I decided to start a new blog to kinda separate my migraine and depression stories from the rest of my blogging stuff. Some of my lovely friends helped me come up with the name It's All in My head! Just in case someone new ventures in, I wanted to start out by kinda going back and explaining how we got to where we are now. So let's go back a few years.
My mom said looking back I probably had more headaches than normal as a kid. Not enough to really be overly concerned about it. I would either go home and sleep it off or the school nurse would give me some tylenol and I would go about my day. I wasn't diagnosed with actual migraines until around 2005-2006. I was working my first actual full time, adult job. It was VERY stressful. I just thought I had a headache all the time. I started tracking the headaches on a calendar. I got insurance through my job and started seeing a dr. He was pretty shocked with the headaches so we started the journey of trying different medications, doing CT scans, etc. During this time I also had just gotten married, moved into an apartment, and went through an unexpected early miscarriage. There were a lot of changes going on in my life during this time, and all of that played a big part in my mental and physical health.
When Jacob, my husband, and I decided we wanted to start trying to get pregnant, I figured it would be easy. You just assume it's something that will naturally happen. But it didn't. I have PCOS. Month after month we tried and failed. During this time I got very depressed. I started taking prozac, at a low dose. I thought infertility was the reason for the depression. I had 2 more miscarriages. Still having debilitating migraines during this time. I still had a stressful job. I was missing a lot of work between migraines and depression. My depression manifests in me being physically unable to get out of bed. I just can't. I don't want to brush my teeth, shower, eat...nothing. I finally got pregnant. But to my surprise, the depression didn't go away. One day I had a mild panic attack at work. Long story short, I ended up losing my job. It was for the best, as I ended up on home bed rest, and then hospital bedrest. Alexia Rosemay came early and spent 9 days in the NICU. The day she finally came home I ended up back in the ER that night with super high blood pressure and a killer migraine. I got to go back home to her the next day. Being a stay at home mom was so so hard. I wanted so deeply to be the kind of mom that loved it. But I couldn't. She had colic. I felt like she hated me. I needed out of the house. I had post partum depression and no one noticed it. On her 9 month birthday Jacob came home for lunch. When he went back to work I started having a panic attack and just felt so irrational and out of control. Something inside me just knew that he wasn't going to come back. I grabbed as many tylenol pm as I could fit in my hand and I was ready to swallow them. I just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. I called him crying. He rushed back home and immediately took me to the ER. I started seeing a therapist. Got some new medication. Started feeling a lot better and more in control of my emotions.
That was February 2010. Since then you could describe it exactly like a roller coaster. Up and down. Up and down. With the migraines and depression. Medication works great for a while and then it starts to fail. So we start dropping down, down, down, until we hit the bottom and have to figure out a way to start pulling ourselves back up.
I can't even count the number of CT scans and MRI's I've had. I have a hard time remembering all the antidepressants I've been on. And all the migraine "prevention" medicines I've tried. All the "rescue meds."
In 2011 we bought our first home. We also found out we were expecting our second baby. That pregnancy was also filled with lots of migraines and bedrest. I knew what to watch for in my recovery time so I feel like it was a lot smoother this time around.
Around the end of 2016 I noticed the effexor I was taking for the depression was not working that well anymore. I was having a harder time doing the things I enjoy. Lack of interest is a big indicator for me. But, coming off of effexor is so hard and I felt like it would be harder for me to go through that than to suck it up and try to push through the low time.
((((sidenote::for as long as I can remember it has been hard for me to fall asleep and stay asleep. I have built up a tolerance to everything. Benadryl, ambien, I've tried it all. I can take a horse tranquilizer and go to work and be fine.)))
I was working weird hours, getting off early in the afternoon, so I would come home and drink like a bottle of robitussin and go to sleep for a few hours. I didn't do it to feel high or whatever. I did it to sleep. When I'm depressed, all I want to do is sleep. I'm not trying to downplay what I did. I know it was stupid. I'm just explaining my reasoning.
February 2, 2017 I was just done. I took a bunch of pills, robtussin, and ambien. Planned to be asleep before Jacob and the kids got home. But they got home and I woke up. I honestly don't remember what happened that night. But I know it was bad. Jacob was scared. He didn't know what to do. He wanted to call 911, but he didn't want them to take me away. So he just laid in bed next to me. So I tried to lie and say I didn't know what happened. Because it's embarrassing to tell someone that you tried to kill yourself and you couldn't even do that right!!! But I finally did tell him. I wanted to die. I wanted to be gone before he got home. I think this post is getting too long, but in the next post I will explain more about being at rock bottom and pulling myself back up to where I am now 9 months later.
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