Who Am I?

Hi!

I’m Ruth and I’m a 23 year old, grade A lay-about. I worked as a lab technician in a secondary school in Newcastle for the summer term of 2008, which is where I graduated in 2007 with my first degree in Biochemistry with Immunology from. I was a PhD student from September 07 until April 08 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looking into malaria, anti-malarial drugs and prevalence of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa but I quit my course. Everyone tried to persuade me not to, but the PhD was meant to be a fresh start in my life and be enjoyable and by April so many horrible things had happened that I felt like I couldn’t do it. However, when I am physically back on my feet again I have decided that I would like to do back and complete at least an MSc before deciding what to do with my life. A part of me in toying with teaching as well but I won’t be able to start the course for that until September 2009 now, so I have a year to fill in.

The title of the blog refers to my mental state. I have a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder which was the diagnosis which really kicked everything off. At the age of 18 I narrowly avoided being sectioned and landed myself in a psychiatric unit for 28 days. Some of the time was fun (where else can you do cartwheels down the corridor?), some of the time was bad (sitting on your bed and crying for the third day running isn’t much fun), some of the time was bizarre (I had a psychiatrist who believed that getting me to overcome the stereotypes of me was essential so on one of my trips out by myself towards the end of my stay she asked me to buy a tin opener, basically to see if I would do myself any damage with it) and some of the time was just plain boring (4 weeks in a hospital with no one the same age as you and nothing to do and nowhere to go loses its charm after a while). I have self-harmed since I was about 15, mainly by cutting but occasionally through burning myself, hitting myself and breaking bones. I have also overdosed a fair few times, some of the time to kill me but sometimes just to ache and hurt inside. I also have dermatotillomania and trichotillomania (compulsive skin picking and compulsive hair pulling) which I guess are related to the self-harm.

I have an absolute hatred of my body, which links with the self-harm and I am a bulimic. Less so than I used to be, but I do play around with binges and purges and also my medications (some of them have loss of appetite as a side effect so I stop taking them for a while so they are out of my system and then start again to reap the benefits of the side effects). I currently weigh more than I would like to, but then as a friend of mine always tells me my perfect weight will always be below whatever weight I am now. I see a psychiatrist and a psychologist for most of my mentalism and I am slowly learning how to open up and explain things before everything reaches a head. I have been a psychiatric inpatient 5 times in 4 years and I don’t want to make it 6!

One of my main urges I have to fight is my dependency on prescription and OTC painkillers. I first discovered them when I had major surgery to repair my ankle in 2005 and was hooked from then on. Unfortunately I have some physical conditions that mean that I take painkillers regularly, and narcotic ones too, so this doesn’t help me in my quest to be rid of them. I have dabbled (possibly stronger than that) with illicit drugs but have stopped now as during my manic phase I took an unknown tablet to ‘calm me down’ that made me end up in A&E with a cardiac arrythymia so bad that I thought I was having a heart attack.

Currently I live in South Kensington with the parents. However, they are getting divorced soon so I have no idea where I am going to live or what I am going to do with my life. I do know that things may have to go on hold slightly as I have just been diagnosed with osteosarcoma (bone cancer) in my left tibia and so am undergoing chemotherapy treatment for that first before hopefully having the tumour removed.

This is my place to whinge about how I feel, to write about self-harm, depression, BPD and bulimia and to explain my rather down to Earth life.