helen-louise's journal

Joy! Our kitchen ring main has died. I was heating up hot chocolate and heard a fizzling sound, and the microwave stopped working. So did everything else that runs off that ring main.

Like a Sensible Person Who Understands Electricity, I went to the fuse box. Where I found that the kitchen ring main fuse had not tripped. I flicked it to off anyway, waited a few seconds and back to on, but there is still no electricity to the kitchen. Richard reckons it might need a new circuit breaker.

Even better: the fridge/freezer is plugged in somewhere behind itself, and it's too damned heavy for me to move. So I can't actually unplug it and move it onto the downstairs ring main until Richard gets home from work.

Also, ( I am having TMI )

I am having the worst case of premenstrual dysphoric disorder that I've had in years. I stayed up until 9 am this morning because I felt so awful - a strange combination of feeling miserable and tearful and fighting the urge to self-harm while simultaneously praising the fact that I have effective enough mood medication now that I can say to myself, quite honestly, "It's just hormones, you'll feel fine in a day or two". I slept for as long as I possibly could in the hope of feeling like a human when I woke up. Except now the body dysmorphia that I always get with PMDD has spiralled into full-blown gender dysphoria and something in my brain is trying to tell me that having breasts is wrong and this body shouldn't have them. Ever tried ignoring breasts when they feel like two massive itchy sacks of WRONG on your chest and you can't move your arms without touching them? Eh.

I am Okay because I'm well-enough medicated that part of my brain keeps thinking rationally even when other parts are being crazy. But it's not pleasant. When I first went onto carbamazepine (an antiepileptic drug used as a mood stabiliser), I didn't have any mental PMS symptoms at all for about 2 years. It was lovely! I still fell off stepstools and down the stairs and cut myself accidentally through sheer clumsiness (why is that a symptom of PMS? Dunno, but it happens every month for me), but I didn't randomly hate myself or my body or want to die. Then it gradually crept back, but only every other month. In the same way, that menstrual cycle is always worse for hypomania mid-cycle, pain and bleeding at ovulation, and period pain. Does one of my ovaries fire up more hormones than the other one?

Normal service will be resumed within the next 3 days. Hopefully as soon as possible, because I'm not sure I can take much more of this mentalism. Argh. Hugs welcomed, advice not welcomed (since I've already explored all of the treatment options with my doctor).

I am currently "enjoying" a "SURPRISE!" period :( Thinking about it, it's right if you ignore when my last one happened (which was ridiculously late) and instead count 2 x 28 days from the one before. Apparently, my body/hormones are going for some sort of extreme 5 week/3 week cycle now.

Nonetheless, I have wasted the whole day asleep, and my sleep pattern may indeed be as broken as it was before. We shall see.

A surprise period explains why I was so utterly exhausted & tearful the other night - it was clearly PMS. I prefer that as an explanation to "my drugs have stopped working". Still, I really feel like all I do is have menstrual cycles these days. I'm either having a period or having mittelschmerz or waiting for my period to start. And I'm sure I have at least another 20 years of this to look forward to! Yay!

In other news, I need good wishes for the safe location of my lab chair. It was "temporarily" living in my office because there wasn't enough space in the lab, and I hadn't started doing any synthesis yet. Then "they" made us move office - twice, in the space of a week. I didn't bother to go in during this because my sleep patterns were screwed up; also, the email I got was after the event, which pissed me off since if they'd sent it 12 hours earlier, I could have moved my own stuff. Dragged myself in yesterday (which I could do with congratulations for) only to find they have actually bought us new desks!! and almost all of the furniture from the old office has disappeared. (We still have the same crappy broken chairs though - I'd have preferred to keep my old desk and have a new chair). I've lost the contents of my old desk because the drawers were locked - though it's only a box of tea, packet of paracetamol & box of sanitary towels, so not the end of the world. But I'm rather concerned about what's happened to the lab chair - which belongs to me not to College, cost rather a lot of money, and was funded through Student Finance England. They're not going to pay for another chair if some idiots at College have thrown the old one out!

And no, I don't need advice about this just yet. I know who to talk to. It's just an underlying worry to go on top of all my usual anxiety.

Random thought: Did the improvement in my PMS symptoms coincide with a general improvement in my mental health, or when I finally gave up the struggle to digest animal milk and switched over entirely to soy? Or both? Could phytoestrogens from soya be relieving the splat in my own oestrogen production?

Interesting link of the day:
Monogamy gene found in people, New Scientist, 01 September 2008, 22:00. Where "people" = men in opposite-sex relationships. I'm a little uncertain how this is relevant to ethical non-monogamy or polyamory - you could hardly call me a "serial commitment-phobe" considering that I have three committed relationships - if anything, I'm a "concurrent commitment-phile"! Nor how it relates to a bisexual woman. Anyway, link posted for interest.

Terrifying link of the day:
Bipolar disorder 'shrinks brain', BBC News, Friday, 20 July 2007, 01:28 GMT. MRI scans of the brains of 20 patients with bipolar disorder and an equal number of volunteers without the condition shows that while everyone loses brain tissue in the areas controlling memory, face recognition and co-ordination, the loss is worse for people who are bipolar, and worst for those who had the most episodes of mania and depression.