#negative and difficult on this blog lately hoo boy is my posting on here not even scratching the surface

[corset]

Our mental health has been in such an interestingly terrible place for the last month or so. Genuinely kind of fascinating to watch from different internal angles....like watching the ocean ebb and flow and change temperament at random sometimes based on weather or the moon or something. Like this shit is just terrible

[simmer-for-hire-blog]

Why I haven’t been around.

Hoo boy, this is gonna be a Longpost™ so I’m probably gonna put it under a cut, just so you guys don’t have to look at the whole thing on your dash. But this is basically just gonna be me outlining why I haven’t been around on Tumblr, and more broadly just kinda everywhere. Also, there might be some darker themes and stuff, so I’ll make sure to put in the appropriate trigger warnings in the tags. And before any of you rush to judgments, no I’m not making this post to garner sympathy or for notes or anything like that. If anything I’m just trying to provide an explanation to those who follow me and are disappointed by my lack of posts, and potentially raise awareness for what I’m going through and provide some basic information. So hold on to your hats, because here we gooo! (There’s also gonna be some TMI in here about periods and stuff so if that kind of thing grosses you out then you probably shouldn’t read this tbh)

So I’ve had a few health problems - both physical and mental - that I’ve been trying to  overcome over the past couple of years or so. Most of my problems concern the endocrine (hormone) system and reproductive organs, so if this is TMI, then it might be better for you to not continue reading as I will probably go into some detail.

For about a year or so, I’ve had the official diagnosis of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS, but I’ve been suffering from it for a good five years or so idk? For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it is a condition that is related to abnormal hormone production in the body, which results in characteristics such as excess hair growth, weight gain, irregular or no periods and - the main focal point - fluid-filled sacs growing in the ovaries, which can cause a lot of pain if they burst. I’d just like to make a note here that I am in no way an expert, so the information here may not be completely accurate, so I urge you to do your own research on this if you wish to find out more, rather than taking what I say as fact. My personal experience with this has been less severe than a lot of cases, I would say. I first started showing symptoms around 2014/2015, when my periods became irregular, and eventually stopped altogether over the period of about 4 months. Naturally, I went to see a doctor, and had maybe the worst experience I’ve ever had with a medical professional. It took him two years (still with no periods) to finally admit that something was wrong, and I ended up having to enter each medical appointment with the attitude that I would need to fight tooth and nail to get him to admit that I could have a problem. But eventually he agreed to send me for an ultrasound, and there it was found that I had a borderline amount of cysts (not enough for a certain diagnosis, but too many to say that there was nothing wrong), leading to a diagnosis being given, as I had a lot of other symptoms. There is no treatment for PCOS, as it cannot be cured, so all the doctors can do is suggest options to manage the symptoms. One such option is the contraceptive pill, which they put me on. I had such a terrible reaction to this that I stopped taking them because it was impossible for me to function as a human being while I was on them, as they worsened the disorder that I will tell you about next. However, when I came off the pill, I actually started getting periods again, which seemed like a miraculous recovery, until something worse happened...

So I was thinking that everything would be magically better when I started having periods again. Unfortunately for me this was not the case. After coming off the contraceptive pill, I had regular (yet very light) periods again. So this meant that the cycle of hormones was continuing normally. For the week or so leading up to my period until a couple of days into the period, where people would often experience PMS, it’s like I became a different person. I’d have episodes where I’d be so sad that I couldn’t get out of bed, and would sometimes barely be able to move. Obviously this caused me to miss a lot of school. I think my attendance at the end of this school year must have been like 50% or something. I’d also experience fits of violent rage, and overwhelming thoughts of self-harm and suicide. In February of this year, it all became too much for me, and I was admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. Luckily for me and everyone around me, I survived and was discharged a couple of days afterwards. My memory of the event is terrible due to the nature of the attempt so I couldn’t really tell you very much about my experience. It was a very strange period of time, because about halfway through each period, these symptoms would fade away, and I’d be left wondering why I’d ever had these thoughts and feelings, because they wouldn’t even cross my mind when these ‘episodes’ weren’t going on. It was during this time that a family member sent me a link to an article. This article was about a woman who, like me, suffered an almost complete personality change for a few weeks per month, in a seemingly cyclical nature. Like me, this started when she first got her periods and didn’t affect her all the time. The only difference is that her periods were always regular, whereas I had barely had any due to the PCOS. This woman was diagnosed with a disorder called Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, or PMDD. A lot of the information is on the website that I have linked, but feel free to do your own research if you’re curious. To summarise, it is a disorder caused by sensitivity to normal hormone fluctuations that causes extreme mood swings, depression, anxiety, bursts of rage etc. between ovulation and bleeding (which basically means the week or two leading up to your period). For me, this disorder is crippling, and has destroyed any chance of a life I could have had. I cannot continue any form of education, I cannot work (I had a job for about an hour before I couldn’t take it but that’s another story), so there’s not much to do with my life. Lately I have been thinking long and hard about some information that I’ve recently come across. According to the Equality Act of 2010 (this applies to me because I live in the UK, but it’ll be different in other countries), a disability is defined as ‘having a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long term negative effect on your ability to do normal day to day activities’. According to this definition, my PMDD is a disability, but I haven’t fully read up on the legislation, so I couldn’t whether legally it would count or anything like that. I also don’t know how I feel about being defined as ‘disabled’, because mental disorders aren’t typically seen as being disabling in our society and there’s a stigma around people with disabilities being ‘helpless’ and I’m certainly not that, and I don’t want to undermine people who suffer from physical disabilities by calling myself ‘disabled’, so there’s a whole host of reasons why I don’t want to jump to that.

Contrary to what I’ve been saying here, there is actually hope for me. PMDD and PCOS are not completely curable per se, but there are ways to manage and educe symptoms, so I can live a normal life (PMDD is more curable than PCOS however, which has been touched upon in the article I linked earlier, and I will briefly discuss in a second). However, so far my GP has been of absolutely no help, and I fully intend to complain officially because the way they have treated me is appalling and has basically ruined the current state of my life. That is why I decided to see a private specialist. I am so lucky that my family have the financial security needed to be able to afford a private healthcare consultation, because I received so much more help from them in the half hour consultation than I ever received from my GP in the four years that I have been going to them for help on these matters. The private doctor listened to the timeline of events that I laid out for her, and the full extent of what is currently going on, and recommended that I take vitamin supplements, as they have been proven to slightly manage PMDD symptoms, and prescribed a five-day contraceptive which would hopefully get my periods kick-started again, as I have missed the last four months with no sign of them returning. I’m currently on the last day of this contraceptive, and I’ve been suffering with really bad PMDD (didn’t really help that I was out drinking on friday which usually makes my symptoms worse, but oh well, it was a good night), so hopefully these will yield results within a couple of days. The consultant is also following up with a colleague in London who is an expert on this kind of thing, and will shoot me an email if she finds anything else out. Treatment options for PMDD can include inducing menopause early or even a hysterectomy (removal of the female reproductive organ), but I have been told that hopefully it will not come to that.

So yeah, that’s been my journey so far. During this time, it’s been difficult, even impossible, to keep up with this blog. I hope that you understand why I haven’t been able to update regularly. If you have any questions, please ask me, and I’ll try to the best of my ability to answer all of them. If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and by the way, thank you for 738 followers! I really don’t deserve that much love and support considering I haven’t made a post in months, but it means a lot. I hope this post informed you all about what I’ve been dealing with and all that, and I’ll try to make some sort of recovery in order to keep posting here. I love you guys xx