Rota Fortuna

The Rota Fortuna is the medieval Wheel of Fortune - not the modern-day gameshow but the concept that life has this tendency to switch things up on you at any time. When life is good, everything is going in your favor and you are happy, you are on top of the metaphorical wheel. However, the wheel is constantly in motion, so at any time it will turn and you will find yourself at the bottom of the wheel. Life becomes rough, bad things happen, everything sucks and nothing seems to go right. But the wheel keeps turning and sooner or later things will start looking up and life will be treating you well again. It might take awhile, the wheel might turn more slowly for you than for others, but things will definitely get better again.

Right now I definitely feel like I'm at the bottom of the Rota Fortuna. Well, maybe just beginning the upswing again but still very much on the bottom. It feels like there was a huge, rapid crash from the top of the wheel to the bottom, and now the wheel is stuck in the mud and it is taking forever to get things rolling towards the top again. I'm sure a lot of this has to do with my mental mindset... how things are handled has a lot with how you choose to perceive the situation... but lately I've just been feeling massively down in the dumps. Okay, I'll call it what it is, I feel depressed. I feel like it's not even worth it to get myself dressed in something other than pajamas in the morning, I feel like brushing my hair is not worth the effort, I feel like barfing whenever I eat, no matter how much coffee I drink I'm always, always tired, I constantly feel like I'm on edge and the smallest little misstep will send me hurling over the edge into even worse depression... I just feel done. And worse, I don't feel like I even care that I feel like I'm depressed. Normally I try have an optimistic outlook on everything, I always have a way of finding the silver lining in any situation, I want to laugh and smile and have a good time and not waste so much of my energy on something that won't uplift me, but now it just all seems like too much effort and I don't care anymore. I do my best to put on a brave front for Mira. I still read her stories and take her on walks and play on the playground with her and be upbeat and playful and happy around her and all that, but beyond that I just. Don't. Care.

I wrote that last paragraph a few days ago and then got busy with working and getting ready for Halloween, and after re-reading it I thought about deleting it and starting over but I'm going to leave that. I don't want to pretend that life is always perfect, because it's not. And the truth is that for the last couple of months, I've been feeling very depressed. It seemed to get set off by the events following my conference trip, and while I expected to feel upset having to deal with the arguing with Mark it did seem a bit odd to me that after almost 2 months I was feeling worse and worse all the time instead of feeling better, even a little bit. I wasn't coping with anything. Getting out of bed was a hassle. Trying to even get the most basic things done for Mira, like getting her dressed and feeding her and changing her diaper, were feeling like Herculean tasks. It took so much of my energy to take care of her I didn't have anything left to take care of myself. I know I've lost some weight because I was barely eating. It would take me until Mira went down for her nap for me to even think about getting dressed or brushing my hair, and by then it was afternoon so why bother? That has become my mantra the last few weeks. Why bother? It all takes too much effort and it doesn't matter anyway so why bother?

Mark was (understandably) becoming bewildered as to why I was acting like this and kept asking me what was wrong and all I could come up with was that everything sucks and I'm miserable all the time, I want to cry all the time, and I don't care about anything. I'm just done, I can't do it anymore, I'm just done. He suddenly had a lightbulb go off and wondered if maybe I was clinically depressed and needed to get on antidepressants. The way I've been acting is definitely not normal, even after a big relationship issue that being dealt with successfully.

My first instinct was to dig in my heels and insist I didn't need to be on medication, but it actually made sense and would certainly explain a lot. And once we got talking, I admitted I haven't felt normal since Mira was born. When she was brand new I felt miserable all the time and was crying all the time and definitely didn't feel ecstatic that I had a beautiful new baby to show off. But I didn't know if those feelings were normal or not. I knew it was normal to have mood swings and cry a lot postpartum because of the rapid drop in hormone levels but I wasn't sure it was normal to feel unbearably sad all the time. When I went in for either Mira's 2-week checkup or my 6-week postpartum checkup I remember asking my OB how you would know if you had postpartum depression because I had been crying a lot. He asked me if I've been able to get out of bed in the morning and function. Well, yeah, I have. He said they didn't usually call it postpartum depression unless you can't get out of bed. So I dropped it and figured I just had bad coping skills, and I've been able to function just fine but I knew I wasn't completely happy. I kept telling myself it would get better once Mira was sleeping through the night, or wasn't so busy, or didn't need as much of my time... and of course nothing was making it better. I would talk to moms who seemed to love that they were losing sleep with their kids or that they didn't have time to go get their hair done once they had kids and I would wonder what the hell was wrong with me that I didn't feel the same way too. Mark had noticed that even when we'd gone to Disneyland or on our big trip this summer I wasn't entirely happy. He was doing everything he could think of to take care of me but I wasn't happy. I tried not to let on that anything was wrong, I tried to hide that I was miserable but that made things worse. And as soon as I told Mark how I'd thought I'd maybe had postpartum depression and my OB had brushed it off, and I'd been living like this for close to 2 years, he was absolutely furious. If only my doctor hadn't brushed it off, or if only I'd pushed the doctor to do something (because every time I don't push a doctor for answers something bad happens - you'd think I'd have figured that out by now), or if only Mark had been more attentive that something was wrong (his words), so much trouble could have been avoided.

Well, what's done is done. But after that talk Mark insisted I go in to see my GP (general practitioner) and get something done. He wanted to go with me to make sure I didn't get brushed off again but he couldn't get off work for a few days and we decided it was more important that I go in ASAP and get the ball rolling. Luckily my GP is a Physician's Assistant and I've always gotten more done with PAs and I have a great working relationship with her. So I had to fill out a few questionnaires, and as soon as she came in, sat down and asked me what was going on, I burst into tears and if there was any question before that something was wrong that took care of that. And based on my answers on the questionnaires, I have really severe depression and anxiety - so severe that something definitely needed to be done right away. Based on my story she thinks I did probably have postpartum depression and just had learned to deal with it, thinking things would eventually get better, which of course they wouldn't as long as the underlying problem was there. But I was able to cope and function until we had that big argument and then Mark was in the hospital and then my cat died and it suddenly became too much and then I wasn't able to cope at all anymore. Bottom line, I'd been living with this for much, much too long. So she discussed different medication options with me that would help and we decided on good old-fashioned Prozac. She doesn't think I'll have to be on it forever, maybe for a year or so to replenish the neurotransmitter imbalance that's there and then we can taper off. I'm going back in to see her in a month to see how things are going. I won't see the full effect from the meds for at least a couple of months but at the end of a month I should definitely be seeing some sort of improvement.

So there you go. That definitely explains everything. Mark was relieved that something was being done finally and we're hopeful that once I start feeling more like myself we can move on. He has been unbelievably supportive and sweet and caring through this whole mess. I've been on the Prozac for almost a week now and even though I still have moments when I feel depressed, I'm still tired and everything feels like too much effort (we took Mira grocery shopping yesterday and I was bone-tired exhausted from that), I don't feel like the lows are quite as low. I think if I were to ask Mark if he's noticing a difference he would say yes. So keep your fingers crossed the wheel keeps turning upwards for me - I'm ready to be happy again.

The rainbow in the storm

So that's enough blabbering about me and my problems for now. I hope getting all this out in the open will serve some good besides making me feel a bit better by not hiding my feelings anymore. I know there's a still a stigma against mental illness but it deserves to be addressed and talked about just as much as any physical illness - as I now know. But moving on to some Mira pictures:

Devil Dog in the background

Mira's favorite TV shows are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Little Einsteins. They are about the only thing in the world that will make her sit still for longer than 2 seconds. I try to limit how much TV she watches but sometimes those 20 minutes of quiet are priceless!

The nice thing about Little Einsteins is it plays classical music through the whole show, so now Mira loves to listen to classical music. I'll play classical music on my iPhone and she dances and twirls around the living room - it is awesome! She likes to "sing" as you can see in this video. We had the bassinet out to get fixed up to sell and I guess it was good inspiration for her.

And some more videos of her singing in the bathtub, which as we all know is the best place for singing.

I don't know what it is about toddlers running around in just their diaper that is so funny to me

And speaking of my iPhone, Mira has figured out how to take pictures and videos on it. She takes lots of pictures of herself or my leg or the floor or the couch and it's always a surprise for me to see what she's done.

She's such a silly girl! My next post will have pictures of her in her Halloween costume.

Now for some random pictures. One of our hens recently gave us their monster egg:

That poor hen! She deserves a day off after pushing that thing out! Since the weather is getting colder our eggs supply has, as expected, dropped off so we're having to buy store eggs again.

In work news, this is what's going on for me. The 1 or 2 readers who work with me will get how big a deal this is.

In my unit we have advanced education the nurses can do to get additional, intensive training in specific patient populations. As you might remember, I passed the Advanced Metabolic Module earlier this year. That gave me training for patients with diagnoses like liver failure, sepsis, kidney failure requiring dialysis, post-op liver transplant, post-op kidney transplant, and of course actually running continuous dialysis. These are certainly some of our sickest patients and they're very challenging. Ever since I tested out, I've had managers and charge nurses trying to convince me to do the Cardiovascular Module so I can take care of babies with severe congenital heart defects that require open-heart surgery when they're just a few days old. It's amazing what can be done to save the lives of these babies that certainly would have died even just a few decades ago. I've been resistant to this specific module because when I was doing my senior capstone in the PICU while I was in nursing school, I had a really traumatic experience with one of these patients. But as someone pointed out, I've been an ICU nurse for 4 1/2 years and I've dealt with my share of super-sick patients and I've handled it, so why would it be different for these CV patients now that I have more experience? Plus, if I want to advance my career at all in the unit, such as being a charge nurse, I'll have to do the CV module (this is the only module that is required to be a charge nurse). Not to mention if I've had lots of people telling me I'd be really good at it... So, I applied for the CV module. It'll be awhile until I find out if I got in and classes won't be until February but nevertheless, this is a big step for me because I swore I'd never do this module. Go figure, I got beaten into it sooner than I thought. :)

Here's a picture of Neo being silly. I sometimes wonder if he misses Stewie. He seems to be doing all right but then, there's no telling with cats.

And just to prove how much Mark cares about me and wants me to be happy: In my last post I made a joke about how I've mentioned a few times since Stewie died that I've always wanted an orange tabby. I don't even know why I've always wanted an orange tabby, I just remember that ever since I was a little kid I've wanted an orange tabby. Not that I love my other cats any less because they're not orange tabbies - I've just always wanted an orange tabby. In an effort to get me out of my depression, last week at work Mark texted me that he had brought home a new present for me. In the morning this what I came home to. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Wally!

A lady a few cities away was moving and unfortunately was not able to take her cat with her so she was giving him away for free. Mark found him and brought this sweet boy home. Wally is such a snugglebug! He loves to sit on laps and when you pick him up he puts a paw on each side of your neck to give you a hug, and for some reason he really loves long hair. Mark was impressed that I really am the cat whisperer because by the end of the first day Wally was already snuggling with me. And he's getting along with the other animals and Mira too. I've missed having a lap cat! And he's only 3 years old so he's still playful. Check out this video of him.

What a sweet boy! He's fitting in so well and I love him already, although it'd be hard not to love this guy. I'm so glad Mark found him! Kitties are almost as good for curing depression as Prozac, and they're a lot fuzzier. :)