In October of 2018 I messaged my Grandpa G on his wife Carol’s birthday to pass along a Happy Birthday to her and well-wishes for their day. He responded that he was taking flowers to her as she was in the hospital, and he would explain on a call.
At the time my anxiety and depression were both unchecked, so while I see in the messages that I made an excuse for my phone not being on me, I regret to say that I did know he was calling and was too cowardly to answer. Even now, phone calls are difficult, but incoming calls from family are ones I will always, always take.
Carol had dealt with ovarian cancer and her healthcare team had gotten it into remission the year prior, however it came back extremely aggressively. Her time in the hospital that October was brief, her health declining rapidly, with her being as much of herself as possible one week, to being in end-of-life palliative care before another week, and before a week beyond that point had passed, she did as well. Grandpa had received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s during the remission she’d experienced, and it seemed totally unfair that the world fell around him the way it did. Carol was an amazing, loving person whose take-no-shit attitude inspired me greatly. Take no distraction in my calling her “My Grandpa’s Wife” instead of my…step-grandma? she was family.
Her passing was one of many to me, having started in 2014 with the passing of my great grandma on my mom’s side. Since then, I have consistently lost loved ones or gone through other terrifying health scares and a six month period of ongoing turmoil from 2016 to 2017 that left me with PTSD. When Carol was back in the hospital and the reality was clear, I struggled heavily with how I would take things and how I would react. I cannot possibly overstate how unhealthy I was mentally and physically then, having locked myself in my house since early 2017 and being too scared to even answer the phone, let alone go socialize with the family or deal with the loss of another loved one. I weighed just over 160lbs and lived a totally sedentary life, my garbage diet and inactivity having what I can only assume to be pre-diabetes breathing down my neck and worsening ovarian cysts bursting with regularity. The physical issues didn’t matter that much at that point since I was working out the methods to kill myself and what small things I needed to have happen first so that I would feel less like it mattered when I did. After all, things were just going to get worse. I’d continue to lose more folks, my Grandpa’s Parkinson’s would take him, my Grandma T’s cancer would take her, my Dad was killing himself with alcohol. Why suffer?
Carol’s passing was something of a catalyst for me in the realization that wanting to end my life wasn’t the right action to take. If for no other reason than sticking around for others, I needed to get help. Leading up to her funeral I would spend some time going through a list of doctors near me on the site of the dominant healthcare organization in my area — it was the night before I went up to stay overnight at Grandpa G’s house that I settled on one, having narrowed the list down to three I felt most comfortable with based on available information on the site, location, cursory googling of each, and ultimately which I could make an appointment with without having to make a phone call.
Some details are admittedly fuzzy about the funeral. I believe we had a service the one night, then came back the next day for the burial. It was some time of sobbing while some hymn was sung by shaky voices, and a blisteringly cold moment around her grave.
The time was significant also in that I came out to the first member of my family on that side, expressing my pansexuality to my gay uncle as well as the work I was doing in the adult toy market — he was a safe person to come out to. Although I now personally consider myself panromantic demisexual, I also don’t really care what labels someone else uses for me (bi, pan, ace, queer), but it was a start in freeing myself and being who I am to a side of the family that has historically not been accepting of anything other than heterosexuality — one of the reasons I was using to justify my want to die was the lack of acceptance of me as I really was.
It was three years ago today that I had my first appointment. Ideally, the first step was to get some immediate treatment for my depression by way of medication, then using that energy to fix myself physically.
There was a specific medication that I wanted to get on — escitalopram, brand name Lexapro — after having had access to it. This is, of course, illegal and constitutes misuse, and while I’ve hummed and hawed a bit about detailing how this happened, there are not a lot of consequences for this that I worry about. The person who abused me ended up with a brief prescription for escitalopram since his mom was working somewhere in the health field and was already stealing medications and sample packs and had more or less given the family access to those medications. Given that others in his family had taken escitalopram without issue, he figured he’d try it. I think he blamed me for needing it as, although I was living in that house at the time, he and I were not together and he was upset I was seeing someone else as it somehow interfered with the image he was painting that we were together. He took one, found out it gave him anorgasmia, and instead of waiting it out he swore off the medication entirely. I ended up taking it and found that it helped me significantly.
My irresponsible access was not a secret in the first appointment, although was capped with “I don’t want to know how you got it,” from my doctor. Fair. Given my experience with it, however, it seemed like a perfect starting place. I have not had to play around with trying to find the right antidepressant since I’ve stuck with it with very few problematic side effects — some insignificant sexual function, profuse sweating and thus heat sensitivity.
What I do and don’t remember from that first appointment otherwise is a bit of a toss-up; I’ve mentioned before that my memory has turned into Swiss cheese and this is a direct result of untreated depression and PTSD, both from The Incident with the person who abused me and the continuous loss of loved ones over the past seven years. I do remember the initial fear of seeking this help, and my reaction to realizing that this doctor was taller than I expected based off his picture on the healthcare website — my abuser is 6'5" and a marker of my trauma was panic in reaction to folks of certain heights. My doctor gave me no reason to feel this panic for any longer than initially, providing the compassion I needed at that moment. This gave me the time I needed to take in as much information as possible, although I remember the second thing I noticed was his hands and…I could wax poetic about them but I won’t.
Acclimation to my prescription of escitalopram didn’t take too long, and some of the more significant side-effects reduced over time. My big one was that suddenly food was repulsive. Truthfully, I was just entirely sick of the garbage I was eating, and this actually still exists today (although I can now occasionally go make a meal out of a bag of chips, which was something I did regularly prior to seeking help and lost complete interest in at the beginning of my adventure of “How does this SSRI effect me?”). The boost in energy and the spine it made me grow made it a lot easier to get out and go walk around at malls. Mallwalkers are truly terrifying beings, but there I was, a mallwalker. It would be a cryptic creature in any place where the malls are failing, but here they are alive and well, so ultimately I just blended in with the others. Through rather suddenly changing my diet and walking 4–5 times a week, I started losing weight, eventually knocking myself down to the approximately 130lbs I weigh today. This is an ideal and healthy weight for me at my height with my structure and being sturdy, although I’d take a few extra pounds of muscle to be truly happy with myself. I’m a little soft and I like it that way, but being a bit stronger would definitely not hurt.
The path to betterment didn’t stop with getting my body back into a frame I find correct, continuing on through seeing a gynecologist and getting confirmation that apparently my uterus is Beautiful but my ovaries are a little prone to cysts. She agreed with my idea that, since my cysts had not gotten bad until I put the weight on, I’d work on it first and then see where we were before talking about other options. They did lessen in severity, with the occasional bout of pain being far more mild than previously with the only exception being my cycle after my first covid vaccine. Later we did some blood-work and she called me back in to have a conversation about how my anti mullerian hormone was low. Her approach was with concern and I appreciated that, but I don’t think she expected my reaction to be so flat, essentially shrugging since I’ve never wanted to reproduce. I did accept the pamphlet she gave me about egg freezing for IVF though, the whole egg-extraction and -freezing thing seems pretty metal.
Something plaguing me throughout my physical changing was a pre-existing Knee Pain. For many years prior to 2019 I assumed it was a “tendon or ligament thing,” but one night while looking at images of knee anatomy I realized that it really couldn’t be either. I was staring at an empty space behind the knee, then I saw an image of an individual with significant swelling in the same area my pain was coming from. What was that? Why was that? Synovial fluid… The Popliteal, Baker’s, Synovial Cyst. As I prodded at the spongy thing behind my knee, I realized that’s what it had to be. Not wanting to be “I googled my symptoms and this is what I have,” I showed up to another appointment with my primary doctor claiming only “I believe I have a cyst behind my knee.” After some prodding, he agreed, and sent me home with information for very good Physical Therapy in the area. I was sitting in a parking lot thinking about what I coward I still was for not wanting to place the call when they called me and we set up my time there. My primary was 2/2 on sending me to truly excellent, caring folks that made me feel comfortable and my completion of PT left me with tools to use to continue to work through any cysty problems, which occasionally pop back up if I spend too much time being sedentary again before exercise. Squats help so much, and since I can drop myself low enough that any further is sitting, I like to use them more than necessary. Look at my deep squatting! It is excellence! …I am not posting a photo. If money is better at some point I would also like to go see someone who can put just as much pressure on my calves as my PT did. Need a steamroller to loosen those things up.
After having asked if I’d like a referral to a psychologist a few times, I finally accepted my doc’s suggestion and went to see one. 3/3 on excellent referrals there. My psych — who I need to set up appointments for in the future, hopefully — got me started on the path to reforming my patterns of thinking, giving me enough tools to approach this period of time where I have not been able to afford seeing her. I think she was the one to put down on paper that, “hey, you have PTSD,” and it’s been another thing to accept and work through. This portion will seem a bit short compared to the others, but opening up the door to everything I have to say here would occupy another ten minutes of reading and probably an hour of writing.
That first step three years ago was crucial. Everything else afterward has changed me for the better. Looking back at messages to family from before that period of time is bizarre. Not that I was terrible, but messaging with my mom has become exemplary — our brief, short conversations before have turned into deeper, longer conversations. To some degree I suppose it helps that she accepted me for who I was despite my sexuality, my previous work, my distancing from the brand of Christianity I grew up under, but a lot of it really has to do with how I’ve changed.
It is easier to accept that the comfort found in damning thoughts of depression is mistaken. It is easier to accept that anxiety does not need to be so overwhelming. It is easier to accept that I can work through things to be strong enough to handle life as it continues to try to beat me and those around me down. To think that I was working out how to end my life seems…so very long ago now.
My Grandpa passed last year. I miss him terribly. I wanted to say that I regret not taking that phone call, and I suppose to some degree I always will, but it also wasn’t our last conversation and time together. He’d found a nice lady online and they were engaged, he moved out to Idaho to be with her, Covid took him there, but she is family now. The family put together a Celebration of Life this year on his birthday and although it never really stops hurting to lose someone, it was the kind of gathering that genuinely felt like he was there, cycling through groups of people being social and jovial with all. It provided the most closure I’ve had from any death in the past seven years, and there was at some point a chance I would never have gotten that important bit of healing.
On reflection, there really was no better decision I’ve made than seeking help three years ago. There are a ton of holes throughout this writing, many of which I hope to fill at a later date, but I just wanted to think about that one decision, everything that’s come as a result of it.
