The Year I Give Up

So far, 2018 sucks a sewage pipe.

First, work sucks for new and different reason than usual.
One of my office girls walked off the job, which was bad enough because the other was set to go on maternity leave at the end of January, but then the pregnant gal had her baby a month early. She’s fine, and it’s a lovely baby (named Ainsley), but that means I have NO billers and we’re in year-end. So, my boss and I had to do bill out, and salesman’s pay, and everything else, plus our own jobs… and we’re still not done. So… that’s been bullshit.

Second, until today, I was suffering from severe food poisoning. (It’s actually norovirus, I will later find out after googling it when Mothership contracts it later this month.) I dunno where it came from, but it was incredibly painful, and gave me vertigo, and it got so bad when we were working on Sunday in a mad-dash to try and get the fucking year billed out, that I nearly passed out. I had to very quickly get on the floor of the fucking bathroom at work. Fortunately, it hadn’t seen much use since we’re closed Sundays, but I did realize that the last place I want my mother/boss to find my dead body is on the bathroom floor at work.

ALSO, I emailed my new doctor at Kaiser, who I’ve never actually gone to see, and asked her about medication for severe stomach cramps that I’ve been getting since I was a kid, because I have IBS. She said no to my dicyclomine script, even though there’s absolutely nothing recreational I can do with it, and stated that since Kaiser didn’t make the diagnosis I could come in for testing. I’m not fucking going in for testing when I already have an EXCLUSIONARY diagnosis from two other doctors I saw for YEARS. So, instead of giving me my dicyclomine, she recommended the FODMAP diet for IBS, since I’m being a stubborn bitch about it.

Here’s what you need to know about the FODMAP diet… I’m not fucking doing it.

Why?

No onion. No garlic. No tea. No ripe bananas. No black beans. No black eyed peas. No beans at all, really. No cauliflower. No celery longer than 5cm, which is not enough celery to diet on. Nothing fermented. No mixed vegetables. No mushrooms. No peas. Nothing pickled. No apples. No apricots. No black berries. No cherries. No mangos. No nectarines. No peaches. No pears. No dried fruits. No pomegranate. No watermelon. No wheat. No gluten. No almond meal, either. Or amaranth flour. Or barley flour. Or bran cereals. Nothing normal people would consider bread. No cashews. No rye. No baked goods. No cous cous. No gnocchi. No granola. No agave. No gravy. No honey. No jam. Nothing with high fructose corn syrup. No corn products at all. No pesto. No relish. no stock cubes. No sugar free sweets. No artificial sweeteners. No tahini. No tzatziki. No more than one beer a day. No coconut water. No fruit juice. No kombucha, not that I’d drink that stuff anyways. No rum. No soda. No soy. No more than one glass of wine a day. No whey protein. No dairy. No carob powder, either… whatever that is.

The first three offend me most. I can’t imagine a life sans onion, garlic, and tea.

On top of that, all the fruit and veg I eat is supposed to be organic, which I can’t afford. Also like half the fruit and veg listed are things I’ve never heard of, such as callaloo, marrow, swede, and whatever the fuck a bilberry is.

The meat preferred is fish and seafood… and I live in Colorado, so I can’t afford that, either. For some reason I can have deli meats, which seems suspect AF, and MOTHERFUCKING KANGAROO IS LISTED AS MEAT I’M ALLOWED TO EAT. Really? Kangaroo? I’m not an Aussie expert, but I’m unsure that people in the AU are eating enough Kangaroo that it needs to be listed next to turkey on this list.

I can have espresso, too. Now, I hate to break it to a doctor who spent a lot of time and money learning to be a doctor, but if I ingest espresso, my ass is going to explode within 6 minutes afterward… and it’s gonna hurt… for like… two hours. Also, I have no idea what Kvass is, but unless it tastes like my darling Earl Grey Tea, it’s not an acceptable substitute to one of my precious drinking staples.

This diet won’t work for me for the same reason I can’t be a vegan: you have to make too much of the food yourself, or you’re going to be eating a lot of watercress.

It’s not like I thought 2018 was going to be MY year… I thought maybe 2017 might be, but it wasn’t. I just didn’t think that on day three I’d having imaginary conversations with shrinks about how if I killed myself it would be good for my mom AND me, because she only sticks around for me, and we are both miserable.

It doesn’t help that other people seem to be having a better time… Lindz is engaged and her fiancé bought her a a new car. Lovely 05 Subaru with purple rims. Mel is preggers. Bird is dating Dom for the umpteenth time in her life, but is planning on law school in the summer. D1 is dating a nice rabbi and has a badass job that earns him insane amounts of money. Billie just celebrated her 1st marriage anniversary.

The short list of good things happening for me is that this evening I upgraded my internet speed while also reducing how much I pay for internet… and my mom ordered me an exercise bike (because I’m fatter than I’ve ever been in my motherfucking life).

So I fucking give up.

Fine, doc, I’ll give up foods… but not onion, garlic, or tea. I give up on internet dating, and won’t do it this year. I give up on having a social life, because I don’t have time anyway, and mostly don’t even want to leave the house. I give up on my dream to make money via my art, cuz no one wants it. I give up most of my hobbies, because they’re just offshoots of the stupid art idea. I give up trying to make this house nice. I give up on trying to keep in touch with people. I give up Coca Cola… that’s a big one.

I just give up on trying to be happy anymore.

I try and I try, and maybe it’s because I’m an unmedicated bipolar, maybe it’s because I’m a god damn fat ass, maybe it’s because I’m too close to my mom, or because I’m a pet hoarder, or because I’m just an unmotivated waste of potential… but every time I try to be positive and do things I just get shot down. I not to let things bother me, but the things pile up until I’m drowning in them. I try to do things that make me happy and just end up realizing that nothing makes me happy anymore.

I’ve tried to drag myself out of my depression by the metaphorical hair, kicking and screaming… and all that’s happened is that I’m back in the fucking blue, drowning on my own sadness. So fine, self. You win. Life is terrible, and not worth living…

And that’s why we’re starting this year back at “I will live until my mother and my pets die… and then I’m probably just going to kill myself.”

Don’t worry… even my oldest pet is in good health, and mom will keep kicking as long as she can for fear of leaving me alone with no husband or reliable friend to take care of me… and I really shouldn’t feel so much despair about that.

New Shrink & New Drugs

Whelp, Monday I saw a new shrink. I didn’t WANT a new shrink, but… Kaiser…

If you don’t know, I’d like to form a terrorist cell just to take down Kaiser…

So, I made the appointment in March. Waiting four months to see someone isn’t something I’m happy about… but I made it. She’s a weird little mousy white woman that could be 26 or 50. I’m honestly not sure how old she is, but she’s extremely proficient with a computer. All she did, really, was ask me questions and type the answers into the computer at lightning speed. I feel like my awe is how other people feel when they see me type without looking and whatnot.

I’m never really happy about rehashing my whole mental health history. It was a long, unpleasant journey from my mother thinking I was just a a moody teenager to being a diagnosed bipolar that fought really hard to get off medication… Not to mention in the middle of all that was my mom not really accepting the idea that I was bipolar, and all the meds I tried, and how all the meds I tried effected my life and relationships…. It’s/was a whole thing, and every time I get a new shrink we have to go over all of it. The records should really just be digital and able to transfer in 2017… I feel like that’s not an unrealistic expectation.

She did ask me what my diagnosis was with my other doctors, in particular if they were classifying me as BP 1 or BP 2. I was honest… it varies. She laughed a little and explained that it’s because I’m right on the cusp… So you could either call me a very sever BP2, or a pretty mild BP1. Based on the fact I have managed to avoid arrest and hospitalization, she decided to classify me as a BP 2, but also said that it’s really just semantics since they treat it the same way.

Anyways, after my interrogation, she decided we should try Abilify. It was a decision based on a couple of things: 1, I told her that I refuse to take Lithium, and 2, the other stuff she considered was shit I’ve already taken that didn’t work. I just have to say…. I FUCKING KNEW SHE WAS GONNA TRY TO PUT ME ON LITHIUM. When I looked at Kaiser’s formulary, I noticed that the drugs they have for psychiatric use are old drugs. There aren’t a lot of them, and a lot of them have been around for a long long time. Apparently they only get new stuff when the patent runs out, and until then they don’t support you trying it for any reason.

If you download this formulary, this is at the top:

Kaiser Permanente will generally cover brand-name (when no generic is available), generic and specialty tier drugs listed on our formulary as long as the drug is medically necessary, the prescription is filled at a Kaiser Permanente or a participating network pharmacy, and other plan rules are followed.

BUT IT’S A MOTHERFUCKING LIE! THEY COVER NOTHING UNLESS A GENERIC IS AVAILABLE. FUCKING LIARS!

Anyways… When I looked at their formulary I knew… But I refuse.
Lithium is sedating. It primarily treats mania… I like my fucking mania. I don’t really care to get rid of my mania. Lithium is dangerous. The therapeutic level for Lithium is like a hair away from overdose levels, which will wreck your kidneys and liver. Fuck that noise… I’m not doing blood draws for the rest of my life because they wanna use an old drug. Lithium tends to make you not care after a while. It’s sedating, as I said, and seems to work in people with bipolar the same way Prozac works in people with depression. It’s not that you feel better, it’s that over time you kind of feel nothing. That’s just what it normally does. The list of side effects is concerning as all get out.

So no, I was not interested in taking a drug first used in 1871 and “perfected” to Lithium Carbonate in 1886, when there are so many new drugs with less severe repercussions.

(BTW, this shit is so dangerous that the FDA didn’t approve it for us to treat mania until 1970, and only under very specific conditions, i.e. lots of blood draws to monitor toxicity. That’s 84 years between “perfected” date and “sure, let’s use this on crazy people,” and it’s been 47 years since then… we have better shit…)

Anyways, I’m done ranting about the dangers of Lithium.

I’ve taken lots of meds before now… Lamictal, Trileptal, Topamax, Risperdal… So between what I’d already tried and my objections, to my surprise Miss Shrinky-Dink actually put some thought into it and told me why she picked Abilify (Aripiprazole).

A, It’s the closest thing to Latuda that they have. Since I’d previously saw another shrink and tried to get Latuda, she took that into consideration. I think it’s a little bit of a cop-out, to try and piggie back off another doctor, but I appreciated that she was trying to stay in the same vein.

2, Abilify should not be sedative. I was very clear that I didn’t want to be sedated and that I do not tolerate unwanted side effects very well. While Abilify has a list as long as any other antipsychotic of side effects, it’s not reported to be sedative. It was also less likely to cause me to gain weight (since I’m already a whale) and she hadn’t had any other patients that had experienced a side effect that caused them to stop taking it.

D, It should STABILIZE my moods, and it’s often used to treat persistent depression. The idea right now is to level me out and see how I feel when I’m not up and down and up and down again all the time. Once I’m kinda stable, if I’m still having depressive moods she said that she could add an antidepressant later. She doesn’t like to use antidepressants alone, or in high doses, because they have a tendency to de-stabilize bipolar people. I get that. When I was on Effexor I was real manic. I liked it, but people around me were less of a fan.

So, overall it felt like maybe she actually listened to my concerns and took them into consideration. I also immediately did some research on Abilify myself… and I actually think I took it for a while toward the end of my last jaunt with meds. At the end I was just mad that we kept changing meds and they all sucked, so I’m not actually sure that I gave it any kind of chance. I was also real manic at the time… for like a month. So, while I’m pretty sure I’ve taken it before, I’ll give it a chance.

So Mousy Head Shrink ordered blood work, because there IS a risk of increased chance for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes on Abilify, and I’m a big fat person. So yesterday morning I went to the facility by work that has a lab and the pharmacy where she put in my meds. All my labs were totally fine, as they tend to be. My old primary used to test me for all the fat diseases every single year, so I was pretty sure that wouldn’t be a problem.

I was going to wait until the weekend to start my meds, but 4 days on the starting dose and then bumping up to twice as much… no matter how I tried to play that it was gonna fall on a week day… So I started last night. This morning, I am tired, nauseous, achy, kind of out of it, and really thirsty. I was expecting all of that. Everything but the thirst should subside the longer I’m on it. Apparently drinking a lot of water is just what I do now. It’s not the worst side effect, though. The body aches should go away, or people said that some magnesium pills will make it subside. So…

That’s where I’m at today… and I’m at work… so… all of that is BLARGH feeling… but hopefully I start feeling less depressed.

Also, I’ve read a few reports where Abilify made people loose a crazy amount of weight… If there was ever a side effect I craved, that would be the one… I’d like to lose like half my body weight… is that a side effect I could have? Please?

I FUCKING HATE KAISER

Haven’t checked in since May 29th… Lemme tell you why.

After getting back from Oregon, I started making a lot of plans… all of which I still have, but don’t seem to be able to execute quickly. It has sucked. I feel real discouraged about it. I have been REAL depressed about it. I genuinely don’t even know how I’m supposed to accomplish anything.

On top of general demotivation and depression, Mothership has MFing Pneumonia!

Let’s recap.
In March, Mothership got sick. It went on for a while, and then she saw a very Kaiser doc (NP I think) who gave her some lil Z pack thing. It never went away and escalated to bronchitis. Pretty typical for Mothership. A very nice doc at an Urgent Care gave her some big antibiotics. It still never went away. She saw a very professional Nurse Practitioner, who had her get a chest xray, decided it was early-onset community obtained pneumonia (not to be confused with hospital obtained pneumonia) and gave her two shots in the butt of antibiotic and a course of Prednisone and Levaquin (which is an antibiotic they use for pneumonia and anthrax). After she stopped taking that, she spiraled down into terribleness. So we went back and saw a really abrupt, terrible at explaining anything, shitty bedside Mannering Kaiser MD name Deja Vandeloo, who gave her another course of the Levaquin. I mention her name, because she was rude to my mother, who is TERRIFIED because her brother DIED of pneumonia, which I fucking told that doctor, who did not give a shit. She was rude, short, didn’t care, and didn’t explain herself well. She essentially told us NOT to come back. Lemme be clear: We weren’t asking for more meds, we were concerned that my mother was spiraling after taking very LARGE meds, and her brother DIED of pneumonia, so it’s not something to play with. If this was normal for pneumonia recovery, she should have just FUCKING SAID SO, but she deemed it necessary to give out more meds, and thankfully they seem to have worked, but FUCK MAN. I DIDN’T GO TO MEDICAL SCHOOL. I AM NOT A DOCTOR. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT RECOVERY FROM PNEUMONIA LOOKS LIKE. Fucking explain yourself.

Also, she said that she would NOT have done the stuff that the previous NP did, which I thought was unprofessional as fuck, and rude, not just to the NP, but to the patient who is sitting there going, “AM I GOING TO DIE BECAUSE YOU PEOPLE ARE INCOMPETENT???” Also, getting an appointment with any of these people was fucking insane, because Kaiser does not have enough doctors to treat their patient base.

I fucking hate Kaiser.

RELATED:
A person I know recently had to have emergency surgery with Kaiser. They were sent home sans antibiotic, which I, someone who has had multiple surgeries, found immediately odd. The next day the were spiraling down, and Kaiser, UNABLE TO SEE THEM FOR ANY KIND OF APPOINTMENT told them to TAKE PICTURES OF THE SURGICAL SIGHT AND EMAIL THEM TO A DOCTOR. So, upon viewing them, they rushed this person BACK into the hospital where they opened them again to clean out the infection. I’m assuming sepsis. Fortunately, they’re keeping this person for observation and more cleaning out of the surgical sight, but I do not trust them at all.

KAISER DOES NOT CARE IF YOU DIE, AND HONESTLY THEY ACT LIKE THAT WOULD BE A LOT EASIER FOR EVERYONE.

I got sick Sunday night. Very sick. Monday morning I would have rather died than come to work… but we’re short and I’m a team player. Still got body aches and sinus probs and shit, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to go to Kaiser doc to treat it. Fuck that noise. I’d literally rather buy drugs off the street than try to see a Kaiser doctor for anything. If only I knew someone peddling basic prescriptions.

To add to my misery, I woke up this morning with a swollen eye. Not sure what that’s about… waiting to see if it clears up or gets worse… Least I know I can see an eye doctor that isn’t Kaiser…

I see a Kaiser shrink on July 10th.
I don’t even want to go. I made the appointment in MARCH and that was the SOONEST they could get me in. I’d cancel, but it’s so fucking hard to get an appointment, and I might spiral into suicide at any minute, that I figure I’ll just fucking go.

Everything is awful.
I hope every single Kaiser building in the nation catches fire at the same time and the whole company is bankrupted by the damages and forced out of existence by an act of god/nature. Because fuck Kaiser. Fuck Kaiser with every fucking fiber of my being.

And fuck my corporation for thinking Kaiser was EVER a good idea. You know the people at the corporate offices aren’t dealing with this shit. Fuck them.

Palm Sunday Miracle

Okay, it’s not a miracle, but I’m super excited about my mother buying me a new computer. She got me an Acer All-In-One… just like… cuz I’ve been looking at computers for months… It’s so nice… I’m in love with it.

My mom is the best.

Today is a much better day than yesterday.
Yesterday morning at 730 my mom called me and I thought she was dying. She wasn’t, but we HAD to get her to a doctor. She’s had a respiratory infection for like a month. Since we’re on Kaiser, though, we couldn’t go to the doctor… I ended up running her to an Urgent Care center… about 20 minutes away. Not really convenient, but we got in pretty quick.

The doctor, a gentleman that I think came from Africa (he had non-specific accent and was very dark), had a fantastic bedside manner, and was very concerned this had been going on so long. So, he gave her a Z pack and prednisone. She was so much better this morning.

After we left the doctor we got breakfast and then saw Power Rangers! I still want to be the yellow ranger. Then we went to Gordman’s because she wanted to walk around… and I had spent the morning thinking she was dying, so I was down for whatever. She bought me a blanket pal, and a weird egg with feet, and some socks. It was a good time.

Today she called to ask me if I wanted Joe’s Crab Shack for lunch. So, we went to Joe’s Crab Shack for lunch. I’d mentioned I’d like her to come look at All-In-Ones with me today, because I was once again looking at what was on the market, but I found one I like and she got it for me. I dunno why, but I love it. Now, I just gotta get the Creative Cloud and get to work. I really hope I can get back in the groove of graphic design, now.

I see my doctor for my depression tomorrow. It’s been an ordeal to reach this point. On Friday, they called me and wanted to say that I couldn’t see her because I have Kaiser. I was like, no… cuz I’m just going to give you money. Money for services. That’s all we’re doing. And like, ugh. It was a whole ordeal and I had to argue with like 7 people. I just hope she can help me… I’m so tired of being tired and sad.

Also, Friday David 2 and I went to the Car Show. It was actually a lot of fun.
We’ve been watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, so we just went back to his place afterward and watched that… drank some wine. It was a good night out!

It was nice to have a pretty good weekend. I hope the week is also this good.

Best to bed.

TTYL.