Hello all, sorry I have not been updating my blog, I’m not going to make excuses, I’ll just say I have been doing other things. Some things have happened since my last post. I went to Amsterdam with my husband on our 1st wedding anniversary on the 17th June. it was great, I highly recommend going to Amsterdam. We didn’t do much during our honeymoon as we just stayed in a hotel in the city where we lived but I’m not complaining, I had a great time on both my honeymoon and my first anniversary. After I got married all I got told was that the 1st year of marriage is the hardest and I honestly didn’t find that to be the case.

I applied to do an online part time course, which I am looking forward to starting on the 8th October, but I’m struggling with getting all the forms out the way and I have a deadline of 28th August. I think it will be good for me to have something to focus on and work towards.

I stopped my volunteer position, I couldn’t hack it but I left on good terms with my boss and she understood my reasons for quitting.

My Gran passed away at the end of last month, her funeral was a day after her birthday where she would have been 83. I tell myself that my Papa will be saying “What took you so long?” and it cheers me up because they are together again now and can have a right good catch up. I held myself together pretty well at the funeral, I did breathing techniques during the service to stop myself from crying and releasing the floods of tears that were in me. The breathing techniques also calmed me from the rising storm of anxiety that came from the amount of family and friends of my Gran that attended the funeral. It’s nothing against them – I’m absolutely happy that my Gran had a good send off from the people close to her – I just don’t like crowds. I do have to say though, it was a strange sort of anxiety, it was anxiety with a coating of protection; although there were a lot of people, I felt protected because I knew that they were my family and wouldn’t hurt me.

My appointments with my CPN and psychiatrist are monthly. There was a lot of stress for me not that long ago regarding my community mental health team; lack of appointments, not taking me seriously and making me worry about a med change when in actual fact it wasn’t happening. I’ll go into more detail for you. In my old service I had at least 1 appointment per week, either with a support worker or my CPN, I didn’t see my psychiatrist a lot when I wasn’t in the hospital but I did see him when problems came up with my meds. So as you would, you get used to that and maybe I shouldn’t have, maybe I should have realised that that is actually quite a lot of appointments and I should be grateful for the help I have right now as I may not have this again in another service. Sorry I went off on a tangent. Anyway I moved services and I’ve maybe seen my CPN 5-6 times in 8 months or so and I’ve not been given a support worker.

I felt they didn’t take me seriously when I was overdosing on the vitamins that were prescribed to me following up a blood test. I was overdosing to hurt myself, to punish myself and I was getting the punishment I was looking for as I had stomach pains, chills, I was sweating profusely and had nausea. I told my CPN that I was taking too many pills to hurt myself and she just looked at me and said “I’m going to stop you right there, because they are vitamins so just talk about something else.”. This was a while ago and it still angers me. I went to her for help, I was open and honest about something I could have very well have hidden, and she just didn’t want to hear about it. I felt like she didn’t care, didn’t think that although self-destructive behaviour it didn’t warrant a conversation because it wasn’t serious enough for her.

Not that long ago my medication was brought up in an appointment, my CPN told me she was going to recommend a medication change as the medicine I am on right now is extremely old and has lots of side effects. I was up for this because I had heard good things about clozapine and was going to ask to be put on it as I have been on so many anti-psychotics that have not made my symptoms go away and instead gave me nasty side effects like a tremor, increased saliva, blurry vision, weird walk, high prolactin levels, weight gain, irregular periods… they’re causing more things than treating more things. The withdrawal is torture; freezing one minute and really warm the next, chills, nausea and vomiting on top of a non-medicated brain, it’s just not pretty. So you could understand why I would have my concerns about coming off my meds and starting new ones. My psychiatrist got in my head that once they have gotten to know me they would change my medicine, and after my CPN said she would recommend, I thought it was happening, maybe I shouldn’t have, maybe it’s my own fault that I got so stressed out about it on the Monday until the Friday when I was told “I wasn’t intending on changing your medicine.”.

A few days ago I found a picture I must have drew when I was having an episode. I had no memory of making the picture and it disturbed me so much that I showed it to my husband who got very protective. It was a picture of what had to be me, laying on the ground next to a glass of bleach with blood on the ground in front of me. When I looked at the picture for a while I could remember the feelings that must have went with the act of drawing it, but I didn’t have the memory of actually drawing it. I struggled a bit with the voices afterwards as they seemed to remember and were shouting at me. This resembled a frightened woman whose head was jerking, hands were shaking, who was mumbling and not quite with it completely. I managed to help myself by having a shower and focused on shaving.

Right, I think that’s enough for tonight.

Hopefully it wont be too long until another update comes along.