I’m glad I dumped my Facebook page. Not just because it lost its excitement, but because I’m so sick of hearing about people I can’t stand. I never beat a child and I never allowed anyone else to do so. Yet if I died, how long/often would my memory be honored on Facebook?

I can’t believe it’s almost the middle of June yet it’s 68° inside the house right now. WTF is this state coming to?

Most of the weekend was positively shitty. I didn’t start feeling better until the end of my day yesterday, around the time we reapplied the Return to Sender spell. It really does seem to help. It doesn’t make things perfect and it doesn’t mean you won’t have some bad days, but you do have more good days with this spell. I looked in my journal and found that the last time we did the spell (it takes two people to perform it) was December 31, 2015. Things were relatively good until June when they tried to statin me, then the shit hit the fan again in the fall when they attempted to raise my levothyroxine dose.

I almost hit my goal. Almost. It’s very frustrating and even a bit depressing to have come so close. Since early January I’ve had a handful of days where my anxiety was borderline, but nothing major until the first of this month. I was hoping to make it until the middle of the month because then I feel like I really would have been breaking records with that and therefore making progress. It’s even been 5 months since I saw Stacey.

But then the fatigue set in, another period came, and I’ve been anxious on and off for the last 12 days.

The last two nights I slept shitty after doing better with that for nearly a week. I’ve woken up with hot flashes, inward trembling, and feeling the pulse in my neck, which I sometimes feel. Had a series of weird dreams along the way, too. I could do a whole entry just on that.

So this morning I skipped my thyroid medication a second time (it took three skips to help back the anxiety off the last time) after waking up borderline anxious, went out walking in this endless winter, then traded anxiety in for lightheadedness. After I relaxed for a few minutes and had something to eat I was fine. He left for work and I did some cleaning and hit the Bowflex.

That super loud car is on its way to work now. So glad they’re working so I don’t have to listen to them come and go 50 times a day, but I feel like that house is never going to sell. I think they need to drop it under 100K.

Anyway, we’re going to reschedule with Dr. A for sure. The question is whether or not I want to see Stacey. I miss her and I usually feel better after talking with her, but I really don’t know that there’s anything more she can do for me. I’m either going to continue to suffer on and off for the rest of my life, or this shit is going to stop before I do something stupid. Gosh, I hope it doesn’t come down to that! But anxiety can morph into depression. While anxiety feels worse than depression, anxious people just want to calm down whereas depressed people can end up with their thoughts turning awfully dark… without the help of Prozac.

First you get anxious, then you get frustrated that you got anxious, then you get depressed because you felt both those things, and then you get pissed because you feel powerless to do shit about it. You think if there really was a God, He’s got to be one seriously heartless asshole to allow you to continue to suffer. You wonder what you did to deserve it, along with all the other countless innocent sufferers of various kinds out there in the world. The only good in it is that it makes the good times all the more special. You appreciate the beauty of nature more than you normally would, the sound of a lovely song, and the wonder of the universe itself, minus the pain, sorrow, violence, war, hate, craziness, death and destruction.

Back to Stacey. Yeah, I miss her at times. The sound of her voice, her warm brown eyes, her intelligence… I don’t have a problem with the fact that we’re attracted to each other and like each other because there’s no harm in simply finding someone attractive and liking them. She probably shouldn’t have accepted some information I gave her, but she did right to remain professional as she has. No one would have known other than my husband and sister had she not, but I do appreciate it in the end. What she looks like doesn’t make seeing her any easier or harder. What matters is that she’s a wonderful counselor, but knowing there’s only so much she can do since it’s not like she has a magic wand she can wave to set my hormone straight for life, has me unsure as to whether or not it’s worth a trip out to see her. I think I’m going to give it another week or two. If nothing else I do to try to help myself works, then yes, I’ll call her. I’ve got mixed emotions about that. The thought of never seeing her again may be a bit sad, but I would prefer to do well enough not to have to see her. Life is always full of goodbyes anyway.

What’s frustrating and sometimes even scary about perimenopause is that the anxiety can come and go in a split second, as can other symptoms. Before I finish typing this sentence I could be anxious all over again. Or maybe I’ll be dizzy by the time I finish the entire entry. You just never know. You’re pretty much at its mercy. But everything I’ve taken for it has either quit working or backfired on me, so I’m trying to tough it out with natural remedies. Right now I feel okay and all I can do is hope that it’s for more than just a little while.

Okay, so let me get to the dreams, and yes, Stacey was in a few no doubt because she’s been on my mind. My old endo popped into my dreams too, LOL.

Dr. O was in a small room (her office?) mumbling to herself that she was worried about being recognized somewhere.

Finding it hard to believe she would be the type to straighten her curly hair, and never having seen her with makeup I said, “So change your appearance.”

“In a half-hour?” she asked doubtfully.

“Or less,” I said with a confident nod. Then I pulled my hair straightening brush from my handbag as well as a makeup palette, ready to give her a makeover.

Then I met Stacey somewhere in a long corridor. She was still short and skinny but her hair was a few inches below her shoulders.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked as I began to follow her.

“To the dance rehearsal for the dance contest,” she said.

So I followed her into this auditorium and watched a few dancers go through some dance routines.

Stacey then said, “I think you can win. Think you can do these moves?”

“I don’t know if I can win, and a couple of them seem a bit intricate, but yeah, I think I can do it with some practice.”

I watched them for a while so I would learn the routines, and then I was suddenly in bed with Stacey. No, not doing what you might think we were doing. The room was dark and she was sound asleep beside me.

Then I got up and watched a video I didn’t know someone had made of us sitting in a booth in a restaurant. My hair was only to my shoulders and I thought I looked both fat and old, but I didn’t care. Instead, I wondered who the hell made the video.

Then I was in a dark room sitting at a small rectangular table. The room was silent but I was aware that the person sitting across from me and next to me, whoever they were, was well aware of me. I pushed some papers around that sat on the table.

The rest of the dreams I remember are just fragments of things… lying on a bed with a backache in a dark room. Walking down a long corridor in a building and spotting a cat. Some apartment manager showing me wallpaper options for an apartment. People camping by a road. Someone telling me I looked sad. A girl running really fast to catch a bus.

Later…

Good God, there really is always something, isn’t there? Just like past times we’ve reapplied the Return to Sender spell, things didn’t get better right away. It usually takes a week.

Meanwhile, my eyes started “flashing” and shimmering in a circular section. I’m not sure if it was in both eyes or not but I could see this flashing in a portion of my vision. This happened a while back too, and the eye doctor I mentioned it to said something about getting a headache afterward, but I didn’t. I don’t think it’s anything serious like a detached retina. I noticed slight flashing the last two days, but today it was prominent and it started so fast. My vision was normal one second and then it was flashing the next. I could see the flashing even with my eyes closed. Fortunately, it only lasted a few minutes as it slipped downward and out of my range of sight, so to speak. But yeah, it sort of collapsed downward.

My anxiety started picking up again and so I took my mostly worthless lorazepam and called Stacey, but we could only talk for a few minutes because a patient came in. I’ll call her some other time if I decide that yes, I want to make an appointment for sure. Not sure if I was sensing resistance on her part at seeing me or if she really believed she couldn’t do anything more for me or if she really was just pressed for time, but she never once mentioned me seeing her in the 6½ minutes we talked.

I told her I almost reached my goal and was just two weeks shy of breaking a record as far as when I last had any significant anxiety. As I also told her, my life hasn’t been perfect every single day since I last saw her when I had anxiety in January, but overall life was good until this month. Did she have any advice for me?

She asked if anything happened to trigger it, and I said no, and that we still believed it was perimenopause. I told her about my visit with Doc C and how the clonidine didn’t help. She asked if I was still active and if I had anything to distract myself with. I told her I was doing the usual activities both physical and not. She said that one of the things that always concerned her was that I spend too much time alone inside my head.

Inside my head? Inside my head… she been reading my blog?

As I told her, I agree with her, but not all of us can simply change that at will. I don’t drive and I can’t keep a schedule. At least I’m not spending nearly as much time alone as I did when I lived alone. Sometimes I’d go days without seeing anyone. I just didn’t have anxiety of this kind back then.

Then she asked if I’d ever seen a homeopathic doctor. I haven’t, and it’s definitely something to consider despite my lack of trust in medication with me being so prone to side effects and all that. The natural herbs they use are supposed to be safer, though.

She asked what I’ve been doing to try to help my anxiety, and I told her I’ve been resorting to the usual hacks and anything else I can think of, but they don’t seem to help with this particular type of anxiety, and of course the lorazepam no longer works. I don’t even get drowsy from the stuff anymore.

She reminded me that if I can have times when I’m not anxious, I can get back to that place again. Yes, I know this, but sometimes it’s hard to believe it will ever really happen and for more than just a few months.