#normally I’ll have cramps and other symptoms leading up but so far nothing

[doublesidedgemini]

you know you’re sick when you’re celebrating not getting your period, and you’re for sure not pregnant… 😅

[boredom-thingy]

TL;DR- I have been sorta kinda diagnosed with Executive Function disorder (psychologist said it was very very very likely that I was suffering from it, but he couldn’t do anything) and I think I’m emotionally abused by my parents. I’m still trying to figure out whats what and what problem comes from where and if I can life hack it. I’m looking for help and/or other people suffering from the same things to add to the list. This is my list of symptoms.

Hey, all of you out there who struggle with executive function disorder or have been emotionally abused, or both. I have sorta been diagnosed with EFD and I think I’m being emotionally abused (I could be wrong and over reacting, I honestly can’t tell). Its been a while but I’m slowly discovering more and more symptoms that I thought were normal or scared the shit outta me (and still do) originally. Here’s an incomplete list, mind agreeing or disagreeing with them and adding your own? And/or how you deal with them?

My Incomplete (and ever growing) List-

Time. My sense of time is off, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There are times when I think something happened 2 months ago when in reality, it happened years ago. I can be left home alone and when my parents get home and ask me what I did for hours on end, I have zero clue, its just a blank hole. I lose track of time extremely easily too.

Other Disorders. I often feel like my particular brand of screwyness happens to combine other mental illnesses/disorders like insomnia, depression, anxiety, adhd, add, odd, and paranoia among others

Depersonalization/derealization(dissociation). Especially here recently, I think I’ve been suffering from episodes of Depersonalization-derealization disorder. Its happened in the past but not as much as right now.

I feel like I’m going insane. Constantly. I feel like I’m over-reacting to everything, like everything is in my imagination.

I always feel like I’ve done something wrong/upset people. People I don’t know, people I do know, people I love. I always feel like I’ve upset them or I’m some kind of burden or I’ve done something wrong. (Leads to me apologizing to a chair for hitting it.)

Extreme clumsiness. This one is prolly just me. But its often a source of anxiety for me.

Social skills are next to nothing. I can’t make friends. All the ones I have were introduced to me by other people or approached me on my own. And most of the time they end up ditching me and telling me its my fault. Also, my timing is shit. I’ll walk up and ask you for something while you're busy.

Cotton. I feel like my head is full of cotton, like I can’t think straight. My thoughts are either spaghetti or a train wreck. I lose track of what I was thinking extremely easily.

Memory. My memory is shit. My parents claim its not, and I feel like it didn’t used to be, but it is now. I forget how to do something when I read or heard the instructions 10 seconds earlier. I forget things that are important to me, things that I wanted to get or do. I forget when things happened (ties in with the time issue.) I can’t remember important life events, or more accurately, I can remember them, but the memory seems weirdly muddled and I cant remember when it happened.

Food. I love food. But there are times when I’m light-headed and dizzy, and I know I should eat, but I just... Don’t want to. The thought makes me nauseous, its too hard to get up, I’m not actually feeling hungry (despite the fact that I can hear my angry tummy and I can feel the light-headed/dizziness), etc. 

Being left alone (especially with not much to do). I don’t fear abandonment (ok I do a little, but that not the problem here.) I fear my own brain. I hate being left alone, especially for long periods of time because when I run out of things to keep my mind occupied, all those thoughts I forced to go away come steam rolling back. Intrusive thoughts, suicidal thoughts, self harm thoughts, extremely depressing thoughts, disturbing thoughts that scare me witless, thoughts of running away, etc. I can’t stand my own brain. It scares me.

Motivation. I go to school online, 4.1 gpa (so far) and I am a fairly self motivated person. But there are times when I can barely find the motivation to grab my glasses off the nightstand 2 inches from my face and other times when I’m motivated to do something, I’m almost in a frenzy, and I’m hyper-focused on it. And there are times when I really want to do something (usually something that I love, like a hobby) but the thought of doing it makes me nauseous and I just don’t want to. Or if its a creative thing, like writing, I can’t seem to form a single idea or spark to get me started. My brain nopes out and I can’t do anything but stare at the paper, desperately wanting to write, but my brain is a bout as blank as the paper is.

Body-brain disconnect. Sometime my body and my brain seem to be on separate wavelengths. I want to stop scrolling through pinterest, but I can’t seem to make myself. I want to get up and eat, I know I need to, but I can’t make myself. I want to get up and do dishes or take a shower or do something, but my body just wont move. I want to go do something fun, like watch tv or draw, but I’m no moving, no matter how much I want it.

Pain. I am always in some kind of physical and/or mental pain. Headaches(near constant dull headache), back aches(always), cramps even when no where near that time(I am female), random muscle twitches/spasms/aches, etc. Oh and nausea. I’m nauseous a LOT. I also am light-headed or dizzy (or both) a lot.

Extreme mood swings.  I go from being so happy I could burst to emotionally shut down and sobbing in the corner in the blink of an eye. I go from being so pissed off that I want to slam my fist through a wall and break things to being so depressed I want to kill myself and repeatedly slam my head against the wall until I can’t see straight. I also sometimes get extremely frustrated/angry with the smallest things, like a noise, or something not working right, or the pets being annoying. Sometimes it gets to the point where I want to scream and break something or hit something (I never do and try my absolute hardest not to.)

Morbid thoughts. Fleeting morbid thoughts, generally about somehow injuring/harming myself. I might see a light socket and think “oh hey, you should stick a fork in that and see what happens” or I might see a pair of nail clippers or scissors and think “I wonder what would happen if I tried to cut x-spot on my body with those.” When I was younger, I used to want to sew patterns in my skin with a sewing needle and thread (never did, thank god) so they would scar over and create neat patterns on my skin.

War. I feel like I'm at war with my own brain, I talk to myself a lot. (I am an only child with parents that run their own business ((making them constantly busy)) so that is very possibly a reason I talk to myself. I also have very few friends and I talk to walls and my two dogs as well.) I tell my brain to shut up, to stop it, I feel like it has a mind of its own. Thats weird to say. (woooooo I'm totally crazy, right?)

Apologies. I apologize to literally everything. And about everything. I’ll apologize to a chair for bumping it. I apologize to my boyfriend when I rant to him or ask for help from him. I apologize for anything and everything, small or big. The bigger the issue, the more embarrassed and upset I am about it. Even if its not big to the other person. Ties in with always feeling like I did something wrong.

Defense. I am always on the defense, and sometimes it turns into offense. I always feel like I have to defend myself and everything I do or say that might have even the smallest chance of upsetting someone. And if I know it has or will upset someone, I defend myself more, to the point that it sometimes becomes offense. I can’t stop myself, I feel like I have to defend myself or I’m going to lose something or someone, or they’re going to take something I want or love away from me.

Noises and other various audio things.  Sometimes I feel like I can just barely hear someone calling my name, or a song, or a noise, or something just barely audible, but no matter how much I search for it, I can’t find it. Other times I can quite clearly hear someone calling my name, but I’m home alone, or when I ask my parents or the other people around me, they respond with confusion and a “no one called your name.” Other time noises, like beeps from the printer, even when I’m the one causing it and/or I’ve heard it multiple times in the past few minutes, jar me. They cause a jarring sensation, that is almost bone deep, I feel it in the back of my skull and it causes me to jump just a little.

All of these things are terrifying to me at various levels and they only seem to be getting worse. I study psychology for fun, I plan on going into it as a profession, eventually. I have done research on most of this, but I can’t find much on any of it (except emotional abuse), especially executive function disorder. Please help? (I am always adding to things when I think of more.)

@bradshore @katimorton @we-care-org

[these-eyebrows-are-not-even]

Pain, Pain, go away, please come back another day

I have decided to start off the first Thursday of the month with a personal piece, the aim is for it to be like a confessional; I start the month fresh and we dive into all kinds of things during the rest of the month.

I don’t think of myself as any different than most 23 year olds apart from the fact that I have a tendency to write stuff down. For me the thing that sets my life apart is the pain I experience. Sometimes it’s for consecutive hours which lead to consecutive days or sometimes it could be as little as thirty minutes. My first memory of this pain is when I was 15 and sitting in my GCSE French Class. I remember sitting there in so much distress, I couldn’t focus, I was worried I was going to faint. My teacher sent me to the nurse’s office and I hardly remember walking there because of the pain. I was given a painkiller and a hot water bottle and laid there till my mum came and collected me. A friend had dropped off my stuff as I left class for the day and I went home. We were meant to go out for a birthday dinner that night, but my mum said “you’re too tired now, even though you’re no longer in pain, you’ll just be too tired to enjoy it” and she was right.

And then she told me about her pain and the painkillers she used to help with it. The system was you take co-codamol (codeine-paracetamol) and you take that every 3hr 30 so that you’re overlapping between doses — that way, you are ahead of the pain. But that isn’t enough. So you take ibuprofen too, as it’s a different formula to paracetamol so they can be taken together. So you take co-codamol and ibuprofen whilst having a constant hot water bottle. That’s what I did, sometimes it worked and other times the pain still came through. I got used to taking painkillers and pretending I didn’t want to cry because of it. I got used to having painkillers on me or running into drug stores to buy them. For any medical or pharmacy student out there reading this, I get that you’re worried about my kidneys, liver and stomach but I don’t know what to tell you.

When I moved to Maastricht, I had begun taking the pill constantly. Although I still felt pain on the pill, at least it wasn’t as bad when I had my period. There are two incidents I remember. The first was I was coming back from the supermarket with my weekly groceries and all of a sudden I was in so much pain that I just sat down on the pavement, I couldn’t walk. I debated how many minutes it would take for a friend to come get me and if I could walk the last ten minutes home. I finally got up and walked home crying in pain.

The second happened early on in my current relationship. I took my boyfriend to a house party and we were standing in the hallway by the stairs chatting with people and planning to move on to somewhere else soon, when all of a sudden the pain hit and I sat down on the stairs and prayed it would end. It didn’t, I told people I felt tired and would actually just go home. It was an easy walk back to my house but I could barely stand so me and my boyfriend walked to the bus stop. We got on the bus and he was trying every tactic to distract me from the pain that is consuming me. We get back to mine and walk up the 4 flights to my room. I lay down on my bed defeated and he had to undress me as I couldn’t even sit up to undo my jeans.

I suffer from debilitating cramps, I have crawled around my house not able to stand, I have been unable to shower with the pain and unable to sleep. I take far too many painkillers than recommended by medical professionals and I used to drink whilst taking them. But I don’t know what else to do.

My mum had endometriosis and after years of callous remarks and patronisation she was finally taken seriously. I didn’t want my story to be like my mum’s and so last year I summoned enough courage to go and see a doctor about it. I got referred to a gynaecologist and after an ultrasound and listing my symptoms I was told “I think you have endometriosis”. I got referred for a laparoscopy and got one in January this year. It is a minor key hole surgery where they examine the organs inside the abdomen and is the only way they can diagnose endometriosis and conditions like it. An incision around 1–1.15cm is made in your belly button and a tube is inserted through the incision. Carbon dioxide gas is pumped through the tube to inflate the abdomen. Inflating it allows the surgeon to see all your organs more clearly and gives them more room to work. A laparoscope is then inserted through the tube. The laparoscope relays images to a television monitor in the operating theatre, so the surgeon can clearly see the whole area. Further incisions can be made to check fertility or to remove any growths or scar tissue in the area. After the surgery, some of the gas remains in your body and drifts around so you may feel back pain and are very gassy as well as bloated. Apart from that, you may feel cramps and vaginal bleeding. It takes around 5 days to recover and bending, carrying heavy things etc is not advised as you don’t want to open the stitches. You also have to wear compression socks, in order to prevent blood clotting and I put them on straight after surgery and wore them in the days after. Bonus fact, sneezing is incredibly painful and holding a pillow around your stomach is very helpful in cushioning the pain (pun not intended). Two weeks after surgery you can have sex again however, that does not necessarily mean you want to. After the surgery I felt slight body dysmorphia because of the scarring and swelling that had occurred, which was mentioned in the helpful NHS pamphlet I was given! More information: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/laparoscopy/

My mother had the same operation many times and it was almost the exact same when she had it more than 20 years ago. She was the one who told me about the sneezing trick with a pillow! As a society, we have progressed medically in some areas so much, it is unrecognisable. However, for women’s health and women’s reproductive health, it is even hard to say that progress has been made at all.

After the surgery, I was told they had found nothing: I was fertile and there was no reason for the pain. They would book an appointment with me to discuss pain management options.

When the first period after my laparoscopy was pain free, I thought somehow I had been cured. But every one after that has been just like before and I still have random pain.

When talking with a friend about this she said “Planes fly through the air, thousands of them daily, carrying people across oceans and deserts and mountains, defying laws of gravity and weather. When a plane crashes, a full review is conducted and answers demanded despite the fact it defies so many things to even just take off. Despite it all Society cares about plane crashes. However, it takes 7–8 years for a woman to be diagnosed with endometriosis, for her pain to be taken seriously. Thousands of women suffer pain daily and the cause is easily researchable with all our technology but unlike the planes, society does not care about women’s pain”

And she was right. Society does not care about my pain or the pain of any other woman for that matter. That saddens me and it makes me angry. I would like to be in less pain and I don’t think that’s a big ask. I would still be happy with period pain but just at a more normal level of pain as I know my pain scale is messed up.

I would like not to have to decide between writhing in pain as I try and give my internal organs a break or taking the drugs and still ending up writhing in pain

I know they say I am fine but I know this pain isn’t normal and I know this isn’t the life I or other women deserve.

I also know that I’ll probably have more laparoscopies and that this was just my first.

I also know that if I do have endometriosis or a similar condition such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), that by the time they find it and treat it, I could be infertile, and that if society cared about my pain, something would have been done sooner. Society cares about my fertility but it does not care about the factors which alter it. If a woman became infertile due to reproductive conditions such as PCOS not being diagnosed early enough, the blame would fall on her for not seeking help sooner and not on the medical professionals who withheld help .

This may seem like an angry or bitter article but right now, I mainly feel sad. I feel sad because I know I’ll have to keep pushing for statistically 8 years and keep taking painkillers and saying things like “oh I think I’ll just take a seat” when a painful cramp hits and I feel weak.

I also want to say to every single woman out there, I am here to support you and here to continue fighting with you for medical professionals to take our pain more seriously and get the money allocated to needed research. We shouldn’t have to live with this pain.

[yuan2makeababy]

Week 9

Date: 3/20/18

How Far Along: 9 Weeks- got a new due date. we are officially expecting nugget on 10/23! Gender: Still leaning towards girl. I am waiting on a call from the genetics councilor to set up our early chromosomal testing which will also tell us the sex of the baby. so (fingers crossed) we should know in the next 2-4 weeks!  Weight Gain: At my drs appointment yesterday I had actually lost 5 pounds. 

Stretch Marks: Nothing yet. I have some old stretch marks on my hips from just growing up, so i expect those to get larger. Everything I’ve read pretty much says there is no proof that lathering up helps anything... so I will buy some belly/boob lotion once I start growing, but as of now I’m not into rubbing myself down with lotion. If I’m gonna get stretch marks, it’ll happen with or without the lotion.

Maternity Clothes: No, but I would like to go shopping for some soon. I’m looking for a new job and I’ll need to hide the bump for a little bit once I transition. Sleep: can’t. get. enough! Week 9 was the week of total exhaustion. I’ve taken a nap the last 3 days. Then at night, I’m not sleeping well. Little noises wake me and I struggle a bit to fall back asleep when they do. now when I say “a bit” it probably only takes me 2 minutes, but that’s a long time compared to my usual 10 seconds to pass back out! Best Moment This Week: WE SAW OUR LITTLE NUGGET! Now, I have to say I have been stressing about this first appointment. I was convinced something was wrong and was getting mentally prepared for the worst. BUT IT WAS PERFECT *insert all of the crying face emojis*. Nugget is showing 2 days ahead of schedule, which I’m not surprised by as I got the BFP 2 days earlier than I was supposed to. But nugget was perfect. They had a strong heartbeat (179 BPM) and even moved while we were watching them. I started laughing when it wiggled and I think I freaked it out because it stopped moving! haha. But it was amazing to see it safe and sound and moving and perfect. I had an OB prep appointment that got me ready to go with my new doctor. I’m leaning towards using a midwife, which is exciting!

I also got a job offer this week! I have another interview for another job in 2 weeks, so the job transition is looking good! ready to get out of this gig I’m in now and have a normal life with nugget, Dud, and the hubs.

Lastly, we told my in laws about nugget. they were excited and already asked if we had a registry to start buy things! I have a feeling random baby things are just going to start showing up at our house now, haha! Worst Moment This Week: I had a ton of anxiety leading up to our first appointment. I just knew something would be wrong, and thank god nothing was! But the amount of stress and anxiety I felt was terrible. Other than that, it’s been a good week! Miss Anything: I’m feeling pretty normal this week. I still really want a glass of wine, and some oysters sound amazing! Meat still sin’t appeal, except for steak... love me some steak! haha. but chicken and any other meat, heck no! We had my favorite Mexican restaurant for lunch yesterday and i really couldn’t eat the chicken in my nachos, I had to eat around all of it which was pretty sad :( Movement: I don’t feel it, but i saw nugget move in the u/s yesterday! it’s little arm buds were moving and IT WAS SO STINKING CUTE! And i’m having simple back pain still, like early period cramps in my back.

Symptoms: i’m freaking exhausted! So tired all of the time. between noon and 3 I just need to NAP. This is my first day back in the office since the exhaustion has bit, so we will see how that goes, haha. 

And my boobs are actually bigger, like legit bigger! I plan on going to target this week and getting some larger bralets, because these things are getting out of control! I have felt like they have gotten bigger in the early weeks, but now even the hubs has noticed and he doesn’t notice things! And this morning when I was getting dressed I was shocked with how they looked!

Cravings: not a ton of cravings. Still into sweet stuff. we bought a lot of fruit this weekend so I have been eating a lot of grapes which are as sweet as candy! Queasy or Sick: still a little queasy at times. Mostly only after I eat or try to eat meat. thankfully no sickness and actually feeling better most of the day Have You Started To Show Yet: Still just boobs and bloat :) Labor Signs: Nope Belly Button In or Out? In Wedding Rings On or Off? On Happy or Moody Most of the Time: Moody most of the time. My poor husband asked if there was something wrong with me yesterday because I was being so short. I just have mood swings alllll over the place. Sorry hubs. Looking Forward To: I’m currently waiting on a couple of calls! 1- the genetic counselor. we are doing the NIPS test so we are planning the date when that is going to happen. Hopefully in the next 2 weeks we will have the blood work done and ultrasound around week 11/12. with that we will also find out the sex of nugget which is SO EXCITING. 2- the Midwife group. I think I have decided to go with the midwife group so I can have a little more personalized attention. the midwife group works with an OB, so if anything happens I will have access to an OB, but I’m excited to go with the more flexible route! So I need both of these calls to happen so we can get moving with this baby stuff! :):):):)