Day 145 – The little changes
I am doing my best to believe that the shrink is right and that things will get better so this morning when I woke up I try to do something to help the process along. Last night I went to yoga and I took the hideous new little tablets which may well be the answer. When I woke up this morning then at a ridiculous hour, five am I tried to be pleased about it. Okay, so it is a little earlier than I had wanted to wake up but there is no alarm and for the first time in months I am not comatose. In recognition of this small miracle I write a blog and I straighten my hair in some attempt to give off the impression that I am still in here somewhere, that somewhere deep inside of me is the girl who used to care what she looked like when she left the house.
I make it through the day again and when the sickness comes and the nausea sweeps over me I take a short break and another sip of water and will for it to go. I forgot about the side effects, the joy of coming off another tablet totally cold turkey and I think resentfully of those who are taken off heroin and given methadone to stop the excruciating affects of withdrawal. They took me off three hundred grams of a drug whose name I was only starting to understand how to pronounce but there was no methadone mentioned in my care plan. I feel bitter but maybe its just from the sickness and I am confusing the two.
I need to be able to keep it together and I make it through until the afternoon before the tearfulness hits me and thankfully at the time I am out of the office and clinging for dear life I hit the panic button and ring the boy. Trying to hide my face with my hair, thanking God that I straightened it down so it could cover my eyes I tell him that it is happening again. I know it is not fair to call on someone who lives a hundred miles away for help but I don’t know what to do. I’m in the middle of the street and its a sunny afternoon and I need to pull it together because I can not, I can not return to work while I’m still crying. He calms me down he does his best he really does but I’m shaken and I’m hurt that they have left me like this. Can it really have got so bad that I am now crying during the day or is it just the nausea, the lack of sleep and the hundred new chemicals that are now coursing themselves through my veins. I don’t know, but all I have to help me through it at this minute is the boy, there is no methadone.
I get off the phone because this is unfair to him and I am meant to be trying to get through this by myself, because what other way is there. I try some cleansing hippy breaths to take me through the sickness and I try to smile because as the leader of the hippy sport said last night, life’s adversities are best faced with a smile. When she said it I nearly laughed but I was too busy trying to throw my body into shapes the creator had not foreseen when he blessed the human body with a set of ribs so I settled with a cynical smile. Today though I am in need of a mantra and if a smile of adversity will carry me through without having to escape to the bathroom to cry than its a hippy phrase I’m willing to try. It’s amazing what people are forced to turn to in the absence of drug replacement therapies.
- Today’s dress is from my Godmother, I think. It is beautiful and I have been saving it for a day when it was too hard to choose or convert anything else and it has helped for even if I was a wreck I like to hope that in this dress I looked like a lady who had it together, in spite of a slightly manic grin.
