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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 9 of 9. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by ELA on January 29, 2002, at 12:06:13
The prospect of this rehab programme I have to go on has really sent me into another dark mood and feelings of despair. Just when I thought things were finally starting to improve, I get all this. Psychiatrist was actually quite scary, asking and telling me all these things that I hadn't even considered and most of what he was saying was right. Bloody doctors, they're too intelligent for their own good! I've been quite happy just keeping everything locked up inside and now I'm being faced with having to unlock every bad experience/decision/moment from my life and talk about it.
If anyone ever invents a way of turning back time I would be first in the queue to try it. I could go back to November and just ask to be cryogenically frozen for a couple of weeks so that the clots never happen! Maybe not, but it would be nice. But then I guess we all think that from time to time.
Everyone keeps trying to get me to explain what's going on in my head at the moment and the only thing I know for sure is that I just want my life, and the control of it, back again.
Emma.
Posted by Fi on January 30, 2002, at 10:04:45
In reply to RIP My Life, posted by ELA on January 29, 2002, at 12:06:13
Your life and control of it is what everyone will be aiming on helping you get back to, tho of course it would be great to be able to just press 'rewind' on your life a bit!
I dont know all the details, but rehab wont mean talking about *every* bad moment, and there will be routine stuff as well as group or individual sessions. Occupational therapy things like art or yoga; vegging out sessions in front of the TV in the evening (and chunks of the weekend)if you want. etc.
And the talking stuff may actually help you feel less burdened, rather than being some sort of wallowing session opening things up and making you feel even worse.
Before you start is probably harder than once you are there, too.
And its completely unsurprising that your mood is going up and down a bit- that's the way it often goes. Appreciate the rest when they are up and dont panic when they are down (tho I know that's easier said than done).
Hang on in there.
Fi
Posted by Jonathan on January 30, 2002, at 15:16:20
In reply to RIP My Life, posted by ELA on January 29, 2002, at 12:06:13
> The prospect of this rehab programme I have to go on has really sent me into another dark mood and feelings of despair. Just when I thought things were finally starting to improve, I get all this.
Emma,
I'm so sorry that this has happened so soon after you felt you had turned a corner. I hope that, like your dark mood before you decided to return to uni, this one will lift in a day or two and you'll start to see some positive aspects to this programme: perhaps you'll discover a nice pub in the vicinity ;)
In my experience, I'm afraid these potholes on the road to recovery are inevitable. They become easier to cope with as you learn to recognise that they are only temporary. I haven't found an AD that makes them less deep; what I'm taking now just helps me sometimes to get out of the pit in days rather than weeks. They don't mean that you're not yet on that road; I still think you were probably correct in identifying the weekend before last as your turning point.
A very different melodramatic event nearly fourteen years ago was my turning point, though the illness crept back again after several years respite. I need another kick now, and discovered a couple of months ago that getting away from the home environment where my depression became really bad last summer, back to where I was happy all those years ago, might help me to recapture the positive emotions I started to feel then; the remaining obstacle is to find a way to hold on permanently to those positive emotions.
Perhaps getting away for four weeks, both from college where you became ill and from the emotional pressures of home, will help you to handle the difficult decisions you have to make and coming to terms with the illness that nearly prevented you from reaching your 21st birthday (so much more than I've ever had to deal with), as our trip abroad before Christmas enabled me to rediscover how it felt to be happy.
As a student about a quarter of a century ago, I started to drink much too heavily when I fell into depression. Both before and after that, although I perhaps drink a little more than average, I've been okay and not needed to make a conscious effort to cut down, even when I became depressed again but away from the student social environment, or when I returned to uni for an MSc course but was no longer depressed.
From what you said earlier about liver damage, you clearly need to deal with this problem immediately, rather than wait for it to resolve itself like mine as your depression lifts: remember the Norman French warning to visitors entering Magdalene: "Garde ta Foy" - protect your liver. It doesn't necessarily mean that alcohol will always be a potential problem for you, and since your depression, unlike mine, has an obvious physical cause, that is unlikely to recur and mess up the rest of your life as mine has.
I meant to answer a couple of your earlier posts but have inexplicably been going through a worse patch the last few days and felt too inconsolably miserable to do anything. Yesterday morning (always the worst time of day for me) I felt terrible and couldn't motivate myself to get out of bed and go to an appointment with my therapist - the fourth in succession that I've missed - despite feeling very positive about both him and CBT and having been on an NHS waiting list for two years.
Good luck, Emma. I hope you'll find some way of sending owls to us at PSB while you're away.
:) Jonathan.
Posted by sid on January 31, 2002, at 0:48:51
In reply to RIP My Life, posted by ELA on January 29, 2002, at 12:06:13
I can understand you wanting that. It'll take time however, so try to be patient. Patience is so important in life, especially in hard times. Trust that things will get better with time.
Posted by sid on January 31, 2002, at 0:56:47
In reply to Re: RIP My Life, posted by Jonathan on January 30, 2002, at 15:16:20
> remember the Norman French warning to visitors entering Magdalene: "Garde ta Foy" - protect your liver.
Hmmm... this has nothing to do with the core of your message, rather with a slight detail that tickles me.
I am not sure who Norman French is, but "Garde ta Foy" means "keep the faith," faith being feminine in French. "Foy" is old French for "Foi." Protect your liver would be "Garde ton foie," liver being masculine in French. Does that make sense with the Norman French character?
Posted by Jonathan on January 31, 2002, at 23:21:37
In reply to Garde ta Foy? » Jonathan, posted by sid on January 31, 2002, at 0:56:47
Sid,
You are, of course, correct. The noble, feminine old French noun "Foy" evolved into the the feminine modern French "Foi"; she did not change her gender to become "foie", a puerile, masculine noun despite his potentially misleading final "e".
http://www.britainexpress.com/counties/cambridgeshire/az/cambridge/magdalene-college.htm
Magdalene College, Cambridge, used to have an unfortunate reputation for excessive student drinking. An inebriated hooray Henry, returning to his rooms at Magdalene to sleep off several hours over-indulgence across the road at The Pickerel Inn (like Harry Potter's friend Hermione sneaking back to Gryffindor dorm after she solved Professor Snape's logic problem and drank the two bottles of wine) might read his College's motto and smile at the appropriateness to his condition of my schoolboy-howler mistranslation.
> I am not sure who Norman French is
LOL - Norman French is the old French dialect spoken by the Normans, led by William of Normandy, who conquered England in 1066. *Please* read the sample pages from 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman when Dr-Bob inserts a link to amazon.com (Thanks, Dr-Bob!), then read about William the Conqueror in Chapter XI - you'll love this book :)
As a student of English Lit, Emma could certainly tell you about the contribution Norman French, which became the language of the aristocracy while peasants continued to speak Anglo-Saxon, made to modern English. It explains, for example, why our words for farmyard animals as the peasant would see them in the field are of Anglo-Saxon origin (pig, cow, lamb, horse, sausage, potato), while we use nouns of French origin to refer to the same animals as they would be served on the feudal lord's dining table (pork, beef, Mouton Cadet Rothschild, hors d'oeuvres, crapaud dans le trou, fri(t)es).
Emma and I hail from the same "cuello del bosche" (a Spanish colloquialism you must have assimilated while working in Uruguay). I am a graduate of her university, but from a different era, a quarter of a century ago, before 16 of the 22 undergraduate colleges admitted the civilizing and maturing influence of the fair sex: of the other six colleges, three were exclusively for ladies; and only three admitted both women and boys. It was this majority of exclusively male colleges that nurtured the puerile humour of Douglas Adams (St John's, 1971), the Monty Python team in the 1960s, and me.
Please do not mistake my puerile literal translation of "neck of the woods" into Spanish for a lack of respect for your linguistic acumen, Sid. As a monoglot philistine mathematician, I envy your fluency in three languages, my wife's in four, and Emma's enterprise in learning sign language; but my admiration will not deter me from remarking that your combination of Eng Lit and sign language is a perfect preparation, Emma, for a future career teaching something like this :)
http://www.montypython.net/scripts/semaphore.php
Nor does my levity about the serious problems you are facing signify a lack of concern, Emma. I wish only to be supportive by trying to make you smile :)
Alcohol still plays a significant role in my social life, though at a level of consumption which has allowed me to reach the ripe old age of 48 without apparent damage to my health. When I was in my early 20s its role was so central to normal social life as a student that I should have been devastated to be told, as you have, that I must suspend my studies to attend a four-week rehab programme and then somehow begin to enjoy a social life without drink. It would seem worse than being excluded from PSB. I believe that your understandable fear has much more to do with social exclusion and the loss of the independence for which you returned to uni than with addiction.
I hope my attempts at humour didn't obscure the core of my message: in my experience, neither the social pressure on students to drink, nor my depressive illness, was enough without the other to create a serious, health-endangering alcohol problem. I hoped that you might see a tiny ray of hope in this message.
Other than support, the function of this community is education. You were right, Sid, to correct my appalling French, even though it was intentionally appalling :)
Jonathan.
Posted by Jonathan on February 1, 2002, at 6:00:03
In reply to Who is Mr Norman French? » sid, ELA, posted by Jonathan on January 31, 2002, at 23:21:37
Corrección: " cuello del bosche " debe leer a " cuello del bosque "
Que estoy alegre yo manché mi error antes de usted destraillé la inquisición española en mí, Sid.
http://www.montypython.net/scripts/spanish.php
El tema es una cita bien conocida de
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/FawltyTowers/a.touch.of.class.html
y traduje este poste del inglés a usar español
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
Intente traducirlo detrás de español a inglés, o el tecleo justo " traduce " el botón en la tapa de la paginación.
:) Jonatán.
[Original post:
Correction: "cuello del bosche" should read "cuello del bosque"
I'm glad I spotted my error before you unleashed the Spanish Inquisition on me, Sid. ...
The subject is a well known quotation from ...
and I translated this post from English into Spanish using ...
Try translating it back from Spanish into English, or just click the "Translate" button at the top of the page.]
Posted by sid on February 1, 2002, at 17:29:45
In reply to Who is Mr Norman French? » sid, ELA, posted by Jonathan on January 31, 2002, at 23:21:37
> LOL - Norman French is the old French dialect spoken by the Normans, led by William of Normandy, who conquered England in 1066.
Oooops, this is embarrassing. I am of Norman decent. But it did sound like a name in English.
Thanks for all the info. And I speak 4 languages, like your wife, although that sometimes leads to confusion! :-)-Sid
Posted by sid on February 1, 2002, at 17:32:20
In reply to ¿Qué? » Sid, posted by Jonathan on February 1, 2002, at 6:00:03
Muchas gracias, Jonathan, me hiciste reir!
Thanks a lot, Jonathan, you made me laugh!
This is the end of the thread.
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