Accessing Advice: Sometimes The Support Isn’t There

I have been in A&E since writing the last post, which saw me staving off a self-harm attempt by being sensible and seeking help and advice. I had sutures for all times.

The last time, yesterday, I tried so hard to speak to someone, anyone before I cut myself.

At 10.30am I turned up at A&E to speak with the DSH team but no one was answering the phone. The receptionist called the crisis team who said it would be 4 hours before they could see me.

At 11am I rang Allison who was out but her secretary promised me that she’d ring me back.

At 11.15 I rang the Priory to discover my therapist was busy all morning and the assistant psychologist wasn’t in yesterday.

At 11.30 I rang the crisis team who wouldn’t speak with me as I wasn’t on their caseload and suggested I went to A&E or rang my CPN back.

At 11.45 I rang Allison again, who was still out.

At 12pm I took a diazepam and slept until 1.30pm.

At 2pm I cut myself and ended up in A&E with the same receptionist booking me in.

I ended up in minor injuries and got discharged with no psych assessment.

Allison finally rang me back as I left A&E. I told her what had happened and she said I had tried all the right things.

Sometimes I don’t know why I bother.

Ruth

Bipolar Vs. Borderline Personality Disorder: How Having Bipolar Gets You More Support

I freaked yesterday. I was out and about, hobbling around in plaster, with one crutch as I am stubborn and I freaked out in M&S. I had a massive panic attack and felt as if the world was closing in on me. I also had a bad urge to self-harm so when the panic wore off I went and bought blades and stuff.

I then realised that this wasn’t the way forwards so I rang Allison who was out and couldn’t talk to me for 2 hours. I then went into some kind of zoned out state and came round at the reception of the Priory. Here I managed to get 5 minutes with the assistant psychologist who told me to go to A&E.

Now I have never been to A&E without having done anything and asking to speak with the Deliberate Self Harm Team whilst not having self-harmed was very strange. Luckily the triage nurse was one that has seen and treated me regularly so that was OK. The DSH Team turned up within half an hour of me arriving. When I mentioned that they had arrived quickly they told me that it was because I was bipolar and had just had a recent hospital stay.

The DSH Team were pretty helpful, they sat and talked with me, got my psychiatrists appointment moved forward to Monday and seeing Allison to Tuesday. They also got me a GPs appointment that afternoon. We went through all the questions and they ascertained I wasn’t suicidal but needed somewhere safe to sit and to calm down. In the end I sat in the relatives’ room for a few hours having been given 5mg of diazepam by a charge nurse.

Eventually my Mum came and picked me up as I had given the DSH Team permission to ring her and we went home. The plan of action is that I ring the Crisis Team if I feel I need help or turn up at the Priory or A&E if I feel unsafe. My Mum has been given a small amount of diazepam for if I need it and I see my GP again on Monday as wel as the psych to review things.

My Mum was extremely supportive and in her words “proud of me” because I had taken a wise step in not self-harming but seeking preventative support instead. I still feel awful today but the urges have subsided somewhat.

It just shows me how having a personality disorder doesn’t get you much help as you are deemed to be seeking attention, and yet the same behaviour with a mental illness gets you help, support and treatment straight away. It isn’t fair at all.

Ruth

CDMT: The Therapy Of Cadburys’ Dairy Milk, Not Cognitive Behavioural Techniques

I have rediscovered Cadburys’ Whole Nut and it appears, along with 5mg tablets of diazepam to ease some of the stress I feel at the moment. I feel so restless inside, so much so that I can’t sit still for more than about 20 seconds and my Mum claims that me wandering aimlessly around is making her dizzy and given her a headache.

She dragged me out to the new Westfield shopping centre at Shepherd’s Bush earlier today. Usually I would jump at the chance of shopping, but I really couldn’t be bothered today. She got a nice shiny new red iPod Nano, of which I am sincerely jealous and I walked around slightly dosed up on co-codamol thanks to the pain in my arm not really looking at anything in particular, until I saw a pair of shoes which I happened to mention that I quite liked and the next thing I knew my Mum had bought them telling me the father could pay for them later.

I still feel suicidal. I rang the crisis team last night who suggested that I should clean the bathroom (with a right arm which I can barely lift anything with) to relieve some of the excess energy I have. I told them that I still have suicidal thoughts, feelings and plans in my head but I am scared. They asked if I was scared of dying, and I had to admit that it isn’t death that scares me, it’s the fact that if I try again and I fail then I will have failed spectacularly. I would have tried to kill myself 3 times in a fortnight and failed everytime. It would be fucking up on a magnificant scale, and I couldn’t cope with that sort of failure.

I feel enough like a failure in this world at the moment. I got good news yesterday in that the canacer hasn’t spread at all. Te tumour has actually shrunk slightly, not as much as they would have wanted it to but they think they can operate in the new year. It will be risky but they’re prepared to try it. Trouble is, I’m not sure if I’m prepared to struggle on with all the shit in my head for that long. My brain feels so messed up that it is almost like someone has attacked it with a food processor. I see Allison again on Friday and I am scared about her finding out about my revelations to the crisis team as I was trying to portray more of a ‘together’ picture on Monday.

Someone commented on my last post about the amount of help and services I have access to. The self-harm team is based at St. Mary’s in Paddington which although run by the same mental health trust and does assess people in the Chelsea & Westminster is mainly based in the Bayswater/Paddington area of the trust ad therefore I can’t be referred on a long time basis. The mental health nurse I saw in hospital after the second suicide attempt was in the Conquest Hospital in Hastings and was standard procedure for a discharge after a self-harm/parasuicide. Allison is my CPN and I have a psychiatrist whome I have seen twice since moving back to London and on the whole he is approachable and helpful. The crisis team are there as a phone number for out of hours support as I am on the Enhanced Care Plan Approach (CPA) and therefore have to have a box filled in on crisis services and out of hours provision on my CPA.

There are a lot of services and I know I am luckier than most. I hae a star of a CPN and the self-harm team when they come over to the C&W are fantastic and I hate the fact I live outside of the referral area for them as I think they could be of some use. Just I feel at the moment I have dug myself in too deeper hole to be rescued by any number of mental health professionals. Just keep clinging on though, eh? Like I always do.

Ruth

All Is Not Well In The State Of Geordie Land

Life is not good with me.

At present I am posting from the PatientLine system above my hospital bed. I have taken an overdose. The second one is 48 hours. I discharged myself against medical advice on Saturday morning whilst still tachycardic and then was readmitted last night after taking more tablets.

I cannot cope with my life anymore. The boyfriend and I are no longer. I don’t want to go into details as I know a lot of you know who he is, but suffice to say I haven’t taken it well. He was perfectly pleasant about it, I just turned into a borderline bitch. I feel once again as if I am on my own. We have agreed to stay friends, indeed I am going to go up and see him late next week, but I’m not sure how painful I will find that. I truly loved him. More than I have loved anyone in my life. And it’s hard to get over that, but I am sure I will.

I am scheduled for more chemo tomorrow but at present they’re not sure whether I’ll be well enough or not. Part of me hopes I’m not. They’re keeping me in ’till at least early afternoon and getting a psych SHO to assess me. I don’t need a psych assessment I know why I did it. I am a borderline cow who reacts badly to every situation and her response to everything bad that happens is to overdose or cut herself.

I am now resigned to being borderline all my life. I missed an appointment with my psych last week because I went out drinking after school. I was quite drunk when she rang me out of concern at half six. However, I sent her an email and decided to be honest with her. it’s copied under the cut.

Search Terms

I have decided to compile a post incorporating some search terms that have been used to find this blogs and my thoughts, comments and responses to them.

Admitting self to mental hospital

This is bloody hard to do. Somehow the psychiatric services know when you want to be admitted and do everything in their power to ensure you aren’t. However, when the last thing you could ever want to do is be admitted then they suggest admission straight up. In practice most places now have Crisis Resolution Teams, or Home Treatment Teams, to cut down on the number of people admitted because they don’t have the beds, which isn’t what the government will tell you, they’ll say it’s because service users (sic) – I hate that phrase – prefer to be treated at home. However, this search term proves that sometimes people want to be admitted.

Is tramacet used to keep patients quiet?

Tramacet is rarely prescribed as a drug as a first-line treatment, it is usually only prescribed a long way down the line. This is because it is expensive to the NHS as a compound and the individual ingredients (paracetamol and tramadol) are much cheaper to prescribe as individual generics. I could not say if it is used to placate patients. It is a opiate (tramadol) and this tends to have a calming and sedative effect on the majority of people so it could have the benefit of quietening disruptive patients. However, I think that haloperidol is probably better at doing this and tramacet wouldn’t be used for fear of liver damage due to the paracetamol found in the compound.

Tubigrip A&E don’t

A&E don’t tubigrip patients? Well it probably costs too much money. When I broke my big toe at uni I got told by A&E that they weren’t going to give me crutches as I was a student and I’d only run off with them. Some ankle/foot/wrist/elbow injuries aren’t treated with tubigrips anymore. Things like bone chips are often treated by leaving the swelling to come out and then apply a crepe bandageto stabilise. The problem with tubigrip is that when a joint is swollen it’s difficult to get the right size. Maybe you meant don’t go to A&E for a tubigrip which is particularly sound advice asmost major pharmacies, supermarkets and chain shops will sell a tubigrip so you don’t need to bother some poor harassed junior doctor for a piece of elasticated bandage.

How to not be clumsy

When someone has the answer to this question I will be eternally delighted. I guess look where you are going, don’t leave things lying around and remove all elements of danger are tactics that I have used. However, I find accepting your clumsiness and getting used to the bruises is a good plan too.

Throw yourself under Tube train

Don’t do this. I don’t advocate it. It’s very messy, extremely traumatic for the driver, annoying for the Tube passengers and disrupts the line for a while whilst they have to fish you out. Plus the tracks are electrocuted so if the impact of the train doesn’t get you then you will be frazzled, and even that might not work. In short, not a good plan. I’m not pro-suicide, I’m pro-choice but I do think if you are going to kill yourself that do something that doesn’t directly involve other people in your decision.

Psych ward knitting competition

I doubt this would be allowed as knitting needles could be seen as either a ‘sharp’ or ‘lethal weapon’. Anyway I can’t knit. Never have been able to, have tried to learn but get bored. If I was on a psych ward though and there was a knitting competition the ‘click-click-clackety-clackety-clack’ of the needles would drive me insane and I’d probably just go around making bad references to Madame Defarge.

Unusual self harm

This begs the question, is there such a thing as usual self-harm? I mean surely everyone’s self-harm is personal and tailored to their own specific needs, wants and requirements. I know people who won’t self-harm if they don’t have an entire first-aid kit. I know people who won’t self-harm if they can’t make the scars symmetrical or identical. I know people who don’t give a damn about those things but can only use a razor. I know people who will use anything to inflict any kind of damage onto themselves in any location.

Ruth

Ooops

I don’t think ooops even begins to cover it.

I ended up in A&E this morning have stitches. I should have been in a lab session but I couldn’t cope with the hassle and grief the seminar leader was giving me so I started to cry. He then sent me out “to pull myself together” and I went to the toilets and cut my leg open twice, on my thigh. I then realised that it was pretty serious and texted a friend to say that I’d been stupid and did she know any excuses to get out of a seminar? This friend is on a very similar course at the same uni.

I packed the wounds with toilet roll and some sticky tape I had in my bag. Slipped into the lab and told one of the girls on the course to tell the seminar leader I felt ill and was going to go home as I didn’t think it appropriate to work amongst pathogens and viruses when I felt sick. I then went to A&E in lab coat and all.

They stitched my wounds up – 6 stitches in each and ster-strips inbetween – and have sent a referral off to the ‘liaison psychiatry team’ aka the Deliberate Self Harm Team at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and I have an appointment at 9.30am on Tuesday (I also have a lecture at 9am but hey… never mind!). They did ask if I was seeking treatment solely for my wounds, or for the psychological side of things as well, and I said just the wounds – which was true. They then let me go with some prophylaxis antibiotics because of the environment I study in.

Actually I don’t think I’ve ever told you what I study. I’m at the London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine completing an MSc in Immunology with a special interest in malarial prophylaxis and treatment. My BSc is in Biochemistry & Immunology.

I feel just as bad now, if not even worse. I have a bizarre thing going on with myself whenever I have to seek hospital treatment and get stitches for my self-harm. I know in some people that having to do this stops them for a while as they see it almost as a final cut off point. However, with me it just encourages me to want to cut more and receive more stitches and see if I can do it worse next time. It’s almost like a game – then again I mentioned to a friend about a week ago that I treated my entire life like a game. I do things for the hell of it, or as a dare to myself, or to see how much I can get away with, or to see how far I can get with people before they suss me out. It’s stupid really.

I have the MRI scan on my ankle tomorrow morning and then a follow up appointment to go through the scan with the orthopaedic consultant on Friday morning. This scares me as it is all running far too smoothly and fast for the NHS and leads me to suspect that there is something wrong, which the orthopaedic has suspected but wants clarifying with diagnostic tests, but no one is telling me yet.

I’ll just have to wait and see, but as you may have gathered, I’m not the world’s most patient patient!

Ruth