The writer of this blog...

... has been in hell for the past two months...

perhaps more.

My silence here has been down to the simple fact that my head is mostly a jumble of sounds which don't seem to translate into anything as neat and orderly as WORDS.

It even sounds far fetched to me, but it's one of those 'you just had to be there' things. 

Unless you've been in my shoes (and stomped round and around the same hospital building three times a day for twenty minutes 'fresh air') my ridiculously dramatic sounding excuse for silence just won't wash. 

(Cue Persil ad...)

No really. 

Prompted by a friend to describe what it's like to be restoring weight, I wrote that it's like...

...having your skin peeled off in long strips, and then your body being rolled around on a grater, with pressure being applied in varying degrees in different places

and sometimes

it makes you bleed purple rivers in hidden places

or mouth short 

breathless 

cat-screams

and other times

anger-fear juices inwardly curdle

with an inverted agony

that leaves me folded on the floor

pressing cold fists into my eyes

to stem the red pain seeping out of my sockets

and in me, a mighty snake twists

my colon, a strangled tree trunk 

and the more I eat

the more it turns and thrashes 

against the raw muscle tubing 

 ***

Okay. So every word is wringing with pubescent angst and perhaps the silence, if not golden, is at least preferable to the torture - jargon. 

But this is the truth of it.

This is how it feels for my anorexic head to be growing a body.

And no amount of Seroquel or Pregabalin or Duloxetine is going to make it okay. 

It's not supposed to be a joyride, this recovery lark... but six months in... it hasn't got easier... just...
... different. 

Delights of Duloxetine

I don't even want to think how long I have been taking the anti depressant, 'Citalopram' for. Perhaps a decade?

I guess that the efficacy of most medications decreases after long periods of time, although I have never heard this theory in relation to anti d's so cannot claim that this is the case.

However, last week, suffocated by a thickening black fog, I stumbled into the doctor's surgery (not a place I frequent unless death feels imminent) and admitted I had no desire to be alive anymore.

I sat hollowed and empty, crying without feeling the sensation of tears on my cheeks.
I answered questions that I can't remember, without being able to form coherent sentences.

A change in medication has been suggested before but I have always felt too anxious about the upheaval of such change. This time, I simply no longer cared.

I didn't care much about anything actually.

Didn't care when a man who had been staring at me in his car got out and followed me to a secluded area of woodland.

Didn't even care when he tried to make a move on me.

Nothing happened and I suppose I was lucky.

Either way, I find myself, a week into stopping Citalopram, a week into weaning onto Duloxetine (more famously, Cymbalta).

The effects have been good in terms of my mood, though at this point, it could well be a combination of factors, not least of which would be my return to work after the fraught Easter "Holiday" where I lived two weeks as a fugitive. Alternating between hideouts in the gym, supermarket car parks, retail outlets and coffee shops... Anywhere to avoid the pressure of food.

The downside is the side effects.
I haven't slept a full night for two weeks.
The pressure in my right ear is, at times, immense. My eardrum seems to oscillate constantly, and I am drive crazy by the fruitless attempts at yawning.
My stomach is bloated and rock solid. I am almost bent double from the acid pain that spreads from one end of my diaphragm to the other.
That kind of thing.

I have a huge amount going on in my mind but I feel unable to express any of it.

So what's new? I ask myself.