health

  • In the Darkness of Hope

    In the Darkness of Hope

    A bittersweet day. I finished my episode of care with Dr Black and after that, went to my last day of IOP, where I graduated silently. I have all kinds of mixed emotions. At least I am feeling again, at least somewhat. I feel a nervous sense of trepidation, like a kid learning to ride

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  • My Shitty Mental Health

    My Shitty Mental Health

    I am so upset and frustrated with myself. I finally got some sleep…and slept right on through IOP Thursday morning. I was just going to take a nap… It was an important day too. The final wrap up for distress tolerance and and all the skills therein. The most important module and day of IOP,

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 10, Distress Tolerance, Self-Soothe, SAD

    I’ve made it to week 10 and an important part of IOP, maybe the most important for me – distress tolerance. This is the key to hopefully preventing relapse, or at least violent detainment. This morning the first skill the therapist wanted to go over was self-soothing, or small acts in the moment that ground

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  • Tales from the Floor

    Tales from the Floor

    There is little I can do about my reasonable accommodation request over the weekend, but I do have a phone number to call, or I can try to navigate their portal from a work computer. I figure I’ll just call them and expedite it, because I’ve already worked the floor once. I’ve been doing this

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  • Reasonable Accommodation?

    Reasonable Accommodation?

    Day three of orientation for my new job – also the last day. I had clinical content, part of a whole slew of legal regulatory requirements. I wasn’t thinking much of it – it’s all review, I’ve been doing this 15 years – till the instructor got to restraints and whipped them out in front

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  • Justice and Mental Health

    Justice and Mental Health

    I’ve completed the health screening for my new part time renal care job. I have latent TB and completed a course of rifampin to ensure I never develop an infection and that always raises eyebrows when you do patient care, so I had to bring all my documentation for that and hope they don’t make

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 7, Wise Mind, Gratitude

    I can’t believe it, but I finished week seven of intensive outpatient DBT therapy today. The focus is mindfulness for the next few weeks, peppered with shorter concepts to bolster the much larger concept of mindfulness. Today that was gratitude and the “wise mind.” Our minds exist on spectrums. On one end is the strictly

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  • Hypomania, IOP assessment

    Hypomania, IOP assessment

    Trying to sum up the last few days is difficult. My mind has been all over the place, my energy high, my libido even higher. We closed out emotion regulation in IOP, the end of week six for me. Riley the therapist wanted to see me after. I’m at roughly the one-month mark and it

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 6, Emotion Regulation, Cope Ahead

    I can hardly believe it, but I am nearly half completed with IOP. That comes with a lot of feelings – I’m worried I have not learned and properly incorporated the material enough or as well as the others, and I’m scared at the thought of being cut loose. I have to do this, I

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  • “Knock knock…nursing!”

    “Knock knock…nursing!”

    I am exhausted! But I am also damn good at what I do. I didn’t mean to be, it just happened organically. I’ve been at my local VA hospital as a lowly CNA for ten years, with the help of supported employment and a case manager. I started working for an agency back in January

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