I've been under medical/psychological treatment for Prolonged Distress Stress Disorder and severe depression for several years. After a runaway ride on the rainbow pharmaceutical wheel, a retro-looking doctor gave me old reliable Prozac... and it lit Today in high relief for the first time in my living memory.
it was a Good Thing, Martha.
For the first time in my life I felt that today was real, and that this moment was complete and intact and entirely void of dread.
Amazing!
Well since then(about two years now) I have had my daily ups and downs. Life has never been easy or simple in the Dark household. This is ok; usually I manage to balance on the biggest wave, or at least swim off before it breaks me.
But... lately I've been tested right to the edges of my newfound calm.
(Note: whining imminent. Move on if uninterested.)
Due to management roulette at work, we have been without medical insurance for over six months. My maintenance meds for blood pressure cost us over $100 a month. I haven't used the prescription pain medication my doctor recommends for about six months, because it would cost yet another $100 a month.
Then there is the Prozac. It costs almost as much as all the other drugs together. I finagled and took a half-dose for months to stretch it out, but we just can't afford to buy it anymore. I've been off it for over a month now. It shows...
I applied for a drug program that a social worker at the DHS recommended. We have no idea how long the application process takes, so meanwhile we are scrounging the money for the meds. Without the pain med and the Prozac, coping is a moment-to-moment thing. I spend a lot of time in bed and I cry way more, but my minimum needs are met, and hopefully within a month I'll have some clue as to how things will shake down.
In all this, Papa has changed jobs yet again. This is his first step out of retail management in five years, and it's going to be a good job, but the transition between is financially bleeding us dry. Our prospects appear, like the White Queen's jam, to be every-other-day-only prospects: prospects yesterday, prospects tomorrow, but never never prospects today. (Of course it isn't really that bad, but Mommie's old depressed thought-grooves are leading her into those old familiar fears.)
Papa left this morning for a week of training in sunny Fla. I am home alone with Little Dark and his grown brothers. Ordinarily this is no biggie, but I am becoming squirrely, like I was B.P. (Before Prozac), and wonder if I can manage things for a week without melting down.
Three months from now when our medical benefits are active and we are beginning to stabilize financially, I will have a much happier perspective. I repeat this platitude like a mantra.
For today, though, I am having the old weird dreams, the sleep disturbances, and a hair-trigger startle response.
Even positive change sucks when it comes thick&fast. Mommie is a pediscooter in a supercharged motorized world. ANd she can't find a bike lane to save her skin...