metaphortunate son

Science is wonderful. Medicine is wonderful. Back in the late Cretaceous, there were two things you could do for a cough:

1. Codeine, which worked;
2. Everything else, which did not work.

And since you probably don't want to give codeine to a tiny child unless there's no other choice, when tiny us got coughs, we just suffered through it. And, though I am not a neglectful parent I swear, I thought those were still the options. So though Rocket has been coughing and coughing at night, and it is just awful to hear, it doesn't actually wake him up. And he doesn't seem to mind it during the day. So we hadn't taken him to the doctor. Until he got a fever.

And holy shit y'all, now you take your tiny child to the doctor and they send you home with a six month supply of albuterol and a little nebulizer. Protip: tell the child the face mask is an astronaut mask. Ten minutes and the wheeze is gone. Just fantastic.

This is the pants-shittingly awful thing about depression.


When I have the flu:

What do I need to do in order to get better?

• Sleep.

What is the only thing in the world I feel capable of doing?

• Sleeeeeeeeep.

When I have depression:

What do I need to do in order to get better?

• Get plenty of exercise.
  
• Keep my house in some kind of order so it's not despair-inducing just to sit in my living room.
  
• Put in the effort to maintain social connections with my friends.
  
• Find a therapist, that my insurance will pay for, who is accepting new clients, and who actually works for me. This may involve talking about incredibly difficult personal things to a number of different complete strangers before I find one that will help.
  
• Find a psychiatrist, that my insurance will pay for, who is accepting new clients, and who actually works for me. This may involve talking about incredibly difficult personal things to a number of different complete strangers before I find one that will help.
  
• Find psychiatric medication that works for me without unacceptable side effects. This may involve trying a number of different drugs. This may involve getting used to some side effects.

What is the only thing in the world I feel capable of doing?

• Sleeeeeeeeep.

ETA: I am currently fine! Well. At least, I am having the kind of month that reminds me what a luxury it is to be able to be my own worst enemy.

But, on the bright side, I'm not doing that right now. Just meditating on the shittiness of the disease in general.

Welp, good and bad.

Good: Rocket let me sleep for one almost 4 hour stretch and one 3 hour stretch last night. Hallelujah, hot dignity dog.

Bad: Possibly because he's got the same thing I've got. Woke up feeling terrible, with muscle aches, and now it's progressed to layering pants and socks kind of chill. So yeah. I'm sick. Freaking daycare.

The problem here is that years of depression have conditioned me to do the wrong thing. See, I remember this from when the Junebug was tiny! If I started resenting him for real, and genuinely falling into despair over my life - bam. Sick in less than a day. See title of last post, for example. And then when I would get better he would be my adorable sweetie again.

But the problem is, thanks to years of therapy and so on, my reaction to feeling bad about my life is "Dammit, self, you get out of it what you put into it. Let's make the effort to all go out to breakfast. Let's tell Mr. E that it's okay for him to go for a run and I'll watch both the kids. I can draw with the Junebug all morning! He could probably use some one on one time with me!"

Which, normally, would be great! Except I think that this time it would probably have been more productive to grab Rocket and huddle under the blanket all day and make Mr. E deal with the Junebug. :/

One plus, though. I got him this little kiddie wipe erase board & blackboard? And this morning, over and over, he wanted me to draw him a kitty cat and a mouse and an elephant and a dump truck. And then he scribbled over them or erased them.

And at first I got frustrated. But then I remembered this story Mr. E told me about this one experiment, probably published in the Review of Poorly Cited Internet Studies, at least I can't find it now. So maybe it doesn't exist. But I took it as a pattern anyway. The experiment was, they took some people, and they divided them in to two groups, and they told the first group to draw the best house they could. And they told the second group to draw as many houses as they could. The upshot is that the best house was drawn by someone in the second group. Because practice makes perfect.

Anyway, so I took it as an opportunity to draw a million elephants and dump trucks, and it became more fun.

Well, this has been the worst weekend in a long, long while.

( It started off relatively innocuously on Thursday morning, with the Junebug screaming in a small puddle. )