Slightly better

Thanks to everyone who commented yesterday. It is appreciated that you're there (one of the reasons I blog, I suppose). Also big hugs to anyone else who's in the same 'situation'. (area, mood, field, state, whatever.)

Firstly, an update. The sun is shining this morning, I have been to the gym for a swim, and I allowed myself to take half an hour off for a HUGE coffee on the way to work. I do flexitime of a sort and I'm on the late shift tonight, so it didn't matter that I took longer than usual to get here.

All those are things that help ease the pressure of a depressive episode, so I'm slightly up today from where I was yesterday. But those of you who understand will know that it means nothing and I could be back in the pit by tonight.

However, I wanted to discuss the comment Dolores made about people with depression not knowing they had it. It's an interesting question. At first, I didn't know I had it. I can remember the first time I needed a doctor because of it.

I was sharing a house with two colleagues, one of whom was a bit of a bitch, if I'm honest. She had no respect for other peoples' property or personal space. Looking back, I realise it must have been getting to me for quite a while, but I was relatively new to mental health issues back then. (I was 21. There were other things going on in the background of my life that created an unstable frame of mind. She was the last grain of sand that tipped the scale.)

Something happened. Doesn't matter what. But it made me angry. And the next thing I knew was that I was being held down by my other flat-mate (a male rugby player!) because I had smashed up most of the living room using a Chinese sculpture I'd bought her for her birthday. (It was made of resin and almost completely unbreakable.) Next morning I was dragged off to the doctor by said rugby player, and written off on the sick for a week.

Since then I have 'gone off the rails' approximately every two to three years with varying degrees of severity. And in that time I have undergone practically every available treatment for the condition except electro-convulsive therapy. (I suspect it would cause me too much damage because of my structural problems so it isn't a viable option.)

Over time I have learned to recognise the symptoms. It has not been easy. The good thing is that I can start taking avoiding action as soon as I realise the stress is building up. Sometimes I can find an outlet to release some of the steam from my brain's pressure cooker. Sometimes I can't. Sometimes the things I do work. Sometimes they don't. 

I've not had a real downer for several years now. I haven't punched anyone (oh yes - I used to do that too!) or intentionally broken anything (I tried a while back but the thing bounced. Deeply annoying at the time, but it gave me time to calm down a little.) for about five years. (Those of you who follow my posts in detail will realise that coincides with the heart attack. I SHOULD have punched someone that day. I'd have lost my job, but I wouldn't have ended up in hospital.)

On the other hand, I've not been deeply, deliriously happy for quite a while either. I suspect that's not actually possible for me and others like me. We have 'better' days, and we can have a good laugh at something from time to time. We can feel content when things go right. But intensely happy? I don't think so.

The thing I yearn for (and thanks to K can find these days) is 'safe'. Secure. Supported. Protected. From the big, wide, scary world, and from my own mind. Sometimes I lose my way towards that, but at least I know it's there and waiting for me.

See? Told you I was a bit better today.

 

Dealing with it.....

Sad to report I'm in a bit of a downward spiral again at the moment. Life just seems to be handing me hassle. Nothing's too big by itself for me to handle, but all together it's grinding me down. 

We had a few days sunshine over the bank holiday, and I felt better for a while, but I knew the tide was against me. Over the same weekend I had the urge to clear things out and make more room around me. It's always a sign when I start to feel claustrophobic that I'm on the down slope of the roller coaster of my sanity.

It begins on the drive to and from work.  I spend about 45 minutes each way, mostly in motorway or heavy city traffic. In a depressive state the lanes aren't quite wide enough for my car; vans and lorries (or even large cars) seem to encroach on my space.

Getting new vari-focal glasses on the same weekend didn't help. They change my outlook. Literally. I can see things in my peripheral vision that were just blurs before. Now I know they're there and sometimes I don't like what I can see.

I've tried lots of ways to improve my state of mind. I've been working on craft things. and I've been painting. And I've read a few books in the last three or four weeks. But all it's doing is putting up a barrier between me and the 'it' on the other side that haunts me and sooner or later the dam will break.

In the more than 36 years since I was diagnosed with depression I have never discovered what 'it' is. I've been given regression therapy, and CBT, and pills, and counselling, and different pills, and exercise, and mindfulness and breathing techniques and probably other things that I've forgotten. The faceless, fearsome thing remains unidentified.

When everything is considered I know perfectly well that the solution is ultimately in my own hands. Or rather, my own head. All of the treatments are crutches. It's up to me to make myself well. To change the faulty thinking that makes me this way. To rewire the paths through my brain so I don't immediately fear the worst in new situations. So I notice the good things happening around me and not just the bad ones.

Last night on my way home there were no fewer than four traffic shunts. Cars and vans had collided at four different locations and at each one there were angry people shouting each other down. I heard none of it, but saw all the faces. I can't remember anything else about the journey. I know I go past trees in blossom, cowslips in the grass verges, a heronry where I see at least one fly overhead each day, but I can't picture any of that. And until I can alter that balance, this mood will not go away.

Sunbathing 2. Personal health care

After my last blog post about sunbathing and the change of heart in some medical/scientific circles, snafu made an excellent point. He's had a couple of melanomas (melanomae?) that needed removing. Clearly, the risk of sunbathing outweighs the benefits in his case. Indeed, it is, as he said, 'all in the genes'.

{I wish you well, snafu, and hope you have no further problems.}

But it just goes to show that healthcare is a game of chance, really. We have to weigh up the odds and play the best bet for ourselves.

Statistically, the risks from high blood pressure are much greater than those from skin cancer.

Around 13,000 people a year in the UK are diagnosed with malignant melanoma, and it kills just over 2,000. There's an approximately 88% five-year survival rate. (Figures based on Cancer Research UK 2010 statistics)

Collectively, heart and circulatory diseases cause more than a quarter of all deaths in the UK, accounting for more than 159,000 deaths each year. (British Heart Foundation)

So - statistically - you are about 80,000 times more likely to die from something made worse by high blood pressure than you are from something caused by too much exposure to sun.

This is very little consolation for those, like snafu, who belong in the first group!

Now, I belong quite clearly in the second group. I'm on BP meds, had a heart attack five years ago, and come from at least three generations who failed to see their 80th birthdays because their hearts gave up. (In some cases quite considerably earlier than 80. An uncle on one side, and a cousin on the other, didn't make it to 60!)

Where am I going with all of this?

Well, I work for a charity that researches alternatives to animal testing. It's not because it's cruel and animals get hurt.  (They DO get hurt, badly. But that's not why we do it.) It's because animal results simply aren't reliable.

Something like 90% of potential drugs and treatments fail animal testing. But more importantly, nine out of 10 drugs that pass animal tests have to be withdrawn when  human trials begin because they SIMPLY DON'T WORK. (In some cases they are actually harmful.)

Now consider how many possible cures have been discarded because the initial animal tests failed, but which might have worked in humans.

For years 'they' have been telling us that sunbathing is bad for us. And for snafu it is. But for the rest of us there's only an 80,000 to 1 chance that we'll die from it.*  (As a comparison - the chance of winning at least £10 on the UK lottery is about 1 in 55.)

So the next time you hear one of 'them' saying that we HAVE to do animal tests otherwise we'll never find a cure for cancer/heart disease/whatever, PLEASE bear in mind that animal research might be the very reason that we HAVEN'T found those cures yet.


*Statistics can be made to say anything. People die from things besides malignant melanoma and heart disease. But you get the idea...

 

To sunbathe, or not to sunbathe, that is the question.

For years they've been telling us to take care in the sun. Slip, slap, slop. Slip on a shirt, slap on a hat, slop on the sun-cream.  Too much exposure to UV light gives you cancer, right?

Well, maybe, but maybe not.  New research from Edinburgh University suggests that the benefits of sunbathing might actually outweigh the risks.

Kids with rickets

We all need some sunshine on our skin to make vitamin D. And that's necessary for the body to absorb calcium to create strong bones - hence the lack of it causing the deformity, rickets. Back in the days before air pollution control, children in inner cities in the UK often did not see sufficient sunlight to make enough of the substance to keep them healthy.

When times changed, and the country became richer, and more people had more leisure time, sunbathing became a passion. 'Healthy' brown skin was the thing to aim for. Then the dreaded melanoma came along. It turned out that staying out in the sun too long had a harmful effect, causing lesions that could prove fatal if not removed in time.

However, now the team in Edinburgh has shown that being out in the sun releases substances called nitric oxides, which lower your blood pressure. High BP contributes to heart disease, type-2 diabetes and many other conditions, which cause 80 times more deaths per year than skin cancer.

There's more research to do. Meanwhile, if you spent this lovely bank holiday weekend outside absorbing a few rays, like I did, don't beat yourself up about it too much. Maybe you were doing the right thing after all.

A note on religion

"Belief in anything, whether it be an earth goddess or a monthly horoscope, is guaranteed to be alien or almost incomprehensible to those who do not hold the same ideas. Yet, while it is easy to dismiss another's beliefs as irrational or misguided, it is rare to hold absolutely no personal opinion about what lies behind our existence. The variety of theories and divinities to which the question of life is attributed is endless, and has provided the source of some of the most heated conflicts in history. But on one level there is a similarity between, for example, a Carmelite nun praying before a crucifix, an Algonquin kneeling in the forest and communing with Kitshi Manitou, the Great Spirit, and a Muslim facing Mecca at the rallying cry of a muezzin. Each of these believers, obviously, would see great and possibly insurmountable differences in their worship, for a start, none of them is contacting the same spirit."

I found this in the preface to a second-hand book I bought today at the Medieval Fayre in the village. It's from the Wordsworth Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions. (1995. Editor Rosemary Goring.) It's an interesting viewpoint. Of course, I personally believe that the three given examples are contacting the same spirit, it's just the names they call it that lead to the differences. I also believe that the spirit itself is sublimely indifferent to the names we choose for it, or the methods by which we worship it.

I learned a new word!

Altogether now:
Oh-oh
My ears are alight.

Thanks to Rosalind I have today learned another new word! (It's not often I get two in a week. I do words for a living so my vocabulary is, from necessity, considerably larger than most people's. Hence it's always a delight to find a treasure I haven't encountered before.)

And the word is 'mondegreen'.

Visit Ros's blog for the full, amusing, explanation that is her post.

You can also check out my '26 letters' page on my Jobbing Writer blog where you can see just how difficult a task I set myself some time ago in the search for increased word power.

Here’s tae us.

Here's tae us.
Wha’s like us?
Gie few, and they’re a’ deed!

It's a Scottish toast

I came across it on my holidays.

(I'm not sure whether this post should actually be on my Jobbing Writer blog, since it's about language, and something I found in a book. Perhaps I'll do a more 'literary' version for that.)

Do you need a translation? It says:
Here's to us. (Raise your glass in salute at this point)
Who's like us?
Very few, and they're all dead.
(You may now down your wee dram. And lang may yer lum reek!)*

You all know I theme my holiday reading and some of you will be aware that I took a very broad definition of 'Scotland' while we were away and read one of Ann Cleeves's Shetland novels. I also saw off an Ian Rankin. The return of Rebus in Standing in Another Man's Grave.   And that's where I found the toast.

Later in the week I found it on various tea towels, mugs, coasters, and other tat being sold at a peculiarly tourist-directed venue. I won't say where. I also won't be going back there in a hurry!

The phrase triggered a discussion at work with colleague M, who's much the same age as me and has sufficiently similar background for us to find some common ground on most topics. I told her the Scottish toast reminded me of something my Dad used to say.
"They're all mad save me and thee. And I'm not too sure about thee!"

Her granddad used to say it too, apparently. It gave us both a laugh. But the best bit was when she introduced me to another of his sayings.
"I'm going to keep paddling till my hat floats."

Isn't that wonderful? It's typical of a certain generation, who learned to do without things; cope with challenges; make do and mend; and never complained. (Or hardly ever.)

So, for the rest of this month I'm going to try to keep paddling till my hat floats. However deep the water gets!

*********

*Long may your chimney smoke. Or 'may you always be able to afford enough fuel to cook and keep warm.