Let's Be Real

Everyone who knows me knows that I've suffered from depression for, well, forever.  And not only do I suffer from it, but everyone else suffers because of it.  I'm rude, I yell at, dismiss, hurt, whine to, and all around treat everyone around me badly.  I am THAT person.  

How do we treat depression?  Well these days there are any number of ways to deal with it.  Medications, drugs, alcohol, withdrawing into yourself, suicide, bullying and so many more I can't possibly name them all.  I've tried some of these ways to fight it.  Not the drugs and alcohol part, but that's only because God himself said not to.  But really none of it has been a good long-term solution for me.  Whatever works for you you do it.  For me none of these felt right.

So I started doing research.  Did you know there are chemicals in everything?  Like everything, everything.  All the potions and lotions we use to clean ourselves and look better have synthetic parabens.  (Anything that says methyl-, ethyl-, propyl- butyl- is a papaben.)  I haven't found one that doesn't.  Well what's so bad about parabens?  There are some studies that have linked them to higher estrogen levels, which can explain a lot of things, including depression, some cancers, and earlier puberty in kids.

Then there are preservatives and GMOs.  I haven't done research on them as much (it's my next project), but there is a reason that D&C 89 is around and it isn't all coffee, tea, alcohol, and drugs.

And don't forget cleaning supplies and other chemicals we use all the time.

So I decided to do an experiment.  As of January 31 I have not used store bought shampoos, conditioners, or lotions.  Not once.  No more body wash, shave gel, nothing.  I have used hand soap, but only after using the toilet or while cooking to get rid of bacteria.  I only use full-on make up on Sundays, usually sticking to mascara alone.  For the first two weeks of February I was pretty much vegetarian, too.  Last week I made my own laundry sauce, and dishwasher detergent.

And now that it's just past St. Pat's how is it going?  Really well, actually.  I'm feeling really good about myself.  My depression is a lot, I mean a lot better.  I still yell at my kids (because they're kids who are normal and forget to do book reports or chores), but I don't feel sad/lonely/angry all the time any more.  I spend more time with my family, and more importantly with my hubby, than I do reading.  I've had the energy to take my dog on really long walks, like 6 miles long, three or four days a week.  

I still have days when I don't want to do anything except watch Sherlock or Bones or Almost Human all day, but there are less of them.  They may fade even more when I start up the vegetarian thing again at lunch today.  (I lost 7 pounds while I was veggie and it hasn't come back!!)

So all in all cutting back, if not cutting out completely (yet), has been a great thing for my mental health.  I'll continue to research and learning ways to get rid of un-necessary chemicals, and then pass the word along to you.

To Exercise or Not To Exercise...

That is the question!  Hamlet and Gomez Addams got the question wrong.  We have no choice whether or no to be.  Even dead we are.

So does exercise help?  Short answer, yes!  The long answer will take a bit longer to answer.

I love working out.  I love the way I feel when I have been able to work out.  And the harder the workout the better.  Being sore a few days later is such a cool feeling.  I would love to be able to exercise every day. And like all good depressed people I have lots of excuses not to.

First and really the biggest problem is time.  My mornings are crazy.  And not just the normal crazy.  Jason normally wakes up at 4:45, other than this week where he's recovering from a week of night shift work and the highly stupid Daylight Savings crap.  So he leaves at 5:15.  "Great," you say, "work out then."  My treadmill is next to Jamie's bedroom and wakes her up when I run on it.  Now you're thinking "So do a video."  The problem with that is will I make myself so tired that I won't be able to run, and with Ragnar just 3 months away I REALLY need to run.  So I don't work out at 5:30.  I just go back to sleep.

Then I wake the kids up at 7:00.  Breakfast, homework, getting dressed, driving to tutoring and whatever else takes me to 8:20ish.  Then there's cleaning the house, babysitting, and grocery shopping, taking Hunter to preschool.  Cleaning the house and grocery shopping are flexible and can be done whenever.  Hunter's preschool and babysitting are not flexible at all.  In fact neither of them are at set times or days.

So I don't work out that often.  Crappy excuses, I know.  But when you're depressed you'll go with whatever gets you out of whatever is hard.

So long answer short:  I don't work out even though I know it will make me feel better.

Hi, I'm Brittany and I'm...

Depressed.  What can I say?  You know when you see people, like my amazing sister, who has/have gone through some horrible times and you say if that was me I'd curl up die?  Well those amazing people never seem like they're depressed.  Sad, absolutely.  Depressed, never.

So what do I have to be depressed about?  Let's make a list of the usual suspects.  

Hubby?  Nope.  Jason is the best guy I could ever have married.  Don't get me wrong, I had some good boyfriends in the past and dated others a few times.  But none of them were Jason.  He's perfect for me.  He refuses to fight/yell/whine/complain.  He just asks that he has clean undies in the morning, a sandwich at lunch time, and dinner when he gets to his tidy home.  He doesn't even insist on tidy all the time, just so he doesn't trip over stuff.

Kids?  Nope.  Sure we've got our challenges.  Chase is pretty easy, except when it comes to doing homework and his writing in school.  Jamie is a bit of a drama queen, but what little girl isn't.  Matt just wants to play baseball and buy things at Disneyland.  Hunter, well Hunter is a little bit of a challenge.  He's a social butterfly and wants to be out and about playing at everyone else's house and the park.  But they're all really lovable and cuties.

House?  Nope.  I like my house, and I LOVE my neighborhood.  Is my house perfect?  No.  Are there things I would change if I had unlimited resources?  Absolutely.  Would I decide to move if I didn't have to?  Not unless I get unlimited resources and can live in Heber.

Friends?   I've got more now than ever before.  While I've never had friends I'm super close to, except one in high school, I have friends I love and would trust with my life and my kids lives.

Money?  Nope.  Jason's making good money right now.  We had enough that when our van decided it really didn't like us any more we could get a new car, insure it, and still have extra left over at the end of the month.  Sure I don't handle that money very expertly.  In fact I let it handle me more often than not, but all the bills get paid, and we put extra on the house and car every month so we can pay them off early.

So why am I depressed?  Brain chemistry.  Seriously, that's all it is?  I think so.  I'm trying to clear my body of all chemicals, except caffeine which I am slowly cutting back on.  But wouldn't anti-depressants help?  Yeah, they do.  But when I'm on them I'm more numb than anti-depressed.

Preview of my next entry:  Does exercise help?  Quick answer, yes.  Long answer, check back for that one.

On My Own...

I'm not making this a big long post.  Heck if it makes it more than a few lines I'll be surprised.  I just wanted to let you know of my decision to make my blog private.  "But you only have two followers," you say.  Yes that's true (thanks Charity & Teresa!).  I'm having a really tough time right now, and not everyone wants to hear about it.  My depression is not going away as quickly as I'd like and anti-depressants make me so tired that I'm cranky anyway.  I need a place to cry, whine, and vent.  I would love to add a few more followers, but only those people who really LOVE me and won't begrudge me a few minutes of their day.

If you want to be a follower and help me please send your e-mail address to britteld@gmail.com.

Depression Is Not Fun

Everyone's depression story is different, and similar.  Mine is the same.

I spent a long time denying that I was depressed.  There were several reasons for my tiredness, lack of a desire to do anything.  Everything was because of my run-in with Eppstein-Barr virus.

What finally convinced me was a procedure I had done in September.  For the entire month of September I was on a prescription to get me ready.  The prescription is the important part of this story.  It was a drug called Megace.  It's a powerful hormone.  It's used for treating cancer among other things.

All through September my mood darkened and darkened.  By the end of September I was in such a bad mood everyone and everything upset me.  No one had done anything wrong, no one had treated me badly.  But in the dark place that I was trapped in I believed that no one cared about me, my opinion, or my family.  I just wanted to curl up in my bed and sleep.  I didn't want to kill myself, but I felt exactly like George Bailey.  My life had no meaning and maybe I shouldn't have been born at all.

It took two weeks and my kids to get me to call my doctor and get a prescription for anti-depressants.  I didn't want to do it, but I was just not coming out of the depression.  The dark place was getting blacker and blacker.

I started taking the medication.  Within weeks I was feeling more like myself.  That's when I realized that I had been depressed since my bout of Eppstein-Barr.  It wasn't just that I was tired, or sick, or any of the other excuses I used.  It was depression plain and simple.  I fought against the label, the weakness I saw with myself.  I didn't want to admit that I was not in control of any part of my life.

I was wrong.

To those that I offended or upset.  You did nothing wrong.  It was all me.  I'm so sorry.  I really don't deserve your forgiveness, but I am asking for it.

So Many Doctors, So Little Time

In the last two months we've done kind of a lot of medical stuff.  So in order to get it all down I'm going to make a list.

Our little Hunter had his first ever trip to the dentist.  A piece of advice:  don't put the older kids in charge of making sure the little ones brush their teeth.  Hunter's mouth was so horrible that he had to have, no joke, 10 teeth fixed.  Do four-year-olds have more than 10 teeth?  One of them even needed a crown.  In order to do that much work on one small kiddo he had to go through general anesthesia.  Not cool!  There were no complications and he was back to preschool the next day.  However when he woke up he was thrashing, screaming, and crying worse than he ever has.  It was worse than any fit he's ever had.  But the upshot is that he's got great teeth now.

Matthew also had a trip to the dentist.  He had five cavities, see advice above.  We went in to have his right side taken care of yesterday.  One of them was so bad he was going to have to have a baby root canal.  When we got there the root canal tooth had abscessed.  If you're like me an have no idea what that means, it means he's got an infection which causes a nasty bubble on the gums by the roots of the tooth.  So instead of that he's on antibiotics and will have to have that tooth pulled out and a space maintainer put in.  If we don't have it pulled it will just keep getting infected and have to be pulled out later.  So why wait?  It will be out next week.

Jamie had one of her really bad kidney infections.  It was so bad that she had to be on some high grade antibiotics.  The regular stuff just never works on that girl.  She also brought home a note from her school about her vision screening.  Turns out she needs reading glasses.  She looks stinkin' cute in them, but sheesh!  Reading glasses at nine?!  Can't wait to see what her glasses look like when she's my age.

Speaking of reading glasses, Chase had to get them too.  He looks stinkin' cute in them, but etc... just insert he/him in place of she/her.  But he's also been sick.  For the first time in my life a member of my family was diagnosed with an actual case of the flu.  Yep, real life flu.  The doctor told us that he could be sick for up to two weeks.  So we're hoping that it doesn't decide to travel the family.  It's probably too late to vaccinate them, since they've been exposed to it for the past weekish.  Yay.  Just so you know I refused to have my kids get flu shots at school because we never get the flu.  

Jason hasn't had much in the way of medical issues for at least a couple months.  I told you about the foot through the window and broken hand that was the only injury from the incident, right?  But he did have something funny start.  At his work the guys had to start wearing uniforms.  Let me just say if you don't want to think someone is sexy have them put this thing on.  Anyway there are reflective strips that go around the legs and the reflective strips are wearing the hair off his legs in little two inch squares.  Oh my goodness it looks so funny.  We might shave them, but we're debating the issue.  The scars on his legs will show up better without the hair, but the patches will be gone.  I'm laughing as I write this.  I love it!

I on the other hand had my own adventure.  I had been teaching Jamie to sew and she was fixing some doll dresses, and giving a teddy bear stitches.  What happened was, I think, a needle slipped out of the paper that keeps the needles stored.  No one noticed the missing needle since it was hiding in our shag carpet.  I found it - with my foot!  I screamed, and looked down to see what I stepped on and found half a needle.  Yep, half.  The other half was buried in my foot.  None of it was sticking out of my skin, so I couldn't pull it out.  I picked up a magnet that was sitting on my cedar chest next to the bed and hoped it could help.  Yeah, stupid but shock makes you do weird things.  The thing is, I could feel the pull on the needle.  It was strange.  

After a trip to the urgent care center, where  the nice doctor was honest enough to say "I stink at taking these things out, go to the ER," we went to the ER.  The doctor there tried to pull it out, but she put a time limit on it.  After 10 minutes she hadn't been able to get a grip on it, so she bandaged it up, gave me some sample pain killers, and made me an appointment with a podiatrist.  That was a Saturday.  Sunday I stayed home from church and took ibuprofen.  

Monday morning I went to see my new podiatrist.  He's a cute old guy that I would love to have as my kids fourth Grandpa.  He numbed me up, took x-rays, dug around for twenty-five minutes, bandaged me up and set up an appointment for the next day when they'd have an ultra-sound machine in the office.  Tuesday morning I went back.  The partner numbed me up dug around for fifteen minutes while pushing on my foot with the ultrasound machine, they took more x-rays, the partner dug for fifteen more minutes, and told me to meet them at the hospital that night.  What?!  

So heigh-ho, heigh-ho it's was back to the hospital I went.  There they numbed me up again then put me under the floroscope.  You know how in cartoons you see the people behind the machines and you can see them wave?  It was like that only on just my foot.  After only 10 minutes the needle was out, and I was bandaged up.  Seriously?  Why couldn't they do that on Saturday?  The needle was 7/8 of an inch long and nearly to the bone by the time they were able to get it out.

Good thing we met our deductible early in 2012, right?

Disneyland Adventures

Holy heck was this last Disneyland trip crazy!

It started out early Sunday morning.  Like 5:00 early.  We wanted to make it in time to see Fantasmic! the only time it was showing the whole time we were there.  Everything was going great, until the car decided to have a melt-down at Cove Fort.  It overheated to the point of extreme.  Thank heavens for a mechanic dad!  After an hour to let it cool enough to open the radiator it was determined that the thermostat was stuck.  My wonderful dad made the trip down to switch cars with us so we wouldn't miss our trip.  That left us with a five hour wait.  What to do, what to do?  Well we were only a mile and a half away from the fort itself.  We weren't sure that it would be open, being a Sunday and all, but figured it would at least kill some time walking there.  It was open and we were able to get a tour.  It was pretty neat.  They've done some major upgrades to the place.  Wow!

After five hours we were back on the road.  Instead of stopping off for a cheap dinner in Mesquite we just kept going.  I know!  Who turns down the chance for $5 prime rib with all the fixins?  We did because of the traffic jam in the Virgin River Gorge.  Apparently merging is beyond the abilities of everyone who left Utah that day.  When we finally pulled in at the hotel it was 1:00am.  Yikes what a long day!

After getting a mix up at the hotel taken care of we were able to start our week at the park!!  Naturally we hit Pirates first followed by the Haunted Mansion.  I had to make a quick trip back to the hotel for a change of clothes (isn't it lovely to be a girl?).  Then we played around doing the rest of the usual.

Tuesday's adventures were great.  First we got to go to the brand new Car's Land!!  We loved the new rides.  We also got to meet Merida, Jamie's new favorite princess.  Then that night was the Halloween Party, where we had a ton of fun and got loads of candy.  Wednesday was the Blue Bayou and some awesome food.  Thursday and Friday we did the ususal.  The trip home Saturday was uneventful, unless you count two kids throwing up.

Our friends the Partridges were able to play with us at the park.  They decided a couple weeks before that Amy really needed a vacation, and since Disneyland was on their places to go list they came along.  They split up their days between the beach and the parks.  It was fun to spend time with friends!

Our passes have expired, and our Disney adventures are over.  No more will we go to Disneyland until we make more money or prices come down.  It was a great year, and we made some great memories.  On to new things.

Oh, and by the way we're getting a new car.  Heehee!  Next year...CAMPING...a lot!!