zeptember

i went to the doctor. i told him about my history w/ major depression. i told him about the yasmin. i told him about my night last night.

he said by law, he has to put me on a 51-50 hold - lock me up in a state hospital. i lost it and cried. he asked if i have anyone to help me. i brought in my man who was in the waiting room. the doctor had a chat with my man, who agreed to babysit me for the next 72 hours.

the doctor said i can get off the yasmin. he said it only takes about 48 hours before it’s out of my system. i don’t trust him but at the same time felt relieved.

he told me to keep taking the ativan and upped the dose; i’m to take 1mg every 3 hours for the next 72 hours.

i’ve missed my yasmin dose today. i already have cramps worse than last night. the dark brown coffee grounds stuff is coming out more. so on top of fighting the horrible effects of the yasmin, i may also get bad george pains again soon.

i still want out.

yesterday afternoon i became suicidal. very. suicidal. had several plans to choose from. also looked up one-way airfare to several countries.
i know within an hour of taking the yasmin of its effects on me. the hyperactivity and anxiety set right in.
two weeks after the incident by which a new temp was fired and i’d gotten empathic on her behalf and cried ‘bullshit’ and HR heard me… two weeks later i get in trouble for it. why so long? my boss had a talking to me yesterday.
so now i wait to also get in trouble for my ‘forced labor’ comments on tuesday. that could also take two weeks to get me in trouble for that, and who knows, maybe they’ll fire me.
i was so good when i was a temp. i kept myself in check.
i have an attitude and don’t respond well AT ALL to authority figures. i’ve always know that. but taking the yasmin helped all that rotten negativity spring out like a broken fire hydrant.

i also had a customer tell me “don’t EVER talk to me that way” when i suggested that she not have signed up for the software if she’d claimed repeatedly to me that she had no idea what the sales guy was selling her. she tried making it his fault. it’s not HER fault she didn’t understand! HE shouldn’t have sold it to her, then! what a crock of shit! so i told her that perhaps, not understanding things, she might have asked for details or not signed up at all. i’m sure she’ll report me and i’ll get in trouble for those comments, too.

it’s out of control, you see. my attitude mouth won’t shut up. it’s a loose cannon.

then i had to work an hour of overtime just to catch up on emails yesterday. my boss moved my email catchup time to the mornings. so when i finished most of my assigned emails, she piled another ten on me. this fucked me for the rest of the day because i have mail replies coming in, and escalation replies coming in, and i’m sending out mails to customers all day while talking to them on the phone - sending followup instructions and so forth. so she screwed me with more mail. then at one minute til quitting time i get an angry caller on the line that takes up 18 minutes of my precious email followup time.
so i stayed an hour.

there is, despite any yasmin medication, a direct correlation to my severe depression and the amount of overtime i work at the end of a business day. i’d had mental breakdowns well before surgery or yasmin medication because of the overtime stress.

but yesterday afternoon…

it’s the worst i’ve been since 2000 when i had the plan to off myself.
i informed my boyfriend that i was leaving and that i needed help packing my shit. you can imagine the terror and grief on his part. i was not in my right mind. i’m still not in my right mind. i cried and sobbed and grrrrr’d and rocked to and fro. i came very close to going to the emergency room but kept backing off of that. finally, at 10:30pm, i took 2mg of ativan and passed out.

we took today off work. i’ll be seeing a doctor today. despite what any doctor says, i’m getting off the yasmin. i know it won’t be a quick fix. the yasmin has to leech out of my body, now. i’m not out of the woods for awhile.

bottom line remains same as last night’s declaration: i’m tired of being trapped in this meatsack and i’d like to be released. it’s too stressful to be encased in this mess of a body with this broken brain. i want out.

Friday night after having a nice dinner, I was still filled with all kinds of energy. I thought I might be awake all night. This is a side effect of the Yasmin for me.
Other side effects that I’ve noticed, which are ‘known side effects‘, are:

• Changes in appetite (I get hungry but don’t want to eat anything)
• Changes in libido (initially for the better, but it tapered off)
• Dizziness
• Headache
• Nervousness (that’s putting it mildly)
• Breast Pain
• Depression
• Yeast Infection
• Edema
• Breakthrough bleeding
• Nausea
• Gastrointestinal symptoms

The main thing that I don’t see listed is the hyperactivity/mania. Perhaps that’s lumped in with ‘nervousness’, I dunno.
In any case, the last time I had to endure constant bouncing legs, having to get up and pace, and gritting my teeth was when I was on anti-depressant pills back in 2000-2002 or whenever I did recreational drugs.

This is where the Lorazepam comes in handy, but I only use it Sunday night through Friday mornings. I usually don’t need any anti-anxiety meds from Friday evening through Sunday morning because I’m on my own time away from work, and can constructively deal with the mania. So here’s what I did Friday and Saturday with it:

On Friday night, I bleached down the bathroom walls and ceiling.

On Saturday, I:

• Took my car to get new tires first thing in the morning (the tire place is a block away)
• Walked to the bank to cash my paycheck (1 mile round trip)
• Picked up my car and drove to my eye doctor for final contact lens followup (thankfully she’s noticed no ill side effects from the Yasmin on my eyes. So even though I feel like my eyes hurt more often, there’s no damage occurring from use of Yasmin)
• Vacuumed the entire house, including baseboards and the couch
• Moved all my photo album/scrapbooking stuff from a five-shelf bookshelf to storage until I can work on that crap again, and set decorative stuff on the shelves instead
• Rearranged the entire storage unit so everything is more easily accessible
• Cleaned off a three-shelf bookshelf in the bedroom and added different stuff to it
• Went grocery shopping
• Drove to two stores looking for a taller yet thin bookshelf for the bedroom - and failed to find what I wanted
• Emptied garbage and cleaned catbox
• Swept out the storage unit and the area by our front door
• Dusted the computer room
• Hefted a monitor back up onto the linux desktop machine (I was running it headless for awhile)
• Showered, dressed, and hosted a gathering that lasted til after 1am

As a result, this morning I feel like a Mac truck ran over me. So I’m being lazy for as long as I possibly can before I must get dishes and laundry done. Sadly, the muscle pain from all of yesterday’s work means I probably won’t enjoy my new roller skates today. So I plan to keep them in my trunk with some casual clothing so I can go right from work to the decommissioned navy base on the island this week.

And this is what Yasmin does to me, energy-wise. Aren’t you exhausted just from reading that list? I know I am. Lordy.

Friday I maintained all day at work, despite two cow-orkers whispering negativity to me all day about how much they hate that place and want to quit or worry about being fired.

In my weekly one-on-one meeting with my boss, she described why one of our cow-orkers was fired on Tuesday. Apparently, the woman was warned multiple times to stop being up to a half an hour late to work, and they caught her slacking off by popping her screen - they listened in on a call and discovered she was letting a customer go on about their life story (some customers are lonely and just call support to babble) while she in turn watched youtube videos.
Uh, that’s grounds enough for firing, yeah. So I didn’t feel mad about the firing at all after being told the reasons behind it. There is no purge going on, contrary to what the other cow-orkers think. They’re only worried about their own jobs because it wasn’t this locked down before and they’re revolting against the establishment. I understand this. I’ve been in places where the rules changed and I revolted so much that I got fired for it.

However, when I got to this place, things were already Big Brother, so I’m just following those rules as though they always existed. I’m not happy about it, but I’ve gained perspective where these people have not. In the last 12 months, I’ve worked for two shithole places for very shitty pay (four and a half dollars above the minimum wage of $6.75/hr, okay? When I was used to making $25/hr). And both places were ghetto neighborhoods, with screaming ambulances on a daily basis, and a battering happening right outside the doorstep in one instance.
So although miserable, I’m going to play ball. And these cow-orkers are starting to think I’m a Stepford person by all this smiling and nodding, now. But they don’t know where I’ve been recently or where I come from way back.

So Friday during the one-on-one with my boss, she told me yet again how happy she is with my performance, how I don’t have to worry about being on a call for more than 6 minutes because they know I resolve the issues, and how the director of support himself values me and doesn’t want to lose me.

Well! That’s the boost I needed. I’ll continue to play ball. I need the friggin paycheck. And now I’ve also inadvertently gained the appreciation of a few guy cow-orkers who stay very late on a regular basis to make sure the work is finished properly. They want to go out drinkin with me.

The friggin paycheck. Ugh. Lemme go into detail on that for a second, since during my last breakdown, I discussed going on disability. This would also mean living on my man’s paycheck. We had discussed this together, and he said he could do it if it was necessary. By that, he means he’d rather not, but compared to me causing harm to myself, he’d support me for a time until I was well again.
Now, just buying food and paying medical bills, utility bills and rent for me is one thing, but I’m also in debt (only $5K, which is far below the U.S. average per individual). My debt ain’t gonna pay itself. There’s no one gonna come take care of that for me. My man could support me if I wasn’t able to support myself but the debt part … that would take a financial toll on even his paycheck cuz he has his own debt. He’s not rich. He makes $17/hr more than I do currently, but he’s still not making six figures by any stretch.
Besides, as I told both my man and a group of friends recently, I’d rather kill myself than be dependent on someone financially. Hence my reference to ‘reset button’ back on March 26th.

So, by Friday my mood stabilised and I also got a morale boost by my boss. So that’s good. It tides me over. I think I’m going to continue taking the Yasmin at the new time because I’ve not had another breakdown since switching to taking it on lunch hour.

That same day, one of my cow-orkers begged me to meet her on break so she could talk to me. She laid out her plan to quit the job before another job was lined up - just like another one of our cow-orkers did the Friday before. I tried to talk her down but she’s got her mind made up and is willing to live off of a $25K credit card!!!! That’s a terrifying thought, to be in that much debt. That’s three times the U.S. citizen individual average debt. Not saying my cow-orker would let her card max out, but still - why entertain the thought?
Now, having said that, I myself have entertained the thought. I tried finding a card with more than $5K available on it just a few months ago and failed. I did however get a credit card with $2K available. This was my emergency credit card - in case I needed it to pay my medical bills. Thankfully, I’ve been able to pay my medical bills off (over $600 so far) relating to the surgery (the insurance covered most of the $19K surgery, but I still had my deductable and misc charges to pay).

But I digress. Going back to my cow-orker…I tried to talk her down but it won’t work. I fear she’ll quit before the end of this week. This will contribute to the downward spiral in morale already out on the floor. The other woman who’s been venting to me about job stress is likely to go ballistic. I mean, she’s already talking shit louder and louder and not caring - as evidenced by her bomb comment on Thursday.
I have to continue to maintain during the shakeup at this job… I have to continue my mantra that I came up with last year: “This does not belong to you. This is not yours. This is not your responsibility. This does not belong to you.” I have to keep remembering that their shit is their shit and to not take it on as my own.

I can do this.

To sum, in all, Friday was a good day for me at work.

I left work and went straight to a sporting goods store, and bought a pair of roller skates! YEAH! I’ve been talking about it for years and now I finally found the exact colour I’ve been looking for!
I got home and my man and I went out to dinner at a local Thai joint. Mmmm, pad thai with grilled shrimp…

And then the manic upswing for the weekend started. More on that in the next post!

nervous breakdown monday
recovery still on the brink tuesday
don’t fuck with me wednesday
the last customer HAD to piss me off thursday

what will friday hold?

I almost made it through another week. Go me!

Today my friend sherpa brought me a present to work. She rode her bicycle all the way from her workplace, went to the store, found a gluten-free pie, bicycled to my workplace, and delivered it!
WHAT A WOMAN!

I am loved.

Yesterday afternoon, after work, I went in search of new combat boots. The closest army surplus store was 10 miles from my work so I trucked down there in rush hour traffic, only to find that they didn’t have any jump boots in my preferred style.
Bust.

I realised then that I was close enough to my favourite sushi joint. I decided lately that if I’m going to be miserable on ovarian supression medication, then I’m going to goddamn very well have my favourite food and drink EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK if I can help it.
Why? Because food and drink make me happy.
So I went and ordered a massive amount of sushi and took it home to my man, and we feasted like kings.

My search continues for new combat boots - I will have to trek back to San Francisco Real Soon, Now.

And as of today, I’m on the hunt for roller skates again. So before I join my mates at Pissup Nite™, I’ll head over to the sporting store and see if I can find anything suitable.
I dunno, it’s been like three years now, I’ve been on a kick about wanting to roller skate. Ever since our failed attempt at roller blading (my boyfriend felt like his ankles were breaking, and I got shin splints), I’ve decided to just go back to my childhood and get new rollerskates.

Don’t let my fun fool you. I was suicidal again today when as my last call of the day, I got some cuntslit who yelled and put me down and verbally abused the shit out of me for no good reason. I hung up on her and threw my phones and left the building. I didn’t finish my emails today. I just left.
I didn’t let customers bother me like this before getting on the hormones. Now I get The Rage on a daily basis. It’s really … REALLY… out of my control and depressing and puts me in that pit where I don’t like to be.
Oh and morale at work is through the foundation. One guy quit on Friday without having another job lined up - he told me and a couple others that he was so miserable there that being jobless is much more appealing. The same day, a newly hired temp was fired for demanding to be hired. Then, on Tuesday, a permanent employee was fired “for performance reasons”. Then today, another cow-orker starts ranting to me again about how much worse the place is sucking, now, and how she’d convinced they’ll fire her before she can go on maternity leave cuz they don’t want to pay for it and they did that to a girl in the sales department…. and then she tells me she’ll bomb the building but give me advanced notice so I can get out. This is the same girl who now, for the last two days, has people logging into her computer (popping her screen) to see what she’s doing. Usually one gets their screen popped if one is taking over 2 minutes to write up a phonecall. But people are staying logged into her machine for hours at a time for the last two days. She says, “they’re going to fire me next”.

Oh, and because we’re down a few people, and several others called in “sick” today (did I mention morale is low?), we were all forced to give up half of our lunch hour and keep taking calls, which, for the past two days, keep hovering around 13 in queue all damned day.

It’s THAT bad, there.

I highly recommend at this point that you sit down and watch the movie Office Space.

I popped TWO lorazepam on the way out of work and listened to angry music on my iPod all the way home.

Then I got inside, my cats crawled all over me and purred, I had some gluten-free cherry pie with a wee glass of port, and now I feel muuuuucccch better.
I survived. I made it. I came home and didn’t sob. I didn’t break down. I didn’t make out a new Shitlist.

Time to see if I can get me some roller skates and then head over to Pissup Nite™.