Mental Health: I

Something that I've heard repeatedly during this whole thing has been, "You are so strong, I have no idea how you do what you do and still stay sane!" Well, for starters, that's assuming that you consider my baseline mental state to fall within the realm of 'sane'. Many do not.

But in all seriousness, sanity is what you make it. To date, I haven't been dealing, I've been coping. There is a significant difference. The biggest distinction between the two being that the second is largely hiding from the problem, while the first is actually working through it. In my opinion, coping over the long term is not a good thing for one's mental health.

We all have different coping methods. I've cycled through throwing myself into different things, some more destructive than others. There's been work, alcohol, intimacy, Gaming (D&D, MTG, console gaming, LARP, etc.), and most recently, housework.

My employers certainly appreciated me throwing myself into my work. I became the person they could expect to show up early, and not complain about leaving late. The person who was available for on-call, shift swapping, and extra shifts.

Alcohol, I have to be extra careful with. Partly because I have what I refer to as an addictive personality, and partly because the pills that I take magnify the affect of the alcohol. (Before you have a coronary, read the disclaimer in Physical Health: II) Makes me a cheap drunk which, to me, is not a bad thing. *wink*

As for intimacy, well, lets just say that I haven't been in a monogamous relationship since 2010, and leave it at that, shall we?

That leads us to Gaming. Gaming has become my little obsession. There was a time that I was participating in three to five Dungeons & Dragons games a week, doing a Vampire live action role play game once a month, not to mention between-game session stuff via email. And that was before I quit my job...

During the couple of months before my health forced me into the ranks of the unemployed,when at home I would spend my time sleeping, or playing the Xbox 360. My three favourite games were BioShock, Bulletstorm, and Borderlands. These were the kind of point and shoot games that I could play even when I was exhausted from the pain and lack of sleep (This is back when the pain and nightmares meant I was averaging four hours a night of sleep. More on the nightmares later). I played through Bulletstorm, BioShock 2, and the last half of Borderlands in the last two months before I moved to London, leaving the Xbox behind.

I've traded it in for Magic the Gathering (MTG) with my housemates, three of whom are fellow Gamers, and each have several of their own decks. I have one that was built for me that I've tweaked, and three that I've built myself. I'm also back to computer games. Things like Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Torchlight, and Torchlight II, all of which I play with one of my housemates when he has time, or on my own between housework. Part of this Mystery Disease is not being able to sit for extended periods of time without excruciating pain in my back and shoulders. If I can find a comfortable enough chair, and an outlet for my electric heat wrap, I'm good for an hour or two at a time. After that, I have to get up and stretch, but it's still a really long time for me to be stationary. I prefer to be mobile every half hour, which makes movies at a theatre a killer. I've also dabbled with other console games, as we have a PS2, and a Wii, which, as I understand it, plays any of the Nintendo, disc based games.

Which leads us up to housework. I've mentioned in other posts that I have ADHD as well as OCD. I live with four other people, and am the only one not gainfully employed. This means, in my mind, that there is no good reason that I shouldn't be doing the lion's share of the housework. I am one of those few special (read insane) people who actually enjoy housework and find it relaxing. I am considered by most to be a very industrious person. The problem is that I am accustomed to being able to work all day outside the home, come home and do housework, go be social, and come back for more housework. It has taken me some time, and several physical breakdowns, to find a balance between my mental health and my physical health, as far as housework goes.

On that note, let's talk about good days and bad days.

A bad day means that I am limited to things like putting the dishes away, and sweeping the floors, and even those are a struggle, because I am nearly completely numb in my left side. It means needing my cane if I leave the house, and using the railings and likely the walls, to keep myself upright on the stairs, and being overtly conscious of how many trips up and down I take. I often camp out on the ground floor and don't go up or down stairs until bedtime.

My worst days also include left/right confusion between my brain and my body (meaning to do something with the left hand or foot, and having the right respond instead, and vica verca), the inability to string more than a few words together without stuttering horribly, the occasional loss of a line of thought, and huge holes in my generally ample vocabulary. These are generally days when no one hears from me. I hole up in bed watching movies or in front of my computer playing simple RPG's.

A good day immediately following a bad day feels like a gift from the Gods. Even though my baseline keeps sinking, anything better than a bad day is fine by me! Though it leaves me struggling not to overdo things around the house, or going for walks, or social stuff. I have to remember that though I may feel like Superwoman by comparison to the previous day, overdoing it will land me right back on the couch, if not the hospital (which thus far, I have avoided).

My current struggle: Find a long term solution that resembles dealing rather than simply coping.

Physical Health: I

Where to begin. Well, as a kid, I was often sick. Usually the first one to catch any bug going around, and the worst hit by the virus. I can remember having the flu so bad in high school that I dropped 15 lbs in 2 weeks. That'll happen when you have a high metabolism and eat nothing but jello and ginger ale for 2 weeks. Measles I got before I started school. Chicken pox waited until the fourth grade, for some reason. Grew up on a hobby farm, with lots of chores to do. Spent my off time reading or riding my bike or just messing around building forts and clearing trails in the bush. Was on the track team all through grade school and into high school.*shrugs* Nothing major, nothing special. Unless you count undiagnosed ADHD and OCD, which I don't.

The winter that I turned seventeen is where it all started. We did the same thing we had done every year since high school started; went down the road to my grandmother's to go sledding in the series of gullies on her property. The only real difference being, that because there was fresh powder, one of the bigger guys treated us by tossing us all down the hill to flounder in the deep snow. It was a lot of fun, and the perfect way to pack down some of the sled run. Everything was fine until it came to my turn. You see, he found a gopher hole with his foot, misstepped, and it threw off my trajectory causing me to land of the flat of my shoulders. It hurt a lot and knocked the wind out of me. But the freaky part was that I couldn't even lift my arm to let them know I was okay. By the time they scrambled to he bottom of the hill, I was okay, had climbed to my knees, and was giving my head a shake. I got up and spent the rest of the afternoon sledding just at though nothing were wrong.

Later that summer, I got my first migraine. Not that this was unheard of in my family, and until recently, I didn't even consider in part of the bigger picture. These were debilitating migraines. Light and sound sensitivity, vomiting, the whole works. MRI's showed nothing, and Tylenol didn't touch it. Mom's home remedy was a dark room, and sipping a shot of cherry whiskey over the span of half an hour. That always managed to work. And so I carried on with life.

It wasn't until the age of twenty-four that the old back injury seemed to catch up with me. I was working in a Café at the time, and all of the lifting, bending and twisting was finally getting to me. One day in particular, after helping to haul off the plexi glass slabs that made up the patio enclosure, I seemed more done in than usual. And so I booked myself an appointment with my brand new Family Doctor. Initial assessment was most likely a mechanical injury, due to hefting things that a girl of my petite stature really aught not to be lifting but, just to be safe, he scheduled me an x-ray. I got a call back after the scan, and was asked to come back in to see the Doctor.

Now, at this point, I'd like to interject with a little bit of a side note about my luck with doctors to date. While my paediatrician while still in my home town of Orillia had been a marvel of a Medical Practitioner, every doctor I had had since (and living in small town rural northern Ontario, that ended up being a steady stream of them) had been a complete waste of a diploma, in my humble opinion. And this guy, well he just took the cake.

Forgetting the fact that he was late for my initial and follow up appointments (I understand that Doctors are people too, with their own lives and own personal or even professional emergencies), by the time he showed up to my x-ray follow up, he brusquely told me that I had Degenerative Disc Disease, but that we weren't going to be doing any replacement surgery, that it would be up to me to exercise and lose weight. I sort of blinked at him, doing a fair 'deer in headlights' routine. I tried to ask him a few questions, which he bulldozed through. Some explanation of how my vertebrae in the neck and shoulder areas were inverted, but that weight loss and exercise would fix everything. He was about to write me a prescription for oxicodone. No thanks! I'm good! Tried to ask a few follow up questions. I mean, disease? Wouldn't you ask a few questions? His response, was to square off with me and state, in no uncertain terms, "I. Have. To GO!" I sputtered, having no clue what I could possibly have done wrong. I was this close to losing my infamous Scottish/French temper at him before reigning it in and replacing it with my best Customer Service demeanour. I thanked him, apologised for keeping him, and walked out. Suffice it to say, I never went back.

I did however, go home and pull of a wikipedia article on DDD, in hopes of answering my myriad questions. As you can see from the article, it's not really that bad. something that happens to our body naturally as we age, that I had supposedly managed to accelerate due to disregarding that repetitive adage running through my head whenever I did something foolhardy; my mother's voice saying "You're going to regret that when you're older." So I lost the weight, I did the workouts, and I trained my body to deal with the pain which, at first, was only sporadic. Generally, whenever I'd over done it at work.

Two years later, I had migrated from food service to telephone based customer service, the pain getting to the point that I could simply no longer tolerate the strains of standing on my feel all day, and the bend, lift twist that is the natural rhythm of work in a kitchen. I mourned the shift in careers, because I greatly enjoyed the idle banter and lively chit chat with customers that one cannot always, if ever, get away with in a phone anchored customer service environment. But the pain was slowly changing from periodic flairs, to a near constant buzz in my nerve endings. Approximately two years after my original diagnosis, I was missing whole and partial days at work due to the pain induced vomiting. There were now some days that I wouldn't even make it out of bed before my body was rebelling against the amount of pain it was in. It was time to buckle down and find myself a new Family Doctor.