Amber glasses to block out blue light! Why is this such a big secret?

It is known that blue light, when seen with the eyes, tells the body it’s daytime, thereby causing a person to have difficulty sleeping. I started blocking blue light from coming out of my computer screen. It really works!

Looking back, I can analyze why I became sleep deprived in terms of light. This began suddenly following my horrific experience at Mass General Hospital in 2011. I had always thought the insomnia was the result of having had a slow heartbeat for so long. However, my heartrate has been okay for a while.

I looked at the idea of trauma, but that doesn’t make sense as the insomnia is consistent. If I am worried about something (such as money) I sleep the same as if I am feeling calm. The insomnia is not intermittent, it is every single night. I haven’t slept through the night at all in three and a half years. In fact, I’ve only slept an hour or two at a time. I am lucky now that I sleep in “shifts,” that is, I sleep two hours, get up, sleep two more, etc. Some nights I’ve woken up six or seven times, though. Sleeping pills don’t make my sleep any better. They are addicting and dangerous.

Nor does “sleep hygiene” do anything for me. It hasn’t made a bit of difference to use my bed only for sleep or to cut down on caffeine. Making those changes never worked for me and only made things worse.

I have tried various herbs, which may help slightly for a few days then quit on me. Changing my diet didn’t help. I really was feeling hopeless that I’d ever be able to function normally again, that is, be able to work or to go to school or to be productive at all. I told myself I might as well let myself die, since I lived in a nether world, half asleep and exhausted all day long.

I am trying to use light to help me sleep now, and I see a difference, though the placebo effect works, too. But I am hoping I am onto something at last.

The obect is to cut down or eliminate blue light as soon as the sun goes down. I’ve rigged my computer screen not to show blue light past sundown. It now glows amber.

So I thought; What about amber glasses? Wouldn’t that work? If I invented some, they’d sell like hotcakes.

It’s already been thought of:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20030543

But…if the experiment was so successful and sleeping pills so darned dangerous, why are they still pushing the pills?  It’s because you won’t convince anyone that glasses will work. But as you see in the study, they do. They are safer than pills by far.

Sweet dreams.

 

Advertisement

Appointment today

Yes, on Memorial Day.  There are two people on the planet I trust.  This was with one of the people.  She is going to talk to my primary care physician and she has also talked to the head of  CBFS.  She said I needed medical attention RIGHT AWAY (meaning today) and that I should see someone today, but I guess that didn’t happen.

I told this person that I trust I may have developed refeeding syndrome a while back and that I told my shrink and my shrink ignored what I was saying.  This person said I need to have a full workup right away.  But I never got a call about an appointment so I guess maybe tomorrow.

I took a lot of drugs last night.  A lot.  Just to keep myself from binge eating.  I wanted to knock myself out totally so that I would be incapable of going to a store and buying binge food.

You know how when you go to drugs dot com, and when you look up two drugs, you get a “high risk” warning about mixing two drugs?  I mixed two drugs you are not supposed to mix.  I figured that way, I would definitely be really out of it and incapable of doing anything.

No, these were not illegal substances. These were over-the-counter stuff plus the meds I am supposed to take daily.

So I took my usual pills I take every night, and I took this over-the-counter drug.  The usual dose is one pill.  You are not supposed to take more than one in 24 hours.  I took one, and nothing happened.  I think eventually I took seven.  These are sleeping pills and the damn things did not knock me out.  This did nothing to stop me from binge eating.

All I could think about was that nobody gives a damn about me anyway.  I walked in front of cars.  Of course, I knew they would stop.  I wasn’t trying to get hit.  I just didn’t care.

Nobody gives a shit.  Of course, people say they love me, but it’s lip service.  Ask someone for real help, and they back off and lie and make excuses.

That’s when you get dumped. They start lying, then after a while, they just dump you.  Or they lie and lie and lie and you get tired of hanging out with chronic, pathological liars.

Today I slept all day.  My CBFS worker, who obviously doesn’t give a shit, called and I said I was very busy sleeping.  We made an appointment for tomorrow, that is, she said she’d call tomorrow.  I really think she cares more about her phone than she does about me, and I can’t understand her on the phone cuz she  mumbles.

Sleeping all day was truly a blessing.  It’s better than eating. Anything’s better than eating.  I’m afraid to put even one bite of food into my mouth.  I think I might go back to bed soon.  I hope I die in my sleep.

Wish I had the guts

Oh honestly, I don’t really care what people think of what I say on here.  You guys know exactly what I am talking about and what I wish I had the guts to do.

Folks that don’t have the guts to read what my writings or find what I say “triggering” or are sick of reading my writings or haven’t found me yet or (most likely) don’t give a shit are not reading this right now.  Or, of course, those that hate my guts and aren’t around for that reason.  Oh, that too.

And really, I don’t care.  The day I stop losing friends I’m really going to be rather shocked and it’s gonna take some getting used to.  “Goodbye, fuck you,” seems to be my motto.  So if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.

Hey, does talk of wanting to die make you uncomfortable?  Then maybe it’s time we talked about it right here, right now.  And my reasons why.  If you don’t like it you can just close the window.

I saw on You-Tube (not that I watched the whole thing through, I got bored) a thingy about this young woman, late 20’s, who was anorexic and they had her frustrated parents on there.  I thought her parents looked kinda old to have a daughter that young.  Maybe they smoked and it made them appear older than they really were, all wrinkly and haggard and stuff.  She looked about her age.  She looked like she had been through a lot and actually presented herself in a rather mature manner, and it also looked like she made an effort to dress nicely, too.  I knew it was hard for her in regards to the clothes part.  Let me explain that part for a sec.

See, she had been wicked underweight, starving herself a lot, but then something happened, I’m not sure what, I think they forced drugs on her, and she gained weight.  Quite a lot.  Then she had some pain associated with the physical stuff that was going on (maybe she had some bone issues, they didn’t go into it) so she took pain pills too, and downers, too.  Mostly, she used the pills, which she was now addicted to, to cope with her bad feelings about the weight gain.  She took an awful lot of pills a day, many downers, and she’d built up a tolerance.  From what it sounded, her weight was about what a “normal” person might call “normal” weight for her height.  So was she “recovered” from her anorexia?

To me, she looked very, very uncomfortable in her body, and you could see her hatred toward her body in her eyes despite the fact that she’d made such an effort to dress well for the show.  She looked so much more comfortable with herself when she was thinner, at least to me she did.

I felt so, so sorry for her, not so much because of the drug addiction, which was now probably killing her (I didn’t bother to see the rest of the show, I got bored of the drugs part) but because I felt she felt so awful about her body and she said a number of times, “I want to go back to the way I was before.”

Wow, can I identify.  I guess a lot of folks would have said she was pretty good-looking but to me, that self-hatred obliterated it all. That’s how I feel about my body right now.

I haven’t showered in like a week or so, probably less than that.  I think maybe  Tuesday night I showered.  Then, since then, I haven’t bothered.    My legs are blue, all bruised from the skin having stretched so much from rapid weight gain.  Actually, it’s just as well I haven’t showered, cuz the skin is cracking all over the place and I would end up with bad sores like I have before.  If I showered, my skin would dry out worse.  The sores can get infected and take months to heal.  As for my belly, well, it’s bad, too, looks pregnant, worse than that, all stuck out and with stretch marks and bruising on that, too.  Normally, it kinda sinks in and you can see my ribs and stuff.  Well, no more.

I do take drugs.  I douse myself up with laxatives as often and as much as I can get away with.  This is for comfort.  It gets the food material out of my body quicker so I don’t have to carry it around for what ends up being all day and into the next.  If I did not abuse laxatives, I would quickly become impacted, anyway.  A normal body cannot process this huge amount of food without abusing laxatives.  Last year, I got impacted and miserable and I remember having all sorts of gas and stuff and it was bad, I was burping a lot, too, it was worse than this physically.  I think if I abuse laxatives, I lessen the risk of stomach rupture.  I think the electrolyte imbalance risk is also a problem, but stomach rupture is probably a bigger risk IN MY CASE.  Try explaining that to a doctor, and most physical doctors tell me I will throw up before my stomach will rupture and I try to tell them no, this does not happen, my stomach will not throw up. They laugh in my face and tell me to try some self-control.  Or give me some psycho mumbo jumbo that is not their territory.

I have been taking the meds I’m supposed to take but I’m sure they are having minimal effect.  Oh and I douse myself up with double-dose Klonopin so I can sleep all day whenever I get the chance.  This is so I won’t eat.  And so I won’t live, that is, so I won’t experience anything, so I can just shut down and be asleep and not do anything all day, pretend I’m dead.  I’d take 6 mgs, but I don’t quite dare.  I’m not exactly teensy anymore, but I’m not really grandiose either.  So 6 mgs would be a lot on a guy, too.  I took 4 mgs a number of hours ago but with all the food loaded up in my stomach, these pills have done nothing.  I figure my body will be digesting the food forever and forever and the Klonopin will kick in by 2 pm.  Then, I won’t be able to walk a straight line.  I hope I can sleep really, really nicely for many hours and forget that I’m alive.

I don’t take these pills for anxiety.  I take them to make sure I’m totally knocked out.  That’s the one and only reason I take them, so that’s why I take the largest dose I dare.  I hate the dopey feeling I get from them when I’m awake.  I’d rather not be doped up while conscious.  Actually, if I could be asleep 24/7 and just wake up to walk the dog and then go back to sleep again, I’d do it.  Just sleep day after day after day and do nothing.   Definitely, that’s better than spending my time binge eating.

Sleeping the day away is better than doing just about anything, better than hanging with people because people have been mean fuckers lately.  I can’t even stand walking down the street and walking near a crowd of people, I feel hateful feelings toward them.  Like I want to tell them what assholes they are.

These folks were saying, “Happy Mothers Day!” to each other, hugging each other and putting their arms around each other.  I wanted to tell them, “Yeah, assholes.  Go celebrate.  Eat and get fat.”  Cuz all that hugging and stuff is so foreign to me.  I have no family, no one to say, “Happy Mother’s Day” to, no one to put my arm around, no one to say, “See ya later,” or “It was nice seeing you,” or whatever.  It’s all like a different world to me.

Do you understand what I am saying?  I have NO ONE.  NO ONE.  No human to hug and love.  Boy does that ever make me appreciate  my dog a whole lot.

I guess when I hold onto that little furry creature, for hours and hours every day, I guess that makes me tell myself I don’t have the guts just yet.

Enter Neurontin

I saw Dr. P yesterday and she said to me, “Julie, we’ve got to get you sleeping.  This is priority.”

Well, I agree.  In fact, if we weren’t seeing eye to eye on this one thing, I would sure not be going to her.  The situation has gotten ridiculous at this point.  I am exhausted beyond belief, having not really slept since August 2011, and now we’re into April 2013.

I guess most folks, when they are young, anyway, go to bed, sleep around eight hours, or more, I hear, if they are teens, and then get up and live their lives.   Some people tell me that they get by on less sleep and they are fine.  Everyone has their own way of doing things.

But around August 2011, I stopped sleeping pretty much.  Only a few hours.  And after that, it was rather scant.  I am not obsessive about this, so I have not been counting hours or kept charts or even writing it all down.   For me, that kind of record-keeping causes me to obsess over sleep too much, and worsens the insomnia.  That was what happened when I went to a sleep clinic once.  Well-intentioned people have begged me to go to this sleep clinic, but due to my horrible past experience there, I hesitate to return.

All I can remember is my very last session with this “sleep expert.”  Wow, I am really laughing now.  I sat across from him while he told me I had made great strides and a great accomplishment, and I was now finished with treatment there.  He was in fact emotional over this.

Of course, if I had indeed progressed with my sleep in any fashion, it may have been a poignant moment.  However, take a look at the other person in the room: the patient, me.  I was sitting in my chair, my head bobbed off to the side.  I was asleep.

Or sort of asleep.  Awake enough to hear what he said, and tell myself, “This is bullshit,” and get myself some real help. I was ridiculously exhausted from the insomnia I was experiencing.

Due to the stress from the insomnia, I went through through a psychiatric hospitalization (a huge mistake) and even a brief day treatment-type experience over the  summer (a complete waste of time).  These therapist had insisted that I needed high-duty therapy to cure the insomnia, that I had a “coping problem.”  Of course, I knew instinctively that they were wrong, told them to go to hell, and never went back.

No, there was nothing wrong with my sleep hygiene or any habits and I did not need these sleep clinic people to make me obsessed.  No, I did not have a “coping problem.”  About a week later, new doctor with a brain in his head a pair of eyes looked at my medication list and his jaw dropped to the floor.  He said, “I can’t believe you have been given this stuff.  No wonder your sleep has gotten worse and worse. Effexor is the main cause.”

Within two weeks, the entire lengthy ordeal with insomnia was solved, and I was sleeping soundly as I always did.

So now I guess it’s been a year and a half that I have had terrible sleep, sleeping only an hour perhaps at a time.  I have to go through extreme effort to get any entrance into a sleep state at all.  I do not believe anxiety or mania are the cause.  It could be caused by nutritional deficiency.  Most people with anorexia sleep poorly and have to take very strong pills to get any sleep at all, even for years after this so-called “recovery.”  (I choose not to use that word due to its overuse and many misunderstandings about its meaning, and that’s why I put it that way.  But I’ll get into this some other time.)

So, I went to Dr. P, more pills.  I do not like taking pills one bit.   For much of my life, I was medicated out of my mind.  It was the side effects of the meds, and not anything to do with “illness,” that caused me to be a social outcast back when I lived in Vermont.  Why? I guess some people felt sorry for me because I shook so much and had bad pimples.  The pimples were from Lithium.  They thought the shakiness was the illness.  For a while, I could barely walk straight.  I was sometimes heavily sedated.  People just didn’t know that my slurred speech was not illness, but from the meds. I should certainly not have been driving.

They used to say, up to quite recently, that a symptom of schizoaffective disorder, a disease I supposedly have, is “flat affect.”  However, more and more, they are discovering that this “flat affect” is caused by side effects of the medication the suffers are often prescribed.  Take away the medication, and the patient again becomes lively and expressive.

No, I am not saying “get off your meds.”  Just my observation.  I do not have “flat affect,” and when I have had it, it has always been a side effect of a medication.  I am very happy that I don’t suffer from it, because I am a writer and often have to read aloud before an audience.  If I had “flat affect,” I sure would give a very, very boring reading.  Believe me, I’m proud to say I don’t.

Okay, back to Dr. P.  She’s told me a bunch of times that she’s not happy with where I’m at now, and wants me on a huge cocktail, saying I was better off loaded up with antipsychotics.

All I can do is look back on the Seroquel nightmare I went through, which included extreme weight gain and blood sugar problems, and the resulting backfire I have been through with anorexia nervosa, and am simply bawled over, and absolutely dread taking another of these pills again.

I had a near-miss with Tardive Dyskinesia.  I was incredibly fortunate that I bypassed this horrible problem.  It was a stroke of luck for me.  My tongue was vibrating for a while and this was not my imagination.  No doctor ever saw it, but it in fact was visible to others besides myself.  Thankfully,  reported this right away to Dr. P.  When someone I know has symptoms of TD, I tell them to tell their doctor immediately.  TD is not the same as akathesia.  I well-trained doctor will not tell you it’s all in your head but will immediately take action and work with you.  I weaned off the antipsychotic  I had been on that was the cause of the tongue problem.  The tongue problem is often the very first signal that TD is beginning.

Not much later, I began to have a problem with my hand wiggling.  It was noticeable.  This was only my right hand, and when I became conscious of my right hand, the wiggle would stop.  My therapist saw it while I was in my sessions, in fact, the therapist I had back from 2008 to 2010.  I would be speaking with her, and not realize my hand was doing this thing.  She was a well-trained therapist and she was concerned, recognizing that this was no tic, of course, it was TD.  By then, though, I had already noticed it myself and reported it to Dr. P.  This, too, Dr. P explained, is another of those beginning TD symptoms that can turn into something worse if we did not take action very soon.

Risperdal, she said, was causing this.  We tapered the Risperdal in half.  It was my understanding that I would get off it it, but she left it at this half dose.  I continued to have the hand wiggle, but it was less noticeable.  One day, I quit the antipsychotics altogether, cold turkey.  I have not taken Risperdal since.  The sky didn’t fall in.  The fortunate thing was that I no longer had any type of TD symptoms.  I had escaped it all, just a stroke of luck.

Today, I speak like other people, without sounding doped up or slurring my words.  I speak with expression in my voice.  I do not have tremors and I do not twitch or have jerky limbs.  I can walk naturally.  I am so happy not to deal with pimples anymore.  That embarrassment was many years ago.

I have been talked into Abilify on and off, but it causes insomnia.  That is the reason I stopped it. Dr. P was kinda pissed, and has prescribed a variety of drugs since, including another antipsychotic, Latuda, and a bunch of addicting drugs to make me fall asleep, and now, Neurontin.  I did not take the Latuda.

I think it’s a few weeks now that I’ve been doing really well, meanwhile.  I have strengthened and empowered myself considerably, quite on my own.  It’s not due to a drug, or any therapy, but my own inner strength and simple common sense.

See, I really had no choice.  I am all alone in this world.  Me and Puzzle.  I had to get my shit together, or die, and that was it.  No one was going to do it for me.  In fact, there wasn’t even anyone out there to help, when you think about it.  After being repeatedly turned down and refused, the hundreds of calls I made, and little “help” I did manage to receive being not helpful at all or downright hurtful, I realized that it’s not just me, we are all alone here.  There is no magic in this world, no magical therapist, no person out there on whom you can rely to save your life except yourself.

I’ve been around a long time, and my experience is that if you think your therapist is God and you are relying on your therapist or some program to keep you alive, there’s a dependency problem.   It’s a merry-go-round that’s very tough to get off of.  The therapists that do this sort of therapy often get some sort of personal gratification out of these dependencies.  I’m so happy to have gotten out of the merry-go-round.  I fear this type of “therapy abuse” and I’m scared to go back into therapy for fear that I’ll end up with another abuser like the one I terminated with a year ago.

So there I was, with no therapist, no real guidance from anyone or anything except my own inner strength, intuition, gut, and survival instinct.  I tried seeing a nutritionist but I found her unhelpful and certainly not worth the expense.  I had seen one last therapist, and he turned out to be the worst dud you can imagine.  Not really a therapist at all, though he had a license, I would not call what he did therapy at all.  After three sessions, I stopped and never went back.  People tell me I should report him, due to his unprofessional conduct.  I think it will be empowering for me to do so.  The two I’d seen before were totally ineffective.  I just plain gave up.  I signed up to get a therapist at Boston Medical Center, but if this one turns out to be ineffective, I know there is no obligation to keep on showing up.  It’s not like you’re married to the person.

I guess I felt my way, rather blindly.  This is what we all do, ultimately, and we do it alone.  That is what life is.  I told myself that I need to stop eating and drinking dairy food.  I simply knew.  Having made this move has completely improved my life.  Setting up the new site and working on it, and redirecting myself in this manner has totally changed things for me.  I feel a sense of purpose.   It got me out of bed, for one thing, doing things.  I went back to church and feel pretty good about that.

Not only that, but it’s been quite a while since I have done binge eating.  This I am certain is due to stopping dairy.  I am not telling anyone else to make this move, but I guess it was something that was helpful for me.  After that, very gradually, I stopped doing the other nasty “behaviors” that I had been doing.  No one told me to stop.  No one was policing me.  No one forced me to throw away my scale or bring it to their office or bring in any chemicals as “proof” that I no longer do these things.  Heck, I am no elementary school child and I do not expect to be belittled in such a manner.  I am happy to be free of coercion.

Of course, when I went to see Dr. P yesterday, she had no awareness that I am doing so well.  Perhaps she saw a tired, middle-aged skinny lady with a dog who badly needed sleep.  I was in a cynical, dark mood yesterday.  It was sort of a downer day only because the day before was rather exceptional.  For one thing, I’d been slapped with a huge bill that no way did I expect.  I don’t want to get into it really, but it was all downright obscene and I had no way around the whole thing but to pay it off with my credit card.  It’s one of those bad luck things that can happen to any of us.  I didn’t ask for it and suddenly I’m in gigantic debt.  Of course, I was already in debt, but now it’s unexpectedly much worse.

I don’t usually sweat it over money.  But I guess I was under more stress than usual because this financial bad hit was combined with another event.  Again, I’ll get into this some other time in more detail, but I was on a bus and was witness to a hate crime.  I guess that’s what you would call it.  The bus driver was not aware that it happened and could not have prevented it, so there is no reason to alert the T.  No one was physically hurt.  No property was destroyed.  It was done with words and gestures.  I have been riding the T in Boston since 1987 and have seen a lot of stuff.  I will remember this forever, and I will tell you about it later.  So let’s just say at the end of the day, I had myself a good cry.  That was Tuesday.  Then the next day the last thing I wanted to do was to go see Dr. P, but I dragged myself and Puzzle (she sure did not mind the trip) off to Boston to see her.

She knew absolutely none of this.  We focused on sleep.  We have only 20 minutes, after all, you can’t talk about everything.  So really, she didn’t know how well I’ve been doing overall, and that it all had been overshadowed by an exceptionally unlucky day the day before.  After all, I’d just come in from another long bus ride, and every time I get on a bus, I am reminded of this awful bus incident.  I need time to process this, and allow it to heal, the way a bug bite heals, not instantly, but over time.  I can remember these bugs that bit me, and write about the experience, making it into story.  I’m very good at doing that.  It’s better than scratching the sores, because then they will worsen.

So Dr. P again tried to tell me I’m better off very, very drugged up.  But she also thinks that sleep is very important and that I need something that will knock me out.  I didn’t say anything, but I’ve heard marijuana does a good job of that.  Of course, I have no intentions of getting into that stuff due to the side effects and cost.  I also know that acupuncture will knock you out cold.  I have considered going back to acupuncture but am concerned about the side effects.  I am also concerned that if I start, there will be no end to it.  I want something short-term and I do not want to be going there forever and ever.  It is too expensive.

My discussion with Dr. P was not a bad one.  For sure, I didn’t act like an idiot.  It’s nice not being doped up and I love using my quick wit to my advantage.   As a matter of fact, Puzzle had a number of people in the waiting room entertained for about 20 minutes before my appointment began.  I doubt Dr. P knew that I had been enjoying a lively discussion with another dog owner.  She told me all about her dog.  Another person in the waiting room shared an experience he’d had with animals. All because of Puzzle.  Of course, this happens all the time when I have Puzzle with me.

On the bus ride over, I’d enjoyed helping out a foreign student by explaining what to expect this summer weather-wise here in Boston.  Of course, weather is a fun subject if you are a New Englander.  I enjoyed making a few jokes about our weather.  In fact, she laughed.  It was a fun topic, and I think I was helpful to her.

Again, Dr. P knew none of this, and only saw a tired, cynical, uncooperative patient sitting there, her fuzzy little dog in her lap.  In the end, I got handed a prescription for Neurontin and a heavy-duty sleeping pill, Lunesta.  She told me to try the Latuda and if it causes anything bad, to stop it.  I told her I’d think about it.

So I went home, exhausted.  I went to bed for a few hours.  I didn’t really sleep.  But I couldn’t even stand up or sit anymore because I was so tired.  Anyone who has experienced severe insomnia knows the feeling.  You can’t do anything but lie down.  You are desperate for rest.

I got up later, figuring what the heck, I’ll fill the prescriptions even though they will do nothing.  So Puzzle and I trekked to the pharmacy.

The pharmacist said that Latuda was brand new and they don’t really know the long-term outcome yet.  He also said it wasn’t sedating to his knowledge, and he said it was not something that would knock me out at night.  I did remember that Dr. P said I should take it with food.  That means with a meal, not even at bedtime, like people take Geodon.  She said it metabolizes more effectively that way.   He said, “Do you really want me to fill this?”  I love pharmacists, the way they are bold enough to question a doctor’s move.

I told him yes, please fill these prescriptions and we’ll see about all this.  I pay a very small copay.  But as it turned out, my insurance did not pay for the Latuda or the heavy-duty sleeping pill.  The pharmacist said that they would have to contact Dr. P, or I would have to contact her to then get this Medicare Part D to pay for these drugs.  I told the pharmacist it was okay to go ahead and contact Dr. P tomorrow andmeanwhile fill the one remaining, Neurontin.  It was getting awfully late.  Meanwhile, another person waiting for their drugs took interest in Puzzle, asked me what her name was, and we got into a discussion about dogs.  I ran into someone I know from church.  I joked around a little with him, then left.

We got home around 10.  It was miserably freezing out, and I was exhausted beyond belief.  I focused on doing what I had to do and getting to bed.  I hoped I would sleep.  Maybe a few hours.  It’s better than nothing.  A whole ton better.  So I’m not sure which order I did things in.   The neurontin bottle says, “Take one to three capsules,” and I didn’t know what to do.   It didn’t say I had to start with one and build up.  These are 300 mg capsules.  I decided, rather randomly, to try two.  I didn’t want to mix any of those benzos with it because I wanted to see if Neurontin alone would be sedating enough.  The other meds I take, the Topamax (for binge eating) and synthroid (for my thyroid) are not sedating for me, though many folks find Topamax sedating.

The results?  After I took these capsules, I guess they began to do something.  I got Puzzle’s food together and then put it in the freezer for just a few minutes to cool it.   I totally forgot about it and when I awoke in the morning, her dish was nowhere to be found.  Puzzle had been polite all night and had not complained one bit.  There was her dish, in the freezer, with her food frozen and stuck to it.  I guess this can happen to anyone, but I think the Neurontin was making me dopey toward the last bit of the night.

I really should not have chosen to give Puzzle her ear medicine while I was “under the influence,” but how should I have known?  Which ear is the left ear and which ear is the right ear?  It was puzzling beyond belief but I am positive that I did it correctly.  Not only that, but I had been assuming that Puzzle would be uncooperative about receiving the medicine.  Naw, she was fine.  All I had to do was pick up her ear (once I figured out which one was which) and squirt the stuff in.  Done.

Then, I went to bed.  I knew I was dopey, dopey, dopey.  I had not felt dopey like this for a while.  At least I was able to change into pajamas.  I was rather delighted, figuring something might happen.  At least not nothing at all.

I think I lay in bed, not feeling bad or good, just daydreaming and holding little Puzzle while she lay sleeping for about three hours.  But I knew something was different.  I noticed I had a stomach ache, an acidy feeling.  It bothered me for a bit, then passed.  It was not enough to get me out of bed.  Then, I fell asleep.  I don’t know how long I slept.  In the middle of the night, I woke up smelling something funny, and asked myself if maybe the med had some olfactory effects, then realized that my nose was very, very close to Puzzle’s left ear.  I laughed to myself, realizing that the odor was not something burning in the kitchen and not an olfactory hallucination and nothing to worry about.  What I smelled was Puzzle’s ear drops.  I know my sleep was on and off for the remainder of the night and I don’t recall when it was that I got out of bed.  I can’t say it was great sleep but on the other hand, listen up.

It must have taken a half hour, maybe an hour, and then a few more hours to confirm it.  It’s rather obvious now.  Yes, it has happened to me before, and please do not tell someone 55 years old with 32 years first-hand experience in the mental health system that this is not possible.  You could say I was markedly different when I woke up, and knew that this Neurontin is the right thing to do.  I am pleased with the changes in myself that I have noticed throughout the day, and I plan to continue to take it.  Yeah, I’m against chemicals and all that, but I’ve decided to take this plunge.

I phoned Dr. P with a question.  I wanted to know if I should take three capsules tonight.  I was just beginning this blog entry when she phoned back, and told myself that I should probably end this entry by summing up how that phone conversation went.

First of all, I told her how I’d slept in the afternoon, gone to the pharmacy, waited forever, come home late, took two, and so on, just like I’ve told you all.  I asked her many questions about the side effect I have, in particular, the very slight dizziness I experienced today.  I told her I had tested myself for ataxia, and I am not “swaying” when I put my ankles together the way I did when I took Trileptal.  I told her I was quite relieved about this, because if I have ataxia it will affect my ability to use a treadmill and put me at risk for ankle sprains.  I remember back then I was always afraid of turning my foot on a stone, as if I were 90 years old.  I told her that for that reason, I felt the dizziness was not nearly as serious a concern as ataxia, but it was annoying.  She assured me that most likely it is temporary and will go away after a week or two of taking this drug.  It is really very minor.  She said I could go up to three capsules tonight to improve my sleep.  I agreed to do so, telling her it made sense.

I guess she noticed something.  Something different in my voice or something changed.  Maybe I sounded more organized, more grounded.  Whatever she heard, something must have prompted her to ask the following question:

It was something like, “Do you still need me to go through with this insurance paperwork for the Latuda and Lunesta?”

In other words, she knows, too.  I guess she decided she’s not going to push the antipsychotic.

Hey, Julie, victory.

 

I had a funny dream

I so rarely have dreams, cuz I don’t sleep much.  In fact, I think I’ve had only one or two dreams since the beginning of the year.  But today during the day while I was sleeping I had a dream that was absolutely screamingly funny.   It ended as a nightmare, which was not so good, but then, after I got done with the waking up scared part I burst into laughter realizing that the dream was in fact ridiculously long.  I said to myself that there must be a story in this somewhere.  Or a joke.

Or no, just something to share with other folks to get them to laugh along with me.  Cuz if you rarely dream, it’s truly terrific to get a decent one when you do get one, right?

So here’s the dream: I get a knock on the door.  Uh-oh.  Who is this jerk knocking on my door?  I open it up.  Puzzle’s barking her fool head off cuz here’s a stranger at my door.  I tell her relax, it isn’t an ambulance to come take me away, and I’m not being “sectioned,” so not to worry.  But would you believe it’s a doctor?  Yeah, a male doctor with an ID badge and a stethoscope around his neck.  I don’t recall a lab coat and I don’t recall what the ID badge said except it did indicate he was a doctor, an MD.  Of course, anyone can have a badge made up and anyone can buy a stethoscope and pretend to be a doctor, but never mind that, it’s irrelevant.  He had “that look” of someone that had sat through way, way too many lectures at medical school, seen a few too many cadavers, but what the hell was he doing at my house?  I don’t have any money.  If he’s a drug dealer on the side, I’m not interested.  But I let him in.

“What’s up, doc?”

“I’m here to take your blood pressure.”

Now this is gonna be weird, like it often is for us folks with anorexia, cuz (in case you don’t know) we are skinny and we got skinny arms, so the blood pressure thing is often an ordeal and a half cuz they need to use a child-size cuff.  It’s also a huge deal if you are anorexic and then gain weight and you don’t got those skinny arms anymore.  It’s like you mourn the loss.  You mourn the loss of that identity.  It’s incredibly painful.  Hard to explain unless you’ve been there.  Some people think my skinny arms are gross.  I always put something over me when I walk out in the hall so my neighbors don’t start talking (trust me, they are elderly and clueless and I don’t even know their names), especially right now cuz my weight is down.

So anyway, he whips out the blood pressure cuff.  I’m about to slip off the little jacket I have on, but then he stops me, cuz now, he’s not gonna put the cuff around my arm, he’s gonna put it around my waist.

Yep, he’s taking my blood pressure by putting the blood pressure cuff around my waist.

I warned you this was a weird dream.  It gets weirder.

So now, he plugs the other end of the tube into a cell phone.  So the cuff is around my waist and then there’s a long tube and the tube is plugged into a cell phone.

But then I stop him.  “Wait,” I say.  “Doc, you got the wrong cell phone.  That’s my cell phone.  It won’t work.  It’s a welfare cell phone.  You know, the budget type.  Use your own.”

But no, he insists that he’s got the right cell phone and he uses mine.  Suddenly, my cell phone lights up all sorts of fancy pictures that no welfare cell phone is capable of doing.  There’s no way Assurance Wireless is gonna give us welfare cases all that for free.

Really, folks, this must be the space age.

But it’s all a trick on me.  This doctor has in fact put the cuff around my waist as a ploy.  He really intended to do it so that he could find out how much I weighed.  So what does he do?  He lifts up the tube, which then lifts me up by the cuff around my waist.  He’s weighing me!  Oh my god!  There’s no actual scale, he just lifts me up and my weight shows up on the cell phone somehow.  My only consolation is the fact that he’s able to lift me with one arm.  So really, I tell myself, I couldn’t be that fat, right?

Then, he takes off.  But he leaves his own cell phone behind.  I tell myself I gotta do something about this.  I try to dial his cell phone but the buttons disappear right while I’m pushing them.  Especially the SEND button.  Even when I try to dial the suicide hotline, all the buttons on his cell phone disappear.

Never mind that my own cell phone is safely in my pocket, where it always is, and is back to normal, no longer space agey.  That’s irrelevant.  My object now is to go to church and bring the doctor’s cell phone with me and give this cell phone to someone.  I have no clue who should get the cell phone, but I gotta get it to church.  So suddenly it’s automatically Sunday and off I go.

And there I am.  In a room with a group of people.  It must be social hour, which happens after the church service.  My brother the atheist says that’s the good thing about the Unitarian Universalists, they have coffee and food after the service, and lots of potlucks.

So there are a lot of people in the room.  I have this doctor’s weird, weird cell phone in  my hand.  But then, there’s this guy I’ve seen before there, or maybe I haven’t seen him before, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to him or not, and suddenly he’s got his hand on me, never mind where on me, but he’s got his hand on my naked skin, and his shirt is up and his belly is exposed.  And then he reaches and he’s about to grab me with his other hand, his hand is looming above me, coming closer and closer.

I wake up with my heart pounding like mad.  I’m in a crazy sweat, too.  It’s light out.  I realize I’ve had a nightmare, or shall I say daymare, cuz it sure ain’t night.  It takes forever for my heart to stop its pounding.

I open the window wide.  Tear my shirt off cuz I’m still sweating and overheated.  Puzzle has jumped off the bed, startled, but I call her back and hold her tight and we lay together for a while.

At first, all I can recall about the dream is the part about the man and his hands.  Then, all the rest comes back to me.  I laugh and laugh and laugh.  I cry, too, and laugh some more.  I tell myself that my friends with ED especially are gonna get a good kick outa this one.

 

Time to heal

Recently, I have done some good and bad things and some strange things and also sent a bunch of e-mails that got no response and also made phone calls that got no response and I laughed and cried and lay in bed a lot and all that’s okay, cuz I hereby give myself permission to be a strange and quirky person.

Yeah, like I didn’t already know that and haven’t known that for years.  Even my parents knew I was a rather odd kid.  They even told me they were proud of me cuz I wasn’t the same as all the other kids at school.  Imagine that.

No, I wasn’t special needs.  Back then, they didn’t even call it that, they called it retarded.  (There was no such thing as learning disabilities, which I didn’t have, anyway.)   In fact, I was exceptionally bright.  That kinda bugged me cuz my intelligence did not make me any friends.   I learned to act dumb so that other kids would like me more.

The teachers poked fun at me an awful lot.  For everything under the sun.  Cuz I didn’t fit in.  They even teased me cuz I wore glasses.  Back then, it’s true that teachers made fun of loser kids.

Should anything be any different now?  Should I expect the world to be any different?  No.  And I should be damn proud of the quirky person I am.

Let me repeat that: I should be damn proud of the quirky person I am.

So here are a few things I did, not in any particular order, but in the order I feel like mentioning them.  And I’m tired so I’m gonna be selective about what I talk about so I won’t go on and on forever.

I went off my antipsychotic medication, Abilify.  I went off cold turkey and I think the last day of it was something like the 16th of February.  Why cold turkey?  It takes 150 hours to get out of your system, that is, it has a 75 hour half life.  So I had been up to 10 mgs Abilify.  I knew that after 75 hours, it would be like I was taking 5 mgs Abilify a day.  Then after 150 hours after the last dose, the drug would be completely out of my system.  Now is this logical and scientific?  Probably not, but on 10 mgs Abilify I was getting absolutely no sleep whatsoever, so how could I possibly think logically and scientifically if I wasn’t sleeping?  I wasn’t going to ask Dr. P cuz Dr. P would say no, don’t go off the drug, and I wanted off.  Also, after meeting with me the first time, the abusive therapist said I didn’t need Abilify and encouraged me to go off it.  He said it was a bad drug.  But I discount everything that therapist said cuz as we all know, he was bogus and cannot be trusted.

After a few days, I began to notice effects.  There were a few hours one morning when it was a little difficult to put a sentence together, but other than that, I got through withdrawal okay.  I do appear psychotic sometimes, but it’s due to my severe nutritional status, and has nothing to do with “lack of medicine.”  Is there such thing as Abilify deficiency?  I have anorexia nervosa which means severe malnutrition, and have had it for a long, long time, but Dr. P seems to forget that fact.  It doesn’t take just a few days of eating right to correct this.  It takes literally years, especially considering I’m not a kid anymore.

I’ve found there are advantages to not taking Abilify.  For one thing, sleep.  I went from no sleep at all to some sleep.  I never sleep like a normal person, but I can now sleep for a couple of hours at a time, which is an immense improvement. If I’m very, very lucky, I sleep three hours, but that’s rather rare.

And another thing that happened when I stopped the Abilify was that after a few weeks, I stopped getting edema all the time.  That awful curse that plagued me since mid-2011 was over.  There were no other changes that I can think of (or anything I feel like mentioning) so I think it was stopping the Abilify that finally ended that nightmare.  If you are dropping in out of cyberspace and wondering what the heck edema is, it means (in layman’s terms)….well, let me put it this way: it meant to me that out of the blue, for absolutely no reason, my whole body, in particular my ankles and feet and calves, blew up like balloons.  I am short so for me, this meant waking up about six to ten pounds heavier than I was the previous day for absolutely no reason.  For a tall person with an eating disorder, this might mean waking up in the morning up to 25 pounds heavier.  Now picture this on a skinny person with an anorexic mind, and you’ve got a living nightmare.  I would wake up to my anorexic living nightmare and go on a rampage every time I got edema.  Raising my feet did nothing, those stupid socks for elderly people made me look elderly and did nothing, and laying down?  Guess what that did.  The water shifted, and I got a “fat face.”

Not that I’d encourage anyone to go off their antipsychotic to end edema, but I’m just sharing my experience.  I’m not saying the two are connected, but I’ll bet they are.   I’m damn happy I don’t get edema anymore.

Dr. P insisted on giving me sleeping pills and benzos to make me sleep.  Now I have a big collection of these benzos and sleeping pills cuz at first, I filled the scripts but didn’t take them.  They are enough to knock out a horse, the pharmacist tells me.  So I do wish I was a horse, cuz maybe I’d get properly knocked out.  I have no desire to be “calm,” I only want to be completely unconscious.  While awake, I wish to be as undrugged as possible. I took them a few times.  I slept no more than the usual amount of time, and no more deeply.  So basically they made no difference.

I don’t need anxiety pills or something to “calm my nerves” which is why the few times I’ve tried, I couldn’t turn myself into an alcoholic.  I guess I don’t have it in my constitution.  I don’t get all nervous and reach for a pill or the bottle.  I’m not scared to tell part of my life story to a complete stranger and make them laugh and smile on the bus and I’m not afraid to get up in front of a huge group of people and speak.  In fact, that’s something I love to do.  I’m just not one of those anxious people that has panic attacks or the sweats or the shakes or anything like that.  I can relate to people who have had hard lives, cuz I’ve had one too, but calming myself with chemicals and getting addicted doesn’t seem the route to go.

Okay, what else have I done………

You guys know, or maybe you don’t know, that I dislike asking folks for favors.  Why? When I do, the answer is “NO.”  So I don’t ask.  The reason people say no is because I’m not Miss Popularity, first of all, and I’m not sweet and kind like I used to be, and everyone’s a little bit afraid of me these days.  Well, that’s fine.  Be scared, and I’ll be scary.  But no, what I’m saying is, everyone’s got their family, and family comes way, way before me.

So even making a phone call, I pretty much expect that the person, if they know it’s me, they aren’t going to pick up, or they won’t bother returning the call.  Except for my minister, but he goes into “minister mode,” as he puts it jokingly.  And yes, the suicide hotline picks up when I call.  I’m glad of that.  I’ve even had people tell me not to call them, but “e-mail only” because they are “too busy.”  Let met tell you, that line gets old very fast.

But I accept that people are gonna be this way.  I accept that I am way, way too quirky and weird for people and that’s fine.  I am proud of who I am.  I think I was born this way.  I think my dad would be proud, too.

So I asked a huge favor and so far, I’ve had no response and I don’t expect one.  I have a doctor appointment next Tuesday and I asked at a few folks at church if someone could come with me to the appointment.  No, I don’t need a ride.  I do our public transit just fine.  I need someone to be with me at the appointment.  See, I was alone with that abusive therapist and no one else was there.  This is a male doctor I’m seeing and it’s not so much that, but what if he doesn’t “get it”?  Most doctors don’t understand eating disorders.  Some barely know what eating disorders are.  What if he only asks about my periods and nothing else?  I am going to this new doctor mainly so I can get a referral to a therapist.  Maybe even a referral to a nutritionist and since it’ll be at a big hospital, it might be covered on insurance if they make some exception for me down the line but of course the nutritionist might not know about eating disorders, many only know about diabetes.  So I asked for this favor but I guess it’s way too much to ask.  So I’m hereby giving up on this plea and have accepted that I’m gonna be going to this appointment by myself.

Well, no, I’ll have Puzzle with me.  Did I tell you Puzzle can count?  I’ll have her count how many questions this doctor asks about my periods.  After three, she’ll bite him.

Now, furthermore, all you folks out there with eating disorders, what’s the worst most nightmarish thing you’ve ever heard come out of a doctor’s mouth?  I’ve heard some pretty bad stuff.  Now I’ve got Puzzle trained on cue.  I’m just imagining this:

“So, you’re anorexic and you binge occasionally, too?  I think if you shove in three extra large pizzas all at once, it’s a good thing, and you should do it more often, cuz you could stand to gain a few pounds.”

Now as soon as Puzzle hears that line, she’s gonna maul the doctor to bits, and enjoy all the pizza, too.

 

 

It’s really been a while since I’ve eaten

Never mind how many days.  I’ll tell you later.  My cold seems better and I’m not grumpy anymore.  I managed to get undressed, that is, out of my clothes, without freezing to death, and into my pajamas okay, and I’m headed to bed now.   I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow.  I have a lot planned.  Some of it is the usual stuff, you know, therapy, pick up prescriptions, and the like.  I think tomorrow I will buy myself an eraser.  I have made enough mistakes in this life.

I have a miserable cold, feel grumpy, and haven’t eaten for a number of days

And I’m just about out of tissues.

It seems to be February.   We had no snow here in January, or at least nothing that stuck around longer than half a day.  I can recall one other year that this was the case.  I don’t remember, though, which year this was.  It’s handy to be able to walk around without slipping all over the place or having to step in slush or whatever.   Puzzle doesn’t have to pee on snowbanks.

I feel so wicked shitty right now.  Runny nose, occasional itchy sneezy, etc.  No coughing, no sore throat, all in my nose and kind of sinusy, maybe my eyes, a bit in my ears as well.  Seems to be getting worse.  I am so grumpy and pissed off that I picked this up from two humans at the library.  They were inconsiderate and rude and had no business sitting at my table when there were plenty of empty tables they could have sat at, sneezing all over me and my belongings and not even covering their mouths.  Probably I shouldn’t even get started on this topic because I could go on and on and get into a wicked unnecessary stew over it.  I moved away from these two humans as quickly as I could and swabbed a bunch of hand sanitizer on my hands, but I guess it was too late.  This blows.

I think that happened on Sunday, but I’m losing track of days.  I’m tired.

I felt lousy yesterday, too, and suspected that I was coming down with something.  I fought off the grumpiness.  I was able to do so successfully by doing a ton of writing at the library.  I figured out some stuff.  I did a lot of figuring.  I spent all day thinking and working things out in my mind.

I’m going to lie down now.  Sleep some.

I do need to go out and get tissues.  I am down to like nil.  Later.  Just feel so crappy.

 

My life over the past week, in more detail than some of you would like, perhaps

As I have previously stated, my brain doesn’t work properly.  This is going to impede my ability to write this article, but I will do my best.  I have been sitting here a while, in fact, knowing exactly what I wanted to write, but somehow, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do.  Then, I figured it out:  Write.

I plan to be specific, detailed, and graphic.  I may use numbers that specify my weight or pounds lost or gained, calories, and other things people count and measure.  I will mention specific foods.  I will describe in detail some very sick and dangerous things that I have done.  I will talk about body parts.  I will quote some of my negative self-talk.  I think a lot of readers, whether they have an eating disorder or not, will find this article disturbing.  I am not writing this for the purpose of disturbing people.  Actually, I hope you read this.  I am writing it for two purposes: first of all, as always, to tell the world just how insidious this illness can be, and also to share my story because I know now that I am not the only one who engages in these insane behaviors.  I know that there are others, and I know that perhaps some folks reading this may recognize that they experience some of the same things that I do.  No, you are not alone!  I am right here with you.  I guess you could say I have a third purpose in writing this, and that is the simple joy of getting something written.

I suspect that my blog upsets people.  I have an upsetting life, and this is why people don’t want to be friends with me.  It’s too painful to be around me.  I cry all the time and don’t eat, and a lot of the time, I talk nonsense.  But I’m happy that I don’t have a political blog.  There are so many political blogs out there, angry political blogs, and others that are not so angry.  I am a child of the 60’s when everyone was angry and political.  Some grew out of it and some never did.  I never got into it in the first place.  If you read here in my blog about my childhood, perhaps you can understand why, and perhaps this explains why I have a minimal amount of political material here in my blog.  The only way that I get political is when I get revved up about the way society treats people with mental illnesses, and the general ignorance in society about eating disorders.  In sharing my upsetting life here in this upsetting blog, I hope to break down some of that ignorance.  I am a real, 54-year-old woman and I really do experience these things.  See me.  Hear me.  Believe me.

Maybe I’ll start with last Saturday, the 21st of January.   I woke up exhausted and the first thing in my head was, “Ugliest fat stomach you can imagine.”  I hadn’t eaten for a couple of days.  Today was going to be another.  I peed, then weighed myself.  Upon seeing the number, I said to myself, “Gross.”  All day, I was in a bad, bad bitchy-headache mood so intense and angry that I found myself unable to write.  Believe it or not, this bitchy-headache mood is unusual.  I was turning into an anger machine.  I didn’t realize it, but I was very quickly becoming depressed.

I came home from the library having produced nothing.  Out of curiosity, I took my vital signs.  Because of this antidepressant I take, my pulse runs high, around 94, and my blood pressure runs a little high as well, the diastolic around 85.  Now that I think of it, my antidepressant has probably saved my life by keeping my pulse from dropping super low like it was last summer, although I got readings in the 40’s a month ago.  Saturday night it was 54, but my blood pressure was as usual.  I kept my fingers crossed that I would feel okay tomorrow, okay enough to get myself to church.  I hoped, also, that I wouldn’t feel faint in church.

Sunday morning I awoke at 4:30.  Before weighing myself, I guessed my weight.  I was right on the mark.  I had lost three and a half pounds since yesterday.  But within minutes, I was in that same bitchy-headache mood…again.  I returned to bed to try to shake this awful feeling.  Sleep helped.  I was able to get to church, and that, too, helped a great deal.  I find that church calms me in a way that nothing else can.  Church is also exhilarating and energizing.   My headache was gone afterward.  As I walked home, I still felt like I was a walking clenched fist, but I said to myself that at least I recognized that fist.  If only I could rid myself of this anger!  I stole off to the library as quickly as I could and got a bit done on my book, then came home.

By now I’m sure I recognized that the anger in me was the same non-stop anger that I felt in October, the feeling I had that both preceded and accompanied the severe depression I went through at that time.  I couldn’t tell you how long the depression lasted.  The eating binges that went along with the depression were horrific.  At that time, the answer was indeed a pill.  I’m still taking that pill.  Has it stopped working?  Or am I so malnutritioned that whatever pill I take won’t make a difference anyway?

I think it was around 8pm, Sunday night.  My memory is a little spotty.  I’m kind of blanked out on the vegetables.  I hadn’t eaten for several days.  I had some lettuce, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts in the fridge.  I told myself that lettuce was very high in calories and that it would be better to eat cabbage if I were to eat solid food at all.  I measured a little in a measuring cup, and wrote down the calories.  I did this again.  Then I broke into the entire bag, sat down leaning over it, and threw handfuls of shredded cabbage into my mouth.  The dog ate what fell onto the floor.

Either it took several hours to eat all these vegetables, or I lost time and went into a confused state for a while.  I’m sure it was past 11 when I went wandering into the hall.  No one was out there.  No one saw.  I had with me a small empty opaque bag and a small bag of miscellaneous trash to throw out.  I tried the second floor trash room first.  The trash room door is heavy, and the overhead lights make a tell-tale squeal as soon as you turn them on.  The barrels were just about empty.  Just cigarette boxes in a plastic bag.  I exited and closed the door behind me as quietly as I could.  There had been no elevator activity during the past few minutes.  I pressed the “Up” button, hoping no one was awake on the third floor.  What excuse could I make for being up there?  But the third floor was as dead as the second.  Nothing had been left on the table in the hallway for scroungers.  In the trash room I spotted a small bag with two small, heavy, rectangular boxes inside.  Candy.  Chocolate, probably.  Uneaten.  My treasure.  One of the boxes had been broken into by mice.  The cardboard box had been chiseled into sawdust by tiny teeth in spots, revealing the candies, and they were indeed chocolate.  I would have to be careful not to let the sawdust spill in transport.  I tossed out my actual trash, which I was carrying just as an excuse to venture into a trash room, and placed the bag of candy into my empty opaque bag.  No one saw me return to my apartment.

Brandy-filled chocolate, expensive type, real booze, alcohol included.  Only a couple of pieces had been completely devoured by mice.  Three or four had been partially bitten into.  These I tossed out, hoping that I wouldn’t dig into the trash later on and retrieve them.  There were easily forty pieces in the box that I ate.  I found the brandy repulsive.  The chocolate was chocolate like any other.  The smaller box was outdated and the inner brandy had completely evaporated.  The chocolate was discolored, stale, and brittle.  Some was so hard that it cut into my mouth as I tried to chew it.  I tried not to think about my unsuspecting third-floor neighbor who had tossed out these chocolates.  I never even knew who lived on the third floor.  Now, I really didn’t want to know.  I wrapped up the empty boxes and threw them out in the second floor trash room, put on my coat, and went out.  Frozen pizza, bread, peanut butter, a pound of cheese, sour cream, chocolate-covered raisins, cookies, I don’t remember what else.  I ate.  I collapsed on the bed.

In the middle of the night sometime, something happened that even now slips in and out of memory.  I experienced severe leg and foot cramps.  I have heard that cramps of this sort arise out of nutritional issues.   At the time, I thought that the cramping would never, ever end, that I would be permanently in a state of immobility and pain, lying on my bed, trying to work out the knots and kinks that deep down I knew had been caused by my own inability to feed myself reasonably like everyone else.

Yes, I was fully aware that I was overwhelming my body in more ways than the binge itself.  My digestive system hadn’t seen food, or any calories, for days and couldn’t handle anything solid.  I should have had spoonfuls of vegetable juice to start off with, every few hours or so, awakening my body.  There is indeed such thing as being in a starvation state.  It’s no myth.  Because I hadn’t eaten, ingesting anything more than the tiniest amounts of nutrients to start with was putting a strain on my heart and my entire body.

That night, I awoke, stuffed myself, and collapsed again, several times.  It was somewhere during this process, probably during the brief moment before losing consciousness, that I realized, each time, that it was unlikely that I’d wake up again.

Monday morning.  Therapy today.  I can’t do this.  I canceled both appointments last week and I feel pressured to go in.  Just can’t imagine going in like this.  I e-mailed my T, not knowing what to say.  I went back to bed.

I dragged myself to my appointment.  I dragged myself home.  I went back to bed.

If anything happened food-wise Monday, it went unrecorded and forgotten.  Or maybe I can’t even think about it all.

I awoke at 4 or 4:30am or so Tuesday, and found my browser pointed to dunkindonuts dot com to find out which shop opened first.  Mount Auburn Street opened at 5, Main Street at 5:30.  Mount Auburn Street was farther away.  The route back was all back roads, dimly lit, so I wouldn’t be seen.  The only other time I’d been there was late at night, so the chances of being recognized by an employee were next to nil.  But Main Street was so much closer.  I had to walk on a main road and cross at a major intersection, but very few people were out to begin with.  Most of the customers at Dunkin Donuts at this time of morning are in a hurry to get to work, and the chances of seeing someone I knew, such as a former neighbor, weren’t too great.  If I did, I would scoot out of there fast.  I brought with me two large bags.

Dunkin Donuts has packaging for a dozen donuts that’s about as idiotic as you can imagine.   It’s a flat box.  The dozen donuts lie flat out next to each other, face up, on display, instead of nestled side-by-side sensibly in a brick-shaped box.  This flat box will pop open unless you ask the employee to put “stickers” on it.  They have to use stickers because they have no tape.  Undoubtedly, the employee will only put on one sticker, or will put the stickers on incorrectly, and the box will pop open anyway if you don’t instruct the employee properly.  In the past, I have had the box pop open and donuts have fallen on the floor.  I ate them anyway.

But the main problem with this idiotic box is not that it pops open.  It’s that you have to walk around with it.  There’s nothing to cover it.  Sure, Dunkin Donuts has a big bag for it every now and then that they might offer you, but it says “Dunkin Donuts” on it, so what’s the use?  If you’re carrying the box, everyone knows.  If you’re carrying something in a huge Dunkin Donuts bag, everyone knows.  If you’re walking around with anything resembling a flat box and carrying it flat, by god it’s either pizza or Dunkin Donuts and I don’t want my neighbors seeing me walk into my apartment with either of these.  Especially the dozen donuts.

That’s where the two bags came in handy.  One bag for the stupid flat box.  The box fit perfectly.  The other bag for the four pumpkin muffins.  The employee hardly paid attention to me, just did her job.  She wasn’t even awake yet.

I don’t know how long it took me to devour all this.  The donuts were gone in one sitting, but I slowed down on the muffins.  I was in bed for the rest of the day, seriously depressed.

It must have been after the rest of the East Coast had finished supper that I began to consider hospitalization.  Of course, the hospital would do nothing for me.  But at least I’d get a break from this.  Maybe a couple of days.  At most hospitals, they just put you down, call you “chronic,” misdiagnose you, laugh at you behind your back, shake their heads, and when they send you along your way, they say, “See you next time.”  Well, fuck them.  I could try to get into the place I was in in September.  They didn’t once laugh at me.  They were so kind to me that I cried because I felt like I didn’t deserve it.

I must have picked up the phone, stared at it, or dialed it and then hung up, or dialed wrong, maybe twenty times, and then gave up.  I fell asleep.  I woke up and called the crisis team.  I always question myself when I call them.  They are a funny bunch.  I’ve had varying experiences calling them.  The service used to be run by another company, and before that, yet another company was running it, but I’m not exactly certain.  There was a point at which pretty much anyone who answered the phone would give me the same answer.  This was several years ago.  “We don’t know anything about eating disorders.  That is a medical issue.  Go to the emergency room.”  That was basically what I’d get.  Then there was a time that I’d call them, and the minute I’d open my mouth and say half a word, I mean half, not a whole word even, they’d say, “This is not an emergency.”  They’d give me the number of this patient-run “warm-line” to call.  No way am I going to call this number and talk to someone that I might know out of my past life as a mental patient from, say, twenty years ago.  They were just as fucked up as I was and I don’t want to remember them or associate with them.  So if I call the crisis team, I risk the “We don’t know about ED” or “This is not an emergency” responses, but recently I did get a very amusing response from a crisis team person.  At the time, though, I didn’t find it funny.  Starvation has its way of slowing down my thinking and my speech.  Sometimes, my speech is a little slurred, and that combined with the occasional difficulty I have pronouncing some consonants due to missing molars…well you guessed it.  The crisis person told me to call back when I was sober, and hung up.  So I sat there with the phone in my hand for a long time, but that night I did call, and someone useful answered the phone.  Not only that, she wrote down my stats, so the next person I speak with will know a few things before calling me a drunkard and hanging up on me.  We worked out a plan, just some simple things I’d try to get done in the next hour or two, and then I’d call them back.

I never got even the simplest thing on the list done.  I felt like the depression alone would make me drop dead.  But the phone rang.  Late.  I assumed it was a telemarketer.   But my called ID said that it was my therapist.  Really?  No human being had called me in ages.  It was late and I could almost see the lifeline, from me, to her voice.

My therapist and I haven’t communicated, or shall I say I have been pulling away from her, since maybe October, or November, or maybe I should say starting in October, then a little more in November when I went to London, then in mid-December you could say there was this complete split.  She went on vacation and I thought I’d be dead by the time she came back.  I still don’t know what to do about the split.  But there she was, on the phone.  I told her I was surprised that she was calling because I thought she only cared about the patients who were motivated to do well and get better.

She said she cares very much about me.

I knew, right then, that she was telling the truth.

As I write these words I remember that last summer when I was at Mass General (the “Prestigious Boston Hospital”) and in such a weakened state that I couldn’t even get out of bed, weighing eighty pounds, dehydrated and malnourished, my brain slowed and confused, refusing to eat, my heart rate at times dipping under thirty beats per minute….She was there.  She came every day.  This is my therapist.

We talked for several minutes.  She asked me not to cancel my appointment with my PCP, Dr. K, tomorrow, Wednesday, even though it had been my plan to cancel everything that week.  I normally have therapy on Thursday, but this week, my T is in New York for a training or conference or something like that.  I agreed to show up for my appointment with Dr. K, whom I see weekly.  Or at least I’m supposed to see her weekly.

I awoke Wednesday and promised myself cross my heart hope to die stick a needle in my eye that I wouldn’t eat today.  I peed and weighed myself.  I had gained nine and a half pounds in three days.

Then I looked in the mirror at my fat face.  Perhaps there was a quarter inch of added flesh on my cheeks.  I could feel it when I moved my mouth and bit down and smiled.  Chubby face.  A couple of days of not eating, or eating next to nothing, and the fat cheeks would be gone.  I tried getting myself showered and dressed, but my mind slipped into starvation madness.  I repeatedly begged myself to stay sane, but it wasn’t within my control.  It took hours to get ready to see Dr. K, just to get dressed, get Puzzle out, brush my teeth.

In the cab, I knew I was useless for conversation.  I usually try to talk about things.  The traffic, the weather, previous customers.  Do you think I should have brought my umbrella?  We’ve been lucky this January.  But I was silent.  It didn’t matter because my mind was talking up a storm.

I tipped the driver generously, and got out at my doctor’s office.  They were having some kind of pizza or burritos or something at the office for someone’s birthday.  Not only that, but they were eating these huge pieces of pizza and burritos.  I told my doctor that I had turned 54, much to my surprise.  She gave me a hospital gown to put on once I’d taken my clothes off.  If your mind doesn’t work right, this undressing and dressing process can be long and involved and experimental and fascinating and have lots of stuff in it worth writing down.

Dr. K checked everything and asked a lot of questions.  She weighed me even though I didn’t want her to.  Of course I hadn’t eaten all day, but I’d had a heck of a lot of water to drink, and I admitted this to her.  Apparently I drank a half gallon that morning.  For me, that’s not particularly extreme or much to be concerned about.  I’m not supposed to do that before getting weighed, though.  I told Dr. K that I had been incredibly thirsty.  She said that’s okay.  I think she was more worried about other stuff.  Like my overall deterioration.  She asked me if I was going to be okay going home.  I said I would.  I went to the lab to have my blood drawn.  They remember me at that lab, or at least they remember the good vein I have in my left arm.  I am always polite and kind to them.  It’s important to be polite and kind to people.

Much later, I was in the library, finishing my writing.  I had been there a few hours.  I don’t think it was yet closing time, but I decided to leave because I didn’t want to dig into a different project.  I was satisfied with what I had written and decided it was okay enough to leave alone for now.  I started to pack up.  I stood.  I immediately felt faint, but this wasn’t postural hypotension, which is the sudden lowering of blood pressure upon rising.  I know this feeling and I’m generally not prone to it.  Then, all at once, confusion, and fear because I didn’t even know where I was!  Was I in a hospital?  Where was Puzzle?  Where were my glasses?  I knew I had to get out of there.

I don’t know what it was about the opening of the automatic sliding doors and the cold, fresh air on my face that awakened me and brought me back a bit closer to sanity and away from the disorientation that I had felt.  At least I had found my way out of the library.   But when I got to the sidewalk, instead of turning right to go home, I turned left, to the CVS.  Using my CVS coupon, I purchased two frozen pizzas (I was rather fussy about which brand frozen pizza to get) and an 8-oz bag of candy.  These I carried in a large canvas shopping bag.  I often see people I know in CVS, neighbors, frequently.  I make a habit of “casing the joint” upon entering that store, going up and down the aisles looking for familiar faces.  If I see one, I bolt out of there and buy nothing.  This includes if I’m just going there for toothpaste.  But I saw no familiar faces this time.   I closed the canvas bag tightly in my hand when I left the store so no one would see the pizzas.  As soon as I was at a safe distance, I removed the bag of candy from the canvas bag, ripped off the top, opened the zip-lock, and placed it in my jacket pocket.  It fit perfectly, with no tell-tale wrapper showing.  The candy was “for the road.”  It was ideal for this purpose.  No melting on my hands.  No embarrassing brown chocolate on my lips.  Soft enough not to rip up my gums.  And no crumbs.

I stopped at Tedeschi’s, too.  Thankfully, the cashier was one that I didn’t think had me pinned as a binge eater…yet, anyway.  I purchased foods that are totally non-suspect: a loaf of 12-grain bread, peanut butter (18-oz, bargain brand, smooth, can’t stand crunchy), a pound of sour cream, a pound of elbow pasta.  Basically the same as Monday.

Several hours later, it is clear to me that my stomach is filled about as full as it ever has been, ever.  We’re talking about not only a thirty-two-year history of this bingeing behavior, but a gradual weakening of the stomach wall due to stomach cell necrosis.  The reason that the stomach cells die is because the stomach has been stretched to the limit so many times, and this causes cutting off of the blood supply to stomach cells, so they die.  Dead cells don’t stretch.  They are brittle.  They break instead.  This is why each time my stomach is stretched, the risk of stomach rupture is greater.

Yes, I knew the risk, and I knew I was in danger.  So what did I do?  I drank a couple of glasses of water.  Yes, I filled my stomach further.  Stupid?  I suppose.  I was thirsty.  Extremely thirsty.

I knew damned well that all it would take would be an involuntary yawn and it would be all over.

I lay down.  Within thirty seconds, I was asleep.

You see, I don’t want to die of a stomach rupture.  I don’t want to die with a wicked huge belly.  I don’t want to die in a binge.  I don’t want to die with binge food all over my kitchen counter.  I don’t want to be remembered as one who died from pigging out.

That was a lot, lot, lot of food I bought Wednesday evening.  I didn’t finish it until Thursday at around 4pm.  I spent Thursday in bed.

All day Thursday, my stomach remained stretched to the limit.  Let me describe it to you.  I am talking about a round belly, sticking out on three of four sides, a little different from nine months pregnant but definitely just as big or bigger than pregnant considering it was on the sides as well.  The pressure was very uncomfortable.  That’s not exactly the word for it…I’d say the pressure was unbearable, as was the stretching feeling.  If I could have thrown up everything that was inside my stomach I surely would have, for comfort’s sake, but I’ve never been able to do this.  Probably sometime when I was a child, I trained myself to suppress the reflex to vomit.  Not only that, I’ve suppressed the memory of why I’ve suppressed the reflex.  I’ve even tried Ipacac and was miserable for hours and hours and hours…then a little spittle, nothing more….I only did that once.  But back to my stomach….I would have taken a photo, but posting it would have been in poor taste and would have shown parts of my body I’d rather not have posted online.

The rest of my body was not nearly as shocking, or at least not to the ordinary eye, or so I would imagine, but still, I found it disturbing enough in my own eyes.  My arms were still skinny skinny skinny anorexic, the last remaining holdouts.  I found it extremely disturbing that my ribs were rapidly disappearing, both in front and over my entire back.  My collarbones didn’t protrude as much as I wanted; in fact, there was quite a bit of change in this area.  Thankfully, there wasn’t much change in my hands or wrists…yet.  And my legs were downright awful.  The chronic edema I have is bad enough and follows no pattern, not really.  I can starve for ages and consume no salt and still have edema.  Today, my ankles didn’t bulge over my shoes, but my socks made huge ugly dents in my calves.  Edema doesn’t hurt at all but it does ruin my self-esteem.  My entire legs were thick with it.  My thighs were an added two or three inches in thickness.  That’s a lot on a short skinny person.

Ultimately, it was because of my huge stomach that I couldn’t wear clothes Thursday.  Nothing fit.  I would have had to wear nine months pregnant maternity clothes, and I’m not certain that those would have fit because the bulging was on three sides, not just in front.  I couldn’t go out in pajamas and I couldn’t go out looking like this.  I ended up putting a long coat over pajamas to take Puzzle out.  This was the only reason I would need to leave the apartment, and surely, I wouldn’t leave the apartment for any other reason!  I had pajama bottoms sort of hung under my huge belly and over my butt and hoped for the best.  On top I wore one of my large, large shirts that I’ve kept over the years.  Many of these I threw out because I couldn’t tolerate the memories of being nearly two hundred pounds.  Those shirts…it was too painful to look at them…I couldn’t stand it.  But there were others that I kept that are huge but I don’t have the same association for whatever reason.  I sleep in them many nights.  I made a quick exit out the back door, and entered back into the building as quickly as possible with Puzzle, looking at no one.  If it were summer, I don’t know what I would have done.  I couldn’t have hidden a belly like that.

I believe I slept for a period of four hours, from 9pm Thursday until 1am Friday, and awoke feeling that something had changed.  What was this?  I had weighed myself Wednesday morning, chastised myself for my fat face, and vowed that I would not eat all day.  Then, of course, I broke this vow.  Fell flat on that fat face I hated so much.  Why, now, did I want to go through all this again and weigh myself and find some body part to criticize, again?  Wasn’t this what my mother did to me all my life?  Even after I left “home” for good, she always picked a body part of mine, heck, any body part she could think of, and beat it to bits with her commentary.  What is the point of this?  Why play her game?

Fuck the scale.  It didn’t matter if I stepped on it or not, after all.  I decided to step on it.  Between Sunday at 4:30am and Friday at 1am, that is, Thursday night late, I had gained eighteen pounds.

I was now a reasonable weight for my height.  Hah!  Did I feel reasonable?  I felt absolutely miserable physically.  My stomach felt pressure all around and stretched to the limit, my back was killing me from pressure, my bowels felt stuffed, my whole body stuffed with crap, I had a headache, and was miserably carbed 0ut, overheated from metabolism overdrive, and depressed.  I wasn’t even thinking about the eighteen pounds.  This was a given.

It was 1am and something had changed.  Even before stepping on the scale, I knew I had reached a point of turnaround.  I felt it in the air around me and inside me.  Not only that, but I was going to talk about what had happened to me this week.  I felt that by sharing my story, I might help someone feel less alone.  I began this blog entry.  For four hours or so, I wrote.  It was rather tough and slow going.  I daydreamed a lot and got distracted and deleted stuff.  Eventually, I got tired and slept.

I awoke much later and weighed three pounds less.  I knew I needed more sleep.  Several hours later I awoke and had lost another pound and a half.  Another hour later I’d lost another pound and a half.  Somewhere in there, my mind went.  Despite this, I was able to write at the library, that is, work on this blog entry for four hours at the library.  I had hoped to work on it more at home, but ended up goofing off instead.  I weighed myself before bed.  In roughly twenty-four hours, I’d lost nine pounds.

Saturday morning, I was clinically skinny.  I was also no longer depressed.  I determined that this depression “phase,” if you will, was most likely over.  Good riddance!  Today would be the second day that I would be up and out of bed!

Ah, the joy of starvation….It does indeed feel good….

Today is Sunday, the 29th of January.  I have been to church and now I’m at the library.  I feel really terrific.  I’m still working out the kinks in my sleep, because I was asleep all week 24/7, and switching to “normal” hours, that is, awake all day, asleep at night is certainly a switch for me.  In less than three days I have taken off sixteen pounds of the eighteen I gained between Sunday and Thursday, from massive bingeing.

Yes, I warned you readers that I was going to get technical and use “numbers” in this entry.  I was going to get real and show you exactly how I think.  I think about these numbers.  I think about these numbers all the time.  I know at eating disorders sites they don’t let contributors use numbers and that posts are “edited” and the numbers are either taken out or the posts with numbers are completely deleted.  This is my blog.  I run the show here.  And no, this is not a pro whatever blog.  I am just being me.  This has been my world for thirty-two years.  Sometimes things have been a lot, lot better, but since sometime in 2008, I relapsed, and haven’t been able to get out of this nightmare.  We, that is, you and I, don’t know what will happen next.  I have heard some awesome miracle stories, absolutely amazing stories, people nanoseconds before being placed into their graves rising up, defying all odds and attaining what seems like the impossible.  Not just with anorexia nervosa necessarily or mental illnesses in general, but any illness, I have read amazing stories of regaining health.  I’m not sure what the real pattern is to it, what the unifying factor is….Money?  Good insurance?  Supportive family or partner?  Faith?  Something else?   I’m sure some of you are positive that you know the answer to this…think again.  It is not so simple, because everyone is different.

If we were all alike, we could get our miracle cure instructions from vending machines.  There would be a one-size-fits-all religion.  There would be no need for political arguments because we would all think alike.  We wouldn’t even need to vote because we’d all agree on everything.  There wouldn’t be a 1% and we’d all be occupying Wal-Mart.  Eeks!  I don’t even know what Wal-Mart looks like!  I’ve never been to one!  Maybe that’s my problem….

Today the minister’s sermon was called “Occupy Watertown.”  It was about the wealthy and the rest of us in the community, and how disturbing it is that the split seems to be increasing.  I think one of the most moving parts of the sermon was when the minister talked about how disturbing it was when you keep finding babies in the river, more and more, and maybe it is good that you are rescuing them, but what’s really important is finding whoever is upstream putting the babies in the river, and likewise, building shelters for homeless people is one thing, but what’s more important is getting homes for homeless people.  He talked about how in our church we are all together no matter what our economic standing, and we take care of each other, and our sense of community is more important than how much money individuals have or don’t have.   The sermon hung together incredibly well, and I hope that I communicated to the minister that I was quite moved and impressed by it.

Sometimes I drop in on our minister, and it so happened that on Friday, two days ago, I did just that.  I was on my way to the library, where I am now, to write this entry, and work on my new memoir.  I only stayed a couple of minutes.  It so happened that he was in the middle of writing his sermon.  I could tell that the sermon was cooking along, and I didn’t want to take up too much of his time.

I know what it’s like to be on a roll with one’s writing.  It’s got to be one of the most exciting feelings I’ve ever experienced.  You don’t even have to be a writer, and you don’t even have to write to know this feeling.  It is the feeling you get at the track, maybe in December, the feeling you get during the ninth lap at sunrise, the feeling that your legs are no longer there and it’s just you and the track and the sun and you are floating and the music is carrying you.  It’s the feeling you get when you hear Joni Mitchell’s voice, her voice that you remembered some thirty years ago, and find yourself weeping.  It’s the feeling that you get when you and your dog are walking and there’s so little traffic that you don’t need to stop for anything, you’re zooming together, and the dog may have no obedience training and be zooming this way and that, and though the two of you aren’t touching each other, you’re totally in synch, and in synch with the sidewalk and the earth.  It’s the feeling you get when you’re in church, and as the minister extinguishes the chalice, he asks that we hold what we’ve experienced this Sunday in our hearts until we meet again next Sunday, and as you’re sitting there, you feel the chair cushion under you, your hands in your lap, and at once the piano accompanist begins the same Bartok Chorale that he plays every Sunday.  You had known this piece, and forgotten it, until you came to church only a few months ago, and now, it is here again.  You knew this piece as an adolescent, a secret oasis, listening alone with the turntable at night while the others danced at their loud parties.  Now, the Chorale plays in the sanctuary, and the diamond needle rests gently on the record and floats through not only your memory, but the present time, because you know that at this very moment, in this chair in the church sanctuary, where you sit weeping, is right where you belong.

And it has passed from Sunday into Monday.  I have experienced being awake during the day, rather than sleeping all day, for four days now.  Last night I attended a “dress rehearsal” for a recital to be given by our church accompanist later this week.   It was so wonderful that this concert was held at our church, so close to my home that I could easily walk.  Hearing a night full of piano music from the Romantic period awakened a part of me from my distant past, the part of me that existed just prior to the onset of my eating disorder.  Electricity!  Magic!  Such was the beauty and fascination of learning and excelling at everything I did with my music.  It was like walking through a pristine garden where everything was sacred and and glistened with dew.

Just don’t get too close.  Once you touch a flower, it will crumble and disintegrate at your fingertips.

I cried last night.  You could say that I cried myself to sleep, only I really didn’t sleep too well last night at all.  It’s nearly 5pm right now Monday evening.  I cried because I realized, suddenly, that although I am no longer depressed, I am no further away from death than I was before.  I am, in fact, eating nothing at all because it is easier to eat nothing than it is to eat just a bit and try to decide what to eat and when, that is, to make these very complex decisions.  Nothing is absolute, and very simple.  Nothing is perfect.  Absolute is perfect.  You don’t have to weigh and measure nothing.

Starvation is the only way I know, the way I’ve learned, in my sick way, to keep away from dying in a binge.  Of course logic tells me that this is untrue.  I cried last night because what I am doing, in fact, is substituting one death, the more desirable one, for the other.  To avoid death while bingeing, I am substituting death by starvation.  That’s the bottom line.

Why, I ask, you ask, my therapist asks, any logical person asks, don’t I have “life” in there as an option?  Why don’t I just eat like everyone else?  And why do I think about death all the time?

There is someone in my life who talks about taking time to smell the roses.  I hear this expression all too often.  What if I don’t like the smell of roses?  I can’t say if I do or I don’t.  The smell of roses doesn’t impress me one way or another.  Or maybe I haven’t smelled a wicked good rose yet.  Something tells me that roses aren’t the only awesome thing out there.

In a bit, I’m going to leave the library and go home.  I’ll have to bundle up because it’s rather cold out there right now.  It’s so windy out that I might get chilled right through me, but once I get home, I’ll put ice on the thermostat and make myself a cup of Roastaroma herbal tea in the new mug that the church gave me when I became an official member.  But by far, the best part of coming home is the look of excitement and wonder in Puzzle’s eyes when she greets me as I let her out of her crate.  Her little back end wiggles to and fro; in fact, her entire torso wiggles and twists this way and that, and she trots into the kitchen to see if there are any morsels on the floor that she can snatch up.  This evening, she’ll find nothing.  She’ll return to me, her bright eyes full of expectation.

How can I let this creature down?  How can I let anyone down?  How can I leave those that love and care about me?  Much as I gripe about the world, it is mostly filled with goodness.  I may say that I do my best to be rude and hostile, but this is generally the exception, because I truly believe in the importance of being polite as much as possible, and kind to other people.  If God is good, how could the world be bad?  If God is good, how could I be bad?  If people are good, and people are all different, then how could any size, or shape, be at all distasteful or unsightly?  And who am I to judge?  Am I the scale-keeper?

Of course, I do judge a lot of people.  I jump to conclusions about a lot of people.  I say swear words sometimes about people and situations that I don’t like.  Sometimes I get pissed off.  Sometimes I get fed up with situations.  Sometimes, I go on writing rants and probably drive you readers up a tree.

You can climb down now, because I’m ending this entry soon.  But be sure that you know where the nearest tree is, because you can be certain that I’ll drive you straight up it very swiftly…next time…because I have this tendency, when I go to bed, somehow, to make it through the night, and be alive and ticking the next morning.

 

Quick update on Saturday, midday

I am in the midst of a longer post that I started at 1am or thereabouts on Friday.  Today, it seems, is January 28th, so I guess that would mean 1am the 27th of January.   I was in a funk for a week.  Perhaps a better, more precise or clinical term for it would be a  severe depression.  I didn’t get out of bed unless I had to, and slept all day and all night, waking intermittently, sometimes for a few minutes and sometimes for a few hours.  I believe it began on Saturday, a week ago, with the bitchy-headache mood that turned into the clenched-fist perpetual anger state.  This was how it began, I recall, in October.  This state dissipated and morphed into depression.  In October, the clenched-fist anger state lasted for a ridiculously long time and was intolerable to me, not only that but I was depressed at the same time!  I can’t imagine the hell I was going through then.  This past week was bad enough but I think it’s over.  I awoke at 1am Friday, or shall I say it had just turned Friday, and I recognized that I was beginning to become un-depressed…gradually…it was a start.  I began my blog entry because I wanted to tell you about my week.  I felt that it was important to share what happened to me not only depression-wise but with my eating disorder.  Progress on this article has been slow because of my irregular sleeping pattern that has been happening all week due to sleeping during the day and feeling a tiny bit better at night.  I tried to straighten out my sleeping last night, but unfortunately awoke at 3:30 in the morning unable to sleep further, stayed up until I was sleepy again, and then, unfortunately, was unable to sleep extra in the morning to make up for it because my DMH person was due to come, and I had to get ready for her arrival (in case she actually showed up this week).  When I woke up I was kinda pissed about this situation, and would have preferred to stay in bed another half hour or hour.  After all, I’m accustomed to staying in bed all day!  I had a headache due to lack of sleep that disappeared quickly after I took aspirin and I wasn’t in a bitchy-headache mood at all.  While in the shower I made up my mind: I wasn’t going to let this bother me at all.  I would wait forty minutes.  If she didn’t call, I’d split for the library and get on with my day.  No sense in wasting my time sitting around when I can be here at the library being productive.  I might be a mental patient, but my time is precious.  It’s not like I sit around watching TV and smoking cigarettes all day long.  I’m not depressed so I’m going to grab this time while I can.  So here I am, writing.

PS: It reeks of garbage again in the room where I usually sit here at the library. I haven’t noticed that smell since last Saturday, and I believe I mentioned it here in my blog.  Instead of staying in there and putting up with it, and possibly getting cranky, I moved to a different room.  I am happy to have discovered this new place to study!