Yet again I feel the need to apologise for the lack of posts on this blog, my life has just been mad busy and currently I don’t have the internet due to crashing at other people’s houses.

Back-track slightly to what has been going on before now.

Last time I posted I was doing a difficult placement which thankfully I survived.  Unfortunately having thought that was bad I was to be horribly disappointed with the next placement.

I ended up doing a six week absolutely hellish placement with a completely horrible educator.   She was so horrible she made me cry on day 2 due to snide remarks and criticism through sarcasm, which she thought was funny.  Thankfully when new staff started on a rotation, strangely girls who were in my class first time round, it got directed onto them which made life a little more bearable.  She told me the uni wanted her to fail me and that I am a strange girl and that she has grave concerns about how I will do in my final placement.  Oh yeah and she made a huge issue about how my confidence or lack thereof was causing great barriers – well to be honest you are really not helping bitch.  It just wasn’t very fun.

Anyways.  Having scraped my way through the beginning of it and barely passing at my halfway assessment I managed to pull my finger out and give a big fuck you to both her and my university tutors by gaining a fairly respectable C in the placement. HA!

I then had to go away and write a case study based on the placement but the patient I was supposed to write it about was far to complicated so me being me decided to just use an imaginary patient based on a mixture of the patients I had seen.  Again another huge up yours to the uni as I got an A for it.

So the only thing standing between me and my degree is a 6 week mental health placement.  I am one week in and having done absolutely no treatment my supervisor – who is incredibly lovely- says she sees no reason why I wouldn’t pass.  Hell Yeah.  I am bloody loving it so far, mental health is totally my niche.  This is good as I was seriously having my doubts about whether I was going into the right profession.

The placement is pass/fail which means all I need to do is meet my learning outcomes which I am damn well going to do.  So by my calculations – don’t quote me – I am all set for a 2.1 in my honours degree.  I am so incredibly chuffed.  The only downside of the placement is that it’s 30 miles away from my flat which means I am having to live with other people.  I stayed with my friend’s Mum the last week, who is also my supervisors boss- awkward.  She insisted on feeding me which at the moment I am not all that happy with.  I know I should be grateful but all I want to do at the moment is lose some weight as I feel massive and whalelike. Meh.

My mood has been relatively stable for the last, well ages.  I spoke to my consultant and he said at a guess maintenance meds should be taken for 2.5 years.  We worked it out and that means I can technically come off them in the summer.  It has been ages since I self-harmed despite huge urges on my last placement.

This weekend things don’t feel entirely right.  I drove up the road imagining my car drifting into the motorway central reservation, not so good.  Other suicidal fantasies keep going round and round in my head too, keeping me awake all night.  I know it’s not good and it’s subconscious planning and running through scenarios and I should be worried but I know my head is fucked and just plan to ignore it.  Possibly it is caused by the fact over the last couple of months I may have missed too many occasional days of meds.  Not many in a row but odd days,  Never mind.   As soon as I know I am passing the placement and there is no chance of it going wrong I am coming off them anyway.  It’s all just wrong.  I’m not ill anymore, not in the traditional sense.  Yeah I am maybe psychologically a bit weird but as for bipolar I am no longer sure.  Hmmm.

Nothing is set in stone and things change so….

I better go pack my bags for driving down to placement tomorrow, although I am technically homeless tomorrow night but nevermind I am sure it will all work out fine.

Kxx

Oh man has it been a busy day today.  My supervisor had to take a few days off this week at very short notice which left me to cover her ward.  This was a daunting prospect to say the least, although with some guidance and some reassurance that I wasn’t, in fact, about to die from stress I somehow made it through the day and finished everything that needed finishing.  Ok so I had to ask for a list of things that were: urgent, urgent urgent, and standard run of the mill priority but with that as my guide I tread head held high(ish) through the confusion that came with being on my own and having to be autonomous.

I swam!!!!  So often I was convinced I was going to sink, but no, I managed to swim, albeit with armbands but swim nonetheless.

As a consequence of my busy day I am now struggling to keep my eyes open but I guess that is to be expected.  I am keeping myself awake until a reasonable bedtime by checking the important internet stuff, like this, and re-reading Twilight, again.  I can’t afford to break routine now.  I should be studying although I have the feeling that my last two brain cells may just die if they are pushed any further.

I think (I hope) I have managed to successfully stave off a depressive episode for a bit longer.  This is what I hate about my meds, I never got high highs just a few scarce amazing hypomanias and millions (ok slight overstatement) of crippling (not overstated) depressions, and the meds have stopped my highs and not stopped my lows.  It all leaves me feeling a little disheartened.  Although I do know that this is probably the most well I have been in years, probably since my teens – I don’t mean right in this present minute but as a whole, in the grand scheme of things my cycling has slowed down somewhat, become more predictable and things aren’t so extreme.  In short, my life is not nearly so chaotic and unpredictable as it used to be.  Some of me finds this a drag and wants to break from the monotony, part of me loves chaos and thrives on it.  The sensible part of me says listen to the Doctors and be a good girl.  I am going to be a good girl.

This illness is messing with my brain though.  I go from wanting to be invisible to wanting to be the centre of attention but feel uncomfortable in the middle.  I crave for someone to notice when I am not doing well yet resent them when they do.  It’s total double standards and a lose-lose situation.  I feel so self-centred at the moment but if I have my sensible head on I realise that this is all just self-criticism and if I am being self-centred then it’s probably because I need to be or that I am getting sick again and am retreating into my head where naturally things are about me.  It’s as if a lot of the time I spend looking through a filter.  Sometimes it is too tiring to filter stuff out so I stop looking and concentrate on what I have already let in or at other times concentrate so much on looking at the filter itself that I don’t see outside of it.

When did I get so caught up in this illness?  When did it start to define me at a cellular level?  When did it attach itself to every ounce of my being?  I don’t know the answers, I don’t think I want to know the answers.  It isn’t who I am but it is.  I find that very hard to cope with.  I don’t know when this illness started to become such a large part of my life.  For a long time it did define everything I did, that was before I was diagnosed and knew what it was.  I look back and see the car crash that was the last few years and can say – “oh yeah now I can see that I was very ill”.  The thing is I can only see when I am ill in hindsight.  I am a very good reflector, possibly too good, it stops me living in the present.  I don’t want to be self-centred and I don’t want everything to be broken down and analysed as part of my illness.  I want to be able to say – look, these are my actual flaws and not a product of a wonky brain.

I was asked recently why I gravitate towards “damaged” people – in the widest sense of damaged.  I gave many answers and at the time they were all correct – that I like helping people, that I care, that people tend to gravitate towards people in similar circumstances i.e. fucked up people are attracted to fucked up people.

There is one more answer, the one I didn’t think of at the time and probably the one that is the most true of all:  It takes the spotlight off me and it, if even for a second, helps me to pretend that I am not ill.  It’s avoidance.  Pure and simple.  I do not want to deal with the issues in my life so, like a coward, I run away, I hide or I find a distraction.  Maybe I should work on that with my psychologist when he gets back from his holidays.

Anyway, that is quite enough for now.  My two brain cells are now conspiring against me and plotting their revenge

Kx

I’m hot, exhausted and melting.  I feel like everytime I stand up that there is a little part of me upright whilst the rest mushes like melted candle wax into the ground.  My brain is a melted lump in my skull and I can feel it trying to seep out.  I’m just a big blob of mush.

The reason for this?

Working on the 6th floor of a building full of people and the bloody windows don’t open.  No, not even a crack – completely sealed shut.

And they expect me to function! Fat chance.

It’s all going well really though, I have nearly finished my second week of placement and I am for the most part very much alive.  For the rest I am sure my heart is pumping but my head is in space somewhere.  Joys.

I have one confession to make: Although things are going well I am internally giving myself a good kicking.  I beat myself up for every little thing that goes wrong at the moment.  Whenever anything goes the slightest bit wrong I want to run around with my arms in the air screaming like a banshee.  It would probably scare the patients though so I won’t.  For the first time in a long while I really wanted to self-harm today.  Things were going ok and then suddenly WHOOSH heaps of self-harm thoughts came at me as if I were standing on the east coast mainline.  I’m almost 4 months clean, like hell am I letting some freight train worth of thoughts ruin my perfect (pah) skin and wonderful (snort) sense of self-esteem about my body and my life.  No, but really I can’t and don’t want to go there.  Even the thought makes me want to scream.

I was a bit defensive in the office today, probably overly so but I thought I had to argue my case for everyone else out there that is mental.  My colleague and I were whispering a conversation as my supervisor was on the phone.  Something came up and she said it was a dangerous cycle.  As overhearing tends to go my colleague thought she said “dangerous psychos” and her flippant remark was “you should go to (insert local mental hospital name here) hospital for that.”  I wanted to explain to her nicely that “we” are actually very normal people while we are well and that she was, in fact, sitting next to a patient from said hospital.  Unfortunately for me this would have blown my cover as a nice, sensible health care student.  Not that my cover was great to begin with.  Instead I just came out with a comment about how (insert city centre main street here) was filled with many more dangerous psychos than any psychiatric hospital could contain.  I made my point and was sensible about it and she agreed but it still stung that people can still judge people to be mad raving lunatics when in fact most people with mental health conditions strive to fade into the background of normality.

I use terms like “mad”, “mental” etc with my friends so I don’t know why it gets to me that someone I don’t know would come out and say that.  I guess it is what most people would think.  She may have a better understanding than I know of but to me the way she said portrayed a real sense of ignorance and stigma.  I shouldn’t be surprised, very few people I know with no experience of knowing anyone with mental health problems have much awareness.  I guess the aim is to try and re-educate/brainwash them into thinking about things sensibly but the aim is a long-way off.

Anyways, that was all a big long incoherent rant.  I think it will leave it for now before my brain melts away completely.

Kx

Well I didn’t think it would happen but I survived my first week on placement!  That’s me one quarter of the way through the first one so I am slowly progressing towards graduation.  I am excited because I am probably getting to go see some surgery during the week.  As long as I don’t faint in the theatre it should be a fantastic learning experience.

Uni were supposed to call yesterday for their weekly chat with me – this was part of the agreement with occ health.  They are supposed to contact me at least once a week to see how I am getting on and whether I am coping.  Needless to say they didn’t phone.  What’s new?  They don’t give a fuck about how I am coping.

My parents have booked a holiday for us in a few weeks.  It was really nice of them as I can’t afford to go away.  The only problem with going on holiday is the joy that is arranging travel insurance.  I guess that it is something people take for granted unless they do have a health problem.  The amount of companies that cover everything including heart attacks but will not cover someone with a mental health or psychological condition is ridiculous.  Basically with some of the ones that would take me they want as much money as the holiday cost, which is ridiculous.  I think I am now organised after scouring the internet for a few hours yesterday.

Speaking of psychology, I am still finding it a complete waste of time.  I don’t know why I struggle with it so much.  We just end up disagreeing all the time.  Apparently I am not very emotionally connected with my past, and when I am I don’t show it.  I am very factual and analytical which is apparently not a good thing.  I don’t see how I can do anything other than recopgnise the things that have happened and the effect they have on me, I don’t feel the need to reexperience the emotions that I felt during the worst part of my life.  Why would anyone?

Lots of studying to do over the weekend in order to be fully read up for next week.  It is driving me nuts being asleep by 11pm every night, I know I need to do it in order to get up for 6am but I am a total night person and feel like I am missing out in the time I usually do spend doing things by going to bed early.

I just need to find fun things to do over the weekend which don’t cost money – you’d be surprised how difficult this is to do sometimes, especially living in a city centre, it’s just so tempting to go shopping.

Further updates hopefully during the week.

Kx

I would love to tell you that the placement is going fantastically and that all is well and good in my world ok.  I started placement on Monday, by today I am wrecked.

I worked Monday 9-4.30 and Tuesday 8-4 as scheduled.  Today I started at 8 and at 2pm I was pulled into the kitchen by my supervisor and pretty much told that I looked exhausted and she thought it best for my health if I went home and scaled my placement down to part-time hours.  Needless to say I was gutted.  I know she has my best interests at heart but I can’t help feeling like I’ve let her and myself down by not being able to cope as well as I know I can.  I never even managed 3 days.  That is more than a little disappointing.  There was nothing I could do short of nod my head and agree to go home.

When I got home I crashed for an hour and felt a little better – there is nothing worse than feeling so tired it is hard to keep yopur eyes open let alone lift your feet off the ground.  Maybe the people who told me I am aiming too high are right.  I am starting to think maybe I am not up to the job.  It is what I want to do and I enjoy it but I seem to be incapable of actually coping with it – this and I still haven’t got beyond observing and there is a high chance she will decide I am not fit to be seeing patients.  That would be heartbreaking.  If I fail any of these placements I will have wasted the last 5 years and be left with very few career prospects.  At least not prospects that I like the idea of.

I hate that I can’t work full-time and I guess I do have to accept my limitations but I can’t help feeling that life really isn’t fair.  I have seen 2 lots of class mates graduate and get jobs, several are working in the same hospital as me and seeing them working and being all professional and making a wage just breaks my heart.  I just feel like a total failure and I can’t help but ask, why me?  Why can’t |I just function like everyone else.  I have tried everything I can to stay well yet I get fucked over by my body and my moods on a regular basis.  If I have to have bipolar disorder why can’t I have the standard garden variety, why do I have to have rapid-cycling where I don’t know how I’ll be from one hour to the next – or even minute.  The crash today happened over the course of an hour.  I went from being fine and happy and enthusiastic (not hypomanic though) to anxious and being unable to summon any energy – not even enough to hold a conversation without spacing out or wanting to jump out the 6th floor window – it’s probably just as well the windows don’t open at all, although it’s a bitch when it’s hot.

I really want to self-harm.  More than I have wanted to in ages, probably more than I have done in the past when I have self-harmed.  But I’ll be damned if I will give in and do it.  I can’t for placement and I might be going on holiday in 3 weeks so it is completely out of the question, not to mention it will have undone 3 months worth of resisting.  I know thast those few minutes of relief will be met with shame, frustration and self-hatred and will not be worthwhile at all.  I know all this yet I still want to.  Some people would say just do one small cut and it’ll be fine but I know given previous experience that I would end up doing at least 50.  It’s really just not an option and I need to remove the notion from my head completely.

In short I hate my brain and my body.  It is a constant battle at the moment but I WILL win. Damn it.