The Concept of Time
I didn’t realize that more than a year went by since my last entry. When a lot of things happen to you and you completely change up your routine unintentionally because of those things, time flies.
I reread my last entry and I think I need to provide an update, for the sake of the amount of time that has passed.
A month after Miley left us, Tia left as well. I think I already mentioned this, but to recap: The leg without the tumor was overcompensating and making all of her movements for the other leg that had the tumor… because she could not walk on that leg well anymore. Overtime, I guess her tumorless leg got tired and resulted in her giving up using her back legs and walked only on her two front legs. My mom and I felt bad for her and decided to take her to the vet so the doc could see her condition. Knowing we probably weren’t going to be bringing her back home with us that day, I still tried to stay composed. But of course, the inevitable happened. We had to let her go because we couldn’t bare to watch her suffering and living the last moments of her life like that anymore. No animal deserves to live like that.
My mom and I left the vet’s office in tears…
Eventually, her ashes were ready to take home. My mom told me to keep her ashes with me because she didn’t want to be reminded that we had to let her go. So, I have both Miley and Tia’s ashes on one of the shelves in our living room. Majority of the time when I see a picture or video of either of them, naturally, I cry. Like I’m doing right now. Shit.
My husband gets emotional when he, too, sees and thinks about them. Well, moreso Miley than Tia; he loved Miley. She’s the reason that he no longer calls himself just a cat lover. She helped him to want another dog, especially after the fact that he found out that when he was a kid, his dog had to be put down for certain reasons… and he had no knowledge of it until he was told what happened. For a kid, that would be traumatic… and that was the case for my husband. When we happened to find a picture of him as a kid with his dog as we were going through some of his childhood things, his mood completely changed. From feeling positively nostalgic seeing all his old things… to instantly breaking down only 2 seconds of seeing that picture. That was the first time I ever saw him cry.
But time heals all wounds, right?
I don’t know about that…
It has been 3 years since my dad passed, but remembering everything that happened the last couple months up to that pivotal moment of his passing… it still feels like it was yesterday. And it still hurts. I try to keep my head up and cope by writing in a small journal, writing “letters” to him, telling him about my day. Only… it has been over a year since I last wrote to him. Realizing I felt like I neglected thinking about my dad, I brought the journal back out so that it was in my immediate purview. It was never far from me, just out of sight. So I’ll hopefully get back to a routine of telling Dad about my day…
One of the other things that have happened since my last entry: I quit my job at that home foundation restoration place because it did start to become stressful. I always felt like I was doing something wrong. Not only that - pay was low, the drive to and from was longer than I wanted it to be, and even with all of those nice people I met over there, I still felt isolated. It wasn’t something I was passionate about. Okay, maybe this is a thing that isn’t really considered a passion for anyone (except maybe engineers or construction workers), but I just didn’t have the motivation to keep going there. Yes, this was unfortunate… to not have a job again… This put me into the deepest depression I’ve ever had.
Nevertheless, while I was still working there, I was also job searching hoping to find something better and something that piqued my interest more. I feel like I have come full circle because I found a position in a place that I used to work at, only the headquarters version of it, to put it simply.
So I work in the merchandising industry now. Not what I had in mind, but it pays the bills. And I’m adding more skills to my belt.
Looking at my mental health, I have to admit that I have become more anxious about a lot of things. At the beginning of the year, I was prescribed buproprion for my anxiety. And it was helping… until recently…
The height of this leveled-up anxiety was experiencing a pinched nerve in one of my shoulders, which apparently has been a thing since March/April earlier this year. The first time I experienced it, it made me feel like it was just any other pain that lasted for a minute or so… until I felt it again months later. The second time just me made more aware of what was going on with my body.
The third time, I started worrying about why it would keep coming back, and then I started to feel more than just a pinched nerve. The other elements that come with having a pinched nerve started to surface. Not only was my shoulder feeling pain, I also felt like my arm was swelling up and had a tingling sensation. My hands started to feel ice cold. This is when I started to panic and had an anxiety attack because with all of these combined, it felt like my arm was going to fall off. It also felt like there was someone trying to cut the circulation and was tugging my arm away from the rest of my body. It hurt in a way that I never felt before. This was a totally different and scary experience for me.
I googled my symptoms and found a lot of concerning information about other conditions that I hope I wasn’t experiencing and freaked myself out. I went to a clinic to get it looked at, but because I was so frantic, I left the clinic with a referral for psych services. That made me feel worse than I already did, all while not getting any solution to remedy this pain I was feeling…
Because of this, I thought I needed to increase the dosage of the buproprion. So the doctor authorized the increase and sent the medication to me.
Back to talking about the new job, which I was a total stranger to, it had aspects that kept me stressed. Because it was a job in merchandising, I had to learn retail math and how to work with Excel spreadsheets, things that I thought wouldn’t be too hard. We recently had courses for retail math and I’m going to be honest, I thought it was going to be a breeze. There were 2 sections of this course but I can’t recall what those sections were. I breezed through the first one, but I struggled hard during the second one. Because I was struggling, it stressed me out a little but I still found the challenge appealing enough to want to keep working on it.
Working with spreadsheets, however, was a doozy. Because this is something that technology facilitated, even if I didn’t know how to do a certain function, it was easy enough to search online how to do it.
On the other hand, because they are spreadsheets, there’s always numbers to deal with. And the latest experience working on spreadsheets that was challenging for me was looking at those numbers for too long. I had to update some prices in the system by referencing a spreadsheet that a vendor provided. It required me to look between the spreadsheet and the system frequently to transcribe the changes. There were so many columns of data that I had to narrow down to only what I needed at the moment so that I didn’t confuse myself. After completing this task, I doubled check my work… and this is when everything started to spiral down. After feeling somewhat more confident about the work I did, double checking my work made me feel like I lost my mind. What I thought was correct was actually not and I tried to fix it before fully presenting to my boss. I became frantic with trying to figure out where I went wrong and I started to panic. I had another anxiety attack. I had asked my boss for help, and she said take a break from that task and we’ll work on it together next week. My boss also encouraged me to get help from a therapist or psychiatrist about my anxiety. So I started looking…
Going back to my shoulder, I eventually got referred to an orthopedic office and scheduled to get my shoulder looked at. I had x-rays done and the doctor tried out some pressure points on my arm to check for carpal tunnel, arthritis, and other possible conditions. I’m relieved to say that the doctor said that I didn’t have any kind of terrible condition. A nerve in my arm was simply being pinched and it wasn’t anything that ibuprofen and rest couldn’t fix. Somehow, I had a thought that maybe what I was wearing on those days may have contributed to a nerve being pinched… and I recalled that there was this one particular dress that I wore on those days that was causing the pain. I stopped wearing it and wore more loosely fitted clothing and even tried to measure my bra size to check if I needed to start wearing a different size, which I did, only to find that it was more than likely the dress that was causing the issue. I had realized that the short sleeves of the dress were digging into the area close to the armpits. I mentioned this to the orthopedic doctor, and she said it is possible that something like that could have caused the issue because there is a particular nerve in that area that can make anyone feel the pains that I was describing. She also mentioned that I was going about it the right way and that I’ll be fine. But of course, if anything arises and it comes back, I can visit them again.
I left the doctor’s office relieved, although I still felt a little ridiculous for having such an appointment when the solution was simple. Nonetheless, I stopped feeling that pain after not wearing that dress anymore. And that was no longer a thing that stressed me out.
Since increasing the dosage of the buproprion, I started realizing that it wasn’t helping, but it was actually making things worse. The last anxiety attack I had was the scariest I’ve ever experienced…
TRIGGER WARNING
This was on that day when I was working on the price changes and looking at the numbers on the spreadsheet for far too long. On the way home from work, I started thinking about how I’ve been messing up on some of my tasks and having self-doubt and I was crying on and off. I had thoughts like, “because I feel like this, am I going to suddenly forget how to drive and get in to an accident?”
When I got inside my house, I started crying a bit more as my anxiety attack was gradually getting worse. I didn’t want to disturb my husband since he was still working, so I tried avoiding him and stayed downstairs. I cried on the couch for a bit until I decided to grab my tablet and started writing down everything that was on my mind at that moment. I wanted to write out everything because I wanted to be able to remember what was going on in my head, because I felt like my memory was also going to shit. Everything that came out of my head was a bunch of “why” questions, and with each question, I could never finish the sentence because it led up to another “why” question. It was a never-ending train of “why” questions and I couldn’t stop. It was questions like “why is the world the way it is?” and before I can even finish the question to answer, it just jumped to another one, like answering a question with another question. And as those questions came to my head, I simultaneously could not remember the last question that I just asked. It was driving me crazy how I couldn’t remember what I said just 2 seconds ago. Yet, the questions still kept coming. It was like I couldn’t control my mind anymore. And with trying to write everything in my head as it was thought, I felt like I couldn’t control my body as well, because I couldn’t stop writing.
While everything was going on, I was still aware and conscious of everything around me. There were certain words and phrases that would distract me and get off the track of those thoughts, like “stop”, “it’s a loop”, “repeat”, “remember”, “beginning”, “I need a distraction”, and “I need help” and if I spoke out loud any of those words. But I immediately went back to asking those questions in my head. I felt trapped in my own mind and body and it felt like I was in a loop.
My husband came downstairs and tried to comfort me. He didn’t understand that I couldn’t stop what I was doing but he tried anyway to hug me and all I could do was cry. I couldn’t speak at the moment, and if I did, all I said were some of those words that I just mentioned, which would make little to no sense to anyone. When I briefly got out of my mind, I was able to write out a request to my husband, and it was “Please distract me.” And slowly, I started to snap out of it. He would talk about other things to try and distract me. It was helping a little. He even guided me into my office in front of my computer and I was able to think and ask out loud if playing video games would help even more. It seemed like I needed something that didn’t involve repeating anything, and with video games, especially my choice of game, Genshin Impact, there were different things that I could do. A numerous amount of quests with different objectives. Nothing was repetitive. And that was what completely broke the loop, in combination with my husband trying to comfort me as best as he could.
Recounting all that had happened, I was, and still am, scared of this behavior coming back under another wave of distress.
Shortly after, I ended up contacting my husband’s mental health office to schedule working with a psychiatrist and medication management. So that is currently in progress, as well as my current prescribing doctor authorizing to go back down on the dosage of the buproprion.
Going back and remembering what happened that day is making me feel exhausted, so I will stop here for now.
If you made it this far, thank you.
