How you can help me, please

I saw Dr. Brain today. She thinks I'm rapid cycling, along with everything else. Which is just from stress, but at the same time it's bad enough for her to trial an increase in lithium. I have not tolerated more than the tiniest dose of lithium since my toxicity, and we were talking several months ago about possibly stopping it. It has always been one of the last things to try raising and she's avoided it for about 3 years now, but since there is no more room with Seroquel and another mood stabilizer would be drastic, we're trying this.

So, that's the first thing. If you pray, please pray that: 1)my body has forgiven lithium for their past differences, 2) that my diabetes insipidus (damage to the gland or something on the kidney that tells it to concentrate urine to retain electrolytes) doesn't go crazy because I've been allowed to stay on lithium cautiously which is very rare after that diagnosis 3)that I have no increase in side effects. Lithium causes hand tremors for me and was how I lost my patience with sewing years ago. Because I know that can happen I have a prescription ready to go if I need it, however my ability to take this will depend on my blood pressure as it will lower it and it already tends to be low from the MAOI. 4) that this works. I'm not in a very good place right now. Too many too strong feelings about too many things. 5) That the baby situation does not present itself as I'm notified at work that the baby is coming and I need to try to get through the work day. I don't think I can do that at this point, and yet I need to.

The 2nd thing is this: please be understanding. I don't really know what the next weeks hold aside from counseling is going to be working on helping me get some really strong feelings out. My sister's baby is going to be harder than I thought and I'm going to have to deal with a number of things I don't want to face, along with general concern for the health of both of them as the baby remains stubbornly breech and is enormous. It probably will be born in the next few days. All along I've known that if it happens while i"m at work I'll get a message from my mom and after work I'll go take care of her dogs and stay there until she is back home from helping.

But I do know that I am dealing with feelings that embarrass me and are very, very hard for me to talk about. Dr. Mind tells me I rarely have talked about the anger that goes with illness. And I'm very aware of that anger right now and am trying to deal with it. If summed up in one sentence i'm furious because my life has had so many things happen that hurt, a lot. It feels like in my family of 3 kids and later my half brother, I was the one who had the large birthmark (genetics), dealt with the worst sexual abuse from my grandfather, had my father still making decisions about my life for part of college in a way that while i wound up exactly what I wanted I have a whole biology degree that I didn't really want but i was too fearful of him to quit. I also got a D in calculus because when I called him to say "I'm not doing well in this, I have to option to cut back to pre-calc and then try again next semester" he told me not to quit. Duh. We knew that my high school was not academincally strong. I was in no way prepared for that class. I am the one who broke a stupid ankle and then proceeded to not treat that and ruin 2 joints in one leg. I'm the one who has to make the non-choice between surgery and wearing a huge brace. I felt like I got the opportunity to have people stare and ask endless questions with the birthmark. Now i have 2 physically freaky features and a limp to boot. My siblings bear scars as well, but they seem to run deeper in me, maybe because the sexual abuse was so much more severe, maybe because of my personality, maybe because of my illness. Regardless, I'm doing a lot of feeling like "It's not fair".

What I need (and you are all wonderful and will do this, but last year the one time I neglected to spend 8 paragraphs qualifying something I said that someone took wrong I wound up with a number of painful comments, and right now I'm not strong enough to be criticized. If you feel I really should think about something please tell me when I'm feeling better.

Right now I'm feeling constantly 24 seconds from panic. I'm back to a lot of meds for anxiety and even that's not really enough. I have no idea what I'll feel like talking about, but no matter how whiny or self-centered, please try to understand that right now I'm coping with losses that I have ignored for 10 years for the most part. And there's little that just makes it ok; Dr Brain pointed out that although it would be psychiatrically risky for me to have a baby and I would have to stay on meds through all trimesters and would probably struggle after a birth, if I really wanted to have a baby I could. Except that I wouldn't inflict myself on a child 24-7. I also wouldn't risk my own stability. And it's not like people are lining up wanting to have children with me, and even if they were the funniest (saddest) part is that I can't even have sex without physical therapy because one of the ways my body protected itself from the things that happened was by learning that if anything tries to enter the area where babies traditionally begin and emerge I have muscle spasms that prevent it and make it extremely painful. When things got so I couldn't talk about the sexual abuse anymore the biggest question on my mind was that given memories I have and what they imply, why has nobody ever found physical signs of rape (knowing there aren't always, but my body had a pretty good clue that it hadn't been completed if nothing else); my body learned to fight back. So the answer to that, I suspect, is that someone tried. And that's something else Dr. Mind and I have to talk about sometime soon, in a conversation likely to be very difficult. So no babies for me, because unless something drastically changes I do not think I have it in me to go through both psychologically difficult and a combination of physically difficult and embarrassing treatments just to let me ever have sex. I suspect that I will never do that in my life as I just have a limit to what I can work on that i shouldn't have to think about and that is past the line.

So essentially the theme around here is going to be "it's not fair". And anger. And jealousy. And resentment, and maybe even wishing that someone else had this and I didn't (more like I want someone else's life than i want them to hurt) or that if someone in my family had to get sick that it wasn't me. And while I experience all this I have to work on not hating myself for feeling that way. And I don't want to have any help in feeling that, because that hatred of myself for feeling like this has made this be put off for months and not it is time that I have to face things and I've given myself no real time to do so. ...............throw in heat, really busy work right now, learning to accept that while I have much less pain now that my ankle has developed that lovely deep ache called arthritis and it doesn't mind telling me about it, pretty much daily. It's a good thing I'm not wanting to go back to nursing homes; I think my days on my feet that many hours/day are done. And that too, while not what I want, to know that that option isn't a very good one anymore is also frustrating. I'm not interested now, but I've spent most of 10 years doing that and not being back as a strong possibility is odd. Please know I'm aware of the ugliness of these thoughts which is precisely why I've avoided them like crazy until now.

Know also that I still know that my life has very good things and that I do appreciate them. I know that it's incredible that I'm not only working but thriving, and that I'm fixing my finances and many other things. However, at the moment those things don't make up for the perfectly reasonable things I want and can't have and so I am grieving those reasonable things.