The Summer of 2015, Part 2: The Struggle

I am a privileged man, born into and raised by warm, loving, caring and accepting parents who created a stable nuclear family with no major dysfunctions. I am socially, materially and financially comfortable with a job I love. I don't suffer from any health issues or conditions that incapacitate me or require lifelong treatment. I have never starved, never been abused and never beaten. What do I have to complain about?

The answer is obvious, nothing really because I am most certainly among the 5% of the world's population who are best off. So I am aware that there are billions upon billions who are worse off if we were comparing or in a suffering contest. But we aren't, are we?

Just writing this post makes me feel petulant, childish and prissy, so please bear with me. With all my fortunate situation, I have still not been happy this whole horrible year.

I hate death!

Death means someone I love leaves. And not only that they leave me. Being left makes me very angry. I have never learned how to relate to that in a good way.

So my father died in January and my mother went sort of crazy for a while after that. I haven't grieved my father's death properly yet. I haven't shed a tear yet, instead I have been sort of balancing and "coping". Whether this lack of reaction is due to my antidepressants or not, I cannot say.

The reaction I have had instead is fatigue and tenseness and being antisocial. I am so tense that I actually gnawed through two perfectly healthy teeth and a tooth implant in my sleep. Now it seems, I may have damaged another one despite the fact that I now have a tooth guard. The fatigue and anti-socialness leads to me withdrawing from the company of almost everyone, except those who are closest to me.

Although the worst bit seems to be over now, there is still a way to go. And I will make it, thanks to myself, my Tomais and my friends in first life and in SecondLife. 

A Looooooooooong Weekend

I was supposed to work half the day tomorrow, but I have taken the day off, Friday is a holiday and then there is the weekend, so now I get f-o-u-r whole wonderful days off from work! WooT!!!

And boy do I need it!

Since my last visit with my sweet Hungarian doctor a month ago I am under instructions to reduce my normal daily dose of antidepressants from 20 mg to 10 mg. I have done that quiet successfully without any major setbacks. I do however feel unfocused, tired and in need of more sleep and I also feel an increased melancholy. Although my doctor told me that I can increase the dosage to 15 mg or 20 mg if and when I feel the need, I still want to give the lower dosage a chance to stabilize so I can get a sense of how I will feel.

I am going to use the long weekend in first life to relax, rest, sleep more and visit with mother once or twice. My laziness during these four days will break every existing record, I can promise you that!

In SecondLife I am going to kick-start the immense "Organize Your Inventory"-project. It hasn't been done before during my more than eight years here, so it is really high time to take control of it and get it in some order. Every time my well organized hubby gets a glimpse of my Inventory he cries out in shock and amazement "You have everything stored in the root folder, that is crazy!" or something to that effect...

Furthermore I am hoping that Botanical will finally release it's new products so that we can finally finish Project -15, the landscaping project in the South-East corner of the sim. It already looks wonderful and I am extremely happy with the results so far of the toils of Samuel Fallen, of Lytton & Fallen, and Tomais Ashdene and Butch Diavolo, of Southern Charm.

Once the landscaping is all done Tomais and I are going to throw a party to celebrate. You will all receive an invitation through the blog and/or personally.

The 8th and 9th Days After

On Thursday I visited with dad one last time.

My father was laying in a casket, without the lid on, in a large chapel where all religious symbols had been removed. The sunlight was streaming in through the big windows, it was a unusually sunny day. Around the casket six large candles had been placed on safe distance so that one could walk between them and the coffin.

Someone had also put a red rose in his left hand. The right hand was covered, as the undertakers assistant told us, because it had been badly bruised and the bruises had torn when he had been stored in the freezer.

I was - thankfully - accompanied to this visit by my oldest niece, who is also a registered nurse.

My dad looked peaceful enough, but as if he had been in a fight at the end. The veins on his eyelids, closest to the lashes, were red and seemed to have burst. He also had two symmetrically placed bruises on his upper lip, which my niece informed me, was from when they had tried to resurrect him in the ambulance and at the hospital.

Dad was cold to the touch, as I felt when I held his hand and caressed his cheeks. One or two of the hairs in his left eyebrow were sticking out, which made me wish that I had brought a pair of small scissors along so I could have cut them. Instead I gently stroked them down and blended them with the rest of his left eyebrow.

Inside I was in complete and utter turmoil, my mind was moving fast through memories of dad from throughout my life. On the outside I must have appeared calm, a few small tears nothing more.

My father was a loving, caring and accepting father. He loved my mother, me and my siblings dearly and did everything he possibly could to protect us, save us and carry us. Dad also knew all my trigger points and was the only person who could - the few times that he wished to - drive me from calm serenity to a wild frenzy in 15 seconds flat, and then he would ask me calmly why I was so angry...

My niece and I only stayed about 20 minutes, not long at all considering. Outside the chapel we hugged and said a few words and then went each on our own way. She was going to pick up her kids from daycare, while I was going back to my mothers home.

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Nine days after my father had passed away, on Friday, I suddenly realized one of the reason why I was in this strange state of feeling and thinking so much, but not expressing anything, as if I was cloaked in numbness over an uproar of torrential feelings. All was expressed in being much more tired and a slight irritability.

The reason was of course the antidepressants I have been on for 4,5 years now, since a couple of months after Ars died. 20 mg of Cipralex daily has an effect in the long run.

I felt terribly stupid for not having realized the connection earlier.

☆Cough-Cough-Cough☆

Is there anyone still out there?

Waking up today from the feverish, cough-ridden and pitiful condition I have been in the last couple of days, I still feel a bit weak and am wondering what can have happened to the world when I have not been able to be around and take care of things and guide you all.

"Le laird aux camélias - self portrait" (2013) 
Artwork by Bock McMillan
based on a photograph by an unknown photographer

Looking back it has been a couple of horrible days. I have strange bruises on my body and can remember fainting on at least two separate occasions, almost fainting about 123 times (but I managed to get hold of a door post or something else firm or could huddle down to the floor before all the oxygen had left my system) or finding myself crawled up in a couch,  in bed or sitting on the floor in a fetal position with my neck bowed to the front and my arms and legs drawn up against my torso in a rigid cramp.

I took a cab to my appointment with my sweet Hungarian doctor yesterday, because I was too afraid of getting a cough attack while driving. He was rather calm and casual about my vivid descriptions of my condition since the onset of the flu on Friday. "My dear man", he said kindly and calmly, "you need a cough suppressant, because with your coughing attacks you are forcing the air out of your body instead of sucking it in." He gave me a prescription for my favorite medication of all time Cocillana etyfin.

The most dramatic aspect of my present condition taken care of we could move on to the rest. 

I feel mentally and emotionally stronger and the antidepressants seem to be working well in keeping me stable.

To my complaints about my diminishing eyesight he suggested I call the specialist that had examined  and diagnosed my cataract and tell her what I was telling hem, that my eyesight was getting worse and that as a lawyer I actually needed to be able to read and write to work, not in five or then years time but now. He could not make the specialist change her mind, but if she called him and asked his opinion - as she very well might do - he would support me.

The visit over with I went home and pottered around looking sexy in my boxers grabbing hold of the walls and door posts from time to time but feeling better and did not faint any more. This morning I woke up after a good nights sleep and felt that the fever had finally left. 

Oh, did I tell you I love my old Hungarian healer?

Setback

I´m not quite sure what happened, but suddenly and quite unexpectedly - for me at least - I am back in the dumps. The medication I am on have now so limited the scope and depths of my feelings that everything seems connected with "tired". "Happy and tired", "doing fine and tired", "sad and tired", "bored and tired" and sometimes even "tired and tired".

Even I get bored with myself, its no wonder that others do too.

Photography by Peter Marlow

The way I know if I am feeling better or worse is if I wish contact with others or not. Right now I just avoid contact, I can easily do that in first life by turning off the cellphone or simply by refusing to answer, in SecondLife it´s not that easy, so I am staying away until my mood changes.

A Strange Day

Photo GETTY

As I woke up this morning I had the feeling this was going to be an awful day, but in hindsight it turned out not so bad. That should teach me!

So even if I overslept a little, I got to my work place in time for my meeting with one of my staff members. We were going to discuss a few problems in his performance lately. As he sometimes has a tendency to shut off all lines of communication when he feels pressured and just respond with "yes", "no" or "I don´t know", much like a teenager in a bad mood ,even though he is thirty-one years old I had been making plans on how to handle this.

Amazingly enough we had an open and honest exchange of views and after that could reach an agreement on how to move ahead.

After that I had to rush to my doctors appointment and got there just in time. Usually they let me right in but this time no one came for me so after fifteen minutes in the waiting room I mad inquiries. As it turned out my doctor had moved to new offices and had forgotten to inform me about me. When I made a telephone call to his offices the nurse was very sorry about the oversight and gave me a new appointment in the afternoon and the new address.

The meeting with my sweet Hungarian doctor was swift and good. Have I told you earlier that he is one of those very rare kinds of doctors that actually listens to what the patients are saying?

Well I told him about my strange mood swings and that I felt that my mood curve had a declining trend. I also told him about my occasional problems falling asleep. He increased my dosage of Cipralex and allowed me the flexibility to choose what dose to take between 10-20 mg depending on how I feel. I was also prescribed a non-addictive sleeping medicine I could use on those occasions.

I had some difficulties getting my prescription filled for the sleeping drug. Sweden used to have a well-functioning chain of state-owned pharmacies up until a few years ago. The conservative government in their infinite wisdom decided to carry out a pharmacy reform in which "pharmacies would be improved and made more efficient by increasing competition". As a result of this reform anyone with certain qualifications can start a pharmacy and some of the earlier pharmacies have been privatized.

The big benefit of the reform is that you today can buy the most common nonprescription drugs at gas-stations and supermarkets but for the rest it has resulted in a big mess where the pharmacies now only carry a few of the medicines and look more like cosmetics stores than pharmacies.

Earlier every pharmacy could tell you where you could go to get your prescription filled if they did not have the medicine themselves. Now you have to drive around yourself to at least three different of the new chains and check if they have it. Usually the new private chains don´t have many medicines, I am suspecting they only sell the thousand most common prescription drugs, while they leave the rest to the old state-owned pharmacies.

Finally after asking at six different pharmacies in two towns I could get my prescription filled, by the state-owned chain of course.

Progress

Today I took out my vacuum cleaner from the cleaning cupboard for the first time since March 12, 2010. I even used it and cleaned up the living room. It felt very good!

Art by Eugène Jansson  - "Male nude, sitting model" - 1906-1914

The antidepressants I started on shortly after Ars´s death made me able to function well at work, but when I came home I was mostly extremely tired and only able to cope with the most essential household chores.

Since that day I have only been doing the bare necessities to be able to exist, go to work or move around other people. I have been maintaining my personal hygiene, doing laundry and using the dish washer when the kitchen sink was too full or I had no plates or cutlery left to eat from or with. I have however managed to keep the toilet and the washbasin clean - or sort of, my mother wouldn't approve - but no one has been let into my apartment since that day.

Before the depression I was a rather fastidious and tidy person, an inheritance from my perfectionist Lutheran parents. I thrive in ordered and clean surroundings, so the growing clutter and dust around me has not been helpful. Not since I lately started noticing it, which I did not do the first years. So during my last vacation I slowly started on decluttering, step by small step.

Slowly but surely now my home is starting to come back to normal. There is still very much to do, but I have set a generous time limit for myself. Everything should be finished and my home presentable again by mid-December, because then I intend to have a get-together at home with my team at work.

Please, keep your fingers crossed for me!

Worries

So I just removed a post that I regretted because it was made in a foul temper.

I am in a bad mood because I am seeing my doctor tomorrow. I am afraid he will tell me it is time to get off the antidepressant medication (Cipralex) which I have been on the last two years since I was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder following Ars death.

I do not want to go back to where I was in May of 2010 and I am fearing that the sense of complete powerlessness will engulf me again.