Other What's ruining your life right now?

Thanks. Really appreciate it

Fortunately I have a very supportive wife and my boss at work is great (even if the work atm is challenging due to the whole Covid thing).

Also trying to keep my mind occupied with some of my "retro" PC stuff. Currently have my Rampage 2 Extreme up and running with a i7 920 at a relaxed 3.6Ghz. Bios has been updated ready for the Xeon X5650 but I spend way too much time this evening bodging a Asetek mount (didn't help that I was just zoning out half the time) due to missing one of the 4 mounting pins.

Just going to take it a day at a time right now.

 

Wanted to get some wood from Wickes. None of the stock levels on the website reflect in what they actually have, spent ages going back and forth until it let me buy something without claiming it was now out of stock.

Earliest delivery slot I have is the 13th, hoping we don't have downpours and it actually turns up because I'm building my son a mud kitchen in the garden. The email said they'll let me know closer to the time if they can fulfil the order.... not feeling hopeful they will deliver.

 

Is their online stock on a per branch basis or for a central/regional delivery base?

 

I think builders merchants usually deliver from the nearest branch, our local Travis Perkins certainly does.

 

Night from heck. Sometimes my cocktail of pills at night works brilliantly, others they don't do much. It's usually my fault for eating toast before I take them. If I wait and take them first I end up eating loads, as one of them makes me feel like I've not eaten for a week.

So I took them around 1am. 3:30 I was still wide awake, and itchy and sore from sun burn. I finally managed to get to sleep around 5:30. I woke up at 7am and it seems it got rather cold last night. I couldn't stop shaking and shivering for about ten minutes. Had to put on my winter dressing gown. Got under the covers, then woke up every hour on the hour until 1pm.

Not a good night, at all. Still, at least it's cooled down a lot today so I'm not sweating my ass off.

 

sleep patterns

 

Had my grandfather's funeral today.

Did the best we could in these circumstances, but he deserves a lot more. If we didn't have this pandemic ******** going on, that crematorium would have been packed shoulder to shoulder and most of the town would still be in the working men's club right now.

 

That sucks.

Perhaps you can have an unofficial follow up once the lockdown is fully lifted? Don't know if that would help.

 

Yeah, I believe one of my cousins who was getting married in a couple of months is now planning a small thing for the actual day with minimal guests, then the big do on the first anniversary.

 

Memorials can be at any time, don't have to be on the day or its' anniversary.

 

Once bars & pubs start to open back up, he will have one of the biggest send-offs that town has ever seen. Whether it's a good idea or not in the context of COVID-19, that working men's club will be packed to the rafters!

 

I take a cocktail. I've been off of my mood stabiliser for ages now. I tried to fix it, but they didn't understand the dosage so I just didn't bother. However, I take one small one at night. Seroquel is the knockout. Within about 30 minutes you are out of it. That is where the Zopiclone works to keep me asleep, and of course the anxiety meds too. Sometimes I sleep like a teenager, others they just don't work at all. It's the Seroquel that makes you feel like you are starving. It's very easy to binge eat after one of those.

 

@The_Crapman @Vault-Tec personal question chaps, if I may.

Do you feel your medication changes you as a person, or do you think your core personality (i.e. your beliefs and way of thinking) stays?

I ask because I have a friend (and this is a friend, not me!) who was good fun at uni, but couldn't adjust to the real world (which in my opinion is more a measure of how messed up the world is rather than him) and ended up on meds after, well, let's call it 'an episode'. He's now a much more sedated version of himself and doesn't seem very alert. I would ask him, but it doesn't seem the right thing to do without making him feel self conscious..

 

Over a number of years I was on several different antidepressants, none really helped, all made me almost zombie like, all gave me moderate to severe headaches 5 or 6 days a week. Whether they work for you seems like a lottery.

What has mostly worked for me is moving to a quiet place in the country, coming off mind altering drugs, avoiding situations that cause stress and, as much as anything, getting a dog, meaning I have to take him out for walks. Now without meds, I am, most of the time, really only affected by my memory problems, often very frustrating but, I can cope with it.

 

They don't change me as a person. I still like to make stupid noises, laugh and etc. They do change traits, though. I am far less aggressive. Far less wound up. There are pros and cons to every medication tbh. Like, you do lose certain stuff but you gain others. I could not watch a single horror movie until I was on anti anxiety medication. That's just one example. Some of them though? take away my emotion completely. Which can be good, but I don't really like it. Some of the stuff I have taken is really heavy. Like the Seroquel. All I wanted to do was chill and sleep. However, I will say that at that time that is what I needed. I needed to escape, so those 5 years were like my cannabis days as a 13-21 year old. I just needed to be somewhere else all of the time. I got up, took the first dose, then took 5 more. I can't take the big XR (extended release) because if I take a tiny bit too much I get the most awful palpitations. So we split the doses down into instant release 5x a day. This was good, because it stopped the palpitations and most days I did not need them all. Those particular things did not stop me from feeling stuff, they just made it all far easier to take.

Like I say, pros and cons. However what I do know is that without them I would not be here today. So for better or for worse they have kept me alive. Some people swear they will never take them, well good luck to them. If I have a migraine I take something to stop the pain. If I have a broken leg I get a plaster put on it and so on. You don't just try to stupidly soldier through severe mental illness. I learned that the hard way. It not only wrecks your life but it causes severe damage to those around you. So I started on the mood stabilisers for my family, not me. However I soon found that I was a much better person for it. Yeah I have put on weight and yeah, I get vertigo a bit and sometimes fall over but that is so much better than going absolutely berserk and punching holes in the walls. I can't ride a bike "properly" now. My balance is off. So yeah, you do lose a lot. What you do gain is your life. So I suppose it depends on whether you want to make that compromise.

I also believe that this necessary evil stops me drinking, taking illegal drugs and so on, like many do. Again, that just causes massive damage to every one.

And yeah, my beliefs have remained the same. They've been rocked by traumatic events and so on, but never by tablets. Your thought patterns will be affected, but then it depends on what sort of intervention that needs. I no longer sit in a room full of loved ones and want to pull out a hammer and smash them in the head. And yeah, I hate talking about that but that is the sort of thing that would run through my mind before. I would be absolutely fine, and then WHAM. These really angry, aggressive thoughts would just come into my head.

But no, generally I am still annoying, talk too much and say stupid things

 

The pharma lottery is horrible. Often you will just feel far worse. However, it's finding the correct ones for you. Prozac? made me feel like my head was being crushed in a vice and I wanted to die. Sertraline? made me so manic it was unreal. Within three days I had ground my canines to being flat. Venlaflaxine? locked into misery. Now if I had a choice? I would take sertraline lol. It makes me as high as a kite. However, I found Citalopram to be the middle ground. So yeah, it's trial and error and it's not fun.

If it's seasonal/passing? then yeah, there are plenty of things you can do to avoid the pills. For me though? I have no choice. I can't sit here like Bob Marley taking Es every day any more.

 

I remember taking Prozac and Citalopram, among the others I can't remember.

After years of trying different meds, my GP agreed they were doing me no good and she set me a timetable to come off them slowly. It was also my GP who recommended getting a dog, mainly to get me out in sun. The dog has helped a lot.