Monthly Archives: August 2020

Song: “Dancing Queen” by ABBA

Mood: 7

Nightmares: 0

Ghosts: Few

I’ve been pretty busy this last while. Zombie Mark has made a few more appearances, but nothing quite as bad as when I ate all that junk food. Nightmares are down, and I’m still doing well with the ERP stuff.

With all the stuff going on at J’s work, I offered to help her if I could. This past weekend, she brought me along to her office and the two of us went through a dozen years’ worth of dirty, broken old equipment, got an inventory of it, and stacked it nicely on pallets for when the disposal folks show up. We were there for almost seven hours and I only sat down a couple of times when we took breaks; the rest of the time I was hauling crap around by hand. Not bad for an old fat guy, AAAAAND… my anxiety didn’t get in the way! It was only J and I in the building, but still – I’m pretty pleased with that.

That night, though, I was asleep on my feet by 11PM and went to bed, and I slept pretty well. Got up once at 5AM, then back to bed and woke up again at about 9.

My appointments the other week all went well. I was surprised by my GP – when I got up to leave the room, she said, “You look good – you look so much better than you did when we first met. It’s very good to see.” I thanked her for her help (as she has been a significant factor in my recovery) and left the room with a smile on my face.

Oh, and I asked at the clinic if I could use their livestock scale and they said sure, so I weighed myself. Looks like with the dietician’s help and the medication reductions, I’m finally starting to lose weight – and more that can be explained by whether I’ve got my wallet in my pocket – actual, measurable weight! At the rate I’m going it’s still going to be around March 2057 before I’m down to where I should be, but hey – it’s an improvement!

Tomorrow I’m going in for some surgery on my back. I’ve been waiting for this for almost two years and when they called last week saying they’d had a cancellation, I said yes without hesitation. If it goes well, it will solve a lot of problems, the biggest of which is my inability to comfortably walk for more than a few minutes at a time. I expect being able to go for walks and wander around in comfort will also help with my weight and fitness level.

So I’m excited for tomorrow but a little nervous at the same time. Those of you who know me (or who have been reading this blog) know I’m not a huge fan of people, and I’m even less of a fan of people touching me. But these are professionals, and in less than 48 hours I’ll be fixed up and back home.

Stay safe.

I took my evening medications earlier last night, hoping to get to bed earlier, too. I don’t remember how things went but I think I’ve figured it out.

Had a bunch of weird dreams (no nightmares, just weird dreams) last night and woke up early this morning feeling pretty gross. Took a couple of antacids and went back to bed for a little while. Got up a while later, still feeling gross. Made a tiny bowl of cereal for breakfast, and while I was in the kitchen I noticed something written in my handwriting on the shopping list on the fridge:

That wasn’t a good sign. I checked the cupboard where the chocolate chips (for baking) are… or should I say “were”.

Okay, eating a bag of chocolate chips could easily upset my stomach, especially if I forgot to take some lactase enzyme first. I looked around and found the bag… inside ANOTHER bag:

Yeah, so sometime after 1AM I polished off an entire bag of chocolate chips AND an entire bag of potato chips. That certainly explains why it feels like I’ve eaten two pounds of desiccant packs and they’re burning a hole in my gut.

I don’t eat chips (or most foods) in front of my computer, which means I sat on the couch, which means I probably watched a show or two while I was snacking (the headphones on the couch confirm this). For the life of me, I can’t remember what I watched. I mean, I can get the history and figure out what I watched, I’m just going to have to watch it again.

I think I’m going to have to start setting a timer when I take my evening medications and make sure I’m in bed no more than an hour after that point.

The worst thing about this is that with the medication reductions and help from the dietician, I’ve finally started to lose weight. Pounding back 2500 calories of junk food in the middle of the night isn’t going to help that.

Those were MY chips. Zombie Mark sucks.

Stay safe.

Song: “Stay With me” by Faces

Mood: 7.5

Nightmares: 1

Ghosts: Few

One nightmare woke me up last night but it didn’t get me out of bed, I didn’t have to change my shirt, and it wasn’t too long before I was asleep again. Nightmares have been trending downward from when they were really bothering me a few weeks ago. Two Thursdays ago I had a pretty rough night but otherwise things have been calming down. I think I’ve even been able to catch up on some sleep, which has been great.

I’m still doing my ERP homework and I’m happy to say that the front door is much easier to deal with at night again. I’m going to keep working on it, though – hopefully this will be the last time I have to hammer away at the front door. It may not work for everything, but ERP is a really good tool to have in an OCD toolbox. It’s difficult and painful (and kind of horrible) to use at first but it’s been my experience that once there’s progress, there’s also some “momentum” that helps keep things moving forward.

I’ve also had a lot of success with not taking a picture of the stove on my pre-bed loop around the house. I hope I don’t regret saying this later, but it’s actually not bothering me at all. Not too shabby!

J went to visit her parents last weekend, so I was doing the bachelor thing for a couple of days. I kept myself busy with my usual hobby puttering, but also spent some time outside watching the wildlife and caught up on some of the shows I wanted to watch. I was up a little later than I’d usually be, but I slept pretty well and everything was fine. It was very nice to have J back home, though!

FA came over on Monday and we worked on some project-y stuff, shot the breeze, and went for a wander through the hardware store. As usual, it was a good time full of thinking, hanging out, and joking around. I think some of the best work we do is when we’re trying to figure something difficult out – we have very different ways of approaching problems and usually the best solution is somewhere in the middle.

Had a Dr W appointment yesterday. It wasn’t too bad but I think Dr W was in a bit of a hurry. He wasn’t rushing things, he just… sounded like he was in a hurry or harried or something. We talked quite a bit about my medications and for the first time in months (January? February? It’s been a while) we decided to reduce some of my medications. So now I’m back to 8mg of the prazosin at night (went up to 9mg when my nightmares got bad again) and quetiapine is down 25mg to 125mg. I’m particularly pleased about the quetiapine, as there is correlation between it and weight gain, and I’d like to shed some of the weight I’ve put on since I got sick.

I made the changes last night and I don’t think I noticed anything. At one point I was on 700mg of quetiapine a day, so getting rid of 25mg now will hopefully go unnoticed by the little chemical receptor things on by brain cells.

Oh, and I came across this somewhere in my travels and thought it was a funny and accurate portrayal of some of the things my OCD makes me grind my teeth over:

I always try to get the gas to a full dollar value. If I miss it, I’ll go to the next dollar up. If I go too far and obviously can’t fit another dollar worth of gas in, I’ll go to the nearest $0.25… but I won’t feel right about it for the rest of the day. I don’t know what I’d do in the situation in the picture, though!

Nothing planned for this weekend, but next week after Tuesday is going to be busy. I have a lot of appointments – an appointment with the nurse at the clinic for a vaccination, one with Dr H, one with the surgeon who fixed my arm, and one with the dietician.

Stay safe.

Song: “Act Naturally” by Buck Owens

Mood: 6.5

Nightmares: 0

Ghosts: Several

It’s been a while since my last post. I’m not sure why I’m not writing more often – there always seems to be stuff going on.

Whether it’s the increase in prazosin, changing my nighttime routine a bit, or any other factor, my nightmares seem to have backed off somewhat. I’m still getting them but not every night again, and on the nights when I have them, I don’t get them one after another after another. Hopefully I don’t regret saying this, but I don’t seem to be having the nightmare with the capsized boat anymore, either. Maybe the other two will disappear over time, too…

Some of my OCD issues have been flaring up again lately, mainly around the garage and front doors – to the point where J has been noticing. It could be related to everything that’s been going on, but when it gets to the point where J notices, it’s very important for me that I do something about it. So Dr C and I have been talking about it and she has me doing ERP on them again. ERP helps me a lot but it’s not very pleasant to do. The idea is that exposing yourself to what bothers you and forcing yourself to not give in to the compulsion will cause your anxiety to rise, but if you hang on and wait it out, the anxiety should drop after a while. Ideally, the anxiety over time curve should look something like this:

And as far as the garage door goes, it follows that pretty well (this has four trials on it in different colours):

But the front door is a different matter. For the better part of two weeks, my charts looked like this:

I know that from your perspective this is just a little graph drawn by a stranger on the internet, but to me it represents hours I’ve spent forcing myself to feel like someone’s tightening a strap around my chest and I’m grinding my teeth down to stumps. Anyone who says “well, just think about something else” or “don’t worry about it” or “deal with it” may be well-intentioned, but they have no idea what it’s actually like to deal with this kind of thing… and I hope they never do.

The good news is that my worries about the garage door have dropped back to a very manageable level, and the front door is finally getting there now, too. It’s frustrating that I’ve had go back and work on several things now, but Dr C says that anxiety and OCD are like playing whack-a-mole. It’s taking less time to “re-ERP” things now than it did at the start, which is good, too. I should probably also try to be more proactive about these things and catch them before they’re at the point where they’re bothering me and/or other people notice.

Another thing Dr C has me working on is the little patrol I do inside the house before I finally go to bed. I take pictures of a bunch of things in a particular order, and sometimes just knowing that I’ve taken the picture helps me when I wake up worrying in the middle of the night. But it’s not a healthy habit and is likely feeding and/or is part of my OCD behaviour now. So she has given me the homework to not take a picture of one thing during my wander around the house. I’ve started with the stove and so far it’s going very well. Of course I picked something easier to start with but if I’m successful I should be able to build on that with something a little more difficult, then something more difficult again, and so on. If this works out, it’ll save a lot of wear and tear on the SD card in my phone!

With the uncertainty surrounding J’s job (or, more like the certainty now that it’s going away), other things that I’m worried about, and the recent frustration and stress that it’s caused, I decided to bow out of volunteering at the church down the street. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve been at the building in the last six months, nevermind the volunteering. While I like the idea of helping people, I’ve accomplished next to nothing there and the effort and worry isn’t worth it anymore. I left the door open in the event things change, but I don’t think I’ll be going back.

Let’s see… what else is going on. Oh, the blood pressure thing, right. That’s actually kind of a funny story. Funny? Maybe not “funny” but probably chuckle-worthy. So my GP had me stop taking one of my BP medications and it immediately made a difference in how tired I was during the day. I still have to “finish rebooting” as FA says, but after that I’m alert and don’t immediately fall asleep when I sit down. But then my BP went up… and up… and up. And that’s when I figured it out.

Remember Zombie Mark? The guy who’d eat cake or chocolate syrup at night and then fall asleep on the couch? Well, we fixed that problem by taking my nighttime medication just before I went to bed, instead of at a fixed time in the evening. Well… making that change ended up moving my nighttime and morning medications to anywhere from eight to six hours apart, instead of the twelve that they’re supposed to be. So I was accidentally stacking my medications, almost all of which are known to have the side effect (or main effect) of lowering blood pressure. Anyway, I called my GPs office back and said to the nurse, “you’re either gonna laugh or yell at me”. She was very pleasant about the whole thing and by the end of the day I’d changed my nighttime medication schedule back to the way it was and was back on the medication I’d been taken off (albeit at a lower dose).

Zombie Mark has made a couple of appearances since (most notably to eat an entire bag of chocolate chips and then fall asleep on the couch), but another thing Dr C has been working with me on is getting my bedtime set to a more reasonable hour. It’s working, too… slowly but surely.

Because her office is closing, J has to do a lot of inventorying. Because of the social distancing policies and that it’s easier to do that stuff when people aren’t bothering you every thirty seconds, she went into work last Sunday for about five hours. I tagged along and sat at her desk and puttered with my phone and a computer I brought while she scurried around with a pen and paper. I was glad when we finally got home, but it wasn’t too bad.

I’m also still working on keeping myself occupied at home. Now that I’m not fighting to stay awake all afternoon it’s a lot easier to concentrate and I’m accomplishing stuff again, which is really quite nice. I’m also fascinated and entertained by the rabbits that stop in our yard to relax during the afternoon. I know they’re basically pests, but they can sure be cute.

So if you stop by and there’s no answer at the door, I may be in the back yard watching the bunnies.

Stay safe.