17/05/2010
Apart from the fact that I feel a little breaky-downy every now and again, like at the drop-of-a-hat kind of now-and-again, I also have these weird druggie stages where I feel like I’m floating...in a sewer.
This of course might wholly be attributed to the sleeping tablets my new psychiatrist prescribed for me along with some new, non-placebo antidepressants.
Oh, a psychiatrist you say?
She’s from Poland...but she’s been living here for like 29 years, I think she said, but she still managed to retain her very strong gypsy-esque accent.
Which I thought was fantastic.
I’ve always wanted to go to a fortune-teller.
(I predict that you will go even crazier over time)
I’ve never wanted to go to a psychiatrist but if she poses as a clairvoyant I might be interested.
So I went.
She lives in a wooden cottage at the foot of the Drakensberg, she doesn’t use any electricity and has lost most of her teeth.
That was a lie. She has all her teeth, but they’re badly stained from drinking so much root-of-something tea.
Okay, it’s all lies.
She lives far, far away (Centurion) in a cosy little apartment (security complex) and has all her teeth (pearly-white).
I felt like smoking fists-full of cigarettes on the way there (and did) and by the time I was in the waiting room I wanted to sob helplessly over said cigarettes while I’m at it.
Don’t ask me why this always happens whenever someone’s going to be asking questions, it just does and I don’t seem to have much control over it...or anything for that matter...I hate my life.
So I went to see the nice gypsy-shrink who offered me some coffee (no thanks, I’m scared of suddenly developing caffeine-induced schizophrenia and I really don’t need that right now).
And then she sat me down in a very hot little room with skew paintings on the walls, yargh! (Must not jump up and correct painting, must not...)
I was starting to get those awful red blotches that happen at random points in time, yet another thing I have no control over.
Who needs polygraph-tests when your own body finds outing you to be unutterable funny?
She started asking some standard questions (I could see she’s done this before) but at some point one of my answers must have alerted her to the fact that I am undeniably weird, because she started looking intently at me with every question, narrowing her eyes, sometimes even tilting her head a little and saying “REALly?” and “oh my”.
Now, luckily this was no new experience for me since people have been doing it my whole life, usually ending the conversation with a dead-pan: “You’re weird”.
My best friend (who was, and still is, decidedly unorthodox) and I had this in common and started assuring each other that it’s definitely a compliment.
Why be normal, right?
The she-shrink, fitfully wrote everything I said down, even the fact that I have occasional sinusitis and hay fever (maybe that’s why I’m anxious, I can’t breathe!) and at some point even whipped out a calculator! Maybe she was tallying all the money she was going to rake in from publishing my case-study globally.
At some point I had to confess to being totally insane and dramatically burst into staggering tears, whereas she looked suitably alarmed and didn’t waste any time prescribing lots of strong yet delicious drugs. She also handed me a box of tissues which I promptly aligned with the edge of her desk.
“I...I can see this is really affecting you illmien, but don’t worry, I’ll help you”, she said, sounding a little like an uncertain Russian dominatrix. The fact that she called me illmien made perfect sense to me.
I was worried about getting morbidly obese on the stuff as I’ve done lots of research about everything on the planet for fear of it happening to me, and this was the common consensus of that particular medication. It can also allegedly (horrors) keep you from being able to...um...climax, which might make me want to kill myself a little more, rather than less.
Especially if my husband runs off with another, less morbidly obese, wildly orgasmic woman.
The Pole assured me that she’s been on the same tablet for years and “has a perfectly functional sex life” and hasn’t noticed any weight gain.
“Yes, Doctor, but do you eat starch?”
“Very little”
“How about pizza?”
“No”
“Cheeseburgers?”
“I’m afraid not”
Aw fudge.
I mean fuck (it’s less fattening).
Of course this was before I knew that apart from turning relatively attractive, depressed women into huge, sexually frustrated but stable women, these tablets were also designed to make you feel pregnant.
Which isn’t all that much more comfortable.
But as I told my sister, over my morning cup of wine, at least I’m too tired to go crazy some more.
The good doctor also instructed me to have my thyroid (ugh, I have a tyroid gland!) tested just to be sure it isn’t glandular. Maybe that can also conveniently explain my soon-to-be expanding midriff.
Which could mean that whenever I order the fried calamari instead of the grilled calamari and the slit-eyed, castrati waiter asks me if I’m sure about that, I can bark “It’s glandular, you son-of-a-scum-pig!” at him. And then maybe lob a piece of complimentary (buttered) bread at his (weak) chin.
So, knowing that I am craziest of all when it comes to narrow, silvery things penetrating my throbbing arm to draw out gallons of the stuff that my heart pumps around so it can ferry stuff to other stuff...I’m getting nauseous again.
Deep breaths...
So, knowing all that, I went directly to a pharmacy (with a nurse and everything) and secured an appointment to have some blood dr....you know what I mean.
I did it as early in the morning as possible, so I’m not fully awake yet, hoping I’ll wake up on the way home and would have forgotten all about the abomination I had just unwittingly endured.
Now, please understand, it’s not about pain. I have no problems with pain, as long as it’s not my appendix bursting, a heart-attack or a sneaky, latent brain-tumour that causes involuntary facial spasms (touch wood). Oh and absolutely NO emotional pain will be tolerated.
But a pinprick is nothing.
It’s...it’s the idea.
Now, for some reason while I’m thinking I’ll be fine because I haven’t woken up yet, the nurse always thinks I’ll be fine as long as she fires off mindless question after mindless question, e.g.
“SO, what do you do for a living?” which in itself has an extremely complicated answer at the moment.
Trying to explain to her that I want to be a writer but have been stuffing around as an oral hygienist for seven years and understand that she must hate doctors because they make all the money, blah blah blah I get all confused and start babbling about how much I love nurses because they rock at drawing blah...... and this is the point at which they shoot a shocked expression at me and start steering me towards a bed whilst pushing my head between my knees and I’m thinking was it something I said? just before I embarrassingly pass out.
It usually doesn’t take me much longer than say ten minutes to recover but when I walk out the nurse will glance sceptically at my pierced nose and the tattoo peeking out on my back and shake her head in a perplexed fashion.
I haven’t gotten the results back but I bet my thyroid gland is fine...
Must not think about glands!
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