There's Always Light at the End of the Tunnel

My self-harm scars are something, which I have a love/hate relationship with. At times I love them, they remind me of my journey, the strength it has taken to stop self-harming and to deal with the reasons why I would harm, they represent my story and have become part of me. Other times I hate them, I hate the very fact that I have destroyed my body, marked it for life, and created something for people to look at, for people to associate with mental illness and stereotypes. My scars are without a doubt a part of me. I have never been the kind of person who has easily gotten into a routine of using creams and moisturizes and while I have used many different creams and oils to help with the appearance of my scars I have never used them for much longer than a few weeks. Why? Well besides forgetting and not bothering it is has always been something I wasn’t sure I want to do, it has very much been something which I wasn’t sure I could do, could I erase such a huge part of my life? Wel...

We are now somewhere between week 6 and week 8 of my recovery from corrective double jaw surgery. It has been a rough couple of weeks to say the least. Monday the 2 nd of November saw me having a great post surgery appointment with my surgeon, everything looking great and virtually no pain. A week later I began experiencing immense pain and generally feeling unwell. A call was made and straight away the surgeon had me in to see him the next day. By the time I met my surgeon I had been experiencing the pain coupled with extreme tenderness for 4, days as wells as being exhausted, nauseous and generally feeling quiet miserable.   My surgeon suspected I had an infection, this would have been the second one since surgery and began me on antibiotics, my third set since surgery and organised for me to x-rays at the orthodontist before returning to him a week later. It was also here that he prepared me for the worst; the possibility of having to have another surgery to remove a men...

Today marks three weeks since my corrective double jaw surgery and to be honest I’m starting to get very fed up being at home all the time! I do get out and about for walks and stuff but I miss my routine, I miss my Monday night scouts and my athletics and I even miss going to work on the weekends! I am at the stage where come next week I would like to be getting back into some sort of a routine, I know I’m due to be out of activities for six weeks but next week it will have been a month and I don’t think going to a lecture or two will kill me.   I want to begin to ease my way back into things, starting with college and the youth café I volunteer in followed by athletics, coaching not training because that is off the cards for another little while as is the gym! And finally get myself back into scouts and work, those both being things that will happen at week six as both involve children and children can be unpredicatable and I don’t fancy getting a whack to the face with a ball o...

There comes a time when we all need a helping hand and sometimes we don’t know how to ask for that help and other times we are too afraid to ask for help. I’ve asked for help many times and it has been a difficult thing to do, asking for help meant I had to be willing to take the help that was given to me. In the beginning I was reluctant, I was reluctant to ask for help, reluctant to take the help and most of all I was reluctant to acknowledge that I actually needed the help. Over the years though it has got easier, I have become more aware of when I need to ask for help, more aware of where to go for help and most importantly I have learned to accept the help that is being offered to me. When things began to get stressful last week with the news that I would not be getting my surgery for another 6-8 months at least I broke and I knew I needed an extra bit of help however I was not really sure I wanted extra help. When I was discharged from adult mental health services after comp...

It has been almost a week since I have been told that my surgery will not be happening for another 8 months or so and to saw I just got over it would be a huge understatement. It has been hard, I’ve had days where I’ve stayed in bed and days where I got on with my life but never the less knowing that I am going to have to live with an underbite for at least another 8 months has been on my mind every day. I’ve been trying to push it to the back of my mind, right back so that I can move on and in many ways just forget about it but it is proving to be a lot harder than I thought! I think despite everything I have been coping well with the news, after all I have been looking forward to this operation for a while now and I was just so close I thought it was finally going to happen but of course I was wrong. I can’t even begin to explain how living with an underbite makes me feel, I feel so many different things, everything from angry to sadness to feeling ugly and even hating myself for ha...

Some can view 4 months as a long time while others consider it to be a short time. You can think of 4 months in many different ways as 4 months itself, 16 weeks 121 days, 2921 hours or even 175316 minutes. For me at this moment I think of 4 months not only as 4 months but also as 4 months of taking positive steps to ensure I continue on my road to recovery. You might be wondering what I am talking about and well if you haven't already guessed it today marks 4 months since I last engaged in self-harm. That’s 121 days without harming myself, 16 weeks of battling intrusive and obsessive thoughts and 2921 hours of containing on a long road to recovery. The past 4 months have not been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination. The past 4 months have been filed with ups and downs with many more ups occurring over the past number of weeks, which may be as a result of my recent med reduction. 4 months may not seem like a long time for some people but when thinkin...

Having recently written a post about my journey to come of my medication I felt that the best way for me to ensure I continue on a positive path is to document this journey and being me and the lover of writing that I am I felt it best to document it on my blog. Having spent just about three weeks on the lower dose of 150 mg I have been feeling great. The first three-four days of the reduction had me feeling very tired and I was initially experiencing many headaches something which I expected in many ways as I would have reacted in a similar way when my meds were increased some time ago. Despite the rough start and feeling physically crap for the first couple of days it wasn't long before I was fighting fit and back to myself once I had adjusted to 150 mg. So as a result of this positive reaction to the lower dose, my appetite improves and fining I had a lot more energy at times I decided that while everything is going great and with the support of my GP I would take t...

I recently began my medication reduction with the aim of coming off my antidepressants completely. This is a huge step for me and has been a long time coming. I was initially out on this medication just before I went into hospital in 2011 after my first antidepressants fails to help improve my mood. After going into hospital my medication was increased something, which happened quiet often, and a month or two after being discharged from hospital it was increased to the highest dose possible. So after spending almost three years on these meds I am absolute delighted to have finally begun my reduction with the support of my GP. Despite the sense of security my meds provided me for many years I have wanted to come off them for a while but all the doctors and nurses I have been seeing over the years always felt it wasn’t the right time, but then again is there ever a right time to come off medication. Not really sure if there is ever a good time to come off antidepressants now was a...