Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I sort of feel like I am trying to slog through mud. I’m tired. Everything feels so heavy and difficult. It does not help that I am at work, loaded with around 25 patients because I’m the only CNA. The nurses helped out a lot with vitals but there are a lot of them, and they are fragile and I have to somehow keep them all clean and turned and all of that…

In the morning I have to get yet another mammogram. I’ve had two already, six months ago. There is a large mass or lump under the dense tissue of my left breast. They want to look at it again. I suppose I have to do these every six months while it sits in there. And I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it. For now, I don’t really care, I’ll wait for it to do something.

But that leads to my paranoia. It’s getting worse. Like my phobia of heights, I have a growing and gnawing sense of fear toward the medical system. It takes me a lot of will to go to these appointments. I have all these fears of associated things like drain tubes – I see a lot of those – and medical situations like kidney injury or damage. I work a nephrology floor. It reinforces my already established wish to remain a DNI despite my age. I don’t want to live a life of disability and illness. I guess we all fear that but the real fear for me is losing capacity. It’s already happened to me once before, and the medical system detained me for lack of capacity. This was maddening to me. From my point of view, I was of sound mind. But they said I wasn’t and they had all the power.

Every day I worry about it. About aging. About my bipolar. My depression and anxiety. My anxiety makes me anxious. I’m taking my meds and trying to remember all that therapy, all that work to prevent something like a total psychotic breakdown from ever happening again. But I realize I can’t totally prevent it. The fear is ever present.