Looking Back At 2011

The year is coming to an end and it’s time to take inventory. Over the last twelve months, I have time and again observed anniversaries and compared my life to what it used to be, but it’s because of New Year’s Eve that I feel like I’ve truly come full circle.
A year ago, I was just experiencing the very first days together with my boyfriend, I had just started therapy (but was still in the anamnesis phase, not yet learning coping / healing techniques), was still in the last throes of quitting citalopram. I had an incredibly bad year behind me, full of anxiety and panic attacks, physical and emotional pain, cognitive deficits and side-effects. 2010 was left behind tired and exhausted, but with a tiny spark of hope.

There’s so much I have to be grateful for in 2011:
– My boyfriend. We only lived together until the end of March and certainly didn’t think we’d still be on different continents on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, but even if most of the year was spent geographically apart, we’ve remained emotionally closer than ever. If anything, this forced separation has galvanized our desire for being together, and the bureaucratic process – which took far longer and was far more costly than anticipated – proved that we are serious about our commitment to each other.
He’s made me laugh (despite myself, sometimes), held me when I cried (both literally and figuratively), endured my endless therapy talk without complaining or becoming jealous of my therapist once, cared for me when I was bedridden with influenza for weeks on end. Through him, I learned to enjoy life again, learned to want something more out of life again than just the mere absence of pain. Through him, I lost the fear of giving myself to another person.
– My friends. All of them have been incredibly supportive, encouraging and generous with their feedback as well as very patient listeners. I owe lots of laughter to them and many a good idea. After having been largely unable to maintain social contacts, I am grateful that nobody held this against me and that I actually did have a social life again this year.
– My therapist and the team behind him. Everybody at the hospital I ever had contact to has been nothing but friendly and highly professional. A special mention must go to the psychologist who was my very first contact person ever there; who did the phone interviews and various formal clinical interviews with me as well as the two MRi scans, and who coordinated most of the appointments with other specialists for me. Her kindness ensured that I even made it past the initial phone interview stage without getting scared away.
Towards my therapist I have to be thankful not only because of his skilfulness and expertise, but also for his constant support beyond the requirements. In addition to the therapy sessions, we must have exchanged about a hundred emails over the course of the year. He’s helped me getting a sabbatical at uni and wrote to my health insurance. In crisis situations, his response was quick and most helpful. Most importantly, he treated me humanly when I felt most inhumanly.
– My family. That might come as a surprise, but despite all our problems and dysfunctional ways, I want to be grateful for the good times we shared.
– The progress I made. I learned to verbalize my problems, ask for help, selectively trust people, maintaining social contacts better, take care of my needs, find solutions for my problems. I can read books again and am attending university again. I found out what “normal” feels like and was euthymic for the first time since childhood. Over the course of the last year, I gave my life a completely new direction. I learned to have hope. Last but not least, I started a blog which I’ve managed to maintain for seven months already and which brought me much joy.

To my readers, all the best wishes for the new year – may it bring you much happiness and joy!

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Almost There…

One more day, and it’s Christmas break. I am really running on reserve fuel now… and apparently it shows. One of the students I spend some of my classes with asked me today, “Are you doing ok?” I replied that I was being tired and needed a break, but this was quite the understatement. I was touched by the sentiment of him asking, though – how easy it appears to be for some people.

We got back two physics homework sheets today, one I had done when I was only halfway on the decline, the other I had submitted last week. The old one came back with a result of 31.5/32 points, the other with 8.5/34 points. Both were of comparable difficulty and length and I put equal effort and time into them. The difference is that the first one I did while not suffering from cognitive deficits, the second clearly shows that I could hardly think logically.
Once I go past a certain point, it’s not only fatigue and stiff muscles, but an increasing inability to articulate myself or recall memories. With each point my BDI-II score rises, learning becomes harder. My therapist, who has a background in neurology, actually understands this kind of symptom and takes it seriously. When we were talking last week, I couldn’t remember a word I was looking for and gave him a few others until I finally found the one I had meant to say. He replied, “Good that you remembered!” and nothing more, but from the way he looked at me (and from former conversations), I knew that he was aware of the struggle behind it.
This kind of problem usually starts out very unspectacular, you merely have to concentrate a little harder. But as time goes by, the concentration you have to bring up for understanding the text grows increasingly out of reach. Eventually, the level of your reading skills just isn’t up to it anymore – as if you gave a young child of 6 or 7 years a text written for adults. At the worst stage, sentences just stop making sense. You look at them and it is as if every word is written in a different language, and if you try to read one of them, they start moving over the page and never hold still long enough to actually see them properly.

I know that getting rest and sleep and doing recreational activities will “fix” this again, just as those symptoms disappeared during spring and summer before. I will not touch any of my uni stuff before January 2 – classes start again on the 9th.

Cognitive Deficits

Looks like I came down again for good – no further euthymic phases during the last 48 hours. Which does not mean that I’m doing poorly; quite the opposite. My legs hurt earlier, but I managed to relax them and went for a long walk outside.

Yesterday, I borrowed a text-book for students of psychology from the library, because I want to understand what’s going on better. My therapist always explains everything to me, but if I asked every question which pops up in my mind in between, we’d never actually get to work on my problems.
I’ve always collected as much information as possible about topics that are on my mind a lot, but only now I find myself actually able to do it. Just a few weeks ago, I still lacked the ability to concentrate sufficiently, not to mention the energy. If there is a drop of regret, it is that I was not able to chronicle the whole therapy properly due to those reasons; I’ll have to depend on my unreliable memory for that.

Cognitive deficits are among the most scary symptoms of depression. It is one thing to lie on the sofa without moving for hours on end, and an entirely matter if suddenly you cannot remember facts you usually knew, if your memory gets clouded and you cannot carry on the most simple conversation without frantically searching for words. My brain always had been the one part of my body that I could count on, and suddenly that started to fall apart. More and more often, I would feel like having a wall of opaque glass in my head – I could still tell there was something behind it, but there was no way to access it.
There were days when I was scared about this, especially in the beginning – if your grandmother has Alzheimer’s, that can make you worry quite a bit. Later I had started to accept this state as a given, but still mourned the lost capacities. I could hardly believe it when not too long ago the first cracks appeared in the glass wall, and ever since the impairment has slowly started to crumble away.
Before starting therapy, I had tests done at the hospital where I did not perform too badly, but sitting through exam-like tasks is different from losing personal retention, because on the former you get concrete feedback immediately, but the latter you do not notice immediately. You only know that the recollection of an event, for example, is gone if someone else mentions it and you cannot recall it at all, or if you are asked to name certain situations and draw a blank when searching through your memory for it.
In the very first therapy session, we did an anamnesis of my depression history and I actually had to look through old diaries to get this right, because in my head it was a huge jumble at best. Five months later, this has become a lot easier; I have access to a lot of memories again that were temporarily lost.

Reading As A Mental Strain

After almost a year of lacking even the most basic concentration skills, I read and finished a book again: Jean M. Auel’s “The Land of Painted Caves.”

(Over the next few paragraphs, my spoiler-free opinion: as a huge fan of the series, I was somewhat disappointed in this last installment – the narrative voice seemed changed and the whole novel remained somewhat distant from the characters. For most of the book, Ayla and Jondalar hardly interact and when they finally get a common storyline where they are not just together on stage, this development rather sabotages both their characters and everything we learned about them since they first met in “The Valley of the Horses.” I was silently wailing “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” in my head as I kept reading… Worse, this storyline could even have worked if the execution had been different.

I read the first four books when I was about thirteen years old and the Earth’s Children series has been part of my life for almost two decades. It fuelled my passion for prehistoric archaeology and I really cared about the storyline and a lot of the characters. But after the fourth part, it started to go downhill a little and “The Land of Painted Caves” gives me the impression that maybe the author should have put it to the side for a year and then re-worked and fleshed out certain parts and slimmed others. Given Jean M. Auel’s age, I can understand that the publisher probably was in a hurry to get this printed, but it’s sad to see great writing and great storytelling becoming average only towards the end of a series that started three decades ago.

Unfortunately, the latest addition is still better than any other novel set in those times I ever read.)

At ca. 660 pages, it was not a short book, but once upon a time I would have managed to finish in about a week even if written in English – still takes three times as long as reading German. Here, it lasted 26 days, almost a month, until I was through.

There was a lot of getting used to reading such a long continuous text necessary and in the beginning, I had to put the book aside every few pages. Yet, that already was a progress compared to the last year, when even the average newspaper article demanded more concentration than I could bring up.

Strangely enough, the neurological tests I did at the hospital were within the normal range, while I felt like my cognitive skills had gone down the drain – so maybe the setting plays a role as well. But none of the tasks in those tests lasted longer than a few minutes and, being the model patient, I of course forced myself to give my best.
That’s a behaviour I often exhibit: I’ll give my very best performance, but once I’m within the safety of my own four walls, I will collapse on the sofa and remain there for the rest of the day, completely exhausted. So clinical tests don’t necessarily reveal the full truth in my case and that is what makes it so important that I managed to read a book in my leisure time, at home.

There already is a new book waiting for me that I checked out of the library for the upcoming trip.