up until a couple of days ago, it had been every five.

It was a crazy concept to me, when I thought about it, but Christmas was only less than a week away. The two weeks I’d spent in hospital had seemed to drag on and on, but it turned out that hospital time goes a lot slower than real time.

The time I spent hospitalized was anxiety inducing, especially with my parents and their superpower of smothering the fuck out of me. My family had come to an agreement of a different schedule when I finally lost it enough to need more iv Ativan.

They were only allowed to come in one person at a time. My parents traded of the morning and afternoon shift. Josh, Mackenzie and Jared had each come to visit and take a ‘shift’ that I found unnecessary since I had a very attentive nurse. She came quickly when I had to break down and push the button but she hadn’t tried to make small talk. She was there to get down to business.

Then there was Y/N. She mainly took the night shift, after my parents and I had put our foot down that she needed a shower and at least 5 hours of sleep that she wouldn’t get if she stayed glued to my side 24/7. Selfishly I wanted her to stay with me and scare off my parents with her haunted eyes. But, she truthfully hadn’t recovered from me scaring the ever loving fuck out of her and she needed sleep and food.

So now, even though I was feeling pouty and ready to hunchback my healing ass out of this room and to the nearest bar, I stifled it. Earlier in the week, I’d half heartedly tried to convince her to go home to Wyoming. I told her she didn’t have to stay to take care of me when she had so many things to do at home. The argument was pointless, like arguing with an especially grumpy mule. I tried to let the guilt bog me down. I tried to convince myself that I was not just uselessly just putting her life on hold, and many of the cast and crew were ‘home on break’ until we had a full cast to work with.

So much guilt. Forever with the guilt.  

Unfortunately for me, she was also extremely perceptive. She always had been, and she knew with just one look that I wasn’t handling the bed surfing part of my recovery well. If I were honest with myself, I would admit that the appendectomy had scared the fuck out of me too. But, it seemed wrong to voice that when everyone else had been terrified too. I was damn relieved that she hadn’t listened when I told her that she should go home.

She knew from experience how much of a pain in the ass I could be when I wasn’t feeling well. And, like I’d said before, we’d been there for each other through a large variety of situations. Like, the time I’d gotten mono from making out with Anna McDowell the summer before senior year.

Y/N had been the only person home because she was visiting over her break. Dad was off filming a part in some sitcom that filmed in Vancouver. After I had assured Mom that Y/N and I could behave and would be fine alone, she had reluctantly gone with him.

My throat had been brutally sore and I’d felt weighed down like I could sleep for days at a time. I’ll just say that mono had made the bad cold I’d had back in Cheyenne look like the sniffles. She made sure I drank plenty of fluids and took my medication. She would even bring me popsicles if I didn’t bitch too much. I know I definitely tested Y/N’s patience that first week of summer. It was one of the many times that solidified the position she held in my life as my favorite person.

Now, things were a little different. We weren’t just two teenagers trying to get by anymore. She never gave me any inclination that she ever planned to run like hell. I’d tried to get used to the very real possibility that dealing with all of this was just too much for me to ask. How could such a friend stay in my life for so long? Especially when they were picking up pictures of her and putting them in the gossip magazines?

My life was already spilling over into hers and I hadn’t made anything official. I’d gotten comfortable with what we had, but now I had to consider the possibility that she wouldn’t want the kind of life that was constantly being observed underneath a microscope. Not that I could completely begrudge Danneel for going off the deep end, but I knew I was going to get some backlash for that. That meant that Y/N might get backlash, too. Some of my fans had tagged her as the ‘other woman’ years ago before I’d wizened up.

My sad effort to keep these worries and some others under wraps and my problem alone had failed. She’d tried to cheer me up by offering me my favorite foods or letting me watch whatever I wanted, but the truth was that I was going fucking stir crazy. I didn’t want to sit still so that my abdominal internal sutures could heal properly like the outside sutures were headed to a lot quicker than I had thought. To be honest, it was getting a little itchy which just added to my discontent.

To be fair, I recognized that it was my own damn fault that I’d landed in this situation. If I hadn’t been such a hard headed dipshit, I’d be back on set by now.

On top of that, I couldn’t help but think about Danneel and the fake pregnancy. I still hadn’t been able to give her what she wanted. It still stung more than I was prepared for, even though we weren’t together anymore. Our divorce had caused her to suffer a psychological break, or so her brother had informed me in a very angry, violent conversation over the phone right after I’d been released to go home.

I’d spoken to Danneel’s mother yesterday and she’d informed me that Danneel was receiving treatment closer to her home town in Louisiana in a much nicer, if a little bit professional tone. The doctors there thought the break was due to the imbalance of hormones in her system caused by the fertility treatments she had been having. Oh, and stress. For some reason, Danneel’s mother took pity on me. She mentioned that even though stress didn’t help the situation, it had played a very small part in comparison to the fertility treatments and her unsuccessful attempts at conceiving a baby.

I still couldn’t quite let myself off of the hook, even having been pardoned by her mother. As soon as I was healed enough to drive, I planned on making time to visit with Mrs. Graul and maybe even Danneel if she was ready to have visitors. I knew all too well that the divorce was solid this time, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling of being responsible for pushing Danneel closer to the deep end. She might have meant to harm me, but I would’ve never wished her any real pain.

Y/N was still furious with Danneel who had confessed to running her off the road and into the ravine. A dark, unpopulated ravine that she’d been at the bottom of for nearly a week. Add on top of that the vandalism of her barn, and Y/N had every reason to press every charge possible, but she’d dropped them when she found out that Danneel wasn’t mentally well. She’d told me right before bed the night before that she didn’t want to make a bad situation worse. Plus, it was kind of hard to point fingers at someone who’d had such a hard time adjusting that they had a meltdown.

Once the media got a hold of the story, some negative Tweets and articles had already been released. Some of the Supernatural fandom were not very happy with me. They blamed me for Danneel’s mental break, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. The suits at the CW said not to worry, that the negative press would settle soon. They’d even tacked on that my drama had actually benefited the show being renewed. Bad attention, is still attention. Ugh! I felt used, but at least the crew would still have a job the longer they stayed on tv.

I sighed, feeling the tension building back up in my chest. It had only been momentarily alleviated by Y/N’s earlier animated conversation about how beautiful our hometown was. As she’d leaned into my shoulder, and nowhere else because I was a fucking china doll, she’d reminisced in a way that didn’t completely depress her. It was new, this lighter side of her talking about childhood hang outs and memories of us as high schoolers.

No matter how many times she returned to Dallas, and even though my parents had moved to a new house a few years before, the first couple of days always hit her like a sledgehammer. Especially if she tries to talk about her family. Now though, she seemed relaxed and happy to be here. She’d come back upstairs a couple of times ready to discuss a conversation that she’d had with my parents. There were little tidbits of information that she’d never known about her mom until my Mom had shared with her.

Maybe I’d be able to summon the inner strength to ask her what had changed.

She had disappeared about an hour ago and the book I was trying to read wasn’t holding my attention for longer than 5 minute increments.

Ever since I’d arrived home I’d been battling the nervous, possibly manic energy that was buzzing beneath my skin the longer I was forced to sit still. There were so many things that needed to be done for the show and I’d had to fight with both my Mom and Y/N so that I could leave to do voice work next week. They’d eventually given in when I told them that it was going to be done locally and for short amounts at a time. Even being able to do voice work in the very near future didn’t really quell it.

The crew had made changes as soon as they knew my recovery would be extended. They had left me out of several scenes and used my stunt guy to fill in where they couldn’t. I hated the strain this put on my friends.

Singer had tried to comfort me with the fact that it was only a couple of episodes and then they would break for Christmas. I wasn’t comforted. I hated anything that would possibly take away from the shows full potential and the family that was there.

You’d think the nervous energy would be completely cancelled out by the depressive episode of gargantuan proportions. It was obvious with my unwillingness to get out of bed or eat or to bathe myself with anything more complicated than a baby wipe down. I could actually feel myself sinking deeper and deeper, even with taking my antidepressant regularly. I could recognize it but I couldn’t do anything about it without feeling overwhelmed and defeated.

I had been at the end of my rope a few nights ago and finally caved. I told Y/N a shortened version of what was going on with me, omitting my worries about her because I didn’t want to give her more things to worry about. She had listened patiently but she hadn’t tried to soothe me with putting her hands on my face or giving me a look of pity.

She chose a scientific explanation that put me at ease faster than a generic, ‘I’m sorry, baby.’ She’d simply explained that sometimes anesthesia and the sedatives would mix up the normal balance of brain chemicals. That I should just try to take it easy until they balanced themselves out, but I didn’t know just how much more I could take.

Bored by the book I was trying to read and filled to the brim with hopelessness, I fell asleep. Sleeping was my only escape. It was the only way I could stop the voices in my head telling me how much I’d fucked up. That I was letting everyone that I’d ever cared about down.

^*^*^*^*^*^*^

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep the next time I woke up, but it was a pleasant wake up. Y/N face was leaning down so that she was eye level, a private smile on her face and a little blush on her cheeks. It looked like maybe she had been able to be outside for a little while and gotten some sun on her face.

“Hey.” She whispered like speaking too loud would disturb the room. As I slowly became more conscious, I noted that she’d opened the blinds to let some sun it. It glowed brightly against the beige carpet in the room, reflecting an ethereal glow on her face.

“Hey.” I croaked, lifting a hand to push the hair hanging in her face behind her ear. She leaned down a little further to kiss my nose and then my lips, bringing a small smile out.

“I’ve run a bath for you.”

And… the moment was gone. “A bath?” A bath required energy. A bath meant I’d need help getting in and out. A bath sounded terrible.

“Yeah.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, probably seeing my face fall. “I’ll do all the work. All you have to do is stay awake.”

“I don’t want you to do all the work.” I grumped, groaning quite dramatically as I sat up. “I don’t want you to have to do anything.”

“Would you rather your Mom helped?” Dirty. She played dirty. She deduced the answer by the appalled twist to my expression. “Maybe we could have a little fun.”

I lifted an eye brow in question, wondering if Y/N had lost her mind while I’d been sleeping. It was a tiny bit enticing but absolutely not while my parents were still in the house. That would just be weird. Plus, I wasn’t exactly in shape to be doing acrobatics in the garden tub.

“Your parents are gone shopping for some last minute Christmas things. They’ll probably be gone…” She checked the phone she’d been carrying in her right hand. “For the next two hours.”

And, there went most of my excuses.

I didn’t cave one bit, my face a study in extreme grumpiness, as she walked close beside me while I hobbled into the upstairs bathroom. Even as I saw the bath tub full of bubbles and surrounded by a couple of candles that had to be left over from Mackenzie, I remained against this whole thing. It was one thing for me to help her shower all last summer. It was completely another for her to do the same.

I loved her and I wanted to be her safety and her security. I couldn’t very well do that while she was washing my ass for me.

To Y/N’s credit, she never lost the smile on her face or the genuine care she put into getting me into the tub. Which, if I were in the mood to be honest, it wasn’t as complicated as I’d thought it would be. It didn’t even hurt as much as I thought it would, but I still would’ve preferred some damn baby wipes or a sink bath to this. I could already be napping again by now. I was already a little breathless from the ten feet I’d just crossed to get to the bathroom.

A thought occurred to me as I got lost watching her take her clothes off, neatly folding them up on the counter next to what I assumed were my clean clothes. (Because I hadn’t even thought about grabbing any) But, maybe she was pushing this bath because she was tired of sleeping next to someone that (maybe, possibly) didn’t smell too fresh. The reasons didn’t even really matter that much. I was in the tub now. Might as well be fucking clean.

“Sit up a little.” She helped by pushing my shoulders forward and then slipped in behind me, her legs spread wide to frame mine. “Okay, now lean back.” I carefully leaned back and despite my issue with being the little spoon, I had to admit that it felt good. I closed my eyes and breathed deep, the water gently lapping around us and her arms encircled around my chest so I wouldn’t slide down.

This was nice and quiet, the firm hold around my chest chased a bit of the crazy anxious feeling away. Y/N knew exactly what I was doing and the possibility of her not knowing hadn’t crossed my mind besides being a grumpy asshole.

I didn’t even have to move when she began soaping my hair with shampoo, using a cup to wet my hair and then rinse it. I begrudgingly had to admit, if only to myself, that having my hair washed felt fucking fantastic. I relaxed further, humming as I let my full weight lean against her, as she massaged my scalp with firm fingers.

Her chuckle vibrated against my back, making a relaxed smile slowly spread on my lips. “You and your hair.”

I cocked an eyebrow even though she couldn’t see it, “What do you mean, ‘you and your hair?’” My voice grumbled an octave or two deeper because I was on the cusp of falling asleep.

“All anyone has to do to wipe that grumpy look on your face is put their fingers in your hair. I’m not sure you can have your hair cut in public with the noises that you make. You might get arrested for being indecent.”

“What?” I tensed up a little, only because what she was describing wasn’t very manly at all. I couldn’t help the character traits that I held to so rigidly. “I do fine in public thank you very much.” I had evolved since I’d grown up in Texas and made sure to never extend anything but support, especially to those that chose to challenge the world’s expectations and dared to be exactly who they were. I admired their strength, but I was still stuck living by my Dad’s southern expectations and it was a lot easier to be understanding of someone else than it was to be understanding of myself.

“Shhh…” Her fingers slid down to dig deeply into my intensely tight neck muscles after she’d rinsed my hair thoroughly. I instantly forgot what I was ruffled about. “I didn’t mean to get your hackles up, Ackles. You’re still a big tough guy if that’s what you want to be.”

She got a grunt in response, mostly because I didn’t want to get into another discussion about how I hold myself to too many rigid self-expectations. Oh yes, she had made her point several times, but I just couldn’t stop. The anxiety that I’d been trying to fight since childhood always managed to make me fixate on my flaws. All through Days of Our Lives and Dark Angel, I would spend hours rehearsing and trying to have my line delivery perfect. When I would lay down at night, all the times I’d failed would keep me from sleeping well, including the time I’d failed to get a big part in the kindergarten play. I took a big breath and let it go, relaxing back into her warm, soft body.

I let myself drift in and out of consciousness, letting her hands wash away all the eck that had built up while I was laid up. Y/N had clipped her nails short so that she could massage my skin as she washed everywhere thoroughly, pushing the painful toxins and leaving me basically a pile of jelly. Damn it felt good. She cleared her throat, a tell that she had something important to say, and I braced myself for what would come next.

“You can’t do this to me again, okay?” She began to whisper, her warm breath and lips tickling the back of my neck and setting off goosebumps as she swiped the wash cloth over my healing incision. I hummed in answer, trying to maintain this relaxed state for as long as possible, but let her know I was listening. “You get a free pass for this one, but anything after this, there will be consequences.” I grunted, unable to conjure up enough energy to form words. “I won’t be able to handle it again, Jay. I never wanted to be close to anyone after my parents. But then, there you were. I will never be able to survive a day without you alive on this Earth somewhere, and that terrifies me.”

The sound of her sniffling brought me back to Earth, her words processing clearly. I laid my head back, held up by her shoulder as I searched blindly for her lips. My eyes were still closed as I instinctively found them. I was afraid if I opened my eyes that she would see the fear in mine as well. Not because of her threat of retribution and consequences, but the horrifying thought that if something happened to me she wouldn’t survive.

They were salty from tears when she pressed her lips against mine. I turned the kiss into something needy, something that expressed the vulnerable thing inside me with her name on it, without words. I wanted to pull her into my lap and hold her close but the internal sutures kept me from moving very much at all.

“M’not goin’ anywhere.” I pressed the words into her willing lips, my tongue easing in to glide over her teeth and then battle for dominance with her tongue.

“Okay,” she whispered on an inhale, her fingers teasing my happy trail below the surface. I was already responding to her kisses, my dick already filling with blood and half hard. I couldn’t help the grunt that was muffled by our lips when her fingers lightly grazed me. My eyes squeezed closed even tighter against the emotion that was stirring turmoil in my chest. The bath and the tease of something more made sense now. She wanted to put her hands on me to feel me alive and well. How could I ever have thought I’d be strong enough to begrudge her that.

From then on her touches were done with more intent, her fingers teasing my shaft only to go lower and gently roll my balls and hold them in her palm. I was gonna be a quick trigger and I couldn’t even bring myself to feel self-conscious about it. I hadn’t even put my own hand on me since a few days before my surgery. I hadn’t even thought of this since I’d been home, too distracted by the pain.

But, fuck if it didn’t feel good now. I was already panting hard, my head feeling dizzy from my short breaths and limited oxygen intake. I tried to turn around so that I could touch and taste more of her, but she stopped me with her hands pressing firmly against my pecks to keep me still. “Stay like this. This is just for you.”

I didn’t like being the only one on the receiving end. I got a lot of my pleasure from watching her feel good. I loved how responsive she was. I loved the noises that she made and how she would finally just let go and feel it. However, I had to admit that what she was doing, the being in control? Fuck, that was hot, too.

I finally had to stop trying to kiss her, leaning my head back and tucking my nose into the crook in her neck just so that I could breathe her scent into my lungs. I felt her other hand leave my side a moment and the sound of a thick liquid being squeezed from a bottle. It didn’t really register until her hand was slicking up my cock with a lubricant. It was oil based so that it didn’t wash off right away, removing the friction that water made uncomfortable. The warm, wet sensation was overwhelming and I couldn’t help the groan as I pushed my face further into her skin.

This time she didn’t tease, sensing my urgency in the twitch of my hips, her hand firm as she began pumping with purpose. I was already desperate, my breath started to get caught in my throat and hitch in my chest.

“Relax, let me do all the work.” She whispered like a dirty, dirty porn star and put pressure on my hip to try to keep me still. The action resulting in a moan from deep in my throat, a thrill of pleasure crawling up my spine. Fuck it was hot that she was bossing me around a little.

She would bring me right to the edge, my toes curling in the water, before she’d ease off. I could hardly stay still or hold in the vulnerable moans that echoed in the acoustics of the bathroom. I couldn’t help but to thrust into her hand as much as she would allow, planting my feet and trying to get the most out of every single one. To keep from sliding down, my hands were leaving finger print bruises as I gripped her thighs for dear life. Fuck!

“Oh, fuck. Oh, god-. …gonna… Sweetheart, I’m gonna-. Oh, fuck!” When she finally let me come it felt like months’ worth of come was dragged out of me in long, hard pulses. My balls clamped down so hard that they were actually sore when I could bring myself to give a fuck. To be honest, I didn’t know what I said, my mind blown and focused on just one thing, babbling the words that just rolled out of my mouth without a filter. There may have been curse words or multiple praises for unknown deities and moans that might’ve sounded like I was dying. All I really knew was that my throat was a little dry when I could finally focus on the room.

The orgasm had turned my entire body into jelly, my legs and arms were like limp noodles. I hissed through my teeth, my dick still very sensitive, when she washed the lubricant off with a warm, soapy wash cloth. God, as much as I’d complained and tried to convince Y/N that this wasn’t a good idea, I had to admit to myself that I had been wrong.

Even though I had been a grumpy ass, she had still been able to take care of me so completely that mixed in with the orgasmic haze was a hell of a lot of gratitude.

Getting me out of the bath tub and dried off would probably be a funny story later, but I was too relaxed to care. I could feel the dopey smile on my face as Y/N laughed at me while I leaned almost my entire weight into her side. “Whoo…” We listed to the left and to the right a little because my brain was mostly out of the building.

“Alright, chuckles, hang on for me for just a minute longer.” She kind of sounded like I was probably killing her back, but my center of gravity depended on her.

When we finally made it safely to the bedroom and into bed, she took great care as she tucked me in. She pulled the comforter up to beneath my chin and dipped to kiss my lips one more time.

It was pure luck that I was able to work my hand and to grab onto her shirt before she could get up to leave. She returned the big, dumb smile I could feel on my face. “Stay.”

The amused smile on her kiss swollen lips turned soft as she answered me with a kiss to my forehead. “Okay.” I watched blearily as she ditched her blue jeans and bra, climbing and snuggling up close next to me in just a t shirt and her blue lace panties. She laid up against me, but put her arm over my chest to avoid my incision, tucking her face beside mine, sharing my pillow. “Love you.”

I pressed my lips into her forehead, staying there as I fell into a few deep, quality hours of sleep. “Love you, too.”

Tagging (Forever’s): @perpetualabsurdity, @maileann, @daydreamingintheimpala, @gecko9596, @gemini75eeyore, @jotink78, @dancingalone21, @winchesterprincessbride, @sandlee44, @exploratiionist, @arryn-nyx, @littledarlinhavefaithinme, @tiffanycaruso, @boredoutofmymindstuff, @feelmyroarrrr, @raeganr99, @ruprecht0420, @anokhi07, @letsgetyourdeanon, @sis-tafics, @callmesatansprincess, @atc74, @ryansgirl5509, @notnaturalanahi, @keepcalmandcarryondean, @sea040561, @just-another-busy-fangirl, @uniquewerewolfsuit, @ria132love, @mrswhozeewhatsis, @pretty-fortune, @butiaintgonnaloveem, @justanotherdeangrl, @weasleywinchester,@easelweasel, @akshi8278, @tas898, @mandymoiselle1970, @pansexualmeteorite,

Tagging (CBD Only): @melissaj616, @katrena7, @deansdirtyduchess, @anticipate1003, @jalove-wecallhimdean, @shamelesslydean, @xristina-gkika

[inspectorboxer]

Flesh Wounds

by @inspectorboxer​

Fandom: Supergirl

Pairing: Supercat

Rating: T

Author’s note. A little something for my friend @supergaysupercat​ to brighten a Friday. :) Not thoroughly edited, so all mistakes are mine.

***

“Hey,” Alex greeted Kara, still reeling from the call she’d just finished. She tucked her phone in her back pocket, biting her lip as she stepped into Kara’s apartment and shut the door behind her.

“Hey!” Kara was far cheerier than she was, traipsing to the refrigerator and grabbing a beer for Alex. “So what do you want to watch tonight? I’d be down with a movie, or we could watch Grace & Frankie…”

Breaking news animation swept across the TV, and Alex moved to the couch, grabbing the remote and shutting it off. Kara would handle the news better coming from her, and Alex suspected she had more details anyway.  

Kara closed the refrigerator door with her hip. “What’s wrong? Your face is doing that scrunchy thing right before you tell me the Chinese place on the corner is out of pot stickers.”

Alex ran a hand through her hair as she met Kara at the kitchen island. “I need you to hear me, okay? You can’t just fly off freaked out.”

Kara started to set the beer down only to hesitate, the bottle inches from the wood countertop. “What happened?”

“Promise me you won’t bolt until I’m done talking and you have all the facts.”

“Alex,” Kara growled.

“Everyone is fine. Well, not fine, but they will be. You don’t need to worry.” Alex knew not to bury the lead, not with this.

“You’re making this way worse by not just telling me what’s going on,” Kara scolded.

“There was a kidnapping attempt in Washington DC about thirty minutes ago.” Alex watched understanding sweep over her sister, stiffening Kara’s muscles until she was rigid with fear.

“Cat?” Kara whispered.

Alex shook her head. “Carter.”

The bottle came down on the wood with a little too much force, shattering and spraying foam everywhere. Alex hopped back to avoid the glass, but she was otherwise unfazed.

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. Shaken up, but fine, but…” Alex trailed off as Kara rounded the island and advanced on her. She knew the Grants mattered to Kara, that losing Cat to Washington was still a sore spot, but the terror in Kara’s eyes suggested feelings that ran far deeper than Alex realized.

“But what?” Kara demanded.

“Cat came home early and walked in on things. Her bodyguards took care of the trash, but some shots were fired…”

“Oh Rao.”

“Kara,” Alex soothed, “She’s going to be okay.”

“They hurt her? Did they shoot her?” Kara’s voice quivered and broke.

“Cat was grazed on her right bicep, but–” Alex blinked and wiped the hair out of her eyes, staring at the space her sister had occupied a mere second ago. The window was open now, the curtains billowing inside in Kara’s wake. “I figured that would happen.”

***

Cat slowly paced her balcony in her silk pajamas, the warm, muggy night pleasant on her skin after the chill of the hospital. Carter was sleeping, surrounded by the best protection money could buy, but Cat’s thoughts wouldn’t let her rest.

The bastards had gotten past lax building security and almost taken her boy. Neither would-be kidnapper had revealed why. Did they want money? To gain the president’s ear? To force Cat to deliver a message to the masses? She might never know, and that drove her mad. It meant someone might try again.

She rattled the ice in her tumbler, wishing like hell the glass contained something stronger than tap water, but the drugs they’d pumped her full of made alcohol an unwise choice for now. It hardly seemed fair. Cat had almost died a few hours ago, had felt a bullet burn a path across her bicep. She deserved a scotch, damn it.

“You look like you need a hug.”

A gradual, relieved smile slipped over Cat’s lips and she turned, unsurprised to see Supergirl floating just beyond the rail of the balcony, her cape billowing behind her. “Hmm. If I’d known a little flesh wound was enough to lure the Girl of Steel to the nation’s capital for an overdue visit, I might have employed the method sooner.”

Kara touched down. “If I’d known the Queen of All Media wanted me to visit, I’d have been here any time she asked.” She took a deep breath. “Are you okay? The hospital was locked down. I was afraid I’d cause more harm than good bullying my way inside.”

“I’m fine. Physically. Mentally might be another story.” Cat hadn’t meant to confess that, but apparently her pain medication had the side effect of loosening her tongue.

“And Carter?”

“The doctors prescribed him some Ativan. He’s sleeping. I imagine visits to my therapist are on the docket in the weeks ahead, for both of us.”

Kara sighed. “I’m so sorry, Cat.”

“Not as sorry as I am.” Cat winced as she tried to set her glass aside, forgetting about her injury until she was harshly reminded. Kara was there in an instant, wrapping her hand around the tumbler, her warm fingers brushing over Cat’s. She slipped the glass free and put it on the rail.

“I should never have sold CatCo,” Cat murmured, startling them both as the truth slipped out. “Olivia asked me to a serve, and I thought I couldn’t refuse, but… I should have. I should have stayed in National City.”

“You wanted to dive.”

“Into new adventures, not the cesspool of American politics. There isn’t one person in this godforsaken city I trust. All these vultures would sell out their own mother for a backroom deal.” Cat flicked her wrist at the Capitol Building, glowing in the night beyond the Lincoln and Washington monuments in the distance.

“Wouldn’t you?” Kara teased, arching an eyebrow.

Cat shrugged. Kara had her there. Cat would sell her mother for a lot less. “So mothers were a poor choice, but you get my drift.”

“What about the president?”

“She’s Durlan. She doesn’t count.”

Kara smiled sadly. “Is the grass all that greener in National City though? More than once during our balcony chats you complained about the board, your employees, the city...”

“You’re there,” Cat confessed, and Kara’s breath caught at the admission. “So I’d say that’s one point in National City’s favor.”

“Cat…”

“My life was better with you in it, Kara. Whether you were arguing with me over headlines or saving the city from an alien attack, you never bored me.”

Kara’s throat rippled as she swallowed. “One perk of being in the president’s inner circle, huh? Knowing who I am? Who Superman is?”

Cat closed her eyes, relieved to have the truth between them. At least something had gone her way tonight besides not dying. “I already knew. There’s the cute little scar,” Cat poked the one on Kara’s forehead with her left hand, “and the fact you wear the same earrings,” her fingers slipped over the shell of Kara’s ear to fondle one of the small disks in question.

“A scar and earrings? Seriously?”

“They were further proof.” Cat’s touch drifted to Kara’s jaw and lingered. She was just the distraction Cat needed to forget about this day, about all the dumb choices she’d made. Never mind Kara had been the impetus for most of them as Cat fled from her feelings, running away to the other side of the country.

Kara’s eyes darkened, and her hand slid up Cat’s silk-clad arm to grip her wrist, holding her there. “Then what gave me away?”

“The way you make me feel. How I can feel just as safe and protected with Kara Danvers as I do with Supergirl.”   Kara bit her lip, her blue eyes searching Cat’s. “Is protected the only thing I make you feel?”

Cat wondered if honesty was contagious tonight, or maybe a brush with death had simply shaken sense into them. “There might be… other things. Things I worried were… inappropriate.” She smiled as Kara leaned into her touch.

“You love being inappropriate,” Kara reminded her.

“I do,” Cat agreed, tilting her chin up to capture warm lips in a searing kiss.

When they parted, both breathless, Kara leaned her forehead against Cat’s. “Come back to me. Nothing has been the same since you left.”

“I sold CatCo…”

“Then build another company. A better one. Show the world how it’s done - twice.”

Cat didn’t deny a thrill at the idea, but having Kara back in her life, if they could be more, was infinitely more tempting.

“I’ll think about it,” she murmured, knowing she’d write her resignation tomorrow. Carter would be thrilled.

Kara eased closer, pressing Cat into the rail. “Anything I can do to tip the odds in National City’s favor?”

“You’re a smart woman, Supergirl. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

[woodygaythrie]

I Checked into a Psych Ward (and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt)

So, for the past 4 days or so, I’ve been in the psychiatric facility at a local hospital. I was there because I confided in my therapist that I had made a plan to kill myself last Sunday and, although I did not go through with it, I was worried I might try to go through with it again. She gave me the choice of going there voluntarily or being taken involuntarily by an ambulance with police involved. I chose to go voluntarily.

Being there was an overwhelming experience, and I am partly writing this to help me process it all. I also writing this so people who might end up in this situation will know what it could potentially be like. Although I talk about a lot of negatives, I am not trying to discourage anyone from getting help or even checking in to a psychiatric hospital (it did help me, in some ways). I am simply talking about my experience.

When I got to the behavioral health center (what they euphemistically call themselves), I was made to give up most of my possessions, to be returned to me when I left. They took my Magen David necklace (which was emotional for me and I found it hard to part with), my notebook (spiral bound; I guess someone could try to off themselves with the wire), my pens (obviously stabby), and my phone (I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would). They let me keep my clothes, deodorant. and my book (a book of poems by Leonard Cohen) and that’s about it.

I started out on “level 1” which was for the more “acute” cases, and eventually graduated to “level 2” for more “high functioning” patients. My level 1 room was bare except for a couple beds and nightstands (all bolted to the floor). The first day I was there, I just stayed in my room and slept. I only came out for meals. This seems to be a common trend among newly arrived patients; my two roommates in level 2 both spent their first days in bed and sometimes did not even come out for meals. One of my roommates, who I’ll call Sarah, spent most of this time crying and being out of it on the Ativan the doctors prescribed her. She was upset because her niece discovered her after she took an entire bottle of Klonopin and tried to drown in the pool at her sister’s house. Sarah felt immensely guilty and was convinced her family hated her now. The hospital’s solution seemed to be to pump more drugs into her and keep her in a sedated state.

When I checked in, I listed my name as Ian and my gender as male, as I figured my reason for hospitalization has nothing to do with my reproductive anatomy. The morning after I checked in, a woman from the insurance department came into my room to sternly lecture me about using my “actual” name and told me I had to go by my legal name while there. She was pretty rude and talked to me like I was a child who was stubbornly demanding ice cream. I was so angry and I felt so powerless, that I started crying. She then backpedaled and told me that I could still have the staff call me Ian, as long as I used my legal name on documents. They changed my name on the whiteboard (visible to everyone) to Alexandra, with “Ian” in quotation marks in tiny letters beside it. Staff continued to call me Ian but used she/her pronouns for me almost exclusively. If I was in a group with a few women, they would address us as “ladies”. My patient armband both used my full legal name and listed me as “F” for female. The doctors on staff clearly didn’t understand enough about transgender issues to treat a transgender patient with respect; the psychiatrist I was assigned to was clearly uncomfortable with it. I was also placed in a room with female roommates, because “of course” I couldn’t be placed with male roommates. Being constantly misgendered in a place I could not leave made me feel exhausted and humiliated. There were individual nurses and patients who were really good about not misgendering me, but they were very much the minority.

Another thing that made the hospital stay weird was the pressure to performatively “improve” in order to leave as quickly as possible. Although technically the hospital can only hold you for 72 hours, they can submit a request to keep you longer (up to 3 weeks longer) if the doctor believes you are still in need of hospitalization. By my second day, I became aware that I needed to act like I was improving rapidly in order to get released on time. I started showing up to group therapy sessions (there were about 3 per day), which were mostly unhelpful, just so it would seem like I was going through treatment. I would tell every doctor, nurse, and social worker that I was feeling fine (fine enough to go home, but not too good so as to not make my exaggeration obvious). Everyone seemed to do this to some degree; the unwritten rule seemed to be “bullshit your way out of this hellhole. Tell the staff what they want to hear.”

The whole time I was there made me feel like I was back in Kindergarten. We had set times for eating and going outside, and we were not allowed to do those things outside of the specified time. Even when we were allowed to do these things, we had to be supervised by a nurse at all times. There were certain places we weren’t allowed to go (laundry, showers, etc) without a nurse’s permission. I’m surprised they let me piss without making me ask a nurse to hold my hand while I do it. There was something incredibly funny and sad about a nurse telling a group of depressed adults, ages ranging from 18 to 70-something, that “it’s snack time!” in a sing-songy voice.

Overall, I feel like being hospitalized did help me somewhat; it got me back on my medication and allowed me some time away from everyday stressors, but it did feel like those everyday stressors were replaced with new ones unique to being in a hospital with very limited autonomy and an inability to leave when you desire.

[visionarylee]

Raised by Broken Women

It’s a topic that we rarely, if ever, discuss; Broken souls having children only for those children to be shattered souls themselves. Because I know that millions experience this, I want to share my story in order to save a life or even change one. If that means my story goes public, well I hope something good comes from it.

My mother comes from a neglected, unloving home where her father was in and out of the home, and her mother saw her as a stain on a pearly white wall. She didn’t grow up surrounded by love. Embraced. Held. She would tell me stories as I aged about her life and my grandmother, the grandmother I saw as an angel that guarded me from the darkness that was my mother. Her conclusion was that my grandma was a broken woman herself-shattered by not only the times she lived in, but by her husband, a man who was in and out of the house leaving her with six children to raise alone only to have another child by a different woman. This love child would become friends with her siblings without her identity being known until it was...well...known.

There are many things I can mention about my mother’s life. The one that stands out the most is that my mother is an addict; sober, but what stands out from that is that it was her younger sister who was her “drug dealer”. Ironically, her sister gloats about being the favorite of my grandmother. I know this because she did. If you ask, she will tell you she had a great childhood. Not so much for the other five.

My mother, the shattered woman she was, decided she wanted a daughter. My father wanted nothing to do with me so she left him and married a man, having his child when I was four. I was young; therefore, I can only remember so much of the good, but the bad, it sticks with me like a repetitive nightmare that shakes you out of your sleep.

When I was in the second grade, my mother rushed into the after-school daycare to pick me up then to my grandparents' house. I’m sitting on the couch, my mom in the chair, my grandparents in the kitchen. Silence. Not even the ticking of a clock. That’s until the phone rings. My mother looks up, eyes distraught as she gazed at her father. He answers, listens, and then looks to her, and I can’t remember his exact words, but I remember the shrieks that escaped my mother’s mouth. The cries. I watched as if she was crumbling into a ball of nothing. My step-father had just shot himself and later died.

That’s when the devil himself intertwined with our lives. My mother was already a shattering piece of glass, but this time, she was just...shattered. Her addiction started, she slept for most of my childhood, which I recently discovered her addiction was Ativan and cocaine, the cocaine coming from her younger sister. The same home she grew up in was now my home, and now she was able to snap her finger, and in mere minutes, I was her.

Neglected, unloved, unbearable, I was now a speck of dirt on a new pair of shoes to her yet she treated my brother like a king and honestly, I’m thankful for that because in my eyes, my brother is royalty. However, with me she crippled me into a sheltered, antisocial, reserved being who just closeted her emotions and resentment. We lived in an emotionless, noiseless home except for the occasional running faucet and laughter coming from our television sets. There were no hugs, no speaking about emotions, rarely any “I love yous”. It was no home. Just a house.

As I grew older, my grandmother would try to tell me something was wrong with my mother. Well, obviously, but I’m a child. How was I supposed to know? What was I supposed to do? I remember my mom walking around our house in a daze as if in a dream with a cigarette in hand. I would try getting her attention, shouting, cussing at her, screaming. Nothing, but that daze of hers. She would finally stumble out of my room, and when she was in her right mind, she would initiate arguments with me as if she fed on them. As if she fed on my misery.

From morning to bedtime, she was asleep on the seemingly comfortable sofa in our living room.  I put myself on the bus every morning making sure to lock the door. Tried to keep my unkempt hair tidy as best as a child could. Food? She rarely cooked so we had the choice of cereal, cans of ravioli and spaghetti, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I am eternally grateful for. We had the basics: a roof over our heads, hand-me-down clothes, for the most part electricity and running water. See, my mom would get social security checks in the name of her son due to the loss of his father. We lived off a measly $1000 a month. She would go years without working. How could we survive on just $1000 a month? We couldn’t.

Eight grade comes around. My mother used to pawn off my electronics without asking-even stole money in my older years-so this time she asked and promised me a dog. I was ecstatic! I told her pawn whatever! Soon we went to adopt the being that would alter my life; change its course. A rat terrier I named Casey. A small, 2-month-old baby, and for the first time, I felt loved. I felt wanted. I felt needed. I was finally shown that maybe I mattered. Someone thinks I matter.

I’m finally 18, It’s prom time. I remember thinking maybe this time my mother will be involved in my life. She’ll take me shopping, buy me shoes, do the whole deal, but I should’ve known that the past repeats itself. She only came to one of my basketball games in middle school. Perhaps two. My teacher offered to pay for my basketball pictures because she caught me in the hall crying. My mom decided she didn’t want to miss out on her Ativan, a Bud Light, and sleep the day away. Those were more of a priority. Thankfully my aunt, who I didn’t have to ask, prepared me for two proms. Took me shopping, did my makeup, did my hair. When she told me to take a look in the mirror, I was breathless. This wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me. No unkempt hair, no baggy clothes, no old shoes. I felt like a princess on her way to a ball as cliché as that sounds. I felt beautiful. Confident for the first time.

Before I was off to college, my mother decided to go to rehab-the same facility her brother used. I was happy for my brother’s sake as he was too young to know who and what she was, but my childhood was over. I’m off to college. It was simply too late for me to forgive her.

I became physically sick my sophomore year. It was suggested that I return home for the semester, but I chose to bear the pain than to return to the narcissist who was my mother. Her addiction was gone, but her treatment of me with a city in between us was no different. My mental health was starting to decline because the chronic pain was something a school clinic wasn’t equipped to handle, and I had no insurance. My mother never put me on her insurance when she worked so throughout college I had to endure this mysterious, chronic pain. Eventually I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, anxiety and fibromyalgia. My grades slipped, the pain increased. I would miss a month worth of classes. Rather that than return home to my trigger-my mother.

I managed to graduate college somehow, and now I was in the real world. I was sick, no doctor could help me, I couldn’t hold a job, I crashed my car twice within a year. There were times when I just wanted to die. I prayed for God to end my life, but Baby Casey. Who would take care of him like I did? Anytime suicide popped into my mind, I remembered Casey needed me, and that was enough for me to go on for another day.

But the worst had finally debuted. May I add on time. I knew Casey was sick for years. He had a bad heart and was getting sick and sicker by the months. The love of my life, my guardian angel. He didn’t have much time. I was on vacation for the week when my brother texts me that something was wrong with Casey. I come home, and he looks awful, bloated, but he had always looked like this if his body had too much fluid in it. I gave him his daily medicine, thinking I’ve seen this a hundred times. He’s fine...The next day what I thought were seizures were not seizures. Cardiac arrest. He died. It took weeks for me to comprehend that he was really gone. I would come home and shout for him, be at work thinking I needed to hurry home to walk him only to remember...

I fell into the deepest depression that I had experienced. As I type this, I’m still experiencing it. Since December I feel no emotion. No happiness, no sadness, no motivation, no anger. Nothing. I knew I needed help, and I went to my mother. What a mistake. She couldn’t have cared any less, calling me miserable, depressing, and pathetic yet there were times she’d texted or called me crying about a man breaking her heart. Once I had to leave work and take an extended lunch break because she was so distraught on the phone and indubitably intoxicated. I left my job to comfort her over a man. She’s in tears, stating she wanted to call her drug dealer. I stayed with her for an hour to calm her down. I even took her to Miami to get her mind off of him and my brother, who needed a car and was depending on my mother for that.

Time passes, and I lose my job. I’m about to lose my car, my apartment, my belongings. I’ve already lost my mind. To protect myself from her as I am in this bottomless pit that has no exit sign, I isolated myself. What does my mother do? What a broken woman who despises her daughter would do. She leaves voicemails saying if I starve myself to death or hurt myself, she’d be sad for a little while, but REMEMBER, “it’s not my fault. You’re an adult. You make your own decisions. You're not going to kill me!" I hadn’t talked to her in weeks, and she knowing how fragile my mental state was says this. She goes on to say she never wanted to live with me, but since I don’t have a job “I GUESS you can come live with me.” She rescinded the invite.

That is my mother. The mother who purposely harms me. The mother who compulsively lies to the family about me, who then turns around and degrades me. For example, I visited my grandma, who lives with my aunt and her children, to ask for assistance. My 23-year-old cousin verbally attacks me calling me pathetic, looking down at me as if I was some stranger begging for change. As if she is not in nursing school, although lacks compassion for the career. I could see the emptiness in her eyes as she persistently attacked me even after I apologized. Just pure boredom. As if she herself didn’t ask her parents for help when she moved in with them with a man and child. As if she didn’t turn a blind eye when her brother borrowed $500 from our grandmother with no intention of paying her back as he continues traveling. This is the grandma who is my pillar. The damage my mother has done is irreversible. This is the woman who gave birth to me.

She is a woman with no remorse. No empathy. Shows no kindness to me. There have been no apologies. Ever. Even while I was reaching out for help, she blocked me from communication unconcerned about my well-being. She reserves that for my brother, who is delighted to be her favorite yet considers him dangerous and threatening afraid to sleep with her door open if he is present. This is why I can longer be anywhere near the shattered woman who gave birth to the shattered girl.

It is a never-ending cycle in some families. Broken people growing up in neglected, unloving homes only to have children and replicate that same environment, picking their favorites as they build and decorate.

Although I thought it was too late for me, I take any opportunity I can get to heal. I jog, I write to producers, literary agents, and submit profiles to talent agents. I promote my screenplays, I continue to write, read and watch films when my depression doesn't hinder my concentration or my anxiety doesn't send me into heart attack mode. I am posting this with the hope that others will read this and not only end this horrendous cycle but heal themselves. Isolate yourself if you must. If you can relate to this even just a little, I want you to know that you are not alone.

Broken people give birth to broken children, and it’s time to end it.

Written by Lee

[tiredoflyme]

TRIGGER WARNINGS: drug use violence psychiatric medication ptsd black out/memory loss

I already know this is just going to be a confusing ramble but my next therapist appointment isn’t for another 4 days and my best lady friend just moved away so I’ve got no solid outlet in real life right now.

Last night was a disaster.

My roommate (who is my best guy friend) and some of our mutual friends went out to the drive in last night. Which you wouldn’t think would be something that would cause massive drama. Most of them do various drugs, which I’m generally okay with, but I don’t allow snortables in my house. Since we were going out and a bunch of them wanted to, I said I didn’t mind. We had two groups so we could split up to watch multiple movies for the first showing and then we were all going to watch the second one together.

In between movies, I went to the snack stand and ran into my roommate who was having trouble finding his way around in the dark so I walked him to the bathroom. He was clearly high but seemed okay. We all settled down to watch the second movie and things started to go wrong about ten minutes in.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with drug culture, ketamine is a disassociative drug that’s popular with “party kids” and taking too much results in a “k-hole.” Most of the people I’ve seen in k-holes are really loopy, have trouble communicating, go really deep inside their heads, and become hyper emotional. One way to snap someone out of it is to give them sugary food or candy. Don’t ask me how or why it works but it does.

So my roommate had started to wander off in a k-hole and one of the girls led him back and I offered the cotton candy I was eating. First he just opened his mouth for me to put some in. The second bunch I handed to him but his hand clenched on mine and he wouldn’t let go until I wrenched my hand away. We were sitting in the open trunk of my hatchback and suddenly he pushed himself out and stumbled away. Someone followed to check on him but he spun back and threw himself into the car. He scrambled toward me and started hitting me while screaming nonsense and growling. One of the guys was trying to pull him off me but he’s surprisingly fucking strong. I ended up punching him in the face twice, hard, before he fell back. They wrestled him down to the ground but he was struggling hard. He lurched up and I put my hands around his neck and practically choked him to push him back. I managed to crawl out the side door while the guys tried to talk him down. Once when they had him pinned down, he just started repeating his name over and over to remind himself who he was. He didn’t recognize the people holding him down, one of whom was his best friend. He started to realize where he was for a bit but then went into it again and started fighting them.

Wow this is hard. My hands are shaking...

By then I was several feet away sitting down. One of the girls sat with me and gave me a klonopin to help calm me down because I was really shaken up. It took a long time for him to come out of the violent episode and then he just switched into the hyper emotional state instead. He has incredibly low view of himself and blames himself for anything that goes wrong ever. So one of the guys made the mistake of telling him that he had hit me. And he freaked out all over again. He became hysterical and tried to crawl over to me to find out if it was true. I got up and told him that yes he did but i hit him back too. He was still freaking out and grabbed my arm too hard while he was trying to remember what he’d done. I had to push aside my own emotional state and reassure him that everything was okay because I was the only one he would believe. It took forever before I thought it was safe for him to manage the car ride home. The two boys sat on either side of him in the backseat in case something happened. I drove and the other girl sat in the passenger seat. I kept holding her hand and I think she thought I was trying to comfort her but really I was trying to comfort me. The whole ride home, we all had to tell stories of bad trips or highs and how it was okay that he’d had one too. It was so difficult to pretend everything was okay.

When we got home, the other girl left asap because she was too freaked to stay. My roommate went inside first while the rest of us got the blankets out of the trunk. I asked if they were planning to stay. Then before they could really answer, I just begged them to stay. I desperately didn’t want to be alone in the house with him. Even if he wasn’t violent anymore, when he’s on K, he tends to get really clingy and emotional to me and need a lot of reassurance and I was in no state of mind where I could provide that. They agreed, thank god. They all went into his room to be with him while the drugs got out of his system. I took a shower to give myself some space, then I took an ativan and my night pills. (It  was hours after I’d taken the klonopin so there wasn’t a risk of interaction.) It was past 3am at this point so it didn’t take me long to pass out.

The guys stayed to keep him company and one of them left a couple hours later but his best friend stayed until morning. When I woke up, they were both gone and my roommate was up in the living room. He tried to apologize but I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. I got myself breakfast and went onto the porch to eat it to avoid him. After a while he came in and asked if I was mad at him. It was hard to answer so I said I didn’t think so.

He was completely blacked out for most the night’s events. He didn’t remember doing anything violent and had to be told when he started to regain consciousness. One of the girls there said it reminded her of someone with PTSD being triggered and blacking out. And that was a pretty accurate description. He was on a bunch of drugs and not in control of himself. Something (probably something in his head) triggered him and he flipped. He wasn’t consciously trying to hurt anyone or himself even. I get that. And he probably took too much of the drugs they had which is his fault, but that doesn’t mean he’s responsible for his actions while blacked out.

I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out how I feel about this as I’m typing it. I’m not sure. I’m not really angry but I’m not okay either. He spent the whole day out at his friend’s house and I’m really not looking forward to when he gets back. I’m still feeling unbalanced about it and feel a little unsafe still. I know he’s not a danger when he’s sober but it was fucking scary last night and I haven’t been able to let go of that emotion yet. I kind of want to call up someone else and go out for dinner so that I’m not here when he gets back. Or maybe he’ll just crash somewhere else for the night.

Last night his best friend kept retelling the story like he’d been trying to climb over me in the back of the car and he wouldn’t stop so I punched him. Like specifically said that I threw the first punch. And I’m not going to correct him in the moment just so my roommate can freak out more. But I definitely punched him in defense. It was a really solid punch too and I’m actually proud that was strong enough for it. Because being disabled, I’m never sure if I’d actually be able to defend myself. But he had a black eye when we got home last night so I can be confident in myself for that anyway.

I don’t know. It sucks. I’m still not calm about it but at least I got the whole story out. I’m going to call some people and see if anyone wants to get dinner with me. I just need to chill.

Thanks for listening.

[naynenay]

An Inconvienient Womb

I got my period at 8 years old and it was mostly regular right away. For three (or more) days every month, I would lie to my mother to skip school, cancel plans with friends and just die for a few days. I was told that this was the way it was: my mother suffered, and my mother’s mother suffered. I remember being in Gaspe with a friend at 9 or 10 and sitting on the bathroom floor crying until her Mom came in and coaxed the information out of me. She gave me a Tylenol and I slept until the next morning.  I was prescribed the pill at 14 years old and I jumped from birth control to birth control, plagued by side effects and restrictions. I tried Yasmin, Micronor, Ortho Tri-Cyclen, Yaz and at least three others I can’t remember names of - all in the name of getting some relief. At 23, I had surgery to cure my cervical dysplasia and ended up with pain related to the scar tissue. 

At 24, I had a single migraine with aura that landed me in the hospital. I remember thinking that I knew how being hit with lightning would feel like. As a result, the neurologist I saw told me I couldn't take any form of hormonal birth control anymore because it was a major countraindication.  That ended up being extremely necessary for me to realize that something was wrong. 

A few months later, my doctor suggested I see a gynocologist (Dr. Lortie) so that I could discuss family planning and my never ending cramps. I was in a super stable relationship, but we were not ready to have children. That’s when she suggested I get Mirena, the IUD. I remembered my aunt telling me her horror story with the copper IUD and did a lot of research before I accepted.  The actual procedure to get it done was extremely painful and I remember worrying that people in the waiting room would hear me scream, becoming irrationally angry at the clownfish mobile dangling above me. I took a few days off afterwards, even though I was supposed to be able to go back to work the same day. Three days later, I was still spending my days and nights crying in the tub and my partner urged me to go to the hospital. Turns out that my cervix was too small and inflexible due to the scar tissue I had from surgery. I then spent a few weeks waiting for my appointment with the gynocologist and the pain subsided with hydromorphone, allowing me to return to work. Dr. Lortie told me that there was a new type of IUD, much smaller than the first. I reluctantly accepted to remove the old IUD and put in this one.  The removal was quite painful and she had some difficulty putting the new one in, but I was more prepared this time as I was given cervix softening medication and an Ativan to manage anxiety. I took a taxi home and slept the rest of the day. I tried to go to work, hydromorphone in hand and heating pad in the other. I made it through a few months with intermittent visits to the hospital and way too many sick days. That’s when the doctor finally discovered what had happened: the IUD had become imbedded into my cervix and was causing contractions. I took advantage of the short-term disability at work and impatiently waited for my surgery with Dr. Lortie. The surgery itself was the most pain I have ever been in my entire life, even with sedation. I had to be in a birthing position and therefore I couldn’t be put under. I remember one nurse talking to me and holding my head up while holding a tray with the other and people running around the room, but I can’t tell you how long it took, what was said or done. Again, I remember thinking about how scary it must be for people in the waiting room hearing me scream. Fast-forwarding a year or so, I quit my job because of the pressure my boss was putting on me to get better, taking way too much hydromorphone and sleeping the days away. My pain was still way too significant and I had been bleeding on and off (but mostly on) for three years after coming off birth control and into the time I had the IUD.

My marriage ended two and a half years ago, when I was at my lowest physically. I had been going back and forth between my family doctor and gynocologist and I was skeptical I was ever going to get better. I couldn’t work, eat or shower properly. Walking was usually done bent at a 90 degree angle. My doctor  accused me of “drug seeking behaviour” and sent messages to specialists requesting that only she prescribe the hydromorphone. This was said after I admitted to smoking marijuana because I felt the hydromorphone wasn’t helping enough. She also told me it was probably just anxiety or “all in my head.” The only outing I can remember from those days was to Ikea in a wheelchair and I was mortified that an old coworker saw me. It wasn’t until my lovingly stubborn best friend Jessica brought up taking birth control pills again that I rallied again to make a change. She also had migraines and was allowed to take pills, albeit different ones. I made an appointment to discuss with Dr. Lortie, and she had just come back from a conference or speech of some kind where they had questioned the contraindication of taking birth control. She subsequently agreed to give me continuous birth control. I started to get small moments of relief, where I was able to get outside. I even managed to keep a job for a few months!  In November of 2016, I was officially diagnosed with endometriosis based on my symptoms and ultrasounds. I had seen and heard the word bounced around so many times, as early as 18, but no one had ever followed through. Dr. Lortie provided me with two sheets of paper that included all the possible treatments that I could try to alleviate endometriosis and pelvic pain. I started an endometriosis specific birth control, Celebrex for pain and an anti-depressant that would help block pain centres in the brain. The birth control reduces the effect of estrogen on tissue, preventing further growth. The Celebrex and anti-depressant help me manage my every day pain and I take the over the counter Codeine with Tylenol for breakthrough pain. I’ve changed my diet to exclude dairy and other inflammatory foods, get massaged and will be starting physio in April to get my body back up to par.   I now spend time on Endometriosis groups, cheering people on and giving advice. I’ve referred tons of people to Dr. Lortie, because she has made such a significant impact on my life. I’ve come a long way from that girl hiding in Ikea, but I could have prevented all of this if someone had prescribed me continuous birth control. We need to do better for women. No person should have to go through almost fifteen years of this.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000005618112/birth-control-your-own-adventure.html

[nashvillerecovery]

Clean for Christmas - Almost

In September 2013 I was seeing a pain doctor who I believe was doing his best with me, despite knowing I was heavily addicted to the medications he was prescribing. or rather, the medications his physicians assistant was prescribing me. A cocktail of 120mg of oxycodone, 60mg of OxyContin and an unknown amount of the antidepressant Ativan. I was told to use the Ativan only when an emergency happened. "You get a paper cut, don't use it. Car wreck? You can use it". Those were the PA's words telling me how and when to use the Ativan. Sadly, I ignored all advice. All I cared about was not feeling the pain I was suffering from death in the family, financial ruin and many other horrible life experiences. By end of October 2013 I was struggling not only with taking too much oxycodone, but now Ativan had its grip on me. In case you don't know, benzo's are horrible drugs when you're addicted to them. Especially when you want to stop taking them. By end of the month I had taken too many Ativan and ran out 5 days early. I called and begged for a refill, but the PA was determined to teach me a lesson. Boy did she. The withdrawals from Ativan were worse than opioid withdrawals. I was manic. I felt insane. I could not function normally even for a minute. Two days of hell and I finally gave up. I called an inpatient treatment center and asked for a bed. They got me in two days later, which meant I suffered almost 5 days of benzo withdrawal. I had no idea at the time, but people die from abruptly stopping a benzo like Ativan. Now, I can see why. It messes with your mind, your heart, your breathing and most everything else you can imagine. Utter hell. "I actually felt worse at inpatient treatment than I did at home taking my damn pills" I went into treatment on November 1, 2013 assuming that by Thanksgiving I'd be cured. Nothing could be further from the truth. I suffered 13 days and nights of opioid withdrawal, couldn't sleep, couldn't function, and actually felt worse at inpatient treatment than I did at home taking my damn pills. In December 2013 I stayed clean for about 3 weeks. I can tell you it was the worst Christmas ever. I simply didn't care about anything. I just wanted relief and could think of nothing else. Those were the worst three weeks of my life and my family's life. I was f'ing miserable. Felt like I'd been hit by a truck. No energy, no motivation, no "want to" and in a lot of pain. I missed my pills, badly. Like any addict, I decided to go back to my pain doctor and start up the Oxycodone train again. After all, anything was better than feeling what I felt that Christmas. And, I mean anything... I got some pills from my pain doctor, but nothing like the dosage I had gotten before. They told me the laws had changed, and since I had gone to treatment they couldn't give me anything close to what they were giving me previously. Now, I was in the very worst place in my life. I can't get clean, I can't get enough pills and I can barely function. Life sucked and I was ready to put an end to it. Life stayed that way for about two weeks. Miserable. Not enough pills. Feeling like a horrible failure that I went to treatment and could not stay clean. In pain mentally and physically. In early January 2014 as a last resort I decided to call a Suboxone clinic. On January 8, 2019 I stepped into a clinic ready to try one last thing before ending my life. If Suboxone didn't work then I was ready to call it quits. "F'-it! Life sucked and I was done. January 9, 2014 - I will never forget that day for as long as I live. It was the day that completely changed my life and turned me from a 13-year addict back into a human being. I visited with the Suboxone doctor and therapist and got my first prescription. I went to the pharmacy and waited for it since I was again out of pills and in complete opioid withdrawal. I put my first Suboxone tablet under my tongue and went to get something to eat for lunch. I will never forget the feelings I got from the Suboxone while eating lunch. I suddenly noticed I was no longer in withdrawal. My shivers stopped. I no longer craved pills. My appetite came back. My mood shifted into a positive one. I was suddenly in a very good mood and felt something that had been missing for 13 years - Hope. What changed? Suboxone, that's what. Suboxone changed my life within 20 minutes of my very first dose. I haven't touched a drug (or alcohol) since. Suboxone allowed me to function like a normal human being without getting high, without taking pills, without withdrawals, without cravings and it restored my drive. Basically, Suboxone made me feel like I did before taking my first opioid pill. Suboxone was my miracle, and it has kept me clean since January 9, 2014. I took my time tapering off Suboxone. I was in no hurry to mess up my life again. Life got good quickly being clean on Suboxone. No more chasing pills. No more wasting money. No more lying to the family about my habit. I didn't take any chances - I did exactly as the clinic told me to do. I came every month on time for my appointments, I spent time with the therapists and I took my Suboxone just like they told me to. So yes, Christmas sucked in 2013. But, it did become the catalyst that eventually helped me get clean. I was either going to get better or I was going to die one way or another. Suboxone Made My Life Great Again Every Christmas since 2013 has been a fantastic. I can be present, caring, attentive, because I'm normal again. Suboxone is the best thing I ever did for myself. I've been clean almost 6 years thanks to Suboxone and I have no doubt I'd be dead without it. I've seen countless other's change their life with Suboxone just like I have. If you do what your doctor tells you to, then you're going to get better - quick. Anything that can turn a hopeless, 13-year addict into a happy, productive father, husband and member of society is a miracle in my book. If you or someone you know suffers from the disease of addiction - Stop right now. Call a Suboxone clinic and put an end to your addiction. You don't have to live this way. Quitting opioids and/or heroin is pretty painless with Suboxone. Hell, what do you have to lose? You know what life is like addicted, right? Why not try something new and start feeling good again? Read the full article

[psychotic-spectrum]

My experience with medications (long post ahead)

I’ve seen a lot of posts where people tell their experiences with psych meds, and since I’ve tried tons of them, I wanted to make my own post, and maybe help people in the process. All these experiences are individual and they might not be the same for other people, it’s just a guide.

My current diagnoses are BPD and schizophrenia-schizoaffective disorder. My previous misdiagnoses have been depression-anxiety, GAD, bipolar disorder type 2 and a dissociative disorder.

I’m gonna post the generic name of the medication and then the brand name, I’ll use the most popular brand name because in that way people would be able to identify them, but usually I use different brand names where I’m from.

Modafinil (Provigil) It was the first psych med I ever tried, a doctor friend of mine gave them to me after realizing I fell asleep everywhere, even sometimes standing up. At that time it was sold over the counter so I didn’t need a prescription. It was wonderful, I could have so much energy to work, to study, to go out at night, it was a life saver for me because that same year I started to study law and I was also working at the same time so it didn’t matter if I didn’t sleep because I still had energy and I could focus. I still use it today but the similar armodafinil.

Venlafaxine (Effexor) It was the first antidepressant I ever took, it was prescribed to me after I went to see a psychiatrist that had zero empathy and he diagnosed me with depression after talking for about ten minutes. I was really stressed when I saw him, but he decided I had depression even though I didn’t experience any symptoms of depression. He also gave me a “deal”, one box of Effexor and the next one free. Still I took it and it was terrible. I was sleepy as hell and nauseous, I couldn’t eat, I might‘ve lost at least a kilo in the month I took it, and it did nothing for my stress. I stopped taking it after a month and then I felt better.

Escitalopram (Lexapro) It was prescribed to me first by a GP after seeing my colon and stomach problems wouldn’t go away with medication, so she thought I needed something for my mood (I hadn’t been diagnosed with any mental illnesses at that time). It was kinda weird. It made me sleepy but I felt high, like as though I’ve been smoking weed, I felt pretty relaxed and I liked the effect, and I had no side effects. My friends said I talked weird, like a typical pothead, but it was the medication! I was on it for about a year.

Fluoxetine (Prozac) I was prescribed fluoxetine after a visit to another GP due to my colon problems, at that time, I had already seen a psychiatrist because I was in crisis and I had started self-harming (but I didn’t say it to her), she diagnosed me with GAD and increased my escitalopram. I was also seeing a psychologist on and off. When I went to see this GP, she said that fluoxetine was more effective than escitalopram for anxiety that caused my colon problems. Fluoxetine was great, I felt I had more energy, less appetite and I felt happier (by that time I already had mental health issues), but later when they prescribed fluoxetine for BPD, I was in such a high dosage that I started to feel numb, with no emotions. I remember seeing Steven Wilson, one of my favorite singers and feeling like I couldn’t cry with his songs. Later the dosage was reduced. I still take it nowadays but a low dosage. It helps.

Clonazepam (Klonopin) By the end of 2011 I was in a complete breakdown and I started having panic attacks. A doctor then prescribed me clonazepam and it was fantastic, I loved it. My anxiety was gone, I could do the things I wanted to do, concentrate, my mind wasn’t so active. It made me sleepy but it was tolerable. I stopped taking it because I grew a tolerance towards it.

Risperidone (Risperdal) OMG, I have a love-hate relationship with this medication. It was first prescribed for BPD, to control the self-harming urges. It was my first experience with antipsychotics. At first, I hated it, it made me really sleepy and foggy, it was hard to wake up, but I felt I improved a little. The downside? The weight gain. I could never get my pre-medication weight back. I’ve been on and off it since 2012, and now I take it every day for schizophrenia. It has done wonders for my psychotic symptoms, and I no longer feel foggy or extremely sleepy, I got used to it, and it works. It makes me more stable, so there’s no way I’m gonna go off this med, despite wanting to lose weight. It’s more important to be stable than thin. But the current side effects are: akathisia, zero sex drive and I stopped ovulating, so I can’t have kids right now (not that I’m looking for kids at the moment anyway)

Quetiapine (Seroquel)Oh boy how much I hate this drug. It was first prescribed after a psychiatrist changed my BPD diagnosis into bipolar disorder. At first, I was so unwell that I liked being almost unconscious from the drug. I couldn’t wake up on time, I fell asleep at work, everywhere I felt like I had no energy whatsoever. The year I was prescribed this med (2013) I started working two jobs and I had to take tons of coffee and modafinil to be able to perform in those jobs. I grew intolerant towards it, until one day, without asking my doctor, I simply stopped taking it, and I felt so good. I had energy again, I didn’t fall asleep everywhere, I didn’t need coffee 24/7, but I started experiencing weird psychotic symptoms. My doctor then decided to switch it to risperidone, but I was in such a low dose that didn’t help with my symptoms. But I was feeling fine so I didn’t really care at that time.

Lithium Since I was diagnosed as bipolar in 2013, my doctor said I should take lithium, I didn’t want at first, mainly due to the stigma associated with that drug. It was supposed to make me more stable, but I never felt stable with it. I also gained weight and I got acne. It did give me energy though, but since I took it with quetiapine, I didn’t really noticed it that much. I was on it for a year or more, until I went to the hospital and they stopped giving it to me, without knowing that my diagnosis was about to change.

Haloperidol (Haldol) I was first prescribed a low dosage after I started having auditory hallucinations, and it was great, the hallucinations stopped. Since I was only on 1 mg I didn’t have extrapyramidal effects and my muscles weren’t stiff. I stopped taking it later and replaced with a higher dosage of risperidone. When I was hospitalized, they started giving me 5 mg in the morning and 5 mg at night, and I felt completely numb. My brain had shut down. I had no motivation; I felt everything was plain, nothing excited me and also I had extrapyramidal effects. I felt dull, like my wits had gone. I took it the month after I left the hospital and I asked it to be switched to another antipsychotic. Now I take 1 mg prn when I feel psychotic and I haven’t had any side effects.

Lorazepam (Ativan) I started taking it at the hospital, they gave me 6 mg a day. I must admit that I love it. I feel my inhibitions are gone, I don’t feel so anxious, I have no problem showing my self-harm scars and it relaxes me as hell. But I get reaaaaly sleepy. I was supposed to take it when my anxiety was through the roof, but now I take it every day and I crave for it. I take 2 mg a day in the afternoons, and it makes me happy and high. I’ve become dependent on it and I don’t plan to change that.

Lamotrigine (Lamictal) When I was diagnosed bipolar, I took it as a mood stabilizer together with lithium. I didn’t experience many side effects, but I felt like the pill blocked any negative feelings, it’s like, a negative feeling popped into my mind and I could feel the lamotrigine blocking it. I took it for about two years.

Alprazolam (Xanax) When I grew tolerance towards clonazepam, I was prescribed alprazolam for anxiety. I took it every day and it made me feel really good, relaxed, and not as sleepy as with lorazepam. However, I also grew tolerant towards it so it was switched to lorazepam.

Aripiprazole (Abilify) I remember I went to see my psychiatrist almost crying for the gain weight I was getting from Risperidone, and I had done some research and read that aripiprazole was weight neutral. It is extremely expensive though, but I had insurance at that time so I didn’t care. I was only two weeks with it before my hospitalization. After I got my diagnosis of schizophrenia, and since I wanted to stop taking haldol, my doctor prescribed me the highest dosage of it (30 mg), but I still had to take risperidone. Even though it wasn’t that effective with psychotic symptoms, I felt no side effects while on it. I had to stop when I lost my job and my insurance, because I just couldn’t afford it.

Amisulpride (I don’t know the brand name) I don’t have much experience with it, only that I had to take it for a couple of weeks due to increased psychotic symptoms. It made me sleepy and foggy, I can remember.

Bupropion (wellbutrin) Being taking it since 2015, I like it a lot. It gives me energy and helps me to focus, at first I felt tachycardia as a side effect but it didn’t last long. Since I’m on so many meds, I can’t actually tell what it really does, only that it makes me feel good.

Armodafinil (Nuvigil) It was prescribed to me after I grew tolerant towards modafinil. The effect is quite similar, and I feel no side effects. Sometimes, if I’m too medicated with other things I can barely feel the effect. I think it’s more like a placebo to pretend I have energy.

And… that’s it I guess? My current meds are Risperidone 4,5 mg, Fluoxetine 30 mg, Bupropion 150 mg, Armodafinil 75 mg, Lorazepam 2mg, Haldol 1mg prn.

If you have any questions, just send an ask or reply to this post.