Own worst enemy

We’re currently being trialled on some medication to see if it can assist in reducing the anxiety that we have fairly constantly.  This in itself isn’t a bad thing – reducing anxiety is good.  What is a problem, is that the psychiatrist who has prescribed the medication has put it on closed control dispensing because we’re considered a suicide risk.  This means that we have to go pick-up the medication weekly.  Normally this isn’t a problem.  But last week they didn’t have enough pills to fill the prescription so told us we had to come back in a couple of days when they’d been resupplied.  Again, this wasn’t a problem.  We thought that we’d be able to just go in when the current meds finished and pick up the ones owed and the new weeks medication – it was their error for not having enough supplies on site, so we didn’t see the big deal.  Well apparently it DID matter…

1. Initially they were just going to give us the new weeks worth of medication.
2. We stupidly asked for the balance of last weeks medication.
3. Pharmacist went back to the computer to check what the balance was about.
4. She brought out the 1.5 days of medication that was the balance from last week.
5. We asked for the new weeks as well – we didn’t want to have to waste more petrol by coming back in two days.
6. Then they started on about the closed control dispensing and not being able to give the medication early, or more than a weeks worth at any one time.
7. We questioned the validity of this statement considering they were about to give us the weeks worth two days early just a few minutes ago, and it was only when we asked about the balance that this became an issue.
8. They again talked about closed control and brought out the original prescription notes from the psychiatrist.
9. We agreed that it was closed control, however it was not our fault that they couldn’t control their stock levels.
10. They talked about not being their fault and that they couldn’t not fill other peoples medication just because we might come in.

By this point we were more than a little unimpressed.  We haven’t attempted suicide in nearly a year.  Closed control is pointless – we’re librarians, we could find a recipe online easily that didn’t include taking this medication.  This medication isn’t working, so we’re jumping through hoops to obtain a medication that is doing nothing – but we need to keep taking it until we see the psychiatrist again.  At least we’re having no side effects…

After much discussion, we walked out of the pharmacy with the weeks worth of medication and the assurance from the pharmacy that they were going to call the psychiatrist to tell him that we’d come in early to pick-up the medication.  We asked if they were also going to inform him that the reason why we had to pick-up the medication early was because of their stock issues.  We were assured they would.  Doubting whether it happened…

What we found really interesting about the whole interaction is that the pharmacists immediately thought that we were saying that other peoples prescriptions shouldn’t have been filled because we were more important.  They didn’t seem to understand that we were questioning their ability to manage their own medicine stock levels.  I would hope that they gave the medication to the other people.  Again our inability to carry out basic communication.

I sometimes wonder if we get mixed up because of the internal conversations that occur.  I wonder if we forget or don’t realise that something that has been discussed internally has yet to be verbalised to the external world??

As a separate issue, we created the clip One year on… We are worried about making it live because the friend who has been strange with us, might get hurt by it.  Really annoyed with ourselves that we are changing things we should be happy about because of him.

We are our own worst enemy at times…

Shadows & Nightmares **Triggering**

Shadows have always been an issue for us – what’s in the shadows, what will come out of the shadows etc.  But one particular nightmare about shadows is the silhouette of a man in the doorway.  As far as I’m aware this particular image has always been the cause of nightmares for us.  It would be fairly easy to draw the conclusion that it’s to do with someone coming in through the doorway at night to hurt us – I’ve no idea if this is really the origins of the image and nightmare.  Maybe we saw a scary movie with this image in it, not sure.

What I do know is that this image plagues our nightmares.  It’s the reason why we have to have the curtains drawn totally over every window in the house once it’s getting dark – there can’t be any possibility of being able to peek outside and see a face looking in at us.  It’s the reason why we have to have the wardrobe doors tightly closed.  However we can’t close the bedroom doors, and this is the current problem.

We’ve constantly got this image of a man standing in the doorway.  We can’t just close the doors.  If you have a cat, you’ll know that the one thing they hate more than an unreliable feeder, is a feeder who closes doors.  It causes an interruption in their nightly checks and wanderings around the house – and what if they suddenly decide that they want to use you as a heat source?  They end up scratching at the door and make their displeasure well known.  The sounds of which are almost as bad as the nightmare image.

One particularly memorable time when this nightmare caused a problem was when the ex-husband was going off to work early in the morning.  He had turned on the lounge light and had come in to kiss us goodbye.  We were half asleep and just felt the bed dip and then this silhouette come towards us.  Well he’d never seen us move so fast.  We screamed and dove off the bed and tried to get under it.  It caused the neighbours to call the police we screamed so loud and with so much fear.  Other times when he’d done the kiss goodbye we would freeze, but for some reason we needed to escape that morning.  Rather embarrassing telling the young officer why we had screamed!

At the moment this nightmare image is particularly bad.  We’ve been averaging 1-3 hours sleep per night for the last two weeks.  We’re bad sleepers anyway, but this is becoming a real problem.  We had a migraine yesterday which was caused by a combination of a lack of sleep and being so tense while trying to sleep that we’ve pulled several muscles in the neck.  It’s now 5:45am and we’re sitting here with a warm milky drink imagining someone walking up behind us and putting their hand on our shoulder.

Hmmm wonder if this is a phobia or paranoia?  We don’t particularly think that anyone is out to get us.  It’s a very much the concept of someone coming to get us, rather than some organised plot to come and get us.  Either way, I really wish it would go away.  But the internal conversation did distract us from the image for a second.

Oh well, off to read for awhile…