Tag Archive for 'Day-To-Day'

Just Another Morning

I need to go and get my Medicaid taken care of today at DSHS as it really needs to be done this morning, particularly if I want to try and see Cec today. We’ve been out of therapy since the beginning of September. That is never good for us at all. We called DSHS yesterday and the final part on their end had been taken care of and so all that was left was turning in a bill for our spenddown. We were realizing as well earlier this morning that we probably don’t have that many more times that we can utilize this bill before all the portions of it are used up for the spenddowns, at which point we won’t be seeing Cec anymore. So more pressure and a push to find someone privately that we can make payment arrangements with and someone that takes Medicare. There’s other reasons besides that one that we need to find another therapist, but that is one of them.

We’ve been awake since 5 or 6 am. The last two nights we’ve woken up after only a few hours of sleep. Tried falling back asleep, but then finally got up. Now we should be getting ready to go to DSHS to get this done and make a phone call to Cec to try and see her today. She didn’t return our call from last week to make an appt with her. This bothers us, but we’re trying to give her the benefit of the doubt until we can speak with her– something Wendy taught us and that we’re appreciative of.

In some ways it just seems easier to wait another week to see Cec and take care of this medical stuff tomorrow or Friday. In other ways I know we really, really need therapy right now. A lot of stuff is going on and therapy is just so very much needed.

All we want to do is to go back to bed and hopefully sleep, but I know that means we’ll probably be in bed until this afternoon. We have so much to do around here, business oriented stuff and personally, and yet we seem to only be able to do a little bit a day and sometimes not much of anything. I feel depressed and sad and something… something I recognize so very much. My heart aches inside and I feel the weights of so many things that I’m carrying. And sadness, such deep sadness within.

Such is life.

Julie

tremors, focusing, and leaving, oh my—today’s thoughts

earlier today we discovered a tremor with our right thumb and possibly the beginnings of a tremor with a few of our right fingers if they are placed in a certain position.  the thumb though is pretty much a guarantee though in a certain position. we noticed while holding our mouse.  and of course now that we went to actually try and replicate it– we can’t do so.  so perhaps it is only with certain insiders.  i’m not sure.  it was stressing a number of us out because the mother has tremors of unknown origin and she’s had tons of tests done.  and she says her father had tremors as well.  so anyway, we did a little bit of research and came up with a few possibilities.  then we were so exhausted suddenly and had to go lay down and take a nap.  it was the kind of exhaustion that we know and experience a lot as we weren’t tired really just prior to noticing the tremor and then doing a few brief research things on it.  it seems like it doesn’t take much at all to push us past our stress limit and we have to ‘go lay down’ which ultimately usually ends up in a nap.

Mostly we just find it interesting and wanted to document how we’ve noticed how something benign and minor in a lot of ways can affect us so quickly and exhaust us to the point that we can’t seem to push past it without laying down in bed and taking a nap…with the hope it will have subsided by the time we wake up.

It’s not just this example… there are so many.  It’s like one thing can so easily throw us off course in the day or night and we’ve suddenly gone from managing, coping, or surviving, or perhaps even doing okay or well to this drastic non-functioning mode.  We’re still trying to pay more attention to it and document it because we’re really trying to understand this pattern and dynamic and how to get a handle on it instead of it handling us.

This also seems to be connected or tied in somehow to the whole ‘only able to really focus on one major thing at a time’ sort of thing.  And yet that sounds so crazy, being multiple and all.  It’s hard to explain and put into words because we’re trying to recognize it and understand this dynamic as well.  One example we can think of is how when we’re at Sean’s house, it’s like that’s ‘our world,’ and even though we know in the background there is this and that we need to do or take care of and is on our agenda, there’s still like a big concentration on being with him/them and living at his place and whatever is going on around us there. We also tend to ‘disappear’ from staying in contact with our other friends or journaling.  We’re working on changing that though.

This weekend our big focus has been our kitchen cabinets.  It’s taken us days and hours, but there have been tons and tons of breaks.  On one hand our only focus has been the cabinets… in that we can’t really cope with much of anything else and we are struggling to get it done and can’t cope with taking on anything else, even though there are tons of other things we need to be doing and there are friends locally we could be visiting or helping in some way. But we can only focus or handle the cabinets.  Yet that isn’t entirely true because we’ve had numerous breaks and often they are hours long breaks after a short bit of working on the cabinets.  The breaks have basically involved either the computer or napping or sleeping.  It seems the kids and some of us older ones as well have been taking breaks and visiting our neopet and playing lots of neopets word games and so forth.  Somehow playing word games justifies the time spent playing those games.  And of course we like word games anyway.  Plus just general web surfing or email a bit, but a lot of that has been reading.  It’s just that the whole idea of doing other necessary tasks that are critical and urgent things on our business to do list– we can’t cope with them because we’re dealing with the kitchen cabinets.  And if we did cope with them, the kitchen cabinets would have to go.  Rather than going back and forth between them.  And this whole weekend has really been about those stupid kitchen cabinets, which by the way, we’re nearly done with them.  Seriously.  A few more steps and that is it.  Then comes cleaning everything again before putting them away in the cabinets with organization and order.  Uggh.  The sad and shame thing is that we were feeling so much anxiety and being overwhelmed with it all that we couldn’t handle leaving the house to go visit our nephews or the mother to help her with something she needs help on.  Part of it is that we’re leaving out of town in a little over a week for a week with Sean and so that always stresses us out to go out of town, even if it is a good and pleasant trip kind of thing.  And I think when we have more “order and togetherness” in our life that leaving out of town won’t cause nearly as much anxiety as it does for us “to leave.”  But “to leave” is another huge thing for us too.  We have huge issues around ‘leaving’ anywhere that we are at.  Now I just thought while writing it that perhaps it has to do with the whole dissociation factor of ‘leaving,’ and perhaps that is why we always have anxiety and stress and stuff around it.  I don’t know.  I still haven’t figured out exactly what the deal is with ‘leaving’ people or places.

And really when we re-read all of that and think about it, we wouldn’t have been able to cope with going anywhere at all this weekend until we get these darn cabinets done.  We’re just sticking our feet in this and plowing away until they are done, even though it is taking us days and hours to get any of it done.  Had we just stayed with it from the beginning it would have only totaled out to be a few hours (perhaps longer than that), but really, they would have been done in a day for sure.

We’ve written a lot and need to get back to the cabinets before we lose our energy.  We actually were going to write about something else that is really hard to write about and so we ended up writing all of this… which is important too.

julie/s and Julie/s

Still Here, sort of

We’re still here even though we haven’t been writing very much at all and really, we haven’t been reading as many journals as we usually do.

We haven’t had therapy since mid March.  We’re still in the process of getting our Medicaid resolved so that we can return.  It’s a very convoluted mess that we go through regularly but this time it is really screwed up and we already can see in the future that we’ll have regular interruptions in therapy because of it (some policy stuff changed) and also because the agency we’re going to, they won’t accept any payment arrangements.  Oddly enough if we had insurance to begin with, but lost it, and so had zero insurance at this point in time, they would accept the payment arrangement that we can actually afford and come up with somehow for our co-pay.  And ultimately in the future we’re not going to qualify for Medicaid as easily as we do now, because at some point the bill we are using to apply towards our spend-down will be all used up and no longer valid to use.  So at some point, the agency will say another big F-U by actions and we’ll have to move on from them anyway since being able to pay for once a month therapy is just not worth it to us.  We’d rather have zero therapy than wasting money and time on once/month therapy that we know what it will be like as it is always hard to return to therapy, get comfortable with our therapist again, and feel safe enough to talk about the bigger issues, let alone talk about anything knowing we have a month to deal with it on our own.  I don’t want a chit chat basic update bull shit of a session once a month when I could use that money for other things I need.

In the meantime we’ve been trying to research and compile a long list of therapist names to call.  We’ve called quite a number of them, but most of them have full caseloads and the few that might not, they don’t take Medicare.  We’re trying not to give up yet as there is a whole phone book in a relatively large city and outlying area that we can call blindly and see if any of them have experience and stuff that we’re looking for.  We have found one therapist that we interviewed but we haven’t been back since.  We’re going to make an appointment with her this next week.  However, we’re going to continue looking around and finding a therapist that we “click with” relatively quickly.  It’s hard to say just yet with this new therapist that we interviewed as we asked her tons of questions and really didn’t do any therapy talking.  And we aren’t going to say good-bye to Cec until after we’ve found a therapist we’re comfortable with.

So all of that to really say that we are seriously wondering how much our lack of therapy has contributed to our lack of journal writing.  I know some of it has just been all the changes we’ve been going through– moving and getting settled in new place, new romantic relationship, therapist stuff, etc.  Some of it has just been pure exhaustion and so much going on externally.  But even still, I would have thought this past week or so that we would have written and we really haven’t.  I can’t believe how long it has been since we (Julies) have written here.  We think of writing this or that from time to time, but we just don’t actually come here.  Even at our support group the last few weeks, we’ve had no idea what to say really, because so much has been pushed back deeper inside and therapeutic issues that we usually are working on are just not there in the forefront for us to talk about.  We end up with this blank mind and not really able to grasp anything of depth to discuss and we just don’t like our share to be all about general basic update of stuff.

So well, we’re around and still here kind of.  We need to leave to go visit our nephews and hang out with them until tomorrow sometime.  We were going to leave earlier today but we had been doing some research online for Sarah and her Wedding stuff and we ended up needing a nap afterwards and we slept a long time.  It seems silly to leave so late now, but I know the boys will be up late and it will be good to be there first thing in the morning as we have to leave earlier than usual tomorrow to go somewhere afterwards.

I wish sometimes it wasn’t so hard for us to leave our house as I know that we procrastinate and put it off and insiders get scared, anxious, and probably take part in us needing extra naps and stuff in order to prolong actually leaving our house.  Even when we want to see them and now that it is further away, it makes it a bit more overwhelming to leave.  The crazy thing is once we are there, we will be fine, and we will be enjoying our nephews and wishing we had left much earlier and will be berating ourselves for not leaving sooner and making it just happen somehow.

So that’s a little bit of where we’re at right now with things and what’s going on.  We’ll try to return again soon to write about something.

Julies