This week was a rough week, but not because of the nerve pain. In fact, my nerve pain was actually not too bad this week, but I had really troubling issues with my mood. Being depressed is very frustrating because it makes it hard to take care of myself like I should, so it causes everything to compound and can really ruin my week.
Starting off the week with low sleep
Over the weekend, my wife and I both caught a little cold and I ended up having to take time off from work on Monday. It luckily didn’t cause a flare, but it did make it hard for me to sleep. Sleep is pretty important with whatever is going on for me and I can’t go long without a good night’s sleep without it making all of my issues worse. The strange part is that this time, it didn’t cause much in the way of nerve pain, but what I was instead hit with was almost as bad.
By Monday, the lack of sleep was already catching up to me and it caused my mood to plummet. I felt down, uninterested, and hopeless. The strange part was that I am doing better and I finally have the big rheumatologist appointment scheduled for next month, so overall things are looking up. It felt so strange going from being very hopeful to being just totally down in the dumps. I had trouble getting myself to move, eat, and drink enough, which just made everything worse.
Help from my psychiatrist
The good news is that I also had an appointment with my psychiatrist on Monday, so I was able to bring up the problem with her right away. As we talked about it, we realized that with my extreme anxiety under control, the depression is a lot easier to notice. Looking back, it is very obvious that I was depressed, but in the appointment, I actually tried to say it wasn’t that bad and that it was only a 5/10. This is while I had tears in my eyes and hadn’t had much to eat all day. To me, the hardest part of depression is knowing that if I drink enough water, do a little exercise, and eat well, then I usually can get myself out of the funk (at least a little), but not being able to motivate myself to do it.
The appointment helped me realize just how depressed I was and my psychiatrist added a new med and increased another one to get me back to being able to sleep again and to help fight the depression. Like most mood meds, it takes a while to fully kick in, but I can tell it is helping already. A lot of that might just be due to being able to sleep again. Last night I was finally able to get a full night’s sleep with only a couple of wake-ups.
Overall update
I figured I should also include a more general update on how I am doing. I have been having headaches this week that make it hard to go outside. They seem to be triggered either by the bright light or just the high heat. The headache is still in the spot that started hurting after what I thought was a stroke that we now believe to be a massive panic attack. The heat is also really hard on me physically because it triggers the nerve pain within seconds of going outside. Walking across a parking lot is a real struggle because my feet and hands start to hurt really bad and I feel generally fuzzy. With the headache on top of that, I am more just hobbling around and trying to get in the building. It also makes it hard to get back into the car because my hands are super sensitive to heat once it triggers, so trying to grab the car handle to open the door is a real struggle.
Overall, it was a generally difficult week. I am hoping that next week will be better and I will be back on track for recovering. The depression isn’t so bad that I can’t get myself to get out of bed, so that should help a lot. I am just so tired of being tired, you know? I want to go back to being able to have a whole day without being in pain. Writing this while depressed is harder than I thought it would be and I felt like I just spent all my energy just typing this out. I am not going to stop fighting though. I am going to figure out what is wrong with me and work hard to learn new ways to cope and mitigate this new normal. Time to get moving for the day, so ready, set, here I go!