The Bloggess

I have so many things to write about or be excited about but I’m still in that same malaise of depression and it’s one where I have such small amounts of energy that I have to be really careful about how I use the few spoons that I have.

BUT! But I completed the intake for ketamine therapy and was accepted and I start my first injection day after tomorrow so I’m crossing all of my fingers that it works for me or that my brain just magically decides to stop being such a dick all the time.

But I’m okay. And I still have times each day when I feel almost normal and I have a good support system and I have hope. The hope remains.

I super crazy love you. Know that if you’re struggling too, you are not alone. Keep breathing. Keeping taking care of yourself. Keep remembering that depression lies and that it will pass. Promise. I’ll remind you if you remind me.

I can always tell when I’m in a depression because I disappear.

I disappear from my blog and my life and I wait until I come back to myself. In the last week I celebrated my 25th wedding anniversary, I went with Hailey and Victor to Vegas for the weekend, I wrote down notes of things I should write about and then wrote about none of them because my depression has eaten my energy, motivation and ability to even string together a sentence properly. I have written and deleted this paragraph 5 times.

It feels so ungrateful to be depressed when you should be happy and celebrating. The cognitive dissonance can make the depression and disassociation even more uncomfortable and yesterday it got so bad that I started looking into IV ketamine for treatment resistant depression, which sounds ridiculous because I always avoided ketamine when I was a young semi-druggie and now I’m looking at getting shot up with it.

I could do TMS again as it’s helped twice before but it takes a long time to start working and I’m so low I wanted something more immediate. Yesterday I reached out to a clinic and started getting set up but the depression causes something so easy to feel impossible. And then today I woke up and instead of feeling 85% depressed I only feel 55% depressed and now I’m at that awkward teetering stage of “Do I use this time to set up treatment?” versus “Well, if I feel better today maybe I’ll feel even better tomorrow and maybe I should just do nothing.”

IV ketamine seems to have good results (overall) and works fast but it’s not covered by insurance so I’ll probably be spending a ton of money to sit with needles in my arms for days as I have a psychedelic trip that will be 90% milder and a million percent more expensive than my college dealer could have given me in 1993. I think about the cost and about how I could use that same money to take my family on vacation somewhere lovely, and then I remember that we just got back from a tiny vacation where I was struggling to do even the simplest of things. So that’s why I’m writing this. To remind myself that I am worthy of treatment. And so are you. Whether that’s medication or self-care or anything else that seems selfish but in the end makes you stronger and more so that you can be a better person for those around you.

I’m very lucky that I can get treatment and that we can find a way to pay for it. A lot of people can’t. A lot of people won’t even have the opportunity to try all of the treatments that have worked for me or that have not. So today I’m going to take that opportunity and the little amount of energy I have and call the clinic to see if this is a good option for me. And if it isn’t I’ll call to start another round of TMS. And I will feel bad about the time and expense and drain but I will remind myself that at the end of every treatment that has given me relief I’ve know without a doubt that it was worth it.

Fingers crossed.

This weekend is our 25th wedding anniversary (which is weird because in my head I’m emotionally 24 at best) so we decided to take Hailey and go back to where we celebrated our honeymoon…Vegas. Well, Victor and Hailey decided really because Vegas isn’t really my kinda town (too peoply) but then Hailey was like, “We can go to see Meowolf!” and I was a little confused but they explained that it’s a supermarket that doubles as an LSD trip and then I was more confused but then Victor was like, “We can see the weird-ass stuff you always like” so this weekend we will be visiting an interactive art Supermarket, a haunted museum, a 40 foot praying mantis shooting fire out of it’s mouth, and watching Cirque du Soleil (through double masks because we’re vaccinated but I’m still paranoid). Any other suggestions for things we can’t miss? (Weird and cheesy is a plus.)

These are some of the only pictures I have of us together in Vegas because this was a time before smartphones when the only way you could have a good picture together was to ask a stranger on the street to take it and you didn’t even know if it was good until you came back home and took the film to get developed. We’re so fucking old.

So yesterday I took Dorothy Barker to the vet for her annual shots and everything was fine other than Dottie trying to ineffectively attack everyone who got near her with a needle with her ridiculously tiny teeth (“We’re putting ‘land-shark’ in her chart.” ~ my actual vet) and it was all fine until I was driving home and Dottie started projectile horking all over the car floor, the car seats and me and I was trying to talk to her reassuringly while struggling not to hurl myself as she went full exorcist so I raced back to the vet while covered in vomit and I saw a cop with his lights on and I was pretty sure I was going to be pulled over but also fairly certain he was going to rue the day once he looked inside the seventh circle of hell currently covering so much more area than you would imagine an 8 pound dog could ever produce but he kept going because honestly he could probably smell it from his car and then when I got back to the vets office they fixed her up with meds but then when I got back home her face started swelling up so I called the vet and they were like, “Give her some pepcid” and I was like, “She’s not vomiting anymore. She’s totally empty” and they were like, “No, pepcid helps with allergic reactions” and then I wondered if I was even taking Dottie to a real vet at all but she assured me that the benadryl they’d already given her and the pepcid would work well together but that meant that I had to get her to eat the pepcid and Dottie was not having it so I mixed it up with peanut butter and she was like, “Bitch, what. I just threw up things I ate in the 80s. What are you doing?” and I was like, “I DON’T KNOW. I’M JUST FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS. And also, you weren’t even alive in the 80s” and she was like, “Well, put on a rain poncho because you’ll be seeing this shit again in 15 seconds” but she kept it down and her snoot shrunk almost back to normal size but we had to watch her to make sure she wasn’t getting worse so I stayed up until 1am rocking a pitiful puppy who wanted to be swaddled and/or not touched at all alternately every 5 minutes and that’s how I know that I am no longer prepared to be the mother of a newborn anymore.

Long story short, Dottie is fine (but irritable, fragile and sleepy) and I know exactly how she feels.

How was your yesterday?