Dream Weaver

    Life is full, and that is a good thing, but it also distracts me from writing my blog, which I always intend to do, but never really get around to doing, mostly because I am too tired.

    Update:  Generally things have been going well.  I have been back on my feet since the last weekend in November.  The holidays were wonderful, we dealt with some winter illness in January and February was COLD, SNOWY and DREARY, as anyone who lives in the Northeast will attest too.  I believe that they are saying it is the coldest February on record.  And it was cold, too cold to play outside, too cold to walk the dog and even too cold to do the laundry.  My washer freezes on a regular basis when the temperatures are too low for too long, which seemed to be about two thirds of the month of February this year.  Ugh!  I can say that March has been much warmer though, I have been able to do wash whenever I have needed to!

  So there have been some tough moments, days, even weeks since my last entry.  We had a scare with my husband at the end of January.  He was having severe headaches and we thought maybe he had an aneurysm.  We endured a very stressful trip to the emergency room where the doctors and nurses had us believing he was going to be rushed off for brain surgery, until the results of his tests came back and we found out that he just had a bad sinus infection.  Whew!  It took us a couple of weeks to get the headaches under control with the right medication.  Thankfully he is just fine now.  But, while we were dealing with the headaches with him, my daughter had the flu with a fever for five days and she missed four days of school while my son had an ear infection.  That was a LONG two weeks.  I think I survived on adrenaline alone, because nobody was sleeping and I was taking care of all three of them.  As soon as everyone was showing improvement, this Mama was a cranky mess for a few days.

  My last cycle was really tough on me mood wise.  I had a few of those kinds of days that make me feel like the depression is starting all over again, and all I want to do is be left alone so I can sleep. but as always, sleep eludes me.

   One of the biggest reasons I was so upset that insurance forced me off the medication that worked the best for me (Cymbalta), is because it was the one medication that did not make my problem dreaming worse.  After being off it and trying other medications, nothing else worked quite right.  Now I have been back on it since the early fall and I feel better overall than I have on anything else,  but it is making the dreaming worse this time around.   I am at the point in my life where I feel there really is no solution to my dreaming problem.

I have always been a dreamer.  I don't know what most people dream about, but my dreams only sometimes contain people and places that I know.  I am more likely to be a character in a movie with a really confusing and drawn out plot.  I have had dreams like that ever since I can remember.  I have many stories in my head that need to be written down as a result of some of these dreams.  The one component that my depression has added to my dreaming is an emotional component.  We all have occasional dreams that are upsetting, but I find it happening on almost a nightly basis lately.  And the dreams are exhausting.  I wake up feeling like I have just run a marathon.  I have just lived this other life out in great detail, and now am expected to get up, fully refreshed and go about my own life during the day.  Except I never feel refreshed.  The best sleep I get during a 24 hour period are the twenty minutes I am lucky enough to doze off while my son is watching tv before we go to pick my daughter up from school.

I guess they call this kind of dreaming Lucid Dreaming and I can't find any way to make it stop.  My doctor and I have discussed this at length and apparently I just seem to be one of those people who rarely, if ever, gets into a deep sleep.  I can shake off the dreams, but I am never able to really shake off the tired feeling.  I think this is why I have such a hard time getting up in the morning.  When the dreaming gets worse during the PMS part of my cycle, sometimes I ask myself what is the point of going to bed  at all.  Sleep Aids will help me to fall asleep, and sometimes to sleep a little better during part of the night, but it is the crazy dreams towards the mornings that I find most challenging to endure.  Lately I have been waking up feeling really down, and last night felt that way at bedtime too.  It is a struggle, a minor struggle compared to being the throes of a bad depression, but it is still as struggle.

Sometimes my dreams will be tied to real life.  I often dream of my former best friend.  When life priorities changed, our relationship started to change.  I was married, then with one baby, then another baby while she remained single.  Then as the depression took a good hold of me, our friendship fell apart and she decided to end it.  I still miss her all the time, but try not to think about.  I will get heart twinges when I see the kids playing with something that she gave them, or they want to read one of awesome books she found for them.   I still stop and have to remind myself that I can't share things with her anymore.  But I try not to think about her for too long, I have laid the issue to rest.  Then I have a dream about her where we are reconciling and going on some adventure, or I dream that we are having some kind of argument, and either way I wake up thinking about her and missing her, and just generally feeling bad because the dreams are so emotional and they feel so real.  It  is very frustrating to not be able to control what goes on in your head while you are sleeping.

It leaves me with facing a decision about when and how and if I should go off my medication.  I don't think that it is time right now, but maybe soon...I don't know.  I know that going off is not going to solve my depression and it definitely won't make me stop dreaming, nothing is going to that.  My dreams, my depression are all part of who I am and I have to continuously figure out ways to cope with them, and ways to get better sleep whenever I can.  And the issues that the dreams bring up, you know, those issues that I thought that I have dealt with, but apparently parts of my brain don't agree, well, I guess I will have to figure out ways to cope with them too.

Dreams and hormones, hormones and dreams will always be around to frustrate me.

Still Waiting...

So it has definitely been a while since I have written.  I have kind of been waiting to have something different to say, but....

Well I have been having a hard time since I had to go off the Cymbalta, not so much depression wise, but side effect wise.  As of my last entry we had added generic Wellbutrin to the generic Prozac I was taking in the hopes that it would help with the crazy dreams I have been having.  This is where I stand right now with that.  On both medications my side effects did get worse.  Three of these side effects have had a huge impact on the quality of sleep I have been getting.  The first factor of course is the dreams.  I have always been a crazy dreamer but normally that effect is cyclical.  During some days of the month I have more crazy dreams and wake up more often, and during other points it is usually about two times a night that I wake up.  When I say crazy dreams what I mean is my dreams just get me caught up in these intense and confusing stories that leave me waking up feeling like I just ran a three day marathon.  I wish my brain had a shut off switch but it doesn't.  I have long ago accepted this, but I need to get the dream level back to two wake ups a night instead of every single hour.

So at this point I am completely weaned off the Prozac and am only taking Wellbutrin.  This has been somewhat better, I don't feel as groggy during the day as I did when I was on both medications.  I am still battling the dreams though.  I have to take Benadryl or Tylenol PM to get any improvement in my sleep at all, and even with that I am still waking up every hour and a half to two hours.

Then there are the other side effects impacting my sleep which are extremely annoying night sweats,  and dry mouth.  I am constantly waking up thirsty.

Then there is the non medication side effect of parenthood...there has been a lot of this:

At least three or four times a week this little guy wakes up scared and wants a cuddle.  About half the time he does go back to his own bed, the other half of the time we spend the night with his toeys (Matt's word for toes) digging into one of us and his head digging into the other one.  This has been going on for I don't even know how long now.  This past week he was up in the night for two nights with a bad cold that resulted in an ear infection.  I don't mind getting up when he is sick, but I do wish that whatever keeps waking him up at night would stop.  I am always concerned that my kids are going to inherit the wild dreams that I have and that they will never get decent sleep either.

And there has been a TON of this:

Seriously, will this winter EVER end?  As I write this it is sleeting right now, which is supposed to turn to freezing rain in a few hours and then to snow...I keep telling myself that spring is coming.  I feel bad because we have been so cooped up this winter.  The snow is deep and it has been super cold, so we have been inside most of the time.  Which just makes my kids totally wild and I get a whole lot of this:

I am looking forward to better weather so we can all get out more.  I feel bad for my poor dog, I know he misses walks in the woods way more than the rest of us do.

I am relieved to be feeling less groggy taking just one medication.  It seems to be managing my depression very well, but the extreme lack of quality sleep is definitely affecting my energy and motivation levels.

When I last wrote we were still knee deep in the health insurance drama.  I am pleased to say that this has been resolved and my husband and I are now covered...and the coverage seems to be good (so far).  We just started on our new plan on March 1st.  We had temporary coverage before that.  I am so relieved to be able to just move forward now without that to worry about anymore.  I am so grateful for the my doctor.  She helped me to manage my medications over the phone while we waited for the insurance disaster to be sorted out, which is why I was able to wean off the Prozac.  Our temporary insurance covered the medications.  I finally got to see my doctor last week.  A good friend watched the kiddos so I could really talk to my doctor (kids tend to be a bit distracting in the doctor's office).  It seems that my new insurance should cover Cymbalta, which is what I used to take that worked really well.  However it does require a pre-authorization  from the insurance company.  I have been waiting on this for six days now.  After making some calls today it seems that the Pharmacy was trying to put the prescription through to the wrong insurance company, so I am still waiting.  My doctor was confident that this should get approved because of all the side effects I have been having with the other medications.  So now I am just waiting and praying that my doctor is right and everything will go through.  I am thankful that I have an excellent medical team that will advocate to work this out on my behalf.  Right now there isn't really anything I can do but wait.  Once this does go through, I should be completely off the Wellbutrin in a week and then I should start feeling more like myself again.

My husband pointed out to me that I was tired when I was taking the Cymbalta too.  I did not deny this, I am always tired, but I explained to him that there are LEVELS of tired.  The Cymbalta level of tired is easier to live with.  I would be (and I was tired) when I wasn't taking any medication at all.

If you are new to this depression thing don't be discouraged if the first medication that you take doesn't work well for you.  It can take time to find the right medication and the right dosage to get you to where you need to be.  Don't give up, it does get better.

In the meantime,  I have been working on registering one kid for Kindergarten and one kid for pre-school.  I don't know what I am going to do with myself having two kids in school, even if that will be the case only two mornings a week.  Both of my kids suddenly seem so big to me.  They have both grown so much.  I have been buying new clothes for my daughter every time I turn around.  I have been working on setting some goals and priorities, and figuring out how to get from where I am to where I want to be.  I am happy to say that our general life situation is definitely good right now.  Lots of things have been changing for the better over the last year and a half or so, and it is very exciting to see....although I wish my monkeys would slow down a little bit in the growing up department.  My little guy definitely isn't a baby anymore.  He seems so grown up....if only I could get him to use the potty.  That is not a task I am ready to take on just yet though, unless he wants to do it...in the meantime only this guy has been using the potty:

Keep moving forward!  Don't look back, it can only get better!  And hold on to the things that matter most!  Here I am with my three kids...if you look closely you can see my dog's eyes glowing.  He is a black lab so he tends to blend in with the couch :o)

Super Mom to Super BOMB!!

     Have you ever had a particularly awesome day?  A day where nothing can get you down, and you just sail through your trials smoothly without even the slightest dampening of spirit?  I had one of those days a couple of weeks ago.  Nothing stressed me out, it was amazing....I felt fantastic, almost too fantastic.

    It was a typical day.  Dinner was in the crockpot and I met my good friend and her two little ones, who are exactly the same age as my two, for a walk in the wilderness with my dog.    We chose a path that she had been on before, but not in the summer.  I had never been there.  It truly was the wilderness.  The paths were overgrown and bugs were everywhere...and of course we had no bug spray.  It has been raining forever around here, so the paths were covered in thick, thick mud, the kind of mud that will suck your shoes of if you stand still in it for too long.  I kept telling the kids to run quick through the muddy spots so their shoes wouldn't get sucked off.  We almost did lose a few shoes.  My dog of course was a muddy mess three minutes into the walk and was loving every second.  I was loving every second too.  The two, almost two year olds, decided that they didn't want to walk, they wanted to be carried...and we didn't have our back packs.  The walk that was supposed to last for about 45 minutes turned into two hours because we got lost.  In our defense though, the trail markers were kind of confusing.  So carrying babies on our hips and urging our four year olds along, my friend and I trudged through the wilderness.  I said at one point that we were like those pioneer Mamas following the wagon trains carrying their babies for ours on end.  My arms didn't get as tired as they usually do, I guess they knew how important their job was.  After we came to the same wooden bridge for the third time, I wondered how I would ever make it to my evening commitment on time.  Surprisingly that thought did not stress me out.  I hate being late for anything so it was strange that I wasn't upset.  Finally two hours after we left our cars, my friend led us out of the wilderness.  I felt exhilarated.  We were all completely covered in mud.  I attacked my daughter first, she was wearing shorts and was so brown from mud she looked like she had hairy legs from thigh to ankle.  I cleaned her up as best as I could, removing her shorts, socks and sneakers and wiping her down with baby wipes.  I put her in the car like that, planning on putting both kids in the tub the second I got home.  Then I went after my son.  He hadn't walked as much, but he was still pretty muddy.  I pulled off his socks, shoes and jeans, and found a tick crawling on his leg.  This did not freak me out, like I thought it would.  It wasn't biting him yet, so I flicked it off and we headed home after I toweled off my exhausted, but very happy, muddy dog.

   Once home, I washed both kids and checked them over for ticks very carefully.  Then I showered and checked myself.  I was supermomming it.  I had them both clean in about six minutes.  They were eating dinner when their dad came home, we were all cleaned up and out the door on time.  We made it to church....I felt something crawling on me.  I couldn't believe it was a tick.  I flushed it.  I had showered and was baffled that there was a tick on me still.  Lesson learned...showering does not wash off or scare away ticks.   When we got home, I checked the kids over again when I put them in their pjs.  They were clear.  Then after they were in bed, my husband checked me over.  There was a tick on me, right under my butt cheek.  It was embedded....after several hilarious circumstances and a trip to the store to buy some supplies by my husband....the tick was removed.

     That was just a day, full of circumstances that would have normally stressed me out.   Being lost, being late, being covered in icky insects....I felt good, like I could handle anything.  But....alas, that supermom feeling didn't last.  This past cycle has been challenging for me.  I find that my more depressed days are directly hormonally related and every three or four months I have a cycle that just hits me harder than other ones do.  Typically my "down" days are during the PMS stage and the Menstrual Stage of my cycle.  Sometimes it will last a few hours, sometimes a whole day.  If it is a bad cycle, those down days will also hit around ovulation. 

    I also had to take into consideration that there were other factors at play this time around.  My four year old had her tonsils and adenoids removed right in the middle.  I was 100% sure this was the right decision for her health, and I felt good about it.  The night before her surgery was when I began to realize that I was feeling anxious about it.  I barely slept that night and then had to get up at 5 am to get her to the hospital on time.   That was night one of sleep deprivation.  And it just continued over the next two weeks.  I was up with her to manage her pain, and to take her to the ER in the middle of the night on night two after the surgery.  She had barely had anything to drink all day and started vomiting early in the evening.  The pain medication seemed to be making her really nauseous.  We were really concerned about dehydration, hence the ER trip at 1 am.  That ER trip was traumatic for both of us, and I won't go in to detail.  Luckily they gave us some anti nausea medication that seemed to take care of the problem for Anne and she began to show steady improvement after that.  Once she started feeling better and stopped waking up in the night because of the pain, I was PMSing.  I don't often have anxiety issues at bedtime, but this round I was having a really hard time falling asleep and having really vivid and exhausting dreams when I was asleep.

   I know for me that sleep deprivation is the biggest trigger of my PPD.  I start doubting myself.  I start feeling like I am doing everything wrong or that I am just caught in a rut.  I start to worry that my PPD is turning into Chronic Depression.  I know that can happen....what if it does?  I start feeling like a Super Bomb of a Mom.

     I guess the best thing I can do is not write about it when I am at my worst.  Because if I look back on during a moment when things aren't so bad, I can see some of the things that are okay or even better.

    I have come to the conclusion that I am not a fan of hot, humid summer weather.  That doesn't make me a bad Mom.  We can stay in the air conditioning on a hot day.  I do feel guilty that there have been a lot of either really hot days or really raining days lately, and also Anne recovering from surgery days, so we have not done as much outside as we could, but I can try to do better.

     Anne has been a bit challenging lately, so we have upped the ante on her behavior chart this week.  She has been improving so much with the behaviors that we were originally looking at, but lately, she has started in with some attitude issues and is getting mouthy and disrespectful, so we are cracking down on this.  She had a tough week and did not get a reward this week, but I am already seeing her start to catch herself (sometimes) and rephrase what she is trying to say....so....progress.

     The most amazing thing that I have noticed lately are real moments of clarity.  I have spent so much of my life the last two years, just trying to make it through the day, and get done all the Mom things that need to be done, that I don't often just STOP.  I have caught myself doing this quite often lately.  I can think of multiple times this past week where I have just stopped and totally soaked in a conversation with Anne.  She is so hysterical, and has such an amazing imagination.  I love listening to her.  I have also been stopping and soaking up lots of little boy cuddles and kisses.  I am really starting to see the little person he is becoming and how funny he can be.  We have had some tickle time, I love hearing his little belly laugh.  I also have caught myself just listening and watching them play, either alone or together and just enjoying watching them be their own little selves.   This might not seem like a big deal, but it really is.  This is not something I have often been able to do....and suddenly I have realized that I am doing it all the time.  I don't know...it makes me feel more alive somehow.

My beautiful boy who always makes me smile!

Playing and giggling together!

      Today was actually not really the best day.  I am still exhausted, sleep has not improved for me lately, and I am up writing this entry because I couldn't settle down to sleep.  There were some things that went wrong this day, and negative emotions were felt more strongly than I would have liked, but I can sit down and look over the past few weeks and see that the times I thought were bad have some strong, strong light shining through.  Clarity is starting to come through the darkest moments.  I CAN still fight this, the light is shining.   I will always have challenges to overcome but things are changing.  If the gift of clarity is coming to me, then the strength to change the things that really need to be changed is coming.

I Passed the Test!!

    Once a year my husband travels for work for a week in May.  Last year I was an absolute wreck during the time he was gone.  I had just started my medication and counseling and was terrified at the thought of being alone with the kids for that length of time.  So....I went and stayed with my sister for a few days, which was a wise choice at the time. 

      As the dates loomed before me for this year, I noticed some of those old feelings coming back and I realized that I was feeling anxious about my husband leaving and I was afraid that I couldn't do it alone.  With my daughter's school schedule for the week, traveling was not an option.  Then I had an epiphany.  This was a test, if I could do this alone, for the four long days that my husband was going to be gone, then I could do anything.  If I could do this it would mean that this depression had lost and I have won.

     So....I was definitely put to the test.  I am very challenged when I don't get enough sleep, which is almost all the time, but I usually have backup in the wee hours.  My husband is a great help at night when the kids wake up.   I find that I lose my patience after awhile if I am woken up enough.  The first night Daddy was away, I settled into bed and then started hearing my daughter in the beginning stages of an asthma attack.  Her allergies have been terrible over the last few weeks.  So I got up and gave her a nebulizer treatment, which takes about twenty minutes or so.  Then she was fine for the rest of the night.  So I settled back into bed and then my son decided that he was not going to sleep at all.  He has been having nightmares lately and been waking up very upset and scared.  So I spent most of the first night up with him.  I felt like a zombie the next day.  Anne had school, and Matthew was in good spirits.  It ended up being a decent day.

     The second night, I had just drifted off to sleep and Anne woke up with a bad asthma attack.  So I had to get up around 2 am to give her another treatment.  I got her settled back down and went back to bed, and then fifteen minutes later she was in my bed terrified from a nightmare.  So we dozed on and off for awhile until Matthew woke up screaming with a nightmare.  I finally had them both calmed down and back in their own beds around 5 am.  That was a long night.

    I was very impressed with myself about how ambitious I was the next day.  We all took naps in the afternoon.  Then I packed everyone up, and we went off to get the kids haircuts then I took them out to dinner by myself, which I had never done before.  They were really good.  Then we went to evening church.  That was where I got the phone call from my husband that he was sick.  As it turns out pretty much his entire group contracted the Norovirus at the hotel he was staying at.  I got the kids home and in bed and spent most of the night on and off the phone with him trying to  figure out what was going on and how sick he was.  Initially we thought it was food poisoning.  I didn't sleep much that night worrying about him, although the kids slept fine.

    I kind of dragged though the last day, but we MADE it.  My husband came home just after midnight.  He was feeling much better.  Luckily his flight left mid afternoon so he had time to recover before getting on the plane.  Many of his colleagues were not so lucky and had very difficult journeys home.  

     I feel like I slipped back into some lazy and unmotivated routines for a couple of days after my husband returned, but then we all reset ourselves and got on with our lives.  The point is that I MADE it, I DID it.  I proved to myself that I can handle more than I thought I could handle.  In the end I learned that I need to raise my own expectations for myself.

The kids survived too!  Look....Happy faces!!

The Great Enemy-Sleep Deprivation

Originally I had planned to write my next entry on a completely different topic, but the last couple of weeks have been so crazy, and I have been so tired, that I decided to write about my ongoing battle with sleep.  It is so much easier to fight off the darkness when I am rested, but when the overwhelming fatigue sets in I am the most vulnerable.

I have always had issues with sleeping.  When I was younger insomnia used to be a major problem.  However, since I have had children that is no longer the case (unless I am pregnant).  I am usually so exhausted by the time I go to bed, that I don't have trouble falling asleep.  It is staying asleep that is my problem.  I am a very vivid dreamer, this has always been an issue for me.  The norm for me is to wake up 2-3 times per night because of these dreams.  I can deal with that.  When I get closer to getting my period, this gets worse and I can be waking up as often as every half hour to every hour.  This can go on for nearly two weeks of the month.  Then  you add in all the other stuff:  the husband snoring, the daughter coughing in the night, the son waking up screaming with nightmares, kids just crying in their sleep....or of course the sick family member.

The last couple of weeks have been a doozy.  One family member after another has been sick for about a month now.  A day or two after someone gets better, someone else gets sick.  Aside from a flare up of my daughter's asthma/allergies we have all been healthy for about five days now....WHEW!  But I still have not been sleeping well.  My PMS is causing the dreaming to be worse and my son is going through a nightmare phase.  He is waking up sometimes multiple times a night screaming in terror.  It is very difficult to get him settled back down, he is so upset he just wants to be held.  My husband and I are at a loss trying to figure out what is frightening our happy, bubbly little guy so much.  Last night was especially bad.  Our son was up crying three times.  Our daughter was up crying once, and she woke me up several times either crying or coughing in her sleep.  I am writing this now completely sleep deprived.

My point with this entry is to say, I really feel that with my medication and therapy, and the support I have received and the growing I have done as a person, I have my depression well under control...Unless I am exhausted.  And lately I am almost always exhausted.  It leaves me very short tempered and unmotivated.  It is harder to complete daily tasks and sometimes it makes me feel like I am back where I started when I could barely force myself to do much of anything.  And it makes it much harder for me to handle my spirited daughter in the way that I would like to handle her.  I don't have the patience to deal with her resistance as I would like to, and we end up butting heads.

I have recently accepted the fact that sleep is always going to be an issue for me.  My doctor told me that there is not much that can be done for my hormonal sleep issues.  There are sleep aids that provide me with a little relief, but I won't take those if the kids are sick because I need to be able to get up if they need me.  So my current challenge is to figure out how to navigate life when I am sleep deprived.  I need to figure out how to still do what needs to be done and still be the Mom I want to be when it the hardest for me.  I know that I can fight the depression back.  Each day I become a little more successful at it.  Like today for example.  Last night was probably the worst night of sleep I have had in these terrible past two weeks of no sleep.  This morning my daughter was completely falling apart and resisting everything.  Getting her out the door was the ultimate challenge.  After I dropped her off at school I realized that I accomplished this without yelling at her once.  That NEVER happens when I am in this state.  I found some patience somewhere, I just need to hold on to it.  Here's to the hope of a nap this afternoon!  :o)