Anxiety/Depression

Diagnostic Appointment Delayed

By / December 11, 2014 / 4 Comments

I made the appointment three months ago. I made it after a hard day where I realized that I needed guidance on how to help my teenage son shift into adulthood while managing his own particular mix of capabilities and disabilities. I needed a doctor to talk with him about the medicines he takes, so that my son is prepared to make rational decisions about those medicines rather than making reactionary decisions.

A month passed and things did not get easier. We ended up meeting with a general practitioner to adjust meds. I met with the school to adjust his schedule. I learned about programs that become available with a signed diagnosis letter. I was glad to be able to say “We already have an appointment scheduled.” We were struggling and muddling toward solutions, but I knew that an appointment was scheduled with a doctor I trust. I was willing to wait so I could see this particular doctor.

It was all lined up. The appointment was today. I could get the school form signed. I could get prescription refills. Howard went on the run to get the college kid from school. I arranged for my neighbor to pick up the elementary carpool. I’d cleared and defended the day. I didn’t know all the results that the appointment would bring. Maybe a new diagnosis. Maybe a process to switch medications. Maybe just affirmation that we were already doing all the things that were necessary. But at least I knew that I would no longer be waiting for an appointment. We would then be on the patient list rather than the New Patient list, which meant follow up phone calls and appointments would be handled far more expeditiously.

This morning I got a phone call. They had to reschedule. Next available appointment is January 5, twenty-five days from today. I get another month of muddling through and waiting for an appointment. I’m not mad at the doctor. He didn’t want to have stomach flu today. I’m certain he would much rather have spent his day meeting with me. Yet the cancellation of the appointment hit me hard. Today has been hard. Sometimes I don’t realize how much emotion I have riding on an event until the event is cancelled or changed.

I think this is one of the hardest aspects of mental illness. After making my way over the hurdle of admitting I needed professional help for my child, I had to wait. Then I had to talk about the appointment to school staff. Then I had to go explain to a general practitioner why I needed an interim prescription until I could see the psychiatrist. With the appointment moved, I had to have all of those conversations over again. I had to call the GP and say “Would you please write this letter that the school needs?” because my son can not afford to wait until January for the services. I had to ask the GP for a prescription extension so that we won’t run out before we have the chance to meet with the psychiatrist. Across the middle of this, our insurance will be switching over to a new plan on January 1st. This will probably be to our benefit, but it still requires me to adjust for the new company.

I have enough force of will and comprehension of what needs to be done that I can wade through all of that. I want to cry for the families who have no idea how to navigate to get mental health care and who don’t know what questions to ask at the schools to get help. It has been confusing and exhausting. Instead of exiting today with a new health partner and a new course, I am facing another month of stopgap measures. I don’t like stopgap measures.

So we do the only thing we can do, which is to keep facing each day and do the best we can. The good news is that something in the medicine switches, therapy, and schedule switches has been helping. Life is better for him now than it was two weeks ago. We’ll just keep on doing the things that seem to be working until we can have the diagnostic appointment that we need.

Recognizing Depression in Myself

By / November 30, 2014 / 3 Comments

“Are you okay?” My friend asked. “It feels like even when I see you, I don’t see you. I’m wondering if maybe you’re depressed.”

She used a lot more words than that and they were phrased carefully, but that was the core of what my friend said to me. Yes I’m depressed. I’ve been depressed off and on since the beginning of 2013. I figured it was situational. 2013 was a year of transition for our family. All four of my kids were struggling in various ways. I pulled in and held tight, figuring that when things settled out, my state would also settle out. And I wasn’t depressed all the time. There have been months where I was content or even happy. Sometimes more than one month in a row. I said all of that to my friend and asked her when she last felt like she had seen me. I thought maybe she was noticing the latest downturn. The one that started building about the same time that school started.

“I’m not sure, a couple of years maybe?”

There was something about the way she said it which triggered a connection in my head. Two years ago this month, November 2012, I was having troubles with anxiety. I discussed it with my doctor and we decided to reduce my thyroid medicine to see if that would help. It did help. It brought the anxiety down enough that I was able to find the anxiety triggers and deactivate them. Howard and I have worked together on that. He started his anti-depressants. We’ve restructured how we see and manage anxiety so that it simply is not the problem that it used to be.

But then I thought about what my friend said. She hasn’t felt like I’ve been me in about two years.

How long has it been since I did my hair fancy and dressed extra nice for church just because I felt like it? About two years.

How long since I did crafts just because and idea came to me and I wanted to see how it worked? About two years.

How long since I took on a sewing project because it interested me? About two years.

How long have I been slowly gaining weight that refuses to come off with diet and exercise adjustments? About two years.

How long have I felt just a little overwhelmed with my life? About two years.

I put in a call to my doctor. We agreed to increase my dosage of thyroid medicine. Maybe it will pull me out of this, maybe it won’t, but it is a logical first step. I started the new dosage about a week ago. So far the only difference I’ve noticed is that my resting state is no longer “I feel like crying.” If that is the only improvement I get, I’ll take it. The other thing I need to do is talk to some mental health professionals about my kids needs and about mine. That appointment is scheduled for next week. Hopefully by then I will have shipped the vast majority of the book release packages. That will help me clear my head. I need emotional space to figure out how much (if any) of this depression is chemical and how much is the natural result in all of the family shifts we’ve had in the past two years.

Seeking Happiness

By / November 18, 2014

A few days ago I wrote a post about finding ways to be happy while still being busy. Yesterday Gleek showed me this TED talk which both backs up my assertion that becoming less busy is not the secret to happiness. Nor is it something we achieve after we’ve accomplished our goals. Instead it is being happy that will help us achieve things. The talk is only twelve minutes, laugh-out-loud funny, and well worth your time.

The Happy Secret to Better Work

Signs of Stress

By / November 18, 2014 / 1 Comment

I was sitting on the kitchen floor in front of the heating vent by the kitchen sink. My back was to the cupboards with additional cupboards on all three sides. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, aware that this sitting-on-the-floor behavior is only something I do when I’m stressed. I don’t know why sitting in that particular spot is comforting when I’m upset, but it is. At least in the winter when the vent blows warm. I sat there, eyes closed, sorting my thoughts. One of the thoughts was to review in my mind the various signs of stress that are typical for the other members of my household. Howard gets irritable, particularly about food things. Kiki fixates on small problems and sleeps more than usual. Gleek gets angry and defensive, she also accumulates things. Patch fidgets and gets indecisive. So I review, the girls are both doing well right now. Howard is under work stress, but in normal quantities. The boys are both struggling. They are stressed.

In that list of signs of stress, I didn’t mention Link. That’s because I made a very saddening realization. If I made a list of “Things Link usually does daily” that list will match up one-to-one with the list of “signs that Link is stressed or depressed.” The stress has been so pervasive for so long that none of us recognized it as anything outside of normal. Mental illness is so sneaky. It doesn’t show up with a dramatic change the way that a cold or the flu does. There is no quick comparison yesterday to today. Instead you have a child who is changing and growing all the time. So you assume that everything is just part of their evolving personality. Except there is this creeping, niggling thought which grows stronger. Maybe this isn’t normal. Everyone says the teenage years are hard, but maybe they shouldn’t be quite this hard. I owe huge debts of gratitude to my parenting community. There were people who listened to me and said “no, that’s outside of normal.” I feel like I should have been strong enough to seek help without needing that decision validated.

The good news is that the school administrative staff have bent over backwards to be helpful. I don’t know if everyone has that experience with them. It probably helps that I was able to say that I’ve already scheduled doctor’s appointments. It was obvious that I’m taking all the “right” steps. And yet this still is not easy. There are also teachers in the mix. Some of them understand and work with me. Others, not so much. Which is why I end up sitting on the floor of my kitchen, rehearsing parts of difficult conversations I need to have in the next few days. And I think about how difficult it is to stand strong and say “Yes I know that thing should be simple, but for my child it is not.” And then to have to say it over and over again in different contexts, working to give my child the space he needs to heal and grow strong. My job seems clear when I type it out like that, yet I constantly second guess myself about whether I’m choosing correctly. And once I have the conversations, I’ll probably spend hours rehashing them in my head, thinking of different things I should have said. It is all so exhausting.

Finding Happiness While Being Busy

By / November 9, 2014 / 1 Comment

Someone posted a link to an article about busyness as a disease. The content of the post was familiar. I’ve read it a dozen times before in various iterations. It lamented our over-scheduled lives, the fact that we don’t disengage from technology, that kids don’t have time to be bored. Many times I’ve read articles like this one and I’ve agreed. I spent years in an ongoing struggle to slow down my life. I thought that surely if life had a less hectic pace, I would have more happiness.

Then I had an epiphany, how happy I am has very little to do with the quantity of things on my to do list. I have been happy while working full-tilt with no time to stop. I have been miserable when I had long and leisurely days. Busy becomes miserable when I prioritize urgent over important. Busy is miserable if I’m busy at the wrong things or if I have to be busy according to someone else’s priorities instead of mine. That last part is the part that trips me up most often. I share my life with four children and a husband who all put things on my schedule. Then there are relatives, friends, church, school, etc. All of them would like to schedule me. Misery is not the goal, but sometimes it is the result if I do not keep in touch with my own priorities.

For years my kids did not have any after school lessons or activities. They came home and they played. Mostly they played video games. (There’s another set of articles telling me all about how that isn’t a good idea either.) This year two of my kids picked up one activity each. I watched how these outside activities added to their lives and brought them joy. They became more than they had been. Recently my son has become quite easily stressed. As I was casting about for solutions to his stress, I briefly considered dropping his outside activity (cello lessons) to give him more free time. I’ve rejected that, because I can see that free time doesn’t make him less stressed. In fact, sometimes he gets stressed because choosing to play this video game means he’ll have less time for that one. He’s not stressed because he’s busy. The stress is coming from somewhere else. (Hormones probably. Puberty is hard.) The key is that we don’t want to allow stress to steal something he enjoys. We don’t want to let stress make him smaller.

The life I have chosen is always going to be a busy one. I’ll always have multiple projects running in parallel. I’ll always have to use lists to track the things I need to get done. When I’ve got myself properly focused, I like being busy. Not everyone would be happy with a life like mine. Which is fine, everyone has to build their own life and fill it with their own priorities as much as they are able. (Most of us don’t get to be the sole masters of the lives we have.) For me, these past few weeks have been made of schedule disruption as I’ve responded to kid meltdowns and school absences. I have to find ways to reach for happiness no matter what else is going on in my days. That is hard on the days when I feel both stretched thin and emotionally bruised. Yet if I reach for happiness in the hard times, I’ll likely grab it when things lighten up. And I can do it while still being busy. I’m not going to let stress or anxiety make me live smaller.

Recognition

By / November 7, 2014 / 4 Comments

Optical illusions are fascinating. I remember staring at the picture of the young lady and then suddenly something switched inside my head and I could see the old witchy lady. Then it would switch back again. The same thing happened with word searches. I’d stare and stare at a box of random letters until, bam. There was the word I’d been looking for and I wondered how I could have missed it before. What I remember most is that moment of recognition, when nothing changes in what I’m looking at, but suddenly I see it differently.

I had such a moment this week. I wish it had been a happier one. I listened to my son and realized that he was saying the same sorts of things that Howard does when he’s depressed. It is not a surprise that my son is depressed. Not really. I knew this was there, just like I knew the old lady was there when I saw the young one. But it is different in the moment that I actually see it.

I’ve already met with school administrators once this week. I’ll do it again tomorrow. That meeting will likely spawn further meetings with individual teachers. Today had a doctor’s appointment. Next month there will be a more thorough evaluation. Prescriptions have been adjusted. I know this dance. I can take the steps almost flawlessly. I even feel the requisite parental self-doubt right on cue. I’ve had far to much practice helping loved ones face down mental monsters.

It was not my first choice for how to spend this week, but things can’t begin to be solved until they are seen. I’m not sorry that I finally saw it. I also have a sense that this is a necessary, if unpleasant, step in this particular child’s growing-up process. He is beginning to see it and he needs to be able to recognize this, call it out, and manage it through the rest of his life.

Other People’s Choices

By / November 5, 2014

Years ago I judged my neighbor for decisions I saw her making about her teenagers. It was a very light judgment that I only held in the back of my mind. She never knew about it. It never affected our friendship. I even supported her and aided her. Yet I thought to myself, “I won’t do that.”

This week I find myself making some very similar parenting decisions to the ones I saw her make. I finally understand the troubles which drove her to those decisions. All those years ago, I couldn’t see the troubles, just the decisions that resulted from them. Today I am surrounded by stresses and I have a child who is nearing an adulthood that he’s not yet ready for. Every day I make decisions and I am conscious of how those choices may look to people who aren’t mired in my context. Somewhere out there, someone is judging me. I’m not angry with them for not understanding.(As long as they don’t try to impose their imperfect comprehension on my actions.) I actually hope that they never understand this because having a depressed teenager is not something I wish on anyone.

My neighbor moved away years ago, only a year or two after my judgement of her. I have her number, but to call and apologize would be pointless. What I must do instead is train my thoughts to think more kindly when someone else makes a decision that I don’t understand. They’re probably driven to it by problems that I can’t see.

Twitchy

By / August 27, 2014 / 2 Comments

So, no secret that 2013 was a rough year for me and the hard lasted until March 2014. Most of it had to do with mental health and physical health issues. (depression, anxiety, panic attacks, C Diff infection, whooping cough, with accompanying doctors, psychiatrists, and therapy) Things have been better since March. Worlds better. Let the heavens rejoice, better. Yet I’ve discovered that all the challenging things set up some emotional landmines for later. Now that school has started, I keep stepping on them.

It goes like this:
Child expresses a resistance to a homework assignment. I am suddenly mired in the memory of hours-long homework confrontations. For a moment I’m convinced that we are doomed and the next months will be uniformly miserable.

Child has a fight with a friend which reaches the physical altercation stage. I know it is driven by stress and anxiety in both kids. They fight because they both have similar issues and neither one wants to back down. I come away from the discussion/apology very afraid that the stresses which drove this confrontation will then poison the entire school year and we’ll be back to panic attacks at school again.

Child calls home because he’s not feeling well. I am suddenly angry and ready to cry. It is only the second week of school and we’ve barely had time to catch our stride yet we’re already going to have to play catch up.

The reality is that the child did the homework after only a little grousing, the arguement was resolved and then forgotten, and a single day of missed classes is fairly easy to catch up.

In each case my emotional reaction to the event is far out of proportion to the event itself. There are a dozen more examples that have happened in the last week. It feels like I’m jumping to duck and cover at any noise. I’m twitchy and it is annoying. Yet I can feel that a few months of stability will even it out. I really want those months of stability and I don’t know if I get them. The mix we’ve got of mental health issues, business stresses, and school, may just mean a bumpy ride for quite a while to come. Until then, I try to flinch less often and recover quickly when I do.

Hope and Preparation to Defend Against Depression

By / August 12, 2014 / 2 Comments

In January of 2013 three of my four children began their slide into massive emotional melt downs. In March of 2013 my husband began taking anti-depressants after a lifetime of cyclical depression. That March was also the month where I had one of my kids diagnosed with three different mental health disorders. I helped the others as they slowly grieved and processed the things going on in their lives. I was pretty stable myself during that time, which I regard as an amazing gift because I am often plagued with unreasonable quantities of anxiety. I was stable, but stretched beyond my limits over and over again. My heart hurt every day because people I loved were suffering.

It is sixteen months, seven doctors of various specializations, and six prescriptions later. My heart no longer hurts and my beloved people have taken strength from their experiences to grow in amazing new ways.

Know this. Cling to it in the worst of times: It can get better. Suffering, even with depression or anxiety does not have to be permanent.

Know this also: use the good times to build strong foundations so that when the bad times come again, they do not destroy you. No life is filled only with good things.

When a high-profile person commits suicide, the internet fills with reactions. I react rather like a mouse in the grass when the shadow of a hawk passes by. I freeze and check, are my loved ones safe? Because that thing has pounced on us in the past. And I am certain in my bones that we’ll have to deal with it again. I can’t control depression, but there are hundreds of things we can be doing every day to make sure that we will be prepared for any attack that comes. This mouse is building a castle with armaments and supplies enough to withstand a siege. In this way it is like any other health issue, preventative maintenance is how to thrive long term.

I Don’t Think this is the Tuesday I Ordered

By / July 29, 2014

I’m certain that I did not request to be awakened at 5am by a cracking sound in my neck followed by pain. An hour of stretching, laying on rolled towels, and using a ball for pressure point therapy, all failed to fix whatever it was. So I had a morning of pain, smelly lotions to loosen muscles, and slow movements. Fortunately Howard was able to help me reset some of the alignment, which means I remain stiff and sore, but the pain will subside when my muscles decide to unlock.

Also on the not-entirely-expected list, Link picked an Eagle Scout Project. He’s working with Habitat for Humanity to build a tool shed for a community garden. It is an excellent project, well suited to Link, and obviously needed. Yet suddenly the next few weeks have an array of project related tasks to complete. Many of them have more to do with paperwork than with the actual project. BSA runs on paperwork. I think one of the hardest parts of the project for me will be keeping my hands off. I can picture all of it in my head. I can make it happen. But this is Link’s project, not mine. He is the one who has to make it happen. Not me. That is the point. My role should be limited to asking “Have you thought about this? How do you think you should handle that?”

Related to pain and loss of sleep, extra napping was necessary and stole some work hours.

I knew that today was the day I sent Gleek off to Church Girl’s Camp for five days. I put it on the calendar months ago. I’ve seen it on the calendar many times since. Yet somehow I arrived on Sunday and thought “Oh. That’s this week?” She packed up all her things yesterday and I helped her review them this morning. We went to the church and I lingered for a bit because I need to make sure that a leader was aware of Gleek’s daily medications. I watched Gleek as she joined with the other girls. Last year I spent two months with lots of attention focused on Gleek and camp. I wasn’t certain she could handle it or I wasn’t certain it was fair to the leaders to impose her particular bag of troubles on them. I didn’t know what the stresses of camp would do to Gleek’s anxieties. I had to skip out on half of the writer’s retreat I wanted to attend because I needed to be the one who sent Gleek off to camp. Last year camp was hard and full of anxiety, which is why it surprised me that it sneaked up on me this year. It arrived and I hadn’t been thinking about it. That in itself is a huge measure of progress from last year to this year. Gleek went off to camp happy and I feel confident that whatever difficulties the leaders have with her will be within the range of challenges that are normal with any thirteen year old girl.

After the pain, sending Gleek to camp, the nap, and the eagle project paperwork, I really thought it would be time to sit down and get some focused work done. Unfortunately my brain decided it needed to do 1500 words of writing first. Not writing on my fiction project, nor writing in a blog post. Nope. It was pages of dumping out the contents of my brain just to see what is in there. I have to do that sometimes. It helps me figure out where the anxiety is coming from. Today’s fun anxiety symptom is heart palpitations. Haven’t had those in a while and they seem directly related to the pain, so I know they’ll go away. Yes I’ve had them checked by a doctor. I wore a heart monitor and everything. There is no physiological reason for them. They’re caused by anxiety, and in this case, pain.

I’ve now reached 4:30pm. This day was similar to what I thought it would be, though I’d hoped to get a lot more work done by this hour. Life can not always be executed as planned and I just have to roll with what comes instead.