#i’m more pissed about the recommendation for anxiety medication management because 1) i don’t think this shit is just anxiety

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

yknow i’d love if i could actually make an appointment for mental health without being nerfed. the person had to cancel for a family emergency and is travelling so doesn’t know when her next availability is (i’m frustrated but also shit happens so whatever) but then went on to recommend a bunch of providers for anxiety medication management (i am not on anxiety medication) for an insurance i’m not on

[summerofspock]

hi everyone, I’ve been thinking about this for a bit and wanted to write a thing about what I’ve been going through the last 6 months or so. No one owes anyone an explanation, but I thought I’d give one. CW Health stuff/chronic illness

So if you’ve followed me for a bit it’s probably for Good Omens and you know that I started writing at a wild pace starting last year in July. I managed to keep up that pace and was fairly happy in the fandom.

Car Trouble both seized me by the whole brain and blew up in popularity and I wrote 100k in two months. Unfortunately at the same time, my grandmother passed away, and lockdown went into effect. 

Family stuff has always been complex for me. I loved my grandma a lot, but it did mean dealing with a part of my family I prefer to avoid so I struggled for a while. I have Bipolar II and Generalized Anxiety and I’m medicated and see a therapist and do all the right stuff but it does mean I can spiral on occasion and I spiraled a little.

Fandom and writing were my getaway spaces. Writing shut my brain off. I thought about nothing but the story when I was writing and I needed that.

Then came May. I wasn’t sleeping well. I’ve always had migraines and I noticed I was getting more of them. One a week. I thought it was allergies but my allergy pills weren’t helping. I was taking ibuprofen or naproxen nearly everyday which I knew was bad but they weren’t helping either. The headaches started getting worse until I would have 1 or 2 days a week where the pain was so bad I could barely do anything and the malaise was so bad that I felt I was in an intense episode of depression, but the mood didn’t last long enough to qualify. My BD mood swings were back but shortened. 

I was scraping by at work basically sleeping the day away, joining meetings but unable to focus, replying to emails in between naps. I’m also going to school part time and I was barely keeping my head above water. I started tracking the headaches but there was no pattern. I felt pretty helpless and started looking into FMLA and leaves of absence.

Writing was still an escape but I couldn’t do as much of it. I didn’t have energy or creativity and my patience was gone. Fandom drama pissed me off and I felt like the worst sort of person, but writing felt like the only joy I had left in my life so I kept going.

I got in to see a neuro and am on preventatives now. Down to one headache a week and sometimes every other week. I can go up to ten days headache free which is fabulous! I do wish it was better than that since one headache can start and last three to five to ten days but I’m still figuring it out. I’m doing all the recommended stuff and tracking everything. I’m sure I’ll crack the code. It’s like any chronic illness and who knows? Maybe I just have to live with one a week. It’s better than it was.

So if you’re following my fics and you noticed a significant drop off in May, there’s your explanation. That’s why all my WIPs don’t update weekly. And besides the fact that my life lives at the whims of my fickle fickle neurons, my dedicated Saturday coffee shop writing time has also been taken away for obvious reasons. Until recently, it didn’t matter because I couldn’t exactly go anywhere on Saturdays as I was laid up feeling like I had an icepick in my left eye. I’m hoping I can find a suitable in home replacement now that I’m mobile again.

Long story short: I’m doing better. I still have my job. I have a part time internship. I’m still going to school. And I’m still writing. It all makes me pretty happy.

[donnerpartyofone]

idk if you've talked about it, probably have. but if you don't mind to again, ketamine injections for depression? did it work? was it expensive? how long did it work for? ty.

dang, i never got a notification for this message. sorry! ketamine absolutely worked for the management of my depression, it was very expensive, and i think i would have needed more for it to become a longer term solution. i may still go back in the future if my lifestyle changes, but for right now, i can’t justify the cost--which is an insane thing to say when what i’m paying for is freedom from hurting myself, but, ya know, CAPITALISM. 

the whole story is, i’ve been severely depressed my whole entire life; i don’t have any memories that don’t involve feeling morbidly upset, and i can remember things pretty sharply from the time i was slightly younger than 2.* i took ketamine recreationally some years ago when i was around 30 (i wasn’t adventurous about substances until i reached about that age), and i was totally astounded by how it affected my depression both during, and for weeks after the experience. it seemed to distance me from the oppressively immediacy of my bad feelings, giving me space to actually THINK about what was really bothering me, what kind of control i could have over how i assign importance and authority to things that don’t serve me, and what i might like my life to be like in the future. so, when i found out that there were ketamine clinics in new york, i kind of freaked out. actually, i found out about it from a guy who i met on an ayahuasca retreat upstate (which is its own hilariously mortifying story that i’ve been trying to write down for years and it keeps turning into a big unwieldy novel), who had been through the entire gamut of treatments for major depressive disorder. he liked his ketamine experience, but admitted that it was prohibitively expensive to keep up.

this is the place i went, and i recommend it to anyone who can afford it:

nyketamine.com

they say that they accept patients selectively, if you have treatment-resistant depression. i don’t know how strict they are about that, because by the time i came to them, i was looking pretty treatment-resistant. i’d been in and out of a few shrinks’ offices, and i’m basically incapable of taking any of the usual antidepressants because of how they affect other conditions i have. the process was, i filled out a request form on their website, and in a day or two, a clinician called to interview me over the phone about the character of my depression, and to gather some other anecdotal information about my history and health. the person i spoke to was very kind, attentive, and reassuring. the following day, someone called to set my first appointment. the whole reason i was able to do this is because of some inheritance that i received at the time; it’s $450 a session, and they suggest (or insist? i’m not sure) that you begin with a minimum of 6 sessions, each of them 2 days apart. after that, you just kind of monitor yourself to see when you think you need pickup sessions; the effect is cumulative and long term. i have no idea if they have any type of sliding scale accommodation, it could be worth asking.

when i went in for my first session, i had a brief interview with the head doctor, a navy veteran and anesthesiologist who had been working with ketamine in various capacities for 50 years. he explained a lot of things that i had no idea about, that were great to learn. periods of prolonged stress, especially while your brain is still developing, can result in a deficit of the neural pathways that you need to experience a full range of emotion; essentially, being chronically depressed and anxious can kind of give you brain damage. if you have that type of problem, it doesn’t matter what you do to try to boost your serotonin or dopamine or whatever; it’s like if you’re trying to get somewhere in your car and you can’t, not because you’re out of gas, but because the bridge is out. for some reason, ketamine switches back on the function that builds those pathways, so with regular therapeutic applications, you can actually heal the structural problem around your mood centers that’s reducing your emotional range to anxiety and depression. if you’re over 60 or so and your brain is less plastic, your chances of success aren’t as good as when you’re younger, but there’s always a chance; also, for some reason, ketamine plays especially well with estrogen, so women have a bit of a leg up. anyway, the doctor was great, and i really liked everyone there; it felt like they all knew they were doing something meaningful.

the sessions themselves are pleasant. they put you in a private room in a big cushy medical chair with a blanket and a pillow, and you let them know if you want the lights on or off. they give you an IV drip that lasts roughly an hour, and they communicate with you to figure out the dosage. you basically just tell them what feels comfortable, if the dosage they start you on is too low to notice. you won’t get something that puts you in a K hole, but you should enter a gentle dissociative state where you feel a little numb and floaty, and you might have a lot of interesting abstract thoughts. the worst part of it is just how bad you have to pee by the time the drip is done, when you’re still feeling a little anesthetized; sometimes i wound up looking at the bag with my flashlight to check if i had finished, and then i’d just press the call button to get them to come unplug me before i pissed my pants.

you’re not supposed to necessarily notice a difference right away, but you should detect a change in mood after a few weeks. i did. the way my disorder works is, most days i just have a low level background radiation of sadness and exhaustion, even on a “good day” when things are working out or i’m distracted by things i enjoy. when i wake up in the morning and realize i’m conscious and the time for sleep is over, my first feeling is disappointment, 100% of the time. then, i’d say roughly once a month or once every couple of months, i have a complete nervous collapse where i’m in so much pain i can’t really do anything but like drool and cry and let my eyes go out of focus, for anywhere from 1-7 days. there will usually be an apparent trigger; i’m a fairly dysfunctional person, and i frequently lose things, break things, and fuck things up even though i like STUDIED to do them, took it slow, asked for help, gave myself extra time, etc. but the thing is, i think the “trigger” is arbitrary, this is just a cyclic psychic event that builds up and waits to happen. but after my first battery of ketamine treatments, i had a particular day when i could tell that normally, i would quickly wind up curled up at the bottom of my bathtub scream-crying until i couldn’t move--and this time, i managed to just push through. not only did i not break down, but i actually got a number of difficult chores done, that i had put off because they seemed too intimidating, or like i wouldn’t be able to mentally handle my inevitable failure. i noticed more and more of that, while i was in proximity to the treatments, an ability to just buckle down and keep going. so it’s not like i felt HAPPIER or something, but i felt much more capable of coping, which was like a miracle honestly.

it’s been about 3.5 months since i last went in, and i think i could use a booster appointment, but as i said i just can’t fit it in with my financial reality right now. so, that sucks. but, i definitely feel that it was worth doing, and i would recommend it to anyone who can shoulder the cost. hopefully in the future, ketamine will become a much more common psychiatric treatment, and it will become available to more and more patients.

*A friend of mine just told me he read somewhere that you don’t actually recall memories from like 20 years ago, you just remember the last time you recalled them--so like, i THINK i remember my parents struggling to give me drops for pink eye in our first apartment when i was about 1.5 years old, but in reality, i just remember the last time i remembered it, or the earliest time i’m able to remember remembering it. pretty interesting! and kind of disturbing, like the idea that star trek-type teleporters don’t actually transport a person, they just DESTROY the original person and rebuild a new one on the other end, a thought that REALLY BOTHERS ME.