Duke, I’m glad you’re still with us. I don’t know that there is anything I could say that would help you, but rest assured that if I knew what to say I’d be saying it. Best wishes to you.
I am hanging in here. I don’t feel great but I am continuing to go to work, do things around the house, etc. just to not stop moving entirely. If it was entirely up to me I’d probably be sleeping a lot more, because it does help the blood pressure, but at the same time I know I need to exercise a bit and keep my mind active.
I didn’t want to talk about the particulars of what happened but I feel I should clarify. tygre physically stopped me from hurting myself. Then the cops and the paramedics showed up. I don’t know who called them but there is a cop who lives two doors down from us. It’s a good thing they did because I was going to need medical attention for the blood pressure if nothing else.
I had a migraine, about 11 out of 10 on the pain scale, but that’s not why I did it. There are real problems in my life, and I don’t know how to fix them. I’m going to work on them but I fear another breakdown like Sunday. I’m juggling way too much but like I said in the OP I don’t have a pause button. I can’t tell my health problems to wait up while I deal with everything else.
Thanks to everyone who’s written. I don’t know if it’s help I need. I’ve kind of lived my life over the past 12 years or so for other people. Even my job, it’s paying our bills but I wouldn’t be doing it if other people didn’t benefit more than me. I felt worse for the other people in hospital than myself. I don’t feel brave writing this for the benefit of other people going through the same thing, it’s really what I do.
Let me applaud your efforts as listed above. I realize life feels like suck for you right now (obviously) and it’s hard, terribly hard, and from what I read you’re low on hope, but I admire you for continuing to try to keep functioning.
I hope you get some real help, and soon.
Well, post #16 was a bit of a contrast, but I got the gist of it and don’t find much fault with it.
Duke, I am curious about your thought process leading up to the crash. In 10 years I’ve has a couple close calls: I can barely remember what I was thinking in late 2004, but my impression is that I was more motivated to murder myself in cold blood. Not really a lot of emotion involved, no despair, just a relentless compulsion not unlike what would drive a hungry person to eat. I just needed to do it. I think part of my subconscious wasn’t on board with the plan though and I got intervened on(Dope mods). Consciously though, I was totally into it. Personal life and the rest of my mind really started to fall apart after that until December2007. At that point I considered myself such a complete failure as a human being that the only way to make it right was to make a sincere apology in front of my wife & kids. So I decided I should hang myself in the foyer of our house. After a couple weeks of planning and putting my affairs in order I somehow decided to file for a divorce instead. Turns out that was the real solution (as suggested by Dopers 3 years prior). I still deal with cyclical mood swings and psychotic episodes from time to time, but nothing like before.
Another Doper with major migraines and somewhat less major depression clocking in – I thank you for posting so we can encourage you to keep looking for answers to your pain.
All patients deserve relief from pain and should demand that their doctors and caregivers continue to find ways to provide it – but sometimes the depression removes the motivation and determination to demand it. That’s why you need your family and friends to encourage and stand by you, and why I am glad you posted here.
As far as a pause button is concerned (I know exactly what you mean about that), do you have short term disability through your employer? And does your health insurance have mental health benefits? It sounds like the place you went to really did not help you. If there’s another place you can check into, like a detox facility with active counseling, group therapy, and exercise, think about checking out those avenues. All you need to qualify for STDisability is a doctor’s note. Do you have one who will write to get you out of work for a month or 2?
However, a pause button will not make your current problems go away, either. They’ll still be there when you get back. If you can, get some ongoing counseling (CBT is better than talk therapy). Talk to your wife about mitigating your troubles at home. Ask her for help in looking for new jobs. If you’re the primary breadwinner, maybe she can take care of more things around the house and with the kids while you focus more on work and building a positive relationship with her?
Can you afford to hire a part-time maid, handyman, and/or babysitter? These small things would really help clear out some of your mental clutter. If not, perhaps it’s worth considering renting a room in your house to someone who works part time, with reduced rent in exchange for taking care of menial household chores (lawnmowing, dishwashing, whatever needs done on a daily basis). This would be a source of income, as well, and more money=more freedom. I know, for me, that my mental health is **severely **impacted by my financial situation du jour. If I have spare money, I feel relatively good. If I’m scraping my penny tray to buy ramen, I feel like a ball of shit.
Also get on an anti-depressant and KEEP TRYING new ones until you find one that makes you feel like normal. Consider medical marijuana if it’s available in your state. It has done wonders for my migraines (they completely disappeared) and mood when I used it in the past.
Try not to give up. If your life had less value to others (single, no or relatively few family members), I wouldn’t be staunchly opposed to suicide if that would end your pain. But you have a wife and kids, so I can’t in good conscience agree that it’s a good alternative solution. I only have a long-distance mother and very long-distance sister and some coworkers who would even know I’m gone. It’s frankly an enormous struggle not to give in. But you have to live.
Not much to add here, Duke, except to say that while I’m sorry to hear of your troubles I’m very glad you’re still here to tell us about them. Ask not for whom the bell tolls and all that. Fingers crossed for you and hope that living for at least another day at a time is going to carry on looking like the best choice.
I want to wait until after work to post an update–I’m so far behind here–but I wanted to mention that I have been seeing a neurologist for my migraines, and I’m scheduled to see him again next week. Right now we’re in the stage of “throw every triptan drug at the problem to see what works,” but he is leaning strongly towards Botox injection therapy and will probably recommend that next week.
I know more than one person who’s had excellent success with this therapy - one lady in particular who was on disability due to her headaches - she moved to my part of the world with her husband, where many people experience worse migraine symptoms, apparently.
The Botox injections made a world of difference to her. Before I was pregnant I was considering this route as well, because the triptans don’t do anything for me; however, since Junior was born I haven’t really had headaches like I used to.
Good luck - I can really understand the pain of migraine and it’s awful.
Thank you so much for starting this thread. Those of us with chronic depression are too often dismissed with “It’s all in your head.” Your story is so heartfelt, and we are all pulling for you. Hope you get the help you need, and soon.
Hanging in today. I was able to get relief on one of my problems. A few months ago, our department moved into a converted dorm building. That was great when it was colder, but the dorm was never intended to house office workers during the day during the summer, and we can’t get it air-conditioned because the electrical system can’t handle it. Even on a cool summer day it feels overheated and swampy. Obviously that hasn’t been helping my bp and migraines. Today though I was offered another office that I can use on a temporary basis. That’s going to work over the summer.
I’m going to see what happens with the migraines. I have a history of them, but these ones were different–a lot worse, and on a different part of my head. I’ve already had two CT scans and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I’m at a loss as to why I was having them. I hope the Botox helps; I’ve heard success stories about them.
I thought a lot about what Inigo Montoya said. I’m going to admit that some of the problems are about my wife, but I love her and I don’t want to leave her. I don’t want to go into what’s going on but she’s expressed interest in working together to make things better.
But I think he’s right that the solution is probably a change in life. I enjoy what I do for a living and I’m happy that I’ve been able to help hundreds of students go to college and made millions of dollars for university projects but…there are a lot of other things I want to do too. In particular there’s a big software project that I’ve discussed with some colleagues. I’ve already worked on a smaller one that’s been well-received. If my university was better off I might be able to work on it full-time, but we don’t have the monetary or the IT resources. But I can work with our grantwriter for some help. I’d have to learn a couple of other programming languages, but I know I can do that. I suppose I feel like I graduated from Oxford, and I wanted like a lot of Oxford grads to change the world, especially because I had to fight so hard to make it through. It’s not going to solve everything, working on this project, but it’s something.
I’m going to be talking to my boss tomorrow for our weekly meeting anyway. He’s been encouraging thus far, so, fingers crossed.
I hope your boss can help you find a new path and hopefully take some of that strain and feeling off of your back, Duke.
This is scary timing. A weeka ago, I was showing someone a bunch of photographs on my PC, and came across a bunch of the weekend I met you in East Lansing (do you remember? I was there with my twin sons…). At the time, I thought to myself “I wonder how Duke and tygre are doing?” I know we’re not friends, but (as with the vast majority of people here), we’re potential friends. Reach out – we like what we know of you, and I’m sure you could have lots of friends without too much effort. Hell, come up to Toronto for a visit and we’ll make sure you get some de-compression time! I’m sure we could entice Sunspace back to town; I think you and he would get along well.
Have you and your doctors talked about environmental factors for your migraines? A friend of mine developed crippling, chronic migraines (she was also prone to them) shortly after moving into a new [to them] house. The house itself was suspected, and they had expert after expert examine, “fix”, clean and no doubt de-hex the house, all to no avail. Eventually, she tried living elsewhere for a few months, and the migraines dropped dramatically in frequency. I know it’s probably a long shot, and her situation is probably utterly unlike yours, but maybe it’s worth a few moments of consideration.
Regardless, I do hope things start to straighten out for you. And get better!! I would be terribly distraught if anything happened to you, regardless of how or why.
I have been where you are and most of this advice is right on. Don’t quit trying until you hit on the right kind of anti-depressants. You will find something that’s right for you. I’d like to suggest you get a blood pressure monitor and track it to see how it corresponds with your migranes. Someone upthread mentioned a tie between the two and it took forever for my doctor to link them up. For me the game was always the same: horrible stress leading to increased blood pressure leading to awful migrane. I do take Zomig for the occasional headache now, but sometimes it leaves me a little trippy. These are obviously all my experiences and I am not a doctor.
You will get better, but you’ll need to stick it out until you find the right meds. You seem to have a lot of friends here and family to help you along. I’ll be crossing my fingers for you.
Hey Duke
I don’t know if you remember me, but you came all the way down to Florida to say hi to me and galen, and Trouble Again and Anya one weekend eight or so years back. I really enjoyed meeting you and, when I heard that you and tygre had gotten together, that was great news - you seemed like such a good-to-know person when we met. I’m sorry to hear that things are hard with the two of you right now, but glad to hear that both of you want to work on it.
The idea of a change could be what you need, and I hope your boss continues to work with you on it. That said, don’t pin everything on getting that; doing other things, like finding a good therapist and working with them, including meds if necessary, will help too; and so will what you’re doing with the neuros working on the migraines, and docs on the blood pressure - that’s some scary BP there. One of the most miserable things about depression is that you have to work so hard to be an advocate for yourself when you feel least able to do so - or at least, that was my experience - but you do need to do it, and it sounds like you know that.
One thing I found that helped me was readjusting my thinking for a while to a day-by-day level; “what do I need to do to get through today?” It helped make life into a series of smaller mountains rather than one giant, unclimbable K2. Whatever strategies you come up with, I hope they do good for you.
I find that migraines in and of themselves can make me depressed. I actually have had to work with “I only feel this way because my head hurts, I’ll feel better soon.”
Anyways, I say that to give you hope that, once you get the migraines under control, you may be able to handle everything else. Good luck.
Thank you so much Cerowyn and tavalla for writing. Yes, I remember both of you so well. I really do miss going to DopeFests. It seems the world has changed so much. There are so many Dopers, many of whom have posted in this thread, whom I respect so much, and I’d really love to meet them.
My BP is starting to level out, but unfortunately I’m also going through the worst migraine I’ve had since last Sunday. It didn’t help that LBC (Little Black Cat, aka Lazy Black Cat, aka “Pet Me Now or I Start Headbutting You”) jumped off the windowsill directly onto my head to wake me up this morning. LBC thinks I am the greatest thing since cat food in a bowl but she can be a handful when she thinks she’s being ignored. This migraine isn’t as bad as last Sunday’s migraine, but apparently in the hospital when the doctor asked me where the pain in my head was I pointed randomly into space, so it’s relative. So I’m at work just trying to catch up on things still, and waiting to talk to my boss. I have my annual review to put together, and frankly I have a hard time remembering what I ate for breakfast most days now.
Don’t know if I’d be anywhere near as OK as I am now without you guys. Thanks.
Hey Duke, just saw the thread. I’m glad you’re still here to post and hope things get better soon.
Newly diagnosed 35 year old with depression checking in. Thank you for this thread, the posts and everything. I’m more of a lurker than anything, but it is always amazing that when people find out that I’m heavily medicated their reaction is always “Wow, you’re always so happy”.
Depression is a weird thing.
Hang in there. I’m hanging in there.
We’re all here for you (as much as message board members can be)
I’m certain that the migraines contribute greatly to your depression, so without addressing those, other techniques may be of little use. But I just came across this article and wanted to share it with you because I think it might help in the other areas of your life that you haven’t discussed here.
How to be THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE PLANET in 4 Easy Steps
The complete irony is, just yesterday I was taking a walk with a girlfriend and we were talking about past relationships and why they didn’t work out. I told her that I’ve found that there are 4 Absolutes that partners must fulfill for each other, in order for a relationship to be successful:
Physical
Mental
Emotional
Spiritual
Throughout my singlehood, I adamantly stuck to those criteria, never allowing relationships to continue that were lacking in even one single aspect from that list. As a result, I never “settled” and I ended up with an amazing husband and we are enjoying a beautiful life together.
That doesn’t mean, though, that everything in each of our individual lives has always been peachy and without angst. I suffered some horrific losses a few years ago, a close call that haunted my nightmares for months, and had my work life become untenable as my bi-polar-self-medicating-with-alcohol boss went further and further over the deep end, culminating in losing my job of 10 years, a little over a year ago. I’ve been working with a couple of doctors during the course of this period, trying various different meds and combinations, and trying to find ways to re-focus myself so I could move forward in a better direction in my life.
And I just read that article and a freaking light bulb went off over my head. It’s not just important to ensure that those 4 aspects are met with a partner, but those 4 aspects should be met WITHIN MYSELF!
Major! Duh! Moment! Here!
I’m actually kind of excited right now. Maybe you can be, too? Thinking of you and wishing you well!