Posts Tagged ‘life’

21
Feb
2021

Since I promised that post, here goes nothing.

categories: personal; word count: 330 words

I had my first seizure in April of 2019 when my mother was still alive.

It woke me up from deep sleep, and I went through the whole aura, seizure, and postdrome.

Since this was my first seizure, I didn’t know what was going on and felt like I was dying. It lasted a few minutes, but my sense of time was heavily distorted — to me, it felt like absolutely forever. And symptoms of it left as quickly as it came on, although I felt exhausted at the end of it. For me, the aura often involves experiencing an intense feeling that does not quite match the situation, and the seizure itself feels like my brain is being shocked or an egg that is thrown against hot concrete to cook. I can vocalize during these, although the people that I have vocalized to have told me that I seem “off” having these conversations. I don’t want to vocalize while I’m having them though, not unless I have to, because it feels like I’m taxing the small part of my brain that is completely aware of what is going on. I can also do very basic things during some of my seizures, which perplexes me. Others, I have to wait until it passes. There is no rhyme or reason.

Sometimes I can go months without a seizure. Other times, I have multiple seizures in a month.

I also do not have any involuntary motor movement. However, I am known to hold my head with my hands and rest my elbows on my lap, and the quieter my surroundings are when they can help it, the better. Almost all of the time I still feel the peculiar emotion that was present during my aura, although by the end of the seizure my feelings have returned to normal. Being on Gabapentin for migraines has really helped me out.

Another feature of my seizures are racing thoughts, which also completely stop when the seizures stop.

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’.

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.

04
Feb
2021

Organizing things a bit better than they were.

categories: personal; word count: 192 words

I organized all the consoles, and the cords that go from the consoles to the television, and… well, everything. Since we still have almost all, if not all, of our retro consoles it took some handiwork to ensure that everything that I needed to reach was within reach. And not so surprisingly, organizing everything made it simple to tell what goes where (beyond what it was already, which wasn’t bad), especially because I took a Sharpie pen to various things and wrote on them. HDMI 1, HDMI 2, AV/Component, what have you. At some point in the future I intend on organizing the games a bit better as well, and I’m probably going to start a Microsoft Word or OpenOffice file with the games that we have. I’m actually surprised I haven’t done that…

At some point I would like to start streaming gameplay on YouTube, which is what I am setting up for.

I’m just going to be doing it a bit differently from most streamers because I don’t inadvertently want there to be footage of Bub melting down or vocalizing unhappily, so I’m looking at adding audio from myself in after.

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