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2:24pm December 16, 2012

➸ "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": And the bottom dropped out of the world and I'm scared

adelenedawner:

youneedacat:

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. I feel really bad. And I don’t know the words. Everything is messed up. I don’t remember who I am. I don’t remember a lot of things. I get scared when this happens. The world hasn’t gone away, I’m just confused, and that’s something. There’s…

—-

Granny Weatherwax looked out at the multi-layered, silvery world.

‘Where am I?’

INSIDE THE MIRROR.

‘Am I dead?’

THE ANSWER TO THAT, said Death, is SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NO AND YES.

Esme turned, and a billion figures turned with her.

‘When can I get out?’

WHEN YOU FIND THE ONE THAT’S REAL.

‘Is this a trick question?’

NO

Granny looked down at herself.

‘This one,’ she said.

(Not sure if this is useful, or relevant, or anything. But it seems like it might be, at least.)

Yay I love Granny Weatherwax and I love that scene. Thank you. :-)

This thing happens ever since the hospital where all kinds of parts of my mind just drop out of functioning all of a sudden. It happens worse when I’m in physical pain or other things like that. And right now I’m dealing with what I really hope is just a temporary flareup of gastroparesis, making even my liquid diet hard to get down and keep down, and I just got my nerve blocks on Friday and those always hurt like fuck at first (seriously a bunch of liquid pressing against a trigeminal nerve is bad before it dissipates and starts working, which seems to usually take a couple weeks – and this time a resident learned the procedure on me, at one point having to stick the needle in one direction and then turn it inside my face, which was really not cool). So I’m sure all that is adding to those times when everything seems to drop away and nothing makes sense anymore.

Fortunately there are… bits of my mind that I can usually count on for things like that. Connections to places and people and parts of the world that can be obscured but never destroyed. And if I can find them, it’s still miserable but it’s bearable. Not like the overwhelming lost horrible thing that happens when everything goes wrong in my head. If I can find only one of those threads and hold onto it, it’s like having someone there holding my hand, only far less intrusive than that could ever be.

Of course this is all gradually getting better. It’s not like the first days in the hospital when consciousness was so erratic that I kept being afraid I’d die and not “come back” every time things cut out like that. But I’ve had to pretty much claw my way back from that without a lot of help from medical people, because they weren’t bothering to implement their delirium protocol even though they knew there was severe delirium. My friends helped when they could, but there wasn’t a lot they could do in this regard other than continue reminding me of what the real world actually looks like.

So now when things drop out, it’s downright mellow compared to what it used to be. But it still can freak me out if it catches me off-guard. My DPA said delirium is on a continuum with coma, and if I’d been in a coma for five weeks they’d have known I’d need cognitive rehab for a long time, but with delirium they just somehow sent me home (still so bad that I spent most of my time thinking I was trapped in a white place where white stuff obscured everything that normally made sense) and expected me to deal. I finally worked out if I forced my mind to work, it would start learning to work rather than idle.

But when pain and other physical stuff gets worse, my brain gets worse too. And I can tell it’s like that today. I’d been getting so I could read some young adult novels, but right now I’m back to Victorian children’s novels – that’s how I generally measure my baseline right now, is reading level, because reading’s what I’m doing to get my brain working. The moment I started forcing myself to read, everything started improving a lot. It’s like my brain had learned to do as little as possible.

Wow I didn’t mean to explain all that. And now that I’m thinking it, I probably have mentioned all this before, so now I feel a little silly. But then that’s what my memory’s like these days, so I should figure on being repetitive for awhile and stop feeling silly about it.

But really if I can just find the few little connection points to things, places, and people that matter to me, then everything else follows. Those connections seem fundamental somehow. I can’t describe quite what it’s like finding them. It’s like my mind is my hand, and my hand is grasping lightly at a thread, and pulling backwards just a little, allowing the thread to pull me forward towards… whatever, whoever, wherever. It doesn’t matter how distant, in space or probably even in time. And then that’s all I need. It’s more like letting go with the lightest possible touch than grasping on, and then… things are real, and I can tell things are real down to the core of me, and that makes the rest of it not so awful.

But I’m still new to trying to learn that I am wherever my body is. So Granny Weatherwax is a good reminder. Being connected to myself physically is very important for things to work mentally. Even though right now my entire body feels like hell, it’s still my hell, and that’s something. Eurrggh. I don’t cherish the thought of what is going to happen when my first wave of endorphins wears off and I finally start feeling this even worse before it gets better. But sometimes I can avoid that, when the pain wears off before the endorphins do. Let’s hope that happens this time.