This has been an awful year for me. Unable to find work, having to sell off important assets. And for some reason iOS autocorrect is still terrible.
Here's to hoping next year will be better.
Here's to hoping next year will be better.
Don’t give up hope, and keep trying. Also, one key for me was to get properly medicated. Prozac was a turning point, but everyone is different. There was a clear step function from "before Prozac" to "after Prozac". The suicidal ideation stopped, among other things, which let me get my life in order.
Mostly just remember to enjoy each day in small ways. The only thing I regret from 2016 is not taking the time to appreciate the small things. There’s an interesting mental exercise to snap you out of this: pretend you’re on your death bed at 80, and then you were magically transported back in time to the present day. What would you do? Even being able to run is a blessing I don’t remember to appreciate until I can’t.
You’ll figure it out. Or at least, the chances of you figuring things out is much higher than things going downhill forever. It’s the default path, even if it doesn’t feel like it when things are going wrong.
Major life change happened recently (mom aging mom moved in with me, husband, and dogs) and my saving grace is creating, quilts mostly. I'm reallllly leaning into sewing at 4am!
I appreciate your perspective. Thanks for sharing.
Have a wonderful holiday week.
I do this, occasionally. Didn't realize this was a thing other people do, too. For some reason it really works in terms of making me feel more appreciative for my health and the many years I (hopefully) have left to live my life.
My wife almost died early this year from a hospital deciding to rush her Sodium level restoration because beds were scarce and profitable. She now suffers from extreme anxiety, her previous life as a happy, well-balanced mom is over, and as I write, she’s in the next room chattering in nonsense to herself because it’s how her brain copes. It’s worse in the mornings, gets better, briefly, in the afternoons as she gains more higher-level function, until her loss and grief for that overwhelm her, and she reverts again.
I won’t go into the litany of pain and suffering she continues to go through, suffice it to say she has had a variety of terrible-to-observe, worse to endure, symptoms throughout the year. Screaming in agony for hours, in first or third person, in hospital or at home, when painkillers just don’t work is not an experience anyone should go through.
The highlight of today is that a friend has invited us around for an Xmas meal. It’ll be our first social engagement since it happened, so there’s some risk. It’s at 4pm, which is usually her best time of the day, so we’re hopeful things can play out “normally”. I guess we’ll see, sometimes you have to risk things, just to make progress. I don’t think my friend actually realises just how much it means to us what his family have done, but I am so grateful that I cried on getting the invite. It can be hard to struggle alone.
So again, take heart. There is always something worse that could have happened, even for us. Don’t let the past dictate the future - you can’t change the past, but you can influence the future.
And I will join you in hoping that next year will be better.
[edit: thank you all for the kind wishes. Xmas has been hard so far because the sense of loss she feels is so much stronger than normal, but we live in hope]
If I may, this is a point I’ve been thinking a lot of lately though - as in, is the “oh there’s many people out there who have it way worse, so be thankful for what you have” mindset actually healthy?
Of course there will always be others worse off… and the inverse advice is also widely accepted: “never be the smartest person in the room”, “always look up, not down, to grow”, etc
I’ve been processing this in the context that I’m on the cusp of needing to give up on some life dreams, at least for a long while.
I’m glad to be shut down if this isn’t the right place for this discussion
Is it healthy for a person living under normal circumstance ? Probably not. Is it useful for someone in extremis? From personal anecdote only, I would say so. YMMV.
It’s not always healthy to compare yourself to others but it’s always healthy to be grateful for what you have and what you can do.
I am curious, what exactly happened to your wife? What is sodium level restoration and why did it have such an impact?
I understand if you don’t want to go into it.
You need a certain level of sodium in you - typically around 135-145 mEq/L. The body expects this level in a similar fashion to the way it expects a certain temperature, it’s where it works best and as you go farther away from this optimal value, the body starts to suffer. My wife’s level was 121.
In fact the body can manage reasonably well over a wider range, as long as the value changes slowly, slowly because the level of sodium controls, via osmotic potential, transport across the blood/brain barrier.
So the hospital should have added a maximum of 6-8 mEq/L per day into my wife’s bloodstream via intravenous saline. That would have given her body time to adjust, slowly, to the new sodium concentrations. Instead they initially gave her 13 mEq/L in 12 hours, and then another 6 mEq/L in the next 12 hours, by their own test results. She went clinically non-responsive (ie: near-comatose) for 2 days after they did that.
Sudden sodium changes can result in edema (which can be fatal) or osmotic demyelination - the myelin sheath being a wrapper around nerve cells that allows rapid electrical transmission from nerve to synapse. Losing the myelin is “a bad thing”, see Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis etc.
She woke up after they tried to “reboot her brain” and gave her Prozac, then discharged her because she could “walk” with a walker for help. They subsequently put her on benzodiazaprenes in the (9? I lose track) times we came back to ER over the next month or so. She’s still struggling to get off those, though she has halved the dose they prescribed (1mg Ativan every 4 hours).
We can’t even sue the hospital, because we spent the last 9 months trying desperately to figure out what went wrong and if it can be fixed, and we only got 6 months to file any dispute because it’s a county hospital. I spell it out as simply as I can above, but finding out what went wrong was a gradual thing. We have appealed this, but I don’t hold out much hope.
All told, I am singularly unimpressed with the American “healthcare” system to date.
It also lets you pick more than one language at the same time, which is amazingly useful
(sadly "more than one" is strictly 2, but 3-4 would be even better)
also smart punctuation, especially in macos.
“Keep your highs low and your lows high.”
“When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
And totally with you on iOS autocorrect!