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.