Lakme
12-06-17, 00:56
Hello, it's been a while since I've been here.
I have been fairly well. I've been going outside a lot since I last posted here and finally coped with the fact that the "symptoms" I was experiencing were primarily due to anxiety.
That being said. I have a very uncomfortable issue to address regarding mental health.
My mother, who was diagnosed as being bipolar when she was 12, was supposedly diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 24 years old. I didn't have very many issues in my teenage years, aside from being bullied and harassed in 7th grade. I've had a couple of embarrassing/traumatic experiences (not THAT traumatic) up until 11th grade when I was forced to defend myself from an attacker. I ended up knocking him out and sending him to the hospital. Some still say that his head isn't right since that event took place. Although I only feel partially guilty because he was a total delinquent, I was totally obsessed with the idea that he was seeking revenge through some public Facebook messages I saw. I stayed inside and away from most of my friends and people I knew from high school for an extended period of time and that's when my anxiety began to manifest itself. It wasn't so bad then as it became recently. I was still able to do some of the things I enjoyed. But the cognitive hurdles that appeared more recently were messing with my life. I went to therapy for a couple of years because I ended up telling the officer that I had an anger problem. I was told by the lawyer that that could have helped or hurt my case in some way but that wasn't the point. It's true that for most of my life, although I've been prone to aggressive outbursts, I've tended to keep my cool in most situations.
Anyways, after I left counseling, I felt a lot better than I had before. I didn't feel quite like I did in high school, but I assessed that the reason I felt depressed was because I was telling myself I was depressed. And there may be some truth to this. More recently, my uncle passed away from liver failure because of years of drinking. After this, I slipped into a more severe depressive episode where I started to feel out of touch with the things that I enjoyed. I still partly blame my family for the way they handled things because I felt like they didn't try hard enough to take care of him. His death seemed very painful, and I was distraught at how my grandmother seemed to pay more attention to my other uncles children than her dying son. At one point, he came into our household vomiting blood and when I ran into the room to tell her, she was too busy playing with the kids so I had to tell someone else. She says that the situation I described wasn't how it played out but I perceived it differently. To me that was negligent. Before I get into too many details about my life, my depression and anxiety wasn't extremely bad before I got a job. I did start to have panic attacks when I found myself in an undesirable situation, but I acknowledged it to be anxiety. I started to associate the panic attacks with eye pain and although they happened infrequently, about every once in a week, I was slightly concerned about where my anxiety was taking me.
One day I went out to eat Chinese food at my favorite place and after a couple of hours of eating some very strange tasting food I realized something was wrong with my stomach. I don't know how this allowed my anxiety to progress to what it is now but over the next few hours or so I vomited twice and fell asleep. The next few days or so are foggy in my memory but all I remember is waking up and beginning to see flashes and visual disturbances everywhere. I also noticed that I couldn't quite enjoy my favorite video games and anime like I used to, especially because my mind wouldn't allow me to process subtitles. After about a week of ruminating and waiting for it to go away I realized that something was out of place. I started to think that there was something seriously wrong with my eyes. That's where the health anxiety started. I would roll over on the couch every single day, freaking out thinking that I was going blind. After a visit to the optometrist she disproved my hypothesis and sent me home. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. I forget when but not too long after that I started to worry about tetanus. I used a number of razors to shave my body and I worried that one had given me tetanus and that's why I woke up with a strange feeling in my arm and leg. I won't go into too many details but I developed neck pain before I finally brought myself to the doctor. Before this event took place, I was deathly afraid of the doctor, mostly because of needles.
Anyways, she gave me some antibiotics, some buspar and some and some medicine for diarrhea. I came back a couple weeks later and she prescribed me elavil/amitriptyline. Strangely enough, when I woke up to go pick up my prescription my "symptoms" magically faded away between the walk to and from the store. I felt delighted when I came back home it was as if I was somehow cured in an instant. I didn't want to take any chances so I started the elavil right away. The severity of my symptoms were minimal but still present. I could play video games but I still couldn't quite focus on stories like I used to. In addition to that there were behavioral symptoms that the elavil created. I had strange thoughts, my friends were distancing themselves from me, and my inhibition was so gone that a schizophrenic man told me to bash my head against a wall and I did it. After my anxiety started to outpace the medication and interfere with my memory, I stopped. This was also due to a burning pain that started to develop in my abdomen, yet another physical manifestation of my anxiety. Getting off of elavil was probably somewhat of a bad idea in the beginning but I don't think I was better off either way. Despite spending several months away from google, I ended up back on here again, asking other clueless hypochondriacs if I had colon or pancreatic cancer. I started to lose weight and by the end of October I was so spaced out I spent most days in bed and it got so bad an image flashed in my head of what my insides looked like based on a picture I had seen on the internet.
Anyways I got a blood test that came back completely normal and I spent the next few months floating off and on of placebo effects and different diagnoses before I finally got put on medical and brought myself over to a gastroenterologist. The gastro wrote "anxiety and depression" as a diagnosis and I was beyond pissed because I perceived yet another person "writing me off" because to me the fact that I lost weight was a telltale sign that there was something terribly wrong with me that doctors weren't willing to address. At that point I was convinced that celiac Disease was creating the knot in my stomach whenever I had a meal I was uneasy about. I proved myself wrong when I ate fried shrimp without any problems. I finally found a reason to address it as anxiety. After that I started to gain a bit of my weight back as well as my appetite. I've just been doing a lot of exercise and busing it to the city. I still haven't been able to enjoy the things that I used to do but traveling and walking has lifted somewhat of a burden off of my back.
I'm sure some have skipped over my ridiculously long backstory which you can look into just by going into my backlog, but my real question today has to do with my mother and her illness. I know I'm not experiencing anything of the sort now because I'm totally aware of my current mentality. If I was going to lose touch with reality like that do you think it would have happened already after all that I've been through? She's been known for heavy drug use and I haven't touched a single drug in my life, not even alcohol. It's not even so much for my well being as it is for my dreams and ambitions. This was beyond a setback for me. It's taken over a year to be even remotely close to getting over this you can imagine how much of a setback it would be if I suddenly lost my mind. I know there's not much that people can provide in terms of that kind of information, and I'm fully aware that this is part of my anxiety acting up again, I probably shouldn't have even come back here, but it's been at the back of my mind for the past few days and I would like something along the lines of words of encouragement if possible. I know it's a bit much to ask from other people with similar problems.
I also didn't know where else to post this so I hope this will suffice.
I have been fairly well. I've been going outside a lot since I last posted here and finally coped with the fact that the "symptoms" I was experiencing were primarily due to anxiety.
That being said. I have a very uncomfortable issue to address regarding mental health.
My mother, who was diagnosed as being bipolar when she was 12, was supposedly diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was 24 years old. I didn't have very many issues in my teenage years, aside from being bullied and harassed in 7th grade. I've had a couple of embarrassing/traumatic experiences (not THAT traumatic) up until 11th grade when I was forced to defend myself from an attacker. I ended up knocking him out and sending him to the hospital. Some still say that his head isn't right since that event took place. Although I only feel partially guilty because he was a total delinquent, I was totally obsessed with the idea that he was seeking revenge through some public Facebook messages I saw. I stayed inside and away from most of my friends and people I knew from high school for an extended period of time and that's when my anxiety began to manifest itself. It wasn't so bad then as it became recently. I was still able to do some of the things I enjoyed. But the cognitive hurdles that appeared more recently were messing with my life. I went to therapy for a couple of years because I ended up telling the officer that I had an anger problem. I was told by the lawyer that that could have helped or hurt my case in some way but that wasn't the point. It's true that for most of my life, although I've been prone to aggressive outbursts, I've tended to keep my cool in most situations.
Anyways, after I left counseling, I felt a lot better than I had before. I didn't feel quite like I did in high school, but I assessed that the reason I felt depressed was because I was telling myself I was depressed. And there may be some truth to this. More recently, my uncle passed away from liver failure because of years of drinking. After this, I slipped into a more severe depressive episode where I started to feel out of touch with the things that I enjoyed. I still partly blame my family for the way they handled things because I felt like they didn't try hard enough to take care of him. His death seemed very painful, and I was distraught at how my grandmother seemed to pay more attention to my other uncles children than her dying son. At one point, he came into our household vomiting blood and when I ran into the room to tell her, she was too busy playing with the kids so I had to tell someone else. She says that the situation I described wasn't how it played out but I perceived it differently. To me that was negligent. Before I get into too many details about my life, my depression and anxiety wasn't extremely bad before I got a job. I did start to have panic attacks when I found myself in an undesirable situation, but I acknowledged it to be anxiety. I started to associate the panic attacks with eye pain and although they happened infrequently, about every once in a week, I was slightly concerned about where my anxiety was taking me.
One day I went out to eat Chinese food at my favorite place and after a couple of hours of eating some very strange tasting food I realized something was wrong with my stomach. I don't know how this allowed my anxiety to progress to what it is now but over the next few hours or so I vomited twice and fell asleep. The next few days or so are foggy in my memory but all I remember is waking up and beginning to see flashes and visual disturbances everywhere. I also noticed that I couldn't quite enjoy my favorite video games and anime like I used to, especially because my mind wouldn't allow me to process subtitles. After about a week of ruminating and waiting for it to go away I realized that something was out of place. I started to think that there was something seriously wrong with my eyes. That's where the health anxiety started. I would roll over on the couch every single day, freaking out thinking that I was going blind. After a visit to the optometrist she disproved my hypothesis and sent me home. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. I forget when but not too long after that I started to worry about tetanus. I used a number of razors to shave my body and I worried that one had given me tetanus and that's why I woke up with a strange feeling in my arm and leg. I won't go into too many details but I developed neck pain before I finally brought myself to the doctor. Before this event took place, I was deathly afraid of the doctor, mostly because of needles.
Anyways, she gave me some antibiotics, some buspar and some and some medicine for diarrhea. I came back a couple weeks later and she prescribed me elavil/amitriptyline. Strangely enough, when I woke up to go pick up my prescription my "symptoms" magically faded away between the walk to and from the store. I felt delighted when I came back home it was as if I was somehow cured in an instant. I didn't want to take any chances so I started the elavil right away. The severity of my symptoms were minimal but still present. I could play video games but I still couldn't quite focus on stories like I used to. In addition to that there were behavioral symptoms that the elavil created. I had strange thoughts, my friends were distancing themselves from me, and my inhibition was so gone that a schizophrenic man told me to bash my head against a wall and I did it. After my anxiety started to outpace the medication and interfere with my memory, I stopped. This was also due to a burning pain that started to develop in my abdomen, yet another physical manifestation of my anxiety. Getting off of elavil was probably somewhat of a bad idea in the beginning but I don't think I was better off either way. Despite spending several months away from google, I ended up back on here again, asking other clueless hypochondriacs if I had colon or pancreatic cancer. I started to lose weight and by the end of October I was so spaced out I spent most days in bed and it got so bad an image flashed in my head of what my insides looked like based on a picture I had seen on the internet.
Anyways I got a blood test that came back completely normal and I spent the next few months floating off and on of placebo effects and different diagnoses before I finally got put on medical and brought myself over to a gastroenterologist. The gastro wrote "anxiety and depression" as a diagnosis and I was beyond pissed because I perceived yet another person "writing me off" because to me the fact that I lost weight was a telltale sign that there was something terribly wrong with me that doctors weren't willing to address. At that point I was convinced that celiac Disease was creating the knot in my stomach whenever I had a meal I was uneasy about. I proved myself wrong when I ate fried shrimp without any problems. I finally found a reason to address it as anxiety. After that I started to gain a bit of my weight back as well as my appetite. I've just been doing a lot of exercise and busing it to the city. I still haven't been able to enjoy the things that I used to do but traveling and walking has lifted somewhat of a burden off of my back.
I'm sure some have skipped over my ridiculously long backstory which you can look into just by going into my backlog, but my real question today has to do with my mother and her illness. I know I'm not experiencing anything of the sort now because I'm totally aware of my current mentality. If I was going to lose touch with reality like that do you think it would have happened already after all that I've been through? She's been known for heavy drug use and I haven't touched a single drug in my life, not even alcohol. It's not even so much for my well being as it is for my dreams and ambitions. This was beyond a setback for me. It's taken over a year to be even remotely close to getting over this you can imagine how much of a setback it would be if I suddenly lost my mind. I know there's not much that people can provide in terms of that kind of information, and I'm fully aware that this is part of my anxiety acting up again, I probably shouldn't have even come back here, but it's been at the back of my mind for the past few days and I would like something along the lines of words of encouragement if possible. I know it's a bit much to ask from other people with similar problems.
I also didn't know where else to post this so I hope this will suffice.