Journals

Woke up late, caught up on some sleep, heading into work soon. I'm almost disappointed by how normal everything still is.   It turns out taking a pill isn't the same thing as having a transplant. You're not suddenly thinking with someone elses mind. I know that rationally I understood this, but while every day leading up to this I have been worried that I would be wholly changed by the pills, I now am afraid that I won't be changed at all.   I can't believe how weirdly emotional I've been about this whole thing. I'm definitely an emotive person, but about other people. While I am self aware, I am rarely introspective. And all of this seems like foolishness most of the time anyway. I am absolutely blessed that these are my problems. I just have to fix them, or I'm going to have more serious problems later on.   My treatment of my mental health is similar to my treatment of a cold or flu. I take no preventative measures whatsoever. Get a sore throat and have a half gallon of grapefruit juice. Still getting sick and I'll take some vitamins to hopefully shorten how long I am sick, and then, if I realize I'm just not getting better? I'll wait a few more days...then a friend will bring me to the doctor when they realize I've been sick for a while.   The problem comes with things like IPF, which my Father has. It's full name is "Ideopathic Pulminory Fibrosis." It is a phantom scarring of the lungs, I say phantom because the word "Ideopathic" basically means "We have no clue why this is happening to you." He got sick, thought it was a cold, then thought it was just a chest cold, and it kept getting worse and worse and finally after a lot of nagging to see a doctor he did. The Doctor diagnosed him with Pneumonia. The drugs didn't work, however, and by the time he was finally diagnosed with IPF, he had already lost 50% of his lung capacity.   It's uncurable and untreatable and who knows how much longer we would get with him if things had gone differently during the diagnosing phase, or how much better his quality of life could be today. We're lucky, though. Amazingly lucky. I used to say that the disease was uncurable and untreatable. Well, now it's treatable. My father made it into a study for what has turned out to be the first drug to ever have an effect on this disease. It's not a cure by any stretch of the imagination, but it lessens the occurance of major episodes, and major episodes are when people die with this disease.   It's keeping him stable, no change for a long time now. We have to be careful when we're sick to not get him sick, he should use his oxygen more than he does, but he's already outlived the best estimates from the time he was diagnosed. 4 years ago I thought my Father would be dead today, and he's still doing my taxes for me.   Anyway, where is all of this going? It's mostly that I don't take care of myself, and when I started noticing that I was getting the mental equivalent of the flu I shouldn't have waited and fumbled around so long before I tried to get it taken care of. I probably could have done very well with just therapy and started to put things together in my life, but now I have to face criminal charges and debt well beyond my ability to repay anytime soon and as such, I've turned to medication to try to give me a kickstart.   I'm lucky that these are the problems I have, but I could have done so much better. Hopefully I am, at least, avoiding much worse.