High Anxiety

The reactions to my Monday therapy experience have not gone away. This morning I was as nervous as I’ve been in many a month.

I don’t get it. Maybe a therapist could tell me. For two weeks, I unpacked some fairly traumatic experiences in my life. The first week was work, the second week was family. This may be because the entire conversation centered on trauma.

I hate that I can’t control the ‘willies’ as I like to call them through conventional means. My brain races too fast for mindfulness techniques and Ativan will only take me so far. It’s not good to either drive or try to work popping too much of that drug.

Yesterday in a meeting I got the ‘willies.’ I hoped no one saw me taking the deep breaths in through the nose and slowly out the mouth. That DID buy me time.

This week, routine meetings have become ordeals of nervousness and paranoia. Today I have to attend a noonday awards banquet which I am dreading. At least I get a free meal which is about the best I can say about the experience.

My new therapist promised to teach me some techniques (which I probably already know) for managing these issues. I wanted to unpack some more personal garbage but perhaps I should give my continuing reveal a rest. She’s already diagnosed me as PTSD (and surprised other mental health professional haven’t) and knows enough about me to get to techniques. I suppose the rest of the shit package can be unwrapped later.

The rudimentary Cognitive Behavioral Therapy hasn’t been of much use either. I KNOW I will survive the day. I KNOW I can make it through this awards luncheon. I KNOW I can somehow manage my workload. My rational brain knows these things and keeps telling me I’ll be OK. But all of that knowledge seems to be overridden by – what? I don’t know. Some part of the brain that likes to fuck with me.

It is one of the most frustrating parts of the illness – getting mad at yourself for not being in control, thereby starting a vicious circle.

Yesterday something else happened. I had an eye appointment and went to get glasses. While waiting in the mall for the glasses, I experienced phenomena that comes about every 18 months to two years.

I will write a post in Facebook or Twitter and then come back to that post in 20 minutes and the post will look foreign to me – I didn’t write it that way. I can remember I wrote a post – right there – but not using those words and phrases. It’s like someone, not me, completely rewrote it.

It’s a scary thing. I tend to panic and start looking at other posts and tweets, making sure I haven’t written anything odd or offensive. I used to joke that I think my ghostly rewrites were better than the original text.

So I did post about it, trying to explain that my posts might not be written in my normal style and that if I wrote anything people found odd or offensive to forgive me. I said I’d look at them tomorrow and correct or delete them if so.

Of course, while writing that post, I was fully aware that these words might not look the same to me 20 minutes later. So I stared at the post for about 10 minutes trying to make sure.

When this happens I feel like I’m losing my mind or possibly having some kind of weird stroke. The episode lasts about 6 hours, always comes in the late afternoon or evening and is usually gone after a night’s sleep.

By posting it, I was also hoping someone would recognize the process and maybe help me with some advice. I’ve talked to doctors and the only thing that was ever done was switch me from Xanax to Ativan. It did not help.

But it’s worrisome. The best thing to do is to sign off social media, stop writing anything, and take a walk and connect with the environment around me.

My fear is that one day I’ll get an episode that might not go away.

Sick Sick Sick

Sick, sick, sick.

Everyone has suddenly come down with some kind of illness. 

After having yesterday off, I find that several of my co-workers, who have been fighting various bugs, called in sick yesterday. My wife is hacking up a storm. I’m fighting it myself – AND we all had flu shots – where I work, it’s mandatory.

Our friends

I suspect a lot of upper respiratory illnesses are circulating. Right now I think (hope) I just have a head cold. One of my co-workers undergoing chemotherapy, is avoiding getting close to anyone and I don’t blame him.

This, of course, brings back my fond memories of being sick as a kid.

My mom was an elementary school teacher who had some basic training as a nurse. It was very difficult to get anything past her in the wake of faking an illness, but God knows, I tried. Especially in the third grade when things were . . .um, kind of tough for me socially. 

'Don't eat the pudding in the fridge'

If my mother had to stay home with us when we were little, she would have to call in and arrange for a substitute teacher for her second grade class. So we REALLY had to be sick in order to stay home. Dad never stayed home with us. He just wasn’t the type to bring up chicken soup and check our temperature. 

It got a little easier when we got older and mom would let me and my sister stay home by ourselves. This happened around the time I was in fifth grade. I know today that many will say that was too young but this was a different time (the 70s) and we were given more responsibility for taking care of ourselves. 

Wow, that sounded like something coming from a crotchety old man, eh? Well, it was true, dangumit! 

In fact, I remember having the house key around my neck in the first grade when the bus would let me off on the corner of the street and I would walk up the street and let myself in the house and wait for my mom to come home.

First grade – imaging that happening today. Child Protective Services would have a field day with that one. But nothing ever happened. Well, except that ONE day that I missed my stop which I wrote about earlier.

Um. . . .

So being sick usually started with a firm diagnosis made after a game of 20 questions about how I was feeling. I learned that if I really wanted a day off, careful planning the day before would make a more convincing case. If I started to hack and wheeze and complain the day before, it was easier to believe I was sick the next day. I could also make myself sneeze by picking my nose in a certain way. No I am not proud of this. No I will not tell you how to do it.

A co-worker of mine years later told me how he did it. He’d hide a glass of water in the bathroom, set his watch alarm to wake him at 4 a.m. and then to the bathroom making retching noise and throw the water into the toilet, all of this loud enough for his parents to hear. Then he’d flush the toilet before they got there. What could I say? Genius.

totally unnecessary. But I DID have to have syrup of ipecac. Ugh!

Of course, if I faked it and I was on my own, the day would be spent, first, watching CBS This Morning with Hughes Rudd (and Sally Quinn if you remember back that far) and Captain Kangaroo. Then it was a whole day reading and eating chicken soup. I had to eat the soup because my mom would check the garbage can when she came home to make sure I was eating right. 

But then there were those days when there was no question at all – I was sick and looked it. One such case I remember very well.

It was February 1974. I was getting sick at school the day before, hacking up all kinds of petri dish type gunk. I made a big tactical mistake – I went out for gym class in the snow which made everything worse. When I got back into class I was going downhill fast. I asked our fourth grade nun if I could do to the nurse and have my parents called.

Sister Mary St. Clair was a tough old penguin. She absolutely refused. “If you were well enough to go romp in the snow, you’re well enough to sit here the rest of the day,” she said.

By the time I got home, I could barely speak and shortly, I couldn’t speak. Mom came home and I was already in bed. I croaked out an explanation of what happened and she got mad at the nun which was not a good thing because whenever my mom had words with the nun, I was the one that suffered.

Mom’s anger turned to concern – my temperature was already past 101 so she knew this was not fakery. 

I would be home for the rest of the week and it was NOT that fun.

When I was dragged to the doctor after being sick for two days, he gave me a steroid shot and said I had bronchitis and laryngitis, not to mention a high fever. 

So let me tell you what the second night of my illness was like. 

I had been in bed all day hacking up. . . well, I’ll spare you the gore, but I was going thorough tissues and towels at a prodigious pace. I was also in woozy-woozy land. Much flat ginger ale was being drunk as my head lolled to one side, fixated on my little black and white TV which was on from morning to evening. 

Channel 61 (WKBF for old time Clevelanders) would run their evening movie promos all day. The first day it was for a movie called ‘Five Card Stud.’ They packaged the promo in such a way to build up all the suspense and foreboding of the movies. I assumed from the promos that all the cowboys playing poker were going to get shot. I could live with that since I knew I would not be awake for the movie.

But the second day of my illness, the worst day when my temperature hit 104 late in the evening, they were promoting the movie ‘In Cold Blood.’ 

OK, I kind of got the picture from the promo – nice family in Kansas, bad guys come in the middle of the night, noir shots of the guys coming up the stairs, and everyone dies.

I was 11-years-old and that put the hook into my fevered brain bigly. For a kid who lives in a house that makes strange noises in the middle of the night in winter (the heated water pipes ran through the wooden steps or near them), this was not something I wanted dancing across my dreams that night.

Having Truman Capote in my bedroom after my murder would be creepy enough

You can imaging the night I had. The hot water heater would send the water through the pipes with an evil sounding drip and whoosh. Then the wood would start expanding and contracting. At some point, I kid you not, even you would believe someone was WALKING UP THE STAIRS!

The other problem I was having with my high fever was auditory hallucinations. I was hearing things. The news anchor from CKLW radio (from Detroit but really Windsor, Ontario)  was talking to me “this is CKLW 20-20 News!” I could hear him in my head. Other voices from radio and TV were also speaking randomly to me. Regrettably none of those were Captain Kangaroo or MisterRogers calming me down. 

And all the while, I was waiting for Robert Blake to come up the stairs and kill me. I hoped that my dad would hear him first and, as a Marine, would kick the shit out of those two punks before they could do anything. 

But I didn’t know that. My radio and TV friends were in my head talking to me and they were not reassuring. I wrapped myself so tight in the blankets that I could feel the flop sweat drenching the sheets. 

Eventually, like all good horror movies, the sun came up and mom came in to take my temperature and get me more ginger ale. My fever was better but I still felt like warmed-over dog crap. I did not tell her of my psycho-horror night sleep because, well, that’s not the kind of thing a boy tells him mom. Besides, I survived. I spent most of that day sleeping and watching channels other than 61. There were always cartoons on Channel 43 and Prize Movie was sometimes pretty good. 

Clevelanders of a certain age will remember

Well eventually I returned to school after a four days absence and there was Sister Mary St. Clair, calling me to her desk first thing in the morning. She loomed over me and spoke quietly about the previous Monday. 

Of could she never apologized for not letting me go to the nurse. She justified her actions. I didn’t care and knew better to argue. In the back of my mind, I knew it really would not have made a difference when I got home: I was going to be very sick regardless.

But I learned something about human nature which, as I am wont to do, immediately forgot it.

Nowadays, as an adult, getting sick is not some kind of magical day off from school to watch TV all day and drink ginger all – it’s a genuine pain in the ass. I’m lucky in my job to have sick leave AND the option to use my annual leave in lieu of sick. Most people don’t have that option and have to come in regardless of how sick they are.

And you know what happens then – the sickness of one person spreads around the office like Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

But whenever I do get sick enough to call in, I’m always reminded of those days in front of the little black and white TV, with mom bringing fluids and soup and feeling like you were being cared for in the best way. 

Now, of course, we’re on our own. Make your own tea, pop Tylenol for severe cold, drink lots of water and hope you feel just good enough to come in the next day. 

The term that’s in vogue now is ‘self-care.’ It’s important for all of us. I wish people more people could stay home when they are sick – even if it’s the often derided ‘mental health day.’ Because with more and more demands placed upon us by work and family life, people are being stressed to death.

And not everyone has someone to bring them chicken soup.

One Cup, Two Americas

It has come to this.

Story link:

Daily Mail: 'Coffee should not come with political brainwashing!' Anger at Starbucks over green 'unity' cups that coincide with the election as customers demand traditional holiday designs

Bring us together. . . no, go fuck yourself

At first they thought the nifty green cups were replacing the traditional Starbucks holiday Christmas cups, so the usual suspects were outraged.

Then they thought it was some kind of leftist brainwashing so the usual suspects were outraged again.

All one: The imagery was created by artist Shogo Ota, pictured, in a design intended to communicate 'shared humanity and connection'

It's just a cup with a nice message. Just a freakin' innocent coffee cup.

'Radio Anna' from Detroit, who has changed her Twitter name to '#ScrewStarbucks', wrote: 'Screw you. 'My coffee should not (and does not) come with political brainwashing. I dropped Starbucks like a hot rock.'

'Jerzeee4Trump' said: 'Starbucks nope. Stay out of politics. Haven't had your products since your CEO supported crooked Hillary publicly.'

Archie Bunker, a bar owner and cab driver from Queens, New York, added: 'Stop pushing your liberal b******t and sell coffee. Lifelong customer becoming disgusted with the forced agenda #HolidayCupsNow'.

What have we become?

This would have NEVER happened when I was kid. It probably wouldn't have happened 20 years ago - people would have collected them.

I've said this before - we seem to be a nation on the verge of tearing each other to shreds over stupid crap. You can't even share a kind word with each other without being politically and socially vetted. More of us are just keeping our mouths shut, locking our doors and staying inside. Out there be dragons in human form.

We have seen the enemy, and it is a coffee cup.

World Mental Health Day in the USA

Back in March, something happened in Seattle, Washington. A man climbed a tree and refused to get down. Here he is:

The man has a name: Cody Miller.

After refusing to get down from the tree, Cody became kind of a media sensation. People were making jokes and memes all over the world. The police were trying to get Cody out of the tree. This was all probably very confusing and frightening to Cody, because he is a paranoid schizophrenic.

His mother did not know for a long time that her son had climbed the tree an refused to get down, but when she did, she told his story and all the jokes stopped.

Thankfully, the police did not shoot him. I have no idea how they got him down but eventually they did. The police were not amused and instead of sending Cody to a mental facility, Miller was jailed following the incident and held on $50,000 bail. He was charged with malicious mischief and third-degree assault and ordered to stay away from the tree, which sustained $8,000 worth of damage.

Welcome to the place where so many mentally ill 'non-people' are taken for treatment - jail.

And then something happened. A legislator from Pennsylvania, someone whose staff I work with, Rep. Tim Murphy, got involved in this case from all the way across the country.

Rep. Murphy wrote:

Just look at this picture and tell me our mental health system isn’t a mess. It’s unbelievable! Recall that for 24 hours last week, Cody Lee Miller remained atop a giant sequoia tree in downtown Seattle. Since that time, there’s been a greater outpouring of concern over the tree than the plight of this young man who is so clearly in the throes of a psychotic break. He’s ordered to have ‘no unwanted contact’ with a sequoia, yet no concern over getting him into treatment. Such a sad indictment against an abusive system that would order no contact with a tree, yet remains silent on getting the mentally ill into care.

Cody's mom tried to get him help but since there are so few facilities that will handle Cody, even in Greater Seattle, and, Cody's mom is not a millionaire, she and Cody were, as we say in the Army, shit out of luck.

Rep. Murphy finished up with this plea:

Cody’s mom talks about his downward spiral and has made it her mission to be a voice for families who desperately want to help their loved ones but are blocked by federal & state laws that make it impossible to help mentally ill family members. Meanwhile, Congress is still stalling my Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, HR 2646.”

The good news is that the House overwhelmingly passed HR 2646. The not so good news is that the  bill was read twice and referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, where it has been languishing since July 14 of this year.

You can follow the progress of the bill here and read the entire piece of legislation if you wish. Heck, call your Senator and ask them to support the bill. Nothing will happen until after the election, and who knows then? 

But on this day, I just want you to think about Cody and his mom and, as Bob Dylan sang, for each un harmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail, and consider that just about every other civilized country treats their mentally ill better with better services than the US, that maybe we could do just a little better. Maybe we can do a little more to live out our creed, with liberty and justice for all, and promoting the general welfare, and all of that stuff we were taught in school.

Because everyone is a person has potential. Everyone can contribute. If we only can see them as human beings like everyone else and not as 'the other.'

Just think about that today. And you can tell about what we value by what we spend our money on.

Because from where I sit, America doesn't give a damn about its mentally ill citizens.

I Have A Little List

I have a piece of paper hanging taped to the support beam on my side desk. 

Not MY petition but A petition

I’m debating the good it does. It’s a debate that will go on for a while.’

The paper is a petition, dated Dec. 29, 2015 and signed by eight co-workers and presented by two other employees to top management where I work. 

Basically, without naming me (cowards) they asked management to protect them from an employee (me) who was using “inappropriate, threatening and alarming language,” and asked management to provide a “safe, secure environment” moving forward.

The petition was ginned up by a former boss and pseudo-management co-worker, who took the ‘incident’ of Dec. 19, 2015 and ran with it in an attempt to get me fired. I don’t need to recount that sorry tale again – you can read it here.

The member of management who received the letter asked for written statements containing specific allegations from the people who signed. None ever came. No specific instances, no dates, times or locations were ever forwarded. Of the 10 people who had anything to do with this petition, five are gone and five remain.

The echo of the HR hack at my last interrogation still rings in my head: “the people up there you think are your friends are the ones that are reporting on you.

Yesterday, I sat in my office, on the far side of the floor, isolated and alone. This is the usual day for me nowadays. I try very hard to keep to myself and communicate with co-workers only when work needs to be done. I have exempted myself from all further get-togethers as a stray innocent remark made at a luncheon in June was used against me. 

And yesterday, the lonesomeness and isolation was making a mess of my mind. No matter how many distractions aside from my normal work I can indulge in, it’s tough to maintain a façade when your co-workers are outside your door, having an animated conversation with your supervisor. 

And you’re not a part of it. I could step out with a smile on my face and a “hey guys, what’s happening,” and watch the conversation die and the group break up. I can’t bear that.

So, back to the petition I have on my desk.

The reason I have it there is to get it through my thick skull that as bad as I want to have some human contact (I won’t even go so far as to say ‘have friends’) in this office, that the atmosphere has become poisoned enough that the HR hack’s warning (and my union rep’s warning) that I have no friends here.

" . . .a BLABBERMOUTH!"

And that I have to keep my big mouth shut. Because bipolar people tend to be notorious blabbermouths. Ask me how I know.

 

I really thought I could handle this. But every day that goes by gets just a little bit harder and it wears me down. 

I sit in silence and dread the sound of people approaching my door, coming up the stair, off the elevator or hearing the phone ring. I dread opening every email addressed to me. I didn’t used to be this way. 

I don’t know how NOT to be hyper-vigilant anymore. 

I’ve been this way since my mom’s health started to go downhill which was in the summer of 2008 and my bookstore started to fail because of the economy. Then I had to sell the bookstore in the fall of 2009 and move to South Dakota for a job in December of that year. Then I had to spend the next year (2010) with my bags packed waiting to fly to Cleveland whenever my mom would take another turn for the worst.

Then in December 2010, I started the job with the VA in Pittsburgh and moved here. From the very beginning there was a good deal of stress as my job duties and expectations were never clearly given to me and I never received one whit of training. It was ‘stumble as you go.’ At the same time, my mother’s health continued to decline and I eventually became her power of attorney and executor of her will. During the period 2011-12 I was constantly spending my weekends in Cleveland with my wife and arranging both my mother’s care and the disposition of our family home. This was NOT a very good period in my life. 

Mom passed away in December 2012. It took six more months to settle the estate and satisfy all the obligations. I really didn’t even have time to grieve. I still don’t think I have as I tend to avoid all the family albums in the basement, especially the ones from the last five years of my mom’s life.

Then in October 2013, the man who hired me left one step ahead of his own dismissal. Like many VA managers, a friend set him up in another part of the organization. I did not realize at the time, that this man had been my protection. I didn’t even know I needed protection. 

What followed then was a procession of detailed managers and two ‘permanent managers each of who lasted less than a year apiece and presided over tumultuous times for our section. The first one flooded the zone with new hires in the spring of 2014, many of whose names were on that petition. They were hired in order to get this manager a higher pay grade. When he didn’t get it, he left, but not before using his new people to gradually strip me of all the media relations responsibilities I had had under my old boss. I went from being the ‘go-to’ guy to being the superfluous clerk. 

He didn’t like me. It wasn’t a secret. He was influenced by others in the section who wanted to purge the people from the old regime. Had he stayed around long enough he might have succeeded. I called him on that and his lack of management effectiveness. I’m sure he didn’t like that either. I’m also sure he and the other employees in his little mafia briefed the new manager when he took over in March 2015.

It also strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.

I know this sounds like paranoia but it’s true. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has faced this situation. The new boss was worse than the last one. Within three months of his hire, the incident of June 8, 2015 happened which led to where I am now.

Eight years of looking behind my back. Eight years of worry and fear. More shrinks, more pills, more attempts at living a life where I could relax and enjoy life without the need for pharmaceuticals. 

Even if the magic job fairy came and performed a miracle for me now, I’m not sure I could dis-attach the wires and circuits that have made me what I am today – at least not for a long time. You just can’t turn it off that easily.