Tag: life

Citalopram days 4-5

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I’ve slept! 10 hours on Friday and 9 hours on Saturday. I needed that.

The nausea has definitely settled.

I still feel kind of angsty. Agitated and impatient sometimes. It’s an anxiety symptom, I guess. Maybe this is what it means by making anxiety worse before it gets better – it’s not that I have worse anxiety attacks, it’s just that I feel frustrated. I can live with that.

I have been half-dosing so far to try to minimise side effects. Assuming all is OK tomorrow morning* I intend to go up to the full dose.

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*I’m still nervous about the increased risk of stomach bleeding with my running. It was OK yesterday with a 1h run but today was 1h30, so we’ll see…

Citalopram days 2 and 3

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Sleep: I’m not sleeping well, but I wasn’t before either, which was one of the reasons I chose to start taking it. I am having dreams though. I had a nightmare yesterday morning (about Becky!) which had me waking up feeling sick and dreading going to work, and this morning I had one involving a cockroach… I very rarely have/remember dreams, so this is unusual.

Nausea: Seems to have subsided. It was noticable on day 2, but less so on day 3.

GI: Hmm yes. There are GI effects. I’m getting a lot more discomfort (gas) at the moment. I hope this settles.

Mental: Hard to assess really. I feel… I don’t know. I was quite content yesterday afternoon at work, but today I worked from home and I felt angsty and frustrated. I think for the moment any mood changes can be attributed to lack of sleep.

Citalopram day 1

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I had trouble getting to sleep last night and then I woke up super early and couldn’t go back to sleep, all because I was stressed and dreading going to work – is she going to be rude to me today? will I be able to handle it? After getting up I very impulsively decided to restart the Citalopram because something’s got to give at some point.

The doctor I saw last week advised me to try half-dosing to 10mg for a week or so, as I was concerned about side effects, so I did that.

lavenderandlevity (whose blog is incredible) convinced me yesterday that unless I actually give the tablets a fair chance, I’ll always be wondering if I should be taking them. Even if I quit my job tomorrow and removed all my immediate stress, I’d still need to get through a job-search at some point and I’m not entirely convinced I would actually do that at the moment, versus just… not bothering.

So, I took it this morning, and I have felt…

Physically, pretty rough: I am tired (hardly surprising given I haven’t slept much), nauseous (this is definitely the tablet) and my tongue feels weird. I think my appetite is a bit suppressed by the nausea. Hopefully this will pass in a few days.

Mentally though I’ve felt quite calm today. But this may just be the effects of the resolution to the meds or no meds argument that’s been going around my head continually.

So.

I need to promise myself something here. If these help and I start feeling calmer, I need to not use them to mask the fact work is a toxic workplace. I need to use them to instead give me the confidence to get into a non-toxic workplace so I can come off them ASAP.

I also need to be very careful about stomach bleeding, which SSRIs can exacerbate. I have always linked my occasional bleeds to running, so for the next week or so, I need to ‘stress test’ myself here, because if they are going to cause more bleeding, I need to know about it before my body starts to build a dependency on them. I did 11k this evening at a hard-ish pace (uanffected by the nausea, apparently), but the real test will be when I do 16-17k over the weekend.

Health bits

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I got more of my blood test results back today. My iron levels are borderline anaemic, and they’ve dropped a lot since January. I think I need to be on iron tablets again.

I wonder if this has affected how I’m feeling mentally. When my iron levels were low last year I ended up having a breakdown. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I also don’t feel I’ve ever really recovered from it. I don’t want to repeat that, so I will be back at my GP the first appointment I can get.

Work was tough today. I didn’t work hard at all and spent probably two hours in the kitchen chatting to people today, which should have made it an enjoyable day… but… the reason I did that was because I was struggling. I was in the kitchen alone early in the morning when Becky came in. She got part way through the door, saw I was in there, then made a huffing noise and turned around and walked out again. We always have to have the amateur dramatics with her. She always seems to want me to notice her. I know it reflects badly on her and not at all on me, but it upsets me. I was feeling unsettled anyway and this just pushed me over.

I don’t even know why she’s taken offense to me again; I haven’t spoken to her for months. I think that might be the problem. I think she wants a better relationship but doesn’t know how to achieve it, so she gets frustrated and goes out of her way to make me notice her being rude to me in the hope that I’ll do something differently and then via some magical process which requires no change or effort or communication on her part everything improves. Or maybe I’m just projecting because I thought about doing that too, but then I remembered I’m not 5 years old and it would look a lot like bullying.

But I’m not playing stupid games, so here we are.

I wish I’d seen my counsellor this week.

Work

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The other problem with work, apart from the social side of it, is the overwhelming feeling that I’m wasting my time here. I’ve been here 7 years and I haven’t progressed in any measurable way. It’s hardly surprising that I don’t feel respected by certain coworkers when my employer obviously doesn’t respect me either. Nobody else in the 7 years has been promoted, so it’s not me personally, but it’s still a problem.

The whole situation adds up to say that the company doesn’t value me, and it’s bad for my self esteem to continue working for a company that doesn’t value me – because, what does that say about me?

I was talking about this to my mum. She was horrified when I said I’d started taking anti-depressants, and, in fact, her extremely negative attitude towards them was one of the things that put me off taking them initially, because I didn’t want to deal with her disapproval (note: I know this is a bad reason).

I think she’s starting to ‘get’ it all a bit more. I told her this weekend that the most recent doctor said we were probably focusing on the wrong thing by looking at my diet for reasons as to my weight loss. I have been tracking my weight quite closely since June and I’ve lost 0.4kg since then. Mum was a lot less negative about anti-depressants this time when I mentioned the doctor again suggested I take them – she said “how do you feel about that?”, and she also said that if my job was causing me physical health problems then that’s not good and she’d support me quitting. Which is good, because, like I said, I don’t want to have to deal with her disapproval.

I feel like I’ve gone around in a circle and I’m still in the same position of “do I quit, or do I try anti-depressants?”. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I am hoping that if I started anti-depressants, they’d give me the strength and motivation to get a better job. At the moment, that just feels difficult. It takes me all of my work related energy to be at work. I don’t want to come home and then start stressing about applications and interviews.

But I also see a possible alternative route in that at some point soon I will have an opportunity to voice career progression related discontent to my boss. The project I’m on is almost finished and some time in the next month or so there really should be a discussion about what I’ll be allocated to next. This gives me a natural opportunity to point to my achievements over the past 18 months or so and express surprise and/or disappointment that I haven’t been recognised for them and officially given a more senior role. It might go nowhere, but that’s good in itself because it makes things clear. At the moment I feel I’m probably wasting my time at this company, and this discussion will remove the uncertainty. The timing is bad because the company’s finances don’t seem to be doing too well, but equally, I bring in a lot more money than I cost the company, so they’ll be doing even worse if I leave.

It’s worth pursuing that a bit just because it would piss Becky off if I got promoted.

Circles

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The GP yesterday got me thinking again.

The rough summary is that she felt very emphatically I should be on anti-depressants. I’ve had 3 GPs tell me this now. This one had my recent psychiatric test results in front of me and seemed concerned I had scored pretty highly for some things and that without treatment I might get worse.

She related this to my weight, as I mentioned yesterday, saying that, yes, I can go and see a dietitian, but the chances are that my diet is fine and it’s my anxiety issues preventing me from putting on weight, so we’re focusing on the wrong thing.

So we’re back to square one, really. I don’t want to be on anti-depressants, but my optimism since May that things will improve substantially has not been rewarded.

Phrasing it in the way she did, that “we’re looking at the wrong thing”, with the weight put a certain amount of gravity on it for me. Another way of framing this is that my job – because that’s where the anxiety is being triggered – is interfering with my physical health.

My job is a complex thing. I’ve spent a lot of time here writing about how much the social side of it upsets me, but that’s only a part of it. The whole package is… unrewarding at best. I think I’d be able to deal with work a lot better if I felt it gave me something beyond a number in my bank account.

Medical stuff

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Today was a bit different because I had some medical appointments. The blood test I had done in July showed my haemoglobin level at 140, which is the highest I’ve ever seen it. I noted to the GP that I’ve had two instances of bleeding since then so that reading might be out of date. She decided to repeat it, and, amazingly, the results are already available – it’s now 137, which is good. Not as good as 140, but it means I didn’t lose much blood.

I feel kind of insecure about it though. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking “it was 137 this afternoon… but I could easily find out tomorrow morning that I’ve been bleeding more”.

I have been referred to a dietitian for my weight loss, but she told me it was probably my anxiety and spent quite a while trying to convince me I should be on anti-depressants. Well. Maybe.

I went through the food side of things a bit with my counsellor this week. I said to her that if anyone else ate nearly as much as me, they’d put on a huge amount of weight very quickly, whereas I’m really struggling to keep my BMI above 19. She had me keep a list of what I was eating every day (because I don’t think she really believed that I ate much). She looked at it and her reaction was “hmm, that is a lot of food”.

Work

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So it turns out that my company has funded another five counselling sessions.

I decided on Friday afternoon that come Monday morning I’d just hand in my notice and be done with the ridiculous situation, but over the weekend I softened a bit and decided to just write an email to HR lady expressing my ‘surprise’ at support being withdrawn without discussion.

So we had a meeting. HR explained that The Boss had just decided to withdraw funding and that was that. Reasons stated were brexit, currency devaluation, and the fact we have a lot of costs in external currencies. I wasn’t very impressed with this, as you can imagine.

But HR lady and I had a long chat about mental health and how I was doing (answer: not great). She is actually quite good at this stuff; she has recently completed a qualification in mental health and has struggled with it herself – she told me she had been on anti-depressants for a few years because she was suicidal. She offered to go back to The Boss and ask again.

Which she did. And then five more sessions opened up.

So on the one hand, I’m grateful for that. On the other, it just seems ridiculous to me that The Boss caused resentment over such a trivial amount of money. The company lost far more than £150 between my time, HR lady’s time, and The Boss’s time just discussing the matter. The brexit argument was hard to sympathise with; I didn’t benefit when the currency was stronger, and there are plenty of other local companies who don’t have high costs in foreign currencies, so it’s unclear why I should accept that.

So I don’t know how I feel. I was close to quitting, and now I regard this as a temporary counter-offer. But it still damages trust, which is hard to rebuild. The last year at work seems to have been a sequence of people damaging my trust and then being surprised when that causes problems.

94d

I’m still struggling with job seeking. I am getting so much low-effort spam from recruiters that it’s overwhelming. I am getting emails from recruitment agencies saying “thank you for your application, please phone me on this number” when I haven’t submitted any applications, and “I tried to phone you but couldn’t get through” when they don’t even have my phone number. I’m not dealing with recruiters who are dishonest right from the start, but separating spammers from possible leads is energy and time consuming, which is demotivating.

I don’t get it. If there’s a strong market for my skills then make it easy for me. If there isn’t, then why are you spamming me?

I did get one from an in-house recruiter which looked a bit more promising but the location isn’t great.

Weight

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I received the letter summarising the gastroenterology appointment…

The main thing he noted is that I’ve lost 10% of my weight over the past year. Some people would be happy with this, but I’m at the other end of that scale, and it’s a bit concerning.

He noted that I’d asked him about anti-depressants and speculated that maybe it was dietary due to my depression (I didn’t explain they were for anxiety, not depression, but that’s probably not important).

Actually I don’t think my diet is restricted at all. I think I eat a ridiculous amount and my body just refuses to hold on to much of it. I think if most people ate the amount I eat, they’d become morbidly obese quite quickly. I eat three large meals a day, I eat quite a lot between meals and I still feel hungry all the time. I am very active, but even so… there are faster people than me at Parkrun with more air resistance.

My anxiety does give me what seems to be medically termed “GI distress” though, so maybe that affects digestion.

Anyway, he has asked my GP to refer me to a dietitian, which I think could be educational.

I think, realistically, my weight is verging on unhealthy and might be affecting how I feel in general now. My BMI is hovering around 19.

Unsent letters

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To: HR Lady
CC: My boss (and yours)

Dear HR lady,

My counsellor has informed me that the company has decided against funding additional sessions, and that you would speak to me about this matter this week. I am disappointed that you have not done this, and have instead allowed a third party to deliver news to me which should have come directly from the company.

I was extremely surprised by the decision to discontinue funding counselling. In May, you wrote that my mental health and well-being was important to the company and that you would review whether I needed further support after the 5 sessions were consumed. The decision not to continue was made without consulting me, so I am therefore extremely disappointed that the company no longer considers my mental health and well-being important.

Furthermore, I have received no explanation or communication in general regarding your cancellation of the ‘late June’ follow-up meeting, which we had scheduled. I consider it a recurring problem that the company is not communicating with me to an acceptable standard on matters of professional importance.

About six months ago I would have sent this without too much deliberation.

Now…

I have a growing suspicion she might be a bit autistic. But I can’t take on responsibility for her mental health as well as my own, on the basis of a vague suspicion.