Spontaneous ∂erivation

“It doesn’t sound like something they let you have when you work in the White House….”

“As long as I’ve got a job, you’ve got a job.”

— Josh Lyman and Leo McGarry, his boss, in The West Wing

In part 1, I talked about how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is actually experienced in real life, and the general ways in which fiction often gets it wrong.

In part 2, I covered in detail two specific examples of PTSD portrayals in Babylon 5 and The Lord of the Rings.

Part 3 is going to cover two more portrayals in detail, both more realistic, sometimes even more positive, than induced Set Piece PTSD or the “destroyed forever” implications when PTSD is used as a bitter(sweet) closure to a story.

[And we start off with zombies.]

“I have known him to drive all night.”
– Bunter, describing one of Lord Peter’s PTSD reactions

Last night I missed refilling my dose of Lamictal. I had only 100mg left. I normally take 500mg, which is near the limit for what people can take of this thing.¹

Oh, I thought, what’s the harm. I’m going to be okay in the morning. I feel okay now, I’ll get my prescription tomorrow and buzz off into work.

Yeah. That was stupid.

I forgot all the little things the medication holds off. How it works² is that it calms down the overactive electrical impulses of the brain. That’s why it’s a seizure medicine. It also works surprisingly for some people with bipolar/manic-depressive disorder, and I’m one of them. This is nice, because at low doses the side-effects drug is relatively mild in most cases. Even at high doses for me it’s this way.

When it was suddenly removed, and I woke up the next morning, things had changed in my head.

I don’t know what the Lamictal holds off more: the overactivity of the bipolar, or the overactivity that PTSD induces even when it isn’t being triggered (hyper-awareness and a constant sense in the back of your mind of never letting your guard down are some of the more chronic symptoms). I had the same sense of constant dread³ when I woke up that I last perhaps had years ago, before the Lamictal.

People say that medication is bad for you, that it blunts the edge of your mind. Nuh-uh. It makes your mind function, sharpens you in the areas where other people live. You’re otherwise sharp in the areas where you use to survive, which, outside of actually being in that situation, is not where you need to be sharp.

Anyways, I got my medication, and quietly went out of my mind, even though I took the rest of the dose in the car (I’m sure it takes a while for it to kick in after the shock of being without for over ten hours). Not like I started doing Set Piece PTSD or was a danger to people: I just simply shut down, not of my own accord, almost everything but that part of my brain that I used to survive my father’s abuse and the atmosphere he engendered, even miles away when I was still in contact with him, by his constant need to control, control, control.

So I didn’t go to work. I tried to do normal things to calm myself down. I bought things at shops (breakfast was one, which I haven’t eaten yet, because I’m too nervous still), stimulating the local economy a bit. And I drove around town. Amazingly, it’s one of the things I do well when I’m like this, and it didn’t surprise me that Sayers had Lord Peter Wimsey do this when he was breaking down. It’s something to focus the bit of your mind that isn’t wibbling in a corner, and let it fill up the space in your head with something that matters.

I’m home now, and kind of broken down, and obviously am not in any shape to go to work. At some point I’ll rest after the banana muffins, maybe have a good cry, maybe wonder what’s triggering me right now, or if this isn’t a trigger but the bipolarism breaking through and having fun. At some point the medication will kick in (when, oh, when?) and I’ll be working from home.

Right now, I’m a mess. I didn’t realize how much really rode on those little angular, difficult to swallow, horrible tasting, blue pills.

Like I said, that was stupid.

1. It really does mess with your hair; mine has a white, minor bride-of-Frankenstein streak in it, on the forehead where people can see it (it’s not very wide). [↩]
2. Which took me a long time to figure out, and I suspect that is somewhat because the field of psychiatry is still a soft science, which is no fault of its own. [↩]
3. As opposed to immediate, brain-drowning fear when my PTSD was triggered a little while back. It’s a subtle difference. Man, I hate my life sometimes. [↩]

My tribute to Red Hat Linux, my first Linux ever. And now that I have the Extra Stuff pack, I can actually make another model that has a different style of cowboy hat. Or perhaps I should use a fedora next time instead.

I think I’m having too much fun.

… right, sleep.

Well, okay. I was grown-up today for most of the day, and it involved mortgages and refinancing. Bleh.

I also participated a bit in Dysfunctional Families Day at Making Light, which was amazingly helpful to me last year, when I had broken down even worse than anything this year. (And if you’ve been following the survivor/ptsd tags on S∂, you know it’s been pretty bad for me). Also a grown-up activity.

Then, for a break, I reverted to my college years, when I just played around with technical stuff, and I got High Slide working on this blog. Not through some wussy direct way, but through a self-install and three other plugins that had multiple usage already. If I weren’t in college mode, I’d pretty much have installed one of these HighSlide plugins, but I think I like my current solution better. It’s stable.

That work was, naturally, for my ten-year-old self, so I could upload a digital archive of the My Style Studio drawings I’ve been making. I do want to buy a book for mounting the actual drawings, but I scanned them in at high res and stored them on my multiple file stores¹, then resized them to a decent size (800px high) and uploaded them here via NextGen Gallery.

At some point I’ll start reading Speech-less, but I think I’ll start on Design #9, which probably will be a remake of #1 to something… um… saner.²

Anyways. It’s nice to be ten, playing with the things my adult self bought and things my college self made, living in a house bought by my adult self and made secure by my paranoid, paranoid college self.

Bye for now.

1. Surely Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and my two USB keys can’t all go at the same time. Obviously all set up by my rightfully paranoid college self. [↩]
2. Oo. At that point, my little traced models on tracing paper will have more personality than the nine in 9! [↩]

I know some of you are dropping by. For my posts about surviving 20 years of abuse, dealing with the PTSD (or… not), and summaries of sessions with my candy man¹ and my most recent bartender², look under either the survivor or the ptsd tags.

There is a lot of overlap between the two these days; survivor is the older tag.

1. Psychiatrist. Because they give, with luck, you the good drugs. [↩]
2. Psychologist. Because you talk to them. [↩]

teh tea haz not, tho. sigh

I’ve been thinking about PTSD more than I usually do lately, even when I first knew I had it a few years ago. That all by itself triggers me more than I thought it would, but anyways. I’ve been thinking about it more.

I think what I hate the most about PTSD are not the memories themselves, even though those are extremely bad. It’s the triggers I hate most of all.

Of course, someone who knows how to push your buttons can be dangerous, or at the very least damaging. But someone who knows how to pull your trigger is the most damaging of all where trauma is concerned. The result of yanking it isn’t that you get angry, it’s that you go out of commission. An automatic self BSOD.¹

It’s bad enough when they do it by mistake. It’s bad enough when they don’t know it’s exactly your trigger, but were intent on causing damage some way. It’s horrible if they do it by design and by intent.

Open yourself too much to somebody, give them too many clues as to what causes you to crash, and one day, if they ever get mad at you or wish to get back at you for something, boom. It’s all over except for the increased amount of therapy.

I did want to talk about what triggers me. But then I realized: hey. It could be that guy uses it to hit you again. Or a guy like that guy. If they ever don’t like what you write, all they need to do is this and then you’re done. You’re out of the game. Maybe even talking about triggers even this little amount is too much information to give to strangers who may some day decide to get back at you. And what an easy way to do it. No marks, legally speaking, and every bit as effective as hiring someone to terrorize you, because your brain ends up doing that automatically.

Though frankly, some of what triggers me I don’t know myself. The brain makes really stupid associations sometimes (that is, after all, a large part of its job), and the other thing I hate about triggers is that if you’re not careful, what you do to avoid the trigger can itself become another trigger. Which is an approximation of what happened to me a few weeks back.

So. Yeah. Thinking about PTSD. The idea being that knowledge is a key, even in this kind of storm. Too bad you can’t simply recite “Mary had a little lamb” to keep the telepaths out of your head.

1. Blue Screen of Death, like you sometimes see when Windows crashes. [↩]

Caption is so-so, but I’m not sure I could come up with a better one that wasn’t rather passe.

Terry Pratchett had a wonderful story about chickens and roads, I can’t remember where my copy is… sigh.

And also… apparently there really are Hollywood Chickens.

It’s gotta be too soon for this. But I’m preparing to refill my flu pre-pack. It’s a bit depleted, as I try to use things so they don’t expire on me as I go along, but I got hit with a bug some weeks ago. It really helped quite a lot.

What is a flu pre-pack? It’s a kit of stuff you get together that you’ll need when you get sick. The flu hits you like a truck the first day, so you may not be able to get to a store. So supplies on hand are a good thing.

Here’s a list of things that can go in a pre-pack.

Here’s what I have (and need to refill only a little bit of this at a time, thank goodness):

• Ibuprofen – for fever reduction and pain

• For Reals Sudafed – the kind you have to show id for in the store

• Benadryl – supposedly it works

• Robitussin – like usual, it suppresses cough and I don’t know, other stuff

• Mucinex – cough expectorant, my gods, it works and I love it

• Propel Fit Powder™ water beverage mix – gets ratio of salt/sugar right. I learned from horrible personal experience that it’s easy to screw up when you’re really sick, and then what happens is that you end up in the hospital and learn how evil insurance companies are. Also it adds other stuff and is flavored well for once

• 16.9oz (specifically) water bottles, and make sure I have enough Britta tap filters so I can refill them easily. The Propel powder above is really designed for a 16.9oz bottle.

• Chicken noodle soup (Campbell’s) – although I’m thinking of getting powdered soup, as I have a Zojirushi pot that keeps water boiling for my tea, so soups that can be prepared that way are really easy to deal with when sick, especially when they come in disposable cups. People also recommend Cream of Rice, but I’m lactose intolerant, so yeah, no unfortunately.

• Cans of water chestnuts, bottle of lite soy sauce, bottle of lite teriyaki sauce – and I always keep around a lot of short-grain rice and a Sanyo fancy rice cooker, because only the fancy ones with automatic timers and porridge settings can make rice porridge by themselves while you’re sick. I like to add water chestnuts. They really don’t get soggy. Ever.

• Rolled oats, brown sugar, and raisins – you can cook oatmeal in a non-fancy little rice cooker, which only has “cook” and “warm” settings, and when you’re able to stomach oatmeal (which won’t be for a while) it’s really nice for a change.

• Red bucket with lots of garbage liners – when sick I do not hesitate to puke if I feel like it, it does make me feel better, except for the throat being hella raw afterwards

• Paper towel rolls, Kleenex boxes, and toilet paper in huge supply, like whoa. I buy in bulk from Amazon.com, because it costs me $20 in gas to get to our local Costco miles and miles away, and that was when the gas prices weren’t nuts. I’m already a prime member anyways so the free shipping r0×0rs.

  Actually, I might even buy a dry powder soup in disposable containers in bulk from Amazon.com’s grocery section. (I sadly am not on the route for Amazon Green Fresh, so I can’t get fresh vegetables and stuff while I’m very sick….)

• Saltine crackers

• Huge bottle of chewable vitamin C tablets.

• Easy to use thermometer that isn’t a mercury thermometer, one of those little digital reading things that are totally cheap these days

• Little notebook and ballpoint to take sick notes, it would have saved a lot of trouble that time I ended up in the hospital, as I didn’t remember much by then

• Benzonatate – prescription cough suppressant, so you might not be able to get it, and it might not work for you anyways, side effects being puking. Fortunately you have a red bucket with garbage liners!

• Peppermint tea – works for the stomach, apparently it helps calm the muscle movements of the gut, which is what can make you feel sick

• Pepto bismol in caplets – because sometimes herbs are not enough

• Merck Manual of Medical Information (Home Edition) – although I’d prefer to have it on my Kindle so I can search it. The web is useful for finding out about symptoms, but sometimes books that have like researched information are best

• Extra bottle of anything over the counter that I take

• Ambien

Much of this, even the book but not the food, are in the bucket, which is pre-lined and lives in the bedroom closet, which I assume I’ll be near when the flu steamrolls me. Actually maybe I should stick a bottle of water in it too.

One thing I’m a little sad about is that I can’t stock up on the prescription that keeps my bipolar thingy at bay. I have to take a lot of it (500mg of lamictal is a lot; standard dose ranges from 50 to maybe 200mg), and one supply never lasts a month, and the insurance company makes sure it stays like that. I don’t know if I can terribly blame them, since that is technically a way of keeping costs down, except for society when all the sick people go out to get their prescriptions and infect everybody.

Hmmm. I just realized that it is totally awesome I own an easily cleaned bread machine right now. I can turn inert substances into just enough bread for me to eat, at more or less any time, without spending time kneading—which I probably can’t do well when I’m sick—without it going moldy. And then I have toast, whenever I can stomach toast.

So this early morning, around 2am, I woke up after a disturbing nightmare, the kind that tends to leave me awake but tired and plagues with insomnia. I’d taken a full sleeping pill just four hours before, so it was too soon to resort to that.

Obviously the place to go next was Twitter. Where I discovered that @cleolinda recommended iZen Garden, a little iPhone app that replicates a dry sand garden, you know, the kind you put a few rocks in and then trace around them with a rake.

The app comes with 100 different kinds of objects you can place, move, and rake around, including fossils, bonsai trees, flowers, fountains that run and make soothing noises, and rocks. There are also animated butterflies you can add.

And of course, there must be soothing ambient sound in general, like tiny bells in the distance, rain, birds, etc. They all manage—even the bells—to not be annoying.

I bought it and played around with it, and the sounds and possibly the very simple act of raking repeatedly put me to sleep for the next eight hours, which I really quite needed. No dreams remembered at all, even, which is generally the way I like sleep to work.

I don’t know if it’ll continue to work (for instance, having Neil Gaiman read Coraline to me no longer works well). But it was relaxing. And it is rather pretty.