Tag Archives: medical trauma

Having a hard time

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I’m upset about the lack of support from the NHS. I talked to someone high up at New Craigs (the psych hospital) and she told me I can’t have therapy until after the trial. I feel like if they won’t support me through the more traumatic period I’d rather set the building on fire than go there for help afterwards. (No I am not going to set anything on fire. I am not a violent person. I will, however, opt out of appointments and treat it like a source of hostility and pain instead of help and healing.)

The GPs won’t diagnose me with EDS or fibromyalgia so I’m unable to qualify for medical cannabis. That leaves me with the black market and a lot of lung damage. I feel humiliated and debased.

I feel like the NHS Scotland wishes I would just die and stop being a problem. Or at least leave the country. They would be happy with either.

My house is down with Norovirus. All three kids have fallen like dominoes day by day and I expect to go any minute.

I’m on a medication break because my usage level has increased times 5 and that’s really bad for my body. I’m not coping well. I’m in a lot of both physical and psychological distress. I believe with my entire soul that the NHS does not give a shit. I’m pretty sure I’m going to develop serious health issues here and I won’t seek care.

Hell, I tried to make an appointment with a for-pay clinic in town. They told me it is obvious I am in significant distress and they will see if they can do anything for me then they didn’t respond again.

This is fucking hilarious because I’m not even asking them to do much. I want them to evaluate me and confirm my original diagnosis information so I can go to a different private clinic with UK records and get cannabis. They won’t do it though.

I feel completely dehumanised and devalued and debased. I feel like dirt.

It’s weird

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I like dropping bits from my brain like leaves on the stream of data that is the internet. It feels very alienating when I stop myself. I feel my personality, my sense of self constrict. If I am not sharing thoughts, did I have them? I need to be witnessed in a way that is awful and overwhelming and makes me feel empty. In it I see the way my children yell, “Look at me!”

Do we all want that so much it feels like a burning knife in our bellies?

I finally did something today. I cleaned the kitchen. It was pretty gross. Well, I cleaned most of the kitchen. As much as I could make myself do. I feel in myself this urge to go through and whip the house and garden into shape for the winter–it would take me 3-4 days of solid work if I felt whole enough to do it. Instead I think most of it won’t happen at all and I will stare at walls and wait to die instead.

Nothing expeditious will happen. I’ll just wait. Death is coming for us all. Every day we are always waiting for death. This is a morbid thing more than a suicidal thing. I am feeling morbidly obsessed with death. I feel like I can think about very little else and that’s really annoying.

I was listening to my “hope” playlist earlier trying to have some feeling in my body that isn’t negative and pessimistic and despairing. Fat fucking fail. I can’t.

I cuddled my baby and talked about how she is doing the best she can and no her mistakes do not mean that she is naughty. Sometimes she does do stuff that we aren’t very happy about. She isn’t trying to be mean. She isn’t trying to hurt anyone. She isn’t trying to destroy anything so no, she is not bad.

Why can’t I feel like that applies to me at all?

I’m freaking out about how much I want to see my mom and Auntie. I think I actually want to stop going back to California because I don’t want to feel like I could see them. I can’t. I have no idea how they would feel about seeing me. It’s been almost 14 years. It still hurts like a stab to the heart every single time.

Mama says I could leave Noah and move in with her if he is hurting me beyond what I can bear. I don’t think he is. Also: how in the fuck could I handle moving back to Santa Cruz? Drive past Auntie’s house every time I go to the Valley? Nah. Nah I can’t do that. I can’t. That’s a bridge too far. I really can’t.

Hell, I can’t go back to driving. Moving back to California is a non-starter.

Besides the fact that I don’t want away from Noah. That is the scariest thought. I am so much more afraid of losing Noah than I am of dying. I need Noah for what he gives me spiritually. Noah is the rock around which my life is built. I do not know what I would do without Noah. My life is built around serving Noah and that’s not something I feel motivated to change.

I would not be happier as a slutty single mom. I would probably turn into my mother and never have sex again because I don’t trust anyone. I would be terrified that I would expose my kids to a predator because I have famously shitty taste in people to trust. I like monstrous predators. Apparently. Or they like me. Or something.

I would not leave Noah. This is a hard phase. I’m not going to leave because he delivered on the “worse” he said he would give me during the vows. I knew it was coming. It was foretold and promised and everything. He’s hurting and not being gentle with it.

Noah tells a sad, pretty story about an orphan boy and his escaped, wounded rhinoceros. We trade back and forth who is the boy and who is the rhinoceros. I don’t expect him to always be gentle. I don’t know what I do expect. I don’t know what would be better. I have no idea what I would ask for. Right this exact minute I can’t imagine ever feeling happiness or joy again.

Right this minute I feel like I should cancel with Travel Boyfriend. There’s no way that I could deliver on the good time some other self who used to live inside me offered. That self is gone. She feels dead. She thought maybe it might be ok to really grow and change but no. I need to calcify and chip off edges. Right now it feels like she was the part of me who wanted to recover from being raped. You know what? Fuck the NHS. Medical malpractice my big toe. You are lazy and ineffective motherfuckers. I know it saves you fucking money. And it HELPS YOU CUT OFF THE EDGE OF THE BELL CURVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.

I feel sick and depleted and destroyed. My head hurts. My soul hurts. I hate doctors so much. This entire experience is so degrading.

How would I even be able to tell if I was so upset about Noah? How could I narrow down the sources of stress and distress? Do you know who supplies all of my support? Noah. Leaving Noah would be a form of self harm for me. Noah takes care of me through a great many times and types of incapacity. It’s not even just that he physically cares for me when I’m ill–he cares about my soul. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to help me be ok. That’s one of the many things I’m really sad about.

Right now I’m not feeling better even though Noah is putting a lot of effort in. That feels like yet another betrayal. It feels like improperly displaying gratitude. That old chestnut.

I need to go to sleep.

I keep coming back to this deep unhappiness. I can’t perform good right.

Do I really deserve to be alive? Or am I far enough out on the bell curve that I really should have died already.

But which past behavior?

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I was reading this article about relationships (vanilla/romantic primarily) and one sentence really made me think.

“‘I often end up saying the strongest predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.’” The author of the article is sharing what his coworker, a clinical psychologist, usually says to people who are stuck and unable to get out of a bad relationship. Not necessarily abusive bad, just unsatisfying/not meeting your needs sorta bad for the most part.

I had to meet a new psychiatric doctor yesterday. I was nervous because meeting new doctors is a crap shoot. Will they be older men who tell me that all of my testable, long-term health problems are all in my head? Naw, it was a young masculine appearing person who looked like they would fit right in at any party I would throw. I instantly felt comfortable. I was meeting him for the purpose of handing over the management of my ADHD and I needed to explain my history with medication, my other assorted neurological/mental health issues, a VERY brief summary of my physical health history, and about a 20 second primer on my history with assault so that I could explain how I came to cannabis in the first place and please for the love of god don’t tell me to go off it.

In the course of this conversation I came upon the challenge of how to explain that I am both consistent and inconsistent. My “past behavior” is all over the map on a variety of different axis. I managed to complete my bachelors and my teaching credential but I failed out of grad school at the very last minute because I just couldn’t do more of what I had been doing. We’ve lost a lot of money over the years because I fuck things up regularly. I fuck up in every relationship. I am incredibly variable in how intense/defensive/aggressive I am and if you come talk to me on the wrong day or at exactly the wrong minute on an otherwise good day I might react like a complete dick. That’s consistent.

What is also consistent is that I show up when people are having an emergency. I help people fix problems. I am gentle when I really need to be. My kids have figured out a trick. If they tell me, “I need to tell you something and I’m scared to because this is the sort of thing you might get mad over. I need you to not get mad.” Then I take a moment to pause every other single thing going on; I fully focus my mind and my energy on being calm and I say, “Ok I am ready to hear it.” Or I say: “I am not capable of listening until x” where x might be a time or the end of a current activity and then we go through the rest of it like normal. Then we fix whatever is going on.

I know that when they say that they are asking me to put myself aside and just be support. I can’t do that 24/7–it will grind me into dust. It is very high cost to put yourself aside like that. I don’t know how therapists do it. Maybe it helps because they usually aren’t having to do that in their personal lives? Dinno.

Anyway, the reason I put this here instead of my blog is because this idea that past behavior is the strongest indicator of future behavior is both useful and problematic. I started dating Noah when we were 22/26. If you were to look at the first four years of our knowing each other you would think that we would still be doing almost exclusively slightly rough penetrative sex and nothing else. That’s not at all what our relationship is like at this point. Neither of us have the physical energy or the time to have sex 2-4 times a day every day. That’s just not something we can manage in our life. Putting that much energy into sex requires you to not put it into other things (children, work, other hobbies) and we just can’t do that anymore. We made commitments. Commitments to be consistent. Oh, shit.

This is something I’m thinking about as I’m trying to learn how to deal with my body in the late-stage motherhood zone I’m in. I may have up to 10 more years until I pass into being a crone (a phase of life I am absolutely ecstatic about getting to because long story I’m not going to write here) and I need to figure out how to manage my body in the meantime.

I have PMDD along with all of my other things. Basically what that means is that I am exquisitely sensitive to every hormonal variation in my body. I think of my menstrual cycle like riding a dragon. There are times when it is wild and bumpy and I hold on to functionality with my fingernails and there are times when it is placid and easy and there are times when it takes every ounce of self control I have not to go get in trouble. I really like getting in trouble, except when I don’t.

A lot of the PMDD extremes were dulled by the postpartum period. It is amazing to me how much difference there is in inhabiting my body when I am not still reeling from the influences of parasites who would have been happy to kill me. Did you know that embryos/fetuses colonize the host body? There is a theory that it happened that way because it is a way for the first fetus to have influence over the future of the parent that will care for them. My body was not real interested in having another baby for most of the last four years. I don’t want another child but right now my body is telling me that the only important thing in the world is getting pregnant. At other times in my life when I did not want a child but my body said, “Hey let’s make a baby” that’s when I would go get into trouble.

You would think this would be a bonanza for Noah. He isn’t in his 20’s anymore and he’s had a lot of years of consciously dampening his sex drive because we just couldn’t do much about it even at the rare times I was even a tiny bit interested. Mostly I wasn’t interested and the idea was appalling.

So which past behavior should we look at to decide what I am going to do in the future? Yeah, that’s tricky shit. I mean, if I look at how Noah was behaving from 26-35 I should think he isn’t capable of getting up every day like clockwork and making breakfast for the family. He wasn’t a regular sleeper/riser at other points in his life. He chose to learn how to do that.

We go through phases. We go through stages. Noah wooed me by telling me that if you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say, “Wow I really sucked” then you aren’t trying hard enough.

So now we have to figure out how to transition into how to ride out the next phase. We can’t run off for weekends together to break rules together to do wildly-inappropriate-for-children activities for hours and hours. We get a three hour date a week in a space that isn’t perfectly soundproof. We can have sex at night before going to sleep knowing that we need to be really really really quiet because you can hear freaking everything through the walls in this house. It’s a real buzzkill when it starts getting good and you hear a knock on the door and, “I need you; I can’t sleep without you.” Sigh. This is not forever.

Don’t have kids unless you believe you will never be ok without them because this shit is a lot.

There are lessons here I need to learn. Lessons about patience and being consistent enough and forgiveness and love and what it looks like to accept that you have to make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake if you want to get good at something.

I want to learn what it means to be in a happy family, this is my one shot.

So how do I figure out how to manage the part of the dragon ride where all I want is to make decisions other people would view as “bad”. I’m not in that life phase anymore. I can’t go to a Burner party and do drugs with my friends and hunt for interesting prey. I can’t do a lot of things. I get to behave. I get to be a good role model. This shit is boring, y’all. I’m like a zoo animal. I hurt myself when I get bored.

You know how I have 97 projects going at once… most of which I will finish… eventually… I am not a person who stays bored.

But I have to. I have to figure out how to make furtive sex happen. I need to find a way to inspire Noah to continue on this road to queering our sex. Sex is not dependent on a hard cock. There are a lot of reasons that a 40-something dad who hasn’t been having a lot of sex for a decade and a half is not going to be able to get and stay hard for 3-5 hours a day.

It’s not fair to say that what a person has done is the only thing they will ever do. Our sex life once upon a time was tremendously centered around a hard cock and now it isn’t. If I am going to stay out of trouble then our sex life needs to be a much more diverse experience. That’s not a lot of fun when you have to be almost completely silent.

And I was paged for breakfast