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An Update - 1 week on from needing help
It's been about a week since I wrote the "I need help" post, and about a week since the breakdown which prompted it. Since then, I've had a few things happen. I've contacted the Silver Chain people about getting some assistance with ensuring I take my medication regularly. From what I've read on their website, they're probably the best people to provide the kind of help I need, which is someone dropping in on maybe an "every second day" basis, in order to ensure I'm taking my meds regularly and getting out of bed at a reasonable hour. They've returned my contact, and advised me to get a referral from a GP, which I did on Thursday last week. Now I have to wait for them to get back to me again, and let me know whether it's possible for this to happen or not.
I'm back to taking my medication, and I'm going to try and keep consistent with it, even though I know I have problems with this (see the above paragraph). So far I'm on day two, and I'm suffering the understandable side-effects of restarting psych medication after about two weeks without it. Or in other words, I'm dizzy, dopey, and a bit distracted at present. This too will pass, but at the moment I'm trying not to move too much too quickly.
For most of last week, I was cooking good solid meals for dinner, and serving them with a hot dessert (it helped each day's meal was a 4-person serving, so I could turn it into meals for 2 days in a row). Unfortunately, yesterday I fell down on that, and today with the dizziness, I'm not feeling like cooking either. Today, in fact, is my day for falling off the bike big time - I slept until about noon, I stayed in bed until about four or five, and I was doing stereotypically mentally ill things like sitting around in a dressing gown as part of all this. At present I'm up and dressed (although I still haven't combed my hair or tied my shoelaces - need to do those), which is a start, and I'm onto my third cup of tea for the day (green earl grey tea).
My main activities today have been re-reading Janet Evanovich books (I've worked my way through all my Stephanie Plum books, now I'm up to "Full Throttle" in the "Full [X]" series) and playing "City of Heroes". Oh, and feeling rather sorry for myself, because my period started yesterday. I rather suspected it would, since for the past week (in between bouts of depression) I've been feeling as though if I just organised myself enough, I could take over the world, which is pretty normal for me in the week before my period. Now I look back at things, I realise I've had all the symptoms of a Bad Hormone Month. A Bad Hormone Month is one where the hormones overpower the meds (particularly if I haven't been taking them consistently, I know) and I have a really rotten bout of PMS triggering the depression and vice versa, plus physical symptoms like my breasts feeling like they've grown about three cup sizes and feeling really tender. Ditto the whole "planning to take over the world" thing - that's such a regular symptom of me being immediately pre-menstrual that I tend to use it as a signal I need to plan to check my levels of supplies.
City of Heroes continues to be ummm. For one thing, I tend to have connection issues with getting onto the games (either I can't reach the mapserver for a particular game server, or I just can't connect to the DBserver at all), most of which I have a strong suspicion has to do with the cheerful realisation I'm in Australia, the land connectivity forgot. I'll get in there, get logged on, and start playing away, then have a lovely message popping up (often when I'm in the middle of fighting some nasty or other) saying "lost connection to mapserver". What this means is my packets are getting routed via Perth, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and then Perth three times before damn well exiting the flippin' country, and as a result I'm lagging out. The little voice at the back of my head saying "this never happened with WoW" isn't helping any. Neither is the competing voice which says "it didn't happen with Dark Age of Camelot either".
At present, they're doing their weekly maintenance, which means the whole thing is going to be down until about 9pm local time. This is analogous to good old "patch Tuesday" on WoW, so I can sort of put up with it for now.
Aside from the connection issues, I actually don't mind the game too much. It's a pretty standard MMORPG - you find your quest giver; they tell you to go talk to X, kill Y of Z, retrieve widget A from location B, or defeat bosses C through J; you do that, and return for the reward which you either use or sell. It's got some neat features, such as the user-created content area (as in, game players can create their own quests and similar) which I keep meaning to sample one of these centuries, and the various power sets and similar are fun to fiddle around with. The superhero shtick is fun to be playing around with, and there's at least one of my characters who I'm having lots of fun RP-ing (a very genki fae girl - around 4' tall, bright pink skin, firey aura, and a walloping great battle axe as a weapon). Can't wait to see what happens should I team her up with someone else - I have a strong suspicion she'll drive them bats.
I'm back to taking my medication, and I'm going to try and keep consistent with it, even though I know I have problems with this (see the above paragraph). So far I'm on day two, and I'm suffering the understandable side-effects of restarting psych medication after about two weeks without it. Or in other words, I'm dizzy, dopey, and a bit distracted at present. This too will pass, but at the moment I'm trying not to move too much too quickly.
For most of last week, I was cooking good solid meals for dinner, and serving them with a hot dessert (it helped each day's meal was a 4-person serving, so I could turn it into meals for 2 days in a row). Unfortunately, yesterday I fell down on that, and today with the dizziness, I'm not feeling like cooking either. Today, in fact, is my day for falling off the bike big time - I slept until about noon, I stayed in bed until about four or five, and I was doing stereotypically mentally ill things like sitting around in a dressing gown as part of all this. At present I'm up and dressed (although I still haven't combed my hair or tied my shoelaces - need to do those), which is a start, and I'm onto my third cup of tea for the day (green earl grey tea).
My main activities today have been re-reading Janet Evanovich books (I've worked my way through all my Stephanie Plum books, now I'm up to "Full Throttle" in the "Full [X]" series) and playing "City of Heroes". Oh, and feeling rather sorry for myself, because my period started yesterday. I rather suspected it would, since for the past week (in between bouts of depression) I've been feeling as though if I just organised myself enough, I could take over the world, which is pretty normal for me in the week before my period. Now I look back at things, I realise I've had all the symptoms of a Bad Hormone Month. A Bad Hormone Month is one where the hormones overpower the meds (particularly if I haven't been taking them consistently, I know) and I have a really rotten bout of PMS triggering the depression and vice versa, plus physical symptoms like my breasts feeling like they've grown about three cup sizes and feeling really tender. Ditto the whole "planning to take over the world" thing - that's such a regular symptom of me being immediately pre-menstrual that I tend to use it as a signal I need to plan to check my levels of supplies.
City of Heroes continues to be ummm. For one thing, I tend to have connection issues with getting onto the games (either I can't reach the mapserver for a particular game server, or I just can't connect to the DBserver at all), most of which I have a strong suspicion has to do with the cheerful realisation I'm in Australia, the land connectivity forgot. I'll get in there, get logged on, and start playing away, then have a lovely message popping up (often when I'm in the middle of fighting some nasty or other) saying "lost connection to mapserver". What this means is my packets are getting routed via Perth, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and then Perth three times before damn well exiting the flippin' country, and as a result I'm lagging out. The little voice at the back of my head saying "this never happened with WoW" isn't helping any. Neither is the competing voice which says "it didn't happen with Dark Age of Camelot either".
At present, they're doing their weekly maintenance, which means the whole thing is going to be down until about 9pm local time. This is analogous to good old "patch Tuesday" on WoW, so I can sort of put up with it for now.
Aside from the connection issues, I actually don't mind the game too much. It's a pretty standard MMORPG - you find your quest giver; they tell you to go talk to X, kill Y of Z, retrieve widget A from location B, or defeat bosses C through J; you do that, and return for the reward which you either use or sell. It's got some neat features, such as the user-created content area (as in, game players can create their own quests and similar) which I keep meaning to sample one of these centuries, and the various power sets and similar are fun to fiddle around with. The superhero shtick is fun to be playing around with, and there's at least one of my characters who I'm having lots of fun RP-ing (a very genki fae girl - around 4' tall, bright pink skin, firey aura, and a walloping great battle axe as a weapon). Can't wait to see what happens should I team her up with someone else - I have a strong suspicion she'll drive them bats.