The First Step

I am terrified. I'm an overweight, middle-aged woman with physical and psychological disorders. I have never been married. I have never had children, nor will I ever have children as I recently had a complete hysterectomy with an oophorectomy (they took out my ovaries and fallopian tubes.) I am unemployed and living off the charity of my younger brother.  I do have a college education, but I am unable to get a job with it. In short, I feel like the biggest loser alive, and perhaps I should make room for someone more productive. But wait a minute, children all over the world are starving to death, and I'm over here complaining that I feel bad about who I am. How narcissistic and insensitive can I be? Enter guilt. Lots and lots of guilt. (First world problems, you say? Why, I've got loads.) Apparently, though, that's my disorder talking, and that's why I need help.  

Maybe you understand and feel the same way I do, maybe you don't. Maybe you stopped by because you have a loved one who is like me, and you want to understand him or her a little better. I will try to be as honest as I possibly can. But you have to understand that those of us who have depression and anxiety are beautiful actors. We're very good at telling you just enough about what's wrong with us to make you think we're going to be okay. Believe me, there is so much more that we aren't telling you. We're afraid that if you knew the rest, you would be repulsed. Not afraid of us, but repulsed by us. I honestly don't know why we feel this way. It's something I want to explore, and I will probably write about it a lot. 

This isn't going to be easy for me, but I promise to call myself on my bullshit as soon as I can. What does that mean? It means that I'm going to re-read my old posts frequently. It means that as I progress in my therapy, I will reference what I said in my old posts and point out when, and hopefully why, I was dishonest at the time. For family members reading this blog, I hope my journey will help you understand your loved one. For you who are like me, you're not alone. If you promise to try to remember that, I promise I will, too.

I guess, now that I've introduced myself,  it's time to talk about that first step on my journey.

Last week I had an appointment with a Primary Care Physician(PCP) in a health group whose mission is to treat the mind and body as a whole. Yes, that means they specialize in primary care and mental health. Why did I go there? Because I need a PCP who understands my mental issues. I say issues rather than disorders because I have not yet been diagnosed, but I am an intelligent woman who is very good at research, and I know I have depression and probably some sort of anxiety disorder. The appointment went well, I think.

Let me tell you a little secret now: I don't like doctors. My adult experience with them hasn't been good. With one or two exceptions, they have been know-it-alls who don't listen to what I tell them about what is happening to my body. In fact, most of the time, they have made me feel like I was either a hypochondriac or doctor shopping for drugs. Here I am telling them that I have joint pain and would like to know what I could do to minimize it so that I could exercise without feeling like my joints were grinding glass, and they assumed that I was asking for Percocet. My last doctor actually looked surprised when I declined her offer of narcotic pain medication for my joints. It's like she didn't understand that I wanted help treating what was causing the pain, not just the pain itself. *SIGH*

Don't get me wrong. All of the doctors were very nice, they just didn't listen to me. Well, actually, they only partially listened to me. They listened as long as they needed to to form an opinion of what was wrong with me, and then they tuned me out. For example, when I was in the Air Force, I went to sick call because I had been having severe back pain every time I drank a lot of anything. (Usually that was alcohol.) The doctor I saw heard the words "back pain," and rather than look at where I was pointing or listen to how I was describing the pain, she diagnosed me with weak abdominal muscles and prescribed some strengthening exercises. Flash forward two years and there I am having kidney surgery just in time to save the darn thing. If the first doctor had actually listened to what I was telling her, I might have avoided two years of pain, and maybe not have had to have been sawed in half to save my kidney! (Yeah, I'm still bitter 20 years later.)

Anyway, as I said earlier, last week's appointment went well. I actually felt like my new doctor was listening to me, as well as being really nice and interesting. He asked me questions. We talked about the Air Force, which we both served in. He took a lot of notes. I had some blood drawn for a lot of tests. In short, I feel pretty comfortable with how the medical side of my treatment is starting. As terrified as I was when the appointment first started, it ended really well. I felt good about it, and that is very rare for me.

Next week I'll see my PCP again and find out the results of all the blood work. I really, really, really (honestly, I can't say really enough about this) hope we'll find out why I'm so friggin' tired all the time, and why my joints hurt, and why I can't control my emotions, and a bunch of other stuff. In the meantime, I get to start the really scary part of my journey back to health. This week I have an intake meeting for the mental health side of the clinic. But that's a story for another day, and I'll tell you all about it in my next post.

So...I guess this ends my first post about my journey back to health. I hope I can keep up with it, all of it: the therapy, the healing, the writing, the moving forward with my life. I hope that this truly is the first step towards finding myself again. And I hope you find your first step.