Candor Creek

Current aesthetic: 2012 Toyota RAV4 (KBB stock photo) Normally on the days that I sleep 15 hours and wake at something like 5PM I spend the day berating myself But since I was out of the apartment for close to six hours (!!!) yesterday with constant social contact, doing something extremely stressful for anyone and with various levels of success and failure, ending with a large purchase - only to come home, completely detox everything that left with me, make a full meal, and then eventually take a planned increased dose of Seroquel (which makes me drugged and stupid, especially in the AM, for a few days as I adjust) to kill the growing mania right before heading to bed - Yeah, I counted waking to and remembering that alarm as a victory and went right the hell back to sleep and feel fully justified in doing so. I do know that I can trigger anaphylaxis if the alarm is too early and, while it should have been ok, I was absolutely a fan of complete physical recovery today. I...

My guardian during depressive evenings. I went three months and nearly two weeks with no epipen (!!!!!!) which was a huge milestone for me. Avoided it twice in that time by taking a certain med during what I call pre-anaphylaxis, but tonight's attack descended hard and fast. I almost thought I'd need the second pen. Now is when I'll own up to the weird depression I've had for a week - and you'll see why in a moment. A particularly rough two weeks of PMDD came and went, I was good and active for about five or six days, and then the paralyzing fog knocked me out again. Finally called psych doc so that she knows and we are not adjusting meds yet for various reasons, all of which I agree with. One of these is that one of the symptoms of MCAS can actually be depression (and anxiety) due to all those mast cells mucking things up in that blood/brain barrier. This means that if I'm having an inflamatory response the depression could be a side effect of that. Fu...

Another musician on drugs. It's kinda amazing what can happen when you're on (and adjusting) proper medication and are working with a competent and caring psych team that is capable of putting up with your extensive medical issues. I'm aware that most of the people reading this probably don't know that I have any musical hobbies at all save being a proud alto - but my musical inclinations were early and strong. One of my earlier memories is being just under five and figuring out the interlude to "Fool on the Hill" on the little blue recorder I had gotten at Disneyland that day. I grew up in a singing family where we'd put on the tunes and harmonize: Mom took the alto part, my sister took soprano, and I took/figured out the third part. It turned out I had perfect pitch and subsequently taught myself several instruments by ear - none well, but I had good starts. I started writing four part harmonies by high school. I unfortunately learned that these...

Not for show. I did a thing tonight. Despite the PMDD it was a really good brain day today. I was a particularly ineffective shepherd yesterday due to the afforementioned mood instability, so I decided that the only reason I'd leave the apartment today was to do lovely things with Summer. She and I went to a park and geocached, then visited our fave pet supply store for a Big Treat. She's halfway through a deep brush. We even got her license sorted for the year. All of this is pretty amazing on it's own, but the fact that I got the guitar out on top of that is unprecedented. I actually haven't played for ten years and I certainly haven't played after accidentally driving a knife into my hand while manic and doing sonething stupid in the kitchen. That little stint required surgery and, after fixing two severed ligaments and two severed nerves, I was left with near-normal movement but permanent nerve damage and some grip weakness. The good news: it should not...

We're starting to look like a team here. <3 I am currently in a dose adjustment for one of my mood stabilizers. This makes me oddly groggy and loopy, and sometimes by brain lurches and I drop phones or erase sections I've written - so the current entry likely is not composed to the point I wish it to be. It was a great assessment moment, though, and one I wanted to share. After becoming slightly more concerned by her continually present and fluctuating anxiety outdoors I did some further assessment and found that Summer's fits and starts of anxiousness and the trembling preceeding leaving the apartment are all actually just connected signs of sustained, chronic insecurity and fear and some lack of confidence in the management in the big, scary outdoors (the last bit is not surprising given we've only just hit the four month mark; my home is also very different from and much quieter than her others, and I am but one person in the face of Bad Things). The be...

Old friend. Something to celebrate, 13 years in the making. I've only publically alluded to this recently, but my first grad program (not the awesome one yall know about. I seldom talk about the other one) was genuinely traumatizing, to the point where there is a Sarah before that 9-month period and a Sarah after it. Sarah's already-established mental illness became genuinely crippling afterwards, affecting many things - including my performance in my next program, which still haunts me and likely always will. Among the many things affected was my ability to read. I'm not going to describe the experiences or anguish here today, but do know it was bad enough where I could not and have not read a book from cover to cover since 2005, academic or otherwise, and was seldom able to make it past the first few pages. As you'd imagine this made academics quite impossible; I left grad school after four years of rabid headbutting against the inside of my own skull due to mo...

Not actually 4AM - it was 5. AM. It's that bewitching time of year where the temperature drops at night, and we welcome the coolness into our homes along with the smells and sounds of autumn... ...but my sequestering intensifies, as does the temperature in my home, because heat rises and stops in a closed second floor apartment. All windows remain firmly shut as they have since last snow because my body chooses to fight, with ridiculous and dangerous fervor, all of that autumnal welcoming in particular. See that tall spike? That's my worst mold allergen starting to kick in. I was blindsighted by three epi-pens in 36 hours the day after the spike. I have new tools this year. Increasing the H2 blocker (and possibly the H1 blocker) seems to be keeping me on an every-other day steroid schedule instead of a daily regimen, and my array of ice packs help when my body suddenly forgets how to regulate its temperature, which happens a lot more when trying to do things in an...

This is what my kitchen CAN look like. My aging dog has been sick for a few days, which can lead to some late nights for me. We're close to the end of this episode, but I decided to give him another dose of the mix he needs to purge the badness from his system. I planned to stay up with him (rather than berate myself for terrible sleep habits as I normally do) so I'm doing dishes and laundry at 4AM in between taking him outside so that he'll expell the evil in his system outdoors rather than in the apartment. I am still hoping to tackle at least part of the living room. I wanted to have guests over for the Packer games this season but right now the living room is an atrocious mess, wholly unfit for visitors. Thursday is the Packers/Bears game, though, and I'm kinda tempted to give up and move what I haven't neatened up to the bedroom just to have people over. I'm holding myself to a standard ("you didn't keep house correctly the first time, you...

Me, on a three hour drive, making a pit stop in an attempt to wake myself up. I have a lot of reasons to be tired, exhausted, or sleepy most or all the time - enough, in fact, to be able to tell you the differences between the three descriptors. They are not interchangeable in my world. The symptom is hypersomnolence (too much sleepiness) and it can be a side effect of seasonal allergies, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, bipolar disorder, and several of the medications I take. In addition, it is tiring for a body to have to carry out any semblance of a daily routine while also shouldering several chronic health issues. Finally, someone as introverted as I am gets tired out quickly in social situations. If I'm honest my life is generally one great big exhausted struggle with rest and sleep. By far the activity that is most affected by this is my driving. Sure, I can fake it around town if it's a short trip, but I have cancelled activities with people due to being ...