Does This Make Me Unloveable?

Well, I’m here in the ER. This is so embarrassing, which makes it really hard to talk about. But I need to write about it, so I can figure out what the heck happened. After all, so many things in my life are going so well!!

Symptoms

Well, I’ll start by saying that I’m still doing way better than I used to be by the time I got to the ER. It was kind of a judgment call as to whether I should even come in. The main symptoms right now are somatic flashbacks and command thoughts. These have been escalating the past few weeks.

The somatic flashbacks especially make it super hard to sleep or concentrate on anything else, because I feel like I’m re-living physical abuse from childhood constantly. Once I’m asleep, I have no problems staying asleep. But I procrastinate on going to bed because I know that flashbacks will only get even more severe as soon as I start trying to sleep. So, I’m exhausted and also totally off schedule.

I don’t know what is causing the command thoughts. OCD runs in my family, but apparently they can also happen as a result of PTSD and internalized messaging from childhood. But I keep getting intrusive thoughts that aggressively scream at me 24/7 to commit suicide. This does not happen at baseline. When it started, I tried to push the thoughts away, but they just keep getting stronger. And I didn’t know if it was appropriate to go to the ER, because I know I’m not going to act on the thoughts. But after weeks of being beat down by them, I’m miserable and exhausted. I’ve been soldiering on for weeks, but the symptoms only continue to get worse.

Other symptoms are similar to those in my last post. PTSD is out of control. My upper arms hurt because it just always feels like I’m being pinned down. I’m in physical pain from constant “flashbacks” or whatever they are. And I keep staring off into the void. Like thousand-yard stare, constantly, because my brain thinks it’s back in Whereever. Sometimes I feel like the entire rest of my life is going to be flashbacks and the associated pain. I just want to occasionally be able to feel relaxed! But it’s just either panic or spacing out entirely.

The thousand-yard stare is a huge problem. I tried to find a good way to explain what that is, and this YouTube video does a pretty good job:

Now, I was never in combat. But I do stare off into the void at baseline. It’s a lot worse right now, though, and it affects me a ton at work. But home is also difficult, because I can’t relax or do leisure activities- I just stare off instead. The best way I can describe it is that it’s exactly like the Adam Sandler movie “Click.”

In the movie, Adam Sandler’s character gets a magic TV remote control that can fast forward time. Unfortunately, it has a problem that he can’t always control the device. So he tries SO hard to be present, but the remote control just takes over all the time and he misses huge chunks of his life. That’s what it’s like- I’ll be doing something, then suddenly it’s anywhere from a few minutes to several hours later. “Coping skills” might exist to prevent this, but it’s one of those things where if you realize you’re doing it, you’re not doing it. It’s like being in suspended animation. There’s before it happens and after it happens, but nothing in between. This is why it’s so frustrating when people are like, “What coping skills can you use when you realize you’re dissociating?” It would be like asking someone what coping skills they can use when they realize they’re asleep or unconscious. And if “coping skills” do exist that I can use during the precious moments when I’m in this reality, I’ve been looking for those “coping skills” for my entire life and haven’t found them. Basically, the higher my level of distress, the higher the percentage of my time that’s lost in this way.

Physical pain has also been a big problem. I think it’s at least partially psychosomatic. As I told my True Love, “I feel like I’m annoying the PCP because I’m always complaining about pain in different parts of my body, so I think he doesn’t even believe me anymore. But it’s like, I don’t know how to ask for help when the thing in pain is my entire body all the time.” The thing is that I have pain in most of my body most of the time, but the part causing the most trouble seems to rotate around. I finally got in to physical therapy for my neck and jaw, but now my right foot is causing even more pain than the neck/jaw area. So I can’t just focus my energies on the pain source with greatest need, because it’s always changing. This feels like it has to be psychosomatic!

And finally, ADLs are out the window. I have no appetite and it’s really hard for me to get meals in. I’m also severely dehydrated. A lot of this is because of the staring-off problem, because I lose so much time to that that I can’t always meet my own basic needs.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but basically the problem is PTSD and a bunch of secondary depressive symptoms.

Work

All of this is affecting me at work because I’m always staring off instead of, like, interacting with the kids. Besides, when I was a kid, I had to stay against the perimeter of the room, stay perfectly still and silent, and not engage. This is not an effective strategy at work. But it’s just so ingrained. Even at baseline, it’s very difficult for me to be in a room without being able to feel a solid object behind me. So it’s essentially same symptoms at work as I experience at baseline, but those symptoms are much more severe.

What Triggered This?

The doctors all (understandably) want to know when this started and what triggered it. I’m not 100% how to answer that. I mean, one major thing was worrying that I’ll never have children due to the high cost of cryopreservation. But things started dipping a bit below baseline before that. I think it first got kicked off when I was worried about losing neurofeedback entirely. I sent this text message about a month ago:

I remember it being a hard day, but I didn’t realize it was going to snowball like this!! Especially since the neurofeedback problem has been resolved, at least for once a week. I mean, going from twice a week to once a week has been very necessary but also very hard.

And it’s hard that the reduction in neurofeedback has happened at about the same time that ketamine has been losing effectiveness. As I described in a previous entry, apparently with the way neuroscience works, you get a lot less relief from ketamine after you’ve been going for too long. So now the afternoon after ketamine can be a big letdown because it’s not doing much anymore. I told the doctor this, and I was hoping she’d say something like, for example, that if I stopped treatment for six months, it would work again when I came back. Unfortunately, she just said that yeah, ketamine probably isn’t the solution anymore.

In addition to a reduction in outpatient supports, work has been difficult. I mean, working in the preschool has been vastly better than substitute teaching. But one thing is that I remember my father seething with rage and beating me up (several times a day, every single day). My parents were big fans of the book, To Train Up a Child, summarized in this video by Jen from Fundie Fridays:

So, I remember a lot of “psychological terror” etc from being a kid. And it’s one thing to imagine it happening to me. But it’s entirely different to look at precious little preschoolers and imagine intentionally inflicting fear and pain onto them. So now when I look back, it’s a lot more painful to remember all the things that happened to me in that context. It’s like, how could my dad have been okay with harming me so severely when I was preschool aged? So I think that has a lot to do with constant flashbacks to abuse.

Finally, my True Love thinks that some of the things in the news could be a factor. I’ve been trying not to follow the Lindsay Clancy trial, but the algorithm clearly knows that I can’t look away from the train wreck. People are so cruel to her. Most of the population has no idea how hard it is to navigate the mental health system, and they don’t grasp how hard it is to get help. It feels like her situation could have happened to any of us. The hospital that Lindsay is currently at is the same place that I was almost sent after that 14-month hospitalization. And hearing her sob with everything in her heart, only to have most of the internet insist that she’s faking… is just awful. She’s suffering more than any human should ever be able to imagine. And yet the hospital is preventing her from committing suicide. I get so mad at the doctors who “saved” her when she tried to end it. And it’s a hard thing to look at, because there are parallels to my life. Things in my case turned out totally differently, but there were times before the long hospitalization when I felt like people (like me for example) should have access to euthanasia. I could go on with all the painful reasons why it’s triggering to watch, but it’s also triggering to write about, so I’m going to move on.

What I Tried *Before* Going to the ER

I tried so hard to prevent an ER trip. After all, I don’t have intent to kill myself. The thing is that, now, I have social supports and a true love and a life that matters to me. But for almost my entire life prior to now, I would have had suicidal ideation with some degree of intent at this level of distress. Now my life matters, but I don’t know how to get help for this level of distress without going to the hospital. I did try getting into a trauma-focused PHP, but it was proving to be very difficult if not impossible. So with that out of the picture, it felt like nothing was available between the two extremes of “normal outpatient” and “full-blown hospital.” So, it’s possible that going to the ER was a huge overreaction. But I didn’t know what else to do. After weeks of struggle and no improvement, it became clear that this wasn’t going to just blow over, and I don’t know how to get the supports that I’d need to give myself a “reset.”

So, this is where I’m at. Hopefully my coming here will take some pressure off of social supports. I have a pathological fear of being a Debbie downer, so I get stressed that people won’t be able to love me anymore if I’m struggling every single day. That must get tiring! And hopefully this hospitalization is helpful and I can get back to my normal life soon!