A Surprisingly Sane Blog

An update on my insanity (aka postpartum depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder) for those of you interested in the ongoing saga of what parenthood has done to me.

Last Friday, I had a follow-up appointment with my psychiatrist to determine how I am doing with the treatment.

Short answer:  pretty well.  You can stop there if you don’t want to know details.

Longer story:  (do yourself a favor and don’t hold your breath while reading.)

While the Prozac took a few weeks to fully make its way into my system, I have been extremely responsive to its positive effects and have had very little side effects.  In fact, with the exception of the occasional bout of dizziness, though only at night when I’m exhausted, I haven’t noticed a single bad side effect.  Hopefully I didn’t just jinx myself.

In addition, the weekly therapy with Dee and physical therapy with Dina have given me insight on why I am… well, the way I am, and have given me tools towards a healthier lifestyle both physically and mentally.

However, this good news is not without a bit of not-as-good realizations, which were confirmed at my Friday appointment.

Sadly, my mental illnesses are not entirely isolated to the postpartum era. This is no surprise, but still kind of sad for me to think about.

For the first time since I can remember, I am not stuck in a foggy state where this person named “Tamra” is living my life for me.  I am actually here, present, and able to function more like a “normal” person.  I still have occurrences of anxiety and moments where I feel a little out of control, but as my psychiatrist assured me, those instances fall into the realm of “normal”.  Apparently, “normal” people have bad days, too.  Imagine that.

As I have mentioned before, I am genetically predisposed to this.  While I never go into specifics because I keep my family members’ lives personal (with the exception of my sister’s love for trashy panties), I can say this:  There is a freaking plethora of mental illness in my blood line.  Severe depression, anxiety, personality disorders, eating disorders, suicide, OCD, etc.  If it exists, someone along the line has most likely suffered from it.

My depression can be traced back as far as grade school.  I was about seven years old the first time I realized with frustration that I had a multitude of “bad days” and difficulty sleeping.  By the time I was nine years old, I started writing in a diary, which documented how I frequently thought about how much I wanted to die because I hated myself.

I spent junior high in a complete haze, wondering in desperation if I would ever find something about myself and personality that was a good thing.  I wrote poetry of suicide, carried around a notebook that I wrote in obsessively, and had very few friends.  So many days I used to sneak inside to eat lunch in the solitude of a quiet classroom because I couldn’t bear to face being social.

While I would love to say that my teenage years of high school told a different story, I can’t.  By my senior year, my mom finally called the doctor to seek treatment, but never followed through.  In fact, she unintentionally made me feel dirty for being too weak to handle my diseased mind on my own.

Looking back, I now realize that my quality of life could have been so much better had I grown up in a family that wasn’t too proud to seek treatment for their mental instability.  Parents who didn’t shun medication or laugh at the anti-depressant commercials.

It’s not my parents’ fault, though.  They didn’t know better.  And they were entitled to their own mistakes, just as I am for mine.

But fast forward to today.  To when my illness got so out of control that I couldn’t think clearly for more than three hours a week before the empty black hole of depression swallowed me whole again.

When I finally started treatment, I was extremely skeptical of my diagnosis and whether medication and counseling could help.  On Friday, I told my psychiatrist this.  She wasn’t surprised and told me that it is very common for individuals who are in that bad of a spot to be suspicious of help.

She read back to me different key points of things I was experiencing back in January when I first came to her.  All I could think was, “Holy shit, I really did say that.  I was in *that bad* of a place.”

The denial of this horrible truth at the time makes me wonder how I had the sense at all to agree to treatment.  Thank God I did or I wouldn’t be here writing this today.  I was literally at the end of my rope.

In my much better state, my psychiatrist and I were able to have a very real conversation about my mental situation both past and present.  She was extremely pleased by my obvious progress and ability to answer questions without looking vacantly at my husband for an answer.

In fact, I actually showed up to my appointment alone.  This was a very big step for me.

The part that was a bit hard to hear was the truth that I watched her write down and that she told me at the end of my appointment while she handed me a white slip with a signed prescription for my happy pills.

“Prozac to be continued with no end in sight.”

She assured me that while she is not a “pill-pusher”, she is certain that it is a necessary tool to keep me functioning like a healthy person, even beyond the postpartum time.

And while I had a fleeting hope that maybe, just maybe, I have stabilized enough to stop needing drugs to survive, I realized she was right.  So until further notice, yours truly is dependent on a little white pill to get through life.

But you know what?  I’m finally to a point where I have accepted that fact, and I am no longer embarrassed to admit it.  It’s not my fault I’m fucked up, but it is my fault if I am unwilling to take care of the problem now that I am able to realize how dangerous depression can be.

I told my psychiatrist that it is pretty rough finally seeing how crazy I really can be.  She kind of laughed when she said, “You’re only crazy if you refuse to get the help you need, just like a diabetic would be nuts to refuse the insulin they need.”

Finally, now I am here and coherant for the people who mean the most to me in life.  And I’m actually doing pretty well.

Current Mood: Cool

After a very frustrating day of kids not napping and a flat tire, James and Julie decided to redeem themselves and pumped my tire up for me.

Using a bicycle pump.

The amazing thing was, it actually worked.  Now to drive it to Discount Tires to spend a few hundred dollars.  You know, since my tires have been bald for the last 6 months.

Gotta love when kids use the wrong word.  Julie kept saying she was, “Humping the tire.”

Of course, being the simply amazing parents we are, we were laughing too hard to really correct her.

Notice the smug look on her little face?  Later on when she’s old enough to understand, we’ll have to tell her that was the day she learned to hump a tire.

By the way, my neighbor was outside eavesdropping on our conversation through the bushes.  Nosy butt.  I’m sure she’s wondering why Julie’s daddy was “humping the wheel of mommy’s car”.  She was probably hoping to catch him with his pants down.

Current Mood: Happy