Monday, May 16, 2016

Time to talk

Tuesday:

I saw my doctor this morning for a routine pap smear. I am seeing her again on Friday to talk about how I'm feeling.

Last week when I was listing all my issues to Dr Miller I was surprised when she jumped on depression. To me, it was something recent that the herbal menopause medicine was helping control. But I let her schedule an appointment to discuss it. Since then, I've been looking over some blog posts to get dates of various physical tests I've had in the past, and have found the words "depressed", "sad" and "unable to cope" come up a lot more often than I expected over the past few years. Of course twelve years ago I had quite severe Post Natal Depression with my first child. And before that had depression when I had my serious ongoing shoulder pain when I couldn't even dress myself or do much of anything and had to quit my job and go through the whole stressful compensation process. And finally today I suddenly realised that I should probably include when I was a teenager and used to cut myself. So I guess, yes, you could say I have a history. And it might be time to do something about it.

I'm not sure if talking to anyone will help. Right now, there isn't anything specifically wrong to talk about. It's not like when I was a child and my family was falling apart, or later when I was in constant pain and worried I'd never be able to work again - back then I probably could have used a therapist (an independent one who wasn't paid by Comcare to do anything to get me off worker's compensation). I assume it's my hormones. What would I say? "I feel a bit sad for no particular reason." And I'm not feeling too bad since I started taking the herbal tablets, just a general lack of enthusiasm for life, a difficulty with getting on with things. But I'm willing to listen to what my GP suggests, she may refer me to someone else. I'm certainly not against "talking therapy", I'm just not sure if it will be useful to me at the moment.

6 comments:

  1. What "herbal tablets"? St John's Wort?
    I tried that yrs ago during the worst of my hypothyroid crash, couldn't tell that it helped much...
    Recently started taking a black cohosh capsule for menopause symptoms - MAY be lessening night sweats & general irritability, but too early to tell at this point!

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    1. It's called Harmony Menopause and has about ten different things, I can't see St John's Wort among them. Lots of Asian things. I noticed a difference within a day or two, massive reduction in night sweats and felt less depressed.

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    2. Thanks! I'll see if our local health food store has anything comparable...
      (& Zoloft made me feel like a ZOMBIE, thanks but no thanks!)

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  2. My husband is on Zoloft for depression. Talk therapy would not have been beneficial for him as life was great on all fronts. He simply had an imbalance in serotonin levels. Hope you can find some answers soon.

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    1. I'm not keen on drugs either and I don't know if I'm bad enough for that. But I'll see how I go.

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  3. PS I can see a bit of contradiction in my two responses there, just because I can get it over the counter doesn't mean herbal medicine isn't a drug. Prescription medicine tends to have more risk of side effects though.

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