Archive of ‘personal’ category

16
Feb
2021

I actually have a restraining order against someone.

categories: personal; word count: 438 words

Surprisingly, it is bundled into my oldest son’s custody order.

The behavior that my oldest son’s father exhibited was actually bad enough to deny him access to our son — it was domestic violence — pending the completion of a court-ordered class that, to this day, he has not even tried to enroll in. When he was on probation for assaulting me, he made it a habit to go to one of the branches of the library here and send me harassing and threatening messages over MySpace. He did this every single day that the library was open until they were called and informed what he was doing, at which point the messages stopped. Approximately ninety days into his probation, he decided to stop showing up to visits with his probation officer and moved to a new residence that he did not inform his probation officer about. He was given sixty days to resume showing up for scheduled visits with his probation officer, which he did not do, and then his probation was revoked. Since he was on what was called deferred adjudication, or deferred sentencing, this meant that his guilty plea — held back until that point, because the state would have dropped the assault charge that he had pending upon successful completion of probation — was entered, and he was convicted of the original offense. The criminal justice unit here was actually surprised that he did not successfully complete probation given the circumstances. Personally, I was not surprised.

When he was originally being put on probation, I put in an application for a restraining order against him. It was denied, and the rationale for this denial was that it would be addressed in the rules of his probation and he would be prohibited from contacting me for any reason. Obviously this did not occur because of the messages that he sent me over MySpace at the library, and my custody lawyer put in an application for a restraining order herself including this as evidence. A restraining order without end date was approved by the judge that presided over our son’s custody hearing, although it would have allowed him to communicate with me about our son if he had ever regained access — the communications had to be non-harassing and non-threatening, though, and if they were harassing or threatening he could get into legal trouble due to them. For reasons that I will get into in another post, he is not going to be able to regain access to our child.

This is one of the reasons that I don’t use our real names here on this blog, though… especially the kids’.

11
Feb
2021

So apparently I have a new diagnosis now, fun.

categories: personal; word count: 184 words

In addition to having chronic, intractable migraines, I have occipital neuralgia now.

This was, as the kids like to say, “sussed out” by the location in which my migraines almost always start. Apparently it’s not a common diagnosis or even a common thing, although I am not surprised to have been diagnosed with… wait for it, something that isn’t common. This would explain why triptans do not really work on me, or they only work a little bit. The pain from occipital neuralgia can not be ameliorated by triptans because that pain is not actually migraine pain, even though I have both diagnoses at present. However, it can be lessened with targeted Botox shots as well as steroid shots along the location in which the nerve travels. I am open to both of these things if they can in any way meaningfully help. My pain management clinic is actually trying to get Botox injections approved for me, so I will see how that goes. It has taken awhile, but apparently these things predictably do. I will just bide my time here and wait, heh.

06
Feb
2021

My history with anxiety to diagnosis.

categories: personal; word count: 374 words

Since I had done a post about my depression, I figured… well, why not add this in as well?

This seemed to be something that was exacerbated by being pregnant, although I think I’ve always had some degree of anxiety beyond what normal people feel in certain situations. When I contacted my primary care physician and explained to him how the 20mg of nortryptline that I had been put on was alleviating symptoms of depression, I added anxiety in there as well. I figured that if I was going to medicate one of them, I should medicate both of them… and as it turned out, nortryptline at a higher dose than what my neurologist had prescribed me could be used to alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression. In my mind, unchecked, what can go wrong “does” or “should” go wrong, if any of that makes sense. Prior to beginning treatment for anxiety and depression, I always braced myself for the idea of what could go wrong actually going wrong, even though my mind knew that me doing this was beyond how most people normally… deal with things. At around the time that I got sick of having a chronically low mood and lack of desire to participate in hobbies and interests, I got sick of the anxiety and the hypervigilance. I wanted a change.

Until I began taking medication for it, though, I didn’t quite realize how much anxiety had taken over my life, and how the… decrease in anxiety (does any of this make sense? I hope it does) freed up parts of my brain that could be used on other things, or for other pursuits. It was like it became a part of my personality, one that I didn’t want other people to know about if I could avoid it, but one that crept out enough to the point that people close to me could guess or were aware that I had anxiety. I’m glad to have admitted that I have it, that it is a part of me, and am seeking appropriate treatment for it in the form of taking daily medication.

At some point in time, probably earlier on in my life, anxiety actually became a facet of my personality.

05
Feb
2021

Holy shit, folks… this thing is seriously that fast.

categories: computer gaming, personal, television shows; word count: 370 words

You know that laptop that I mentioned? The one whose letter i I would have to replace?

I’m pretty sure that I mentioned it here, because (your) god only knows how many struggles I had with it.

Well, as it turned out, the entire keyboard was going out… and it was soldered on the bottom of the computer, beneath everything important, which meant that opening it up to replace the keyboard would have been dicey, and then you would have had to put everything back together on top of the keyboard and hope that you did everything right. When taking into consideration the fact that this one make and model of computer had like… between three and six different keyboards, and no one knew if they were cross-compatible with each other, I decided that the best thing to do would be to get a refund on the laptop since I would have kept it if the keyboard had worked. It was a bit of a shame because of the hard drive size and the price that I paid for it, but by paying a little extra on top of the refund that I got from that computer, I was able to get what some people like to call “a gaming rig”. The hard drive size was smaller, but the processor is extremely fast, and it can take up to a whopping 64GB of DDR4 RAM. I’m not actually sure whether I will max it out in the coming months or years because it already runs fast, but I do have one 16GB stick of DDR4 RAM that was taken out of one of the computers over the years that I might put in the empty bay in this…

I’ve also decided that I’m not going to watch the formal series finale of Supernatural at all. I tried to fast-forward to the end of the episode where Dean and Sam are reunited with each other in Heaven, but for some reason Netflix would not let me do that, so it is what it is. That episode is trash though and I’m not going to bother with it. Dean still deserved so much better than what the producers and writers gave him.

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