Wednesday, May 5, 2010
It's all in my mind...and it's true...
As the escape from Methadone hell continues, I now have more information to use to get out of this thing. My cousin, a rather helpful person, called clinics and drug treatment centers to find out all about Methadone. (I'm calling it "Methadon't" from now on)Yes, it's about time I actually researched the medication. I again, ignorantly, took my doctor's advice without questioning it. Now, I am apparently physically addicted to a drug that I hate and it hates me.
This shit makes me so depressed I cannot even believe it.
Supposedly people want to abuse this drug, I cannot even conceive of it.
When I arrived at my medical appointment today, I explained to my doctor that it wasn't so wonderful to try and just quit taking this medicine. In fact, I told him how horrific it was.
Then I told him all about the information I now had, and how it would be months before this shit is out of my system and I might feel better. I wasn't angry--I was disappointed.
So, he goes and asks the other docs in the office if there is something I can take which would help get this crud from hell out of my body.
I hear the other doctor, and he says that it is NOT the methadone making me depressed. He says that's not the problem.
(Trust me it is the problem.)
After not even wanting to talk to my doctor today after all this craziness with the damned doctor dope, he says something really profound. Now he is forgiven.
When this other doctor, who has never seen me or ever spoken a single word to me, now suddenly knows that Methadone CAN'T make "me" depressed. How amazing is he?
In response my doctor says, "it doesn't matter because that's what she believes."
How completely accurate is that? What we believe is what we get.
My depression is coming from somewhere and I think it's the methadone as my last thyroid test rules it out as the cause.
But it is all in our minds.
My cousin was saying that she thought I had been manic for about two years and that hitting depression was tough because I had been on the other end for so long.
Righto, I agree.
And then it hit me, my depressed thoughts are real.When I am positive, chemically enabled, I am creative and things are good. However, when depressive thoughts are present, I sometimes give up control over them, and begin to believe. The thoughts "make me" sick.
The word that comes to mind in all of this, is a small word, faith.
That tiny word has everything to do with how our lives are manifested and how they play out.
My mother a bi-polar mess of a woman, went manic, seriously so, about 15 years ago. I had never seen anything like it. She was happy though and that is what was baffling to me.
Then one day she called me and told me she won the lottery, I pretended she did.
However, I was wrong, she actually had won the lottery: she won more than 200K, I don't remember the exact amount.
It was amazing. She was so manic, positive and happy, things were going her way because she believed they would.
On the other hand she was as crazy as hell too. You couldn't believe everything she said, and she would visit sometimes in the middle of the night. As the mania began to wane, she started using drugs, tweek, to bring her out of the depression.
She went from happy and lucky, to losing everything, and I mean everything. The house, the property, her health, her sanity, all the lottery money, was all gone, it was incredibly sad.
But it's very much an example: she first was happy her thoughts, her faith in life, carried her to a series of fortuitous events, including winning the lottery.
Then when the depression hit, she began, little by little to lose everything. She believed those thoughts as her reality, and thus they were.
I'm learning that my thoughts are my reality. And though I was initially irritated with this doctor for diagnosing something he knows nothing about and that's me and my thoughts, I am grateful for the new perspective.
Getting off this fucking drug, I'm trying to save my own stupid life. But I like my stupid life, it's interesting, and when it's not tragic, it's kind of funny. The depression would have taken me eventually, you can't hear morbid thoughts continuously and live through it.
But you can learn to change those thoughts and make your life different. That is where I am at now: I have faith that if I think I can, I can.
And like my doctor said, if I believe it, that's all that matters...
