Think of your body as a balloon filled with water, and that water is a collection of all of your emotions, fears, tragedies, and pain that have accrued over your lifetime. As more "bad" things happen in your life, little holes are poked into that balloon, with water slowly seeping out but still able to be covered up with a piece of tape. Then one day enough holes are poked that the balloon breaks and the water comes rushing out, surrounding you and filling the space around you until you are up to your neck in hopelessness, struggling to take whatever tiny breaths you can find.
That's what depression is like.
I know I've written about my battle with depression and anxiety in the past. And I know that I've always wrapped up each story with a happy- or at least hopeful- little bow. But that's not reality. And unfortunately, the past year and a half shoved reality down my throat.
2020 was obviously an unprecedented year for everyone. Friday, March 13th brought questions that had no answers, and we all just had to buckle up and hope we didn't get thrown off the ride. But my ride started in January of that year.
I was finally in a place where I felt like things were coming together. I had a good job and was making enough money to comfortably support myself. I had saved up enough to soon be able to put a down payment on my own house. I was in a new relationship that I already knew was The One. I had a new nephew who was (and still is) the love of my life and the coolest little best friend I've ever had. I was at last able to see the light at the end of the tunnel peaking on through.
On Thursday, January 23rd, I woke up to get ready for work. I was eating some oatmeal for breakfast when I felt the left side of my jaw lock up. I didn't become too concerned because ever since I had gotten my wisdom teeth out the year or so before this had started happening. Normally I would drink some water and my jaw would unlock, or worst case scenario I would go to my oral surgeon, he would prescribe me some steroids, and in a day or two I'd be good to go. I remember continuing to eat my oatmeal when my jaw suddenly unlocked itself and then quickly locked up again.
"Well this is annoying", I thought.
I finished getting ready for work, called my oral surgeon, got an appointment for that afternoon, and headed into the office. I worked, went to the surgeon's office, got prescribed the same steroids that worked last time, and went on my merry way.
A few days later the steroids still hadn't worked. My jaw was locked so tightly that I could barely fit a straw in my mouth. I don't know how to describe the pain to someone who hasn't dealt with acute TMJ and lockjaw, but it's excruciating. It travels down your neck, up to your head, and into your ear. You guys- it hurts so bad, trust me on this one.
Cut to another visit to the oral surgeon where they took some x-rays, saw that things were super fucked up, and sent in a request for an MRI. He explained to me that we wanted to do everything possible before having to resort to surgery because that was 100% the final option that we did not want to have to do. Unfortunately, I got a Letter of Denial in the mail from my insurance company, saying they wouldn't help cover the cost of the MRI because they didn't deem it to be a "medical necessity" for lockjaw.
I called my surgeon, explained the letter, and basically was told that surgery was now my only option (kinda felt like I was given up on, but whatever). I was given the name of a doctor down at Penn that I was to contact for a surgical consultation. So I gave them a call, thinking I would be able to schedule the consultation within the next week. It had already been a few days since my jaw locked and I was in absolute misery. The receptionist at Penn told me that their next available appointment was March 19th. I made the appointment, hung up, and cried. Two months I had to live like this.
At the suggestion of my oral surgeon, I went to physical therapy where they were able to open my jaw a few centimeters; enough to be able to open wide enough to fit some food in. The copay was astronomical, to the point where both the receptionist and the doctor checked with me every time if I really wanted to keep doing this. I thought it would be worth it, so I continued.
After waiting for two months, I was six days away from my appointment when the world shut down. I received a call from Penn saying they had to reschedule my appointment to April. In April I got a call saying all non-life threatening appointments were being canceled indefinitely.
As of today, my jaw has remained locked for the past 1 year, 4 months, and 2 days. The bone structure of my face has changed completely. My nose and mouth have been pulled to the left as the tendons in my jaw get tighter and tighter. There has not been a single day where I haven't woken up in pain and gone to bed in pain. I have headaches 90% of the time and it feels like my inner ear is being demolished. I haven't been able to properly kiss my fiancee since the second week of our relationship. I haven't been able to eat anything bigger than a cookie without cutting it up into tiny pieces, or taking little mouse nibbles out of it.
The whole thing is enough to make a person go mad.
Doing everything in my power to fix this should have been my top priority this past year. However, starting in March, it had to take a back seat.
I was laid off from my job a week after the pandemic unofficially hit the US. I knew it was beyond the control of my employer, but I was so angry and so hurt. Losing a job that you put everything you had into takes away you self-worth and makes you feel useless. I saw the office that had become my second home float away. I saw the house I was so close to being able to buy- on my own, by myself- float away with it. I saw my steady income crash and burn.
I went on unemployment along with so many others and felt like a piece of crap for the following months. I knew that there was an overwhelming amount of people who were in the same boat as me, but personally, I didn't know one single other person who had lost their job. I felt like a fucking loser.
In April my man moved in and that went shockingly well. Spending the first year of your relationship living together in a teeny tiny, one bedroom one bathroom apartment while one of you worked from home and the other didn't work at all can make you or break you. It made us.
Some family drama happened over the summer which I'm not going to get into because believe it or not, I do keep some things to myself.
Then came September. A couple years ago I wrote about the miscarriage I had, and while I was totally overwhelmed by the response I got from some people, I was also overwhelmed in a bad way by the response I got from others. I was accused of telling my story for attention and even making the whole thing up. Some said that since it happened around the holidays, I was ruining peoples' Christmas. Sorry, I guess? I'll try to schedule my next personal trauma at a time that works better for people.
Anyway, September. That next personal trauma came. Started feeling not right, like last time. Got this weird feeling in my lower abdomen, like last time. Luckily, not as much pain as last time. Long story short- and I'll try to make this as least gross as possible- went to the bathroom, stood up, and what I saw told me two things:
1) That right there is a very small, very early little baby
2) I had definitely been farther along than the first time
I called my Ob/gyn, whose practice had been taken over by the worst people of all time. The doctors themselves were still amazing, but everything else about this place was the pits. I miraculously got a hold of a nurse after leaving a few voicemails, and after I explained what had happened and that it had happened before- thinking she would agree that I should come in for an appointment- she told me to call back when I had a positive pregnancy test and an actual pregnancy.
Oh.
I hung up with her and then immediately called back to the front desk to try and make an appointment anyway. I got put on a waiting list and told it would be a few months.
So I did the only thing I could think to do. I asked people close to me that had also suffered miscarriages if what I thought happened, happened. I went online and looked at pictures and timelines. All conversations, all medical websites, all signs pointed to yes, yes yes. The entire time I didn't even really feel sad. All I could think was, 'I hope this doesn't happen every time'.
Near the end of November I got hit with a heavier than normal bought of depression and anxiety. There was no real rhyme or reason; I mean, I had had a shit year. Shittier than normal even. But I was used to still being able to push everything down and put on a smile and crack some jokes and go about my day. I went to my general practitioner because I had also been feeling lousier than normal physically. I feel sick every day; this we know. My doctor once told me that basically every morning I wake up feeling like someone who is in their first trimester of pregnancy. But now I was at a point where on top of my usual yuckiness, there was a whole new wave of super-yuckiness.
So I went to my doctor. It was my first time seeing her because my pervious GP had retired. I didn't realize that Dr. B also had a degree in mental health. By the end of the visit, I was practically in tears because she had asked me questions that nobody had ever asked me, and made me admit to myself things that I had never admitted. She used the word 'Trauma' which I had always been afraid to use for myself because I felt there were people that deserved that word more than I did and I didn't want to take that away from them. She used the words "Abuse" and "Victim" and "Disorder" and "Chemically..." and "Mentally...". For the first time ever I felt justified and, in a weird way, empowered.
She suggested therapy. She suggested medication. I started to resist as these things hadn't helped before. She said, "Try again".
She left the room for a few moments and then came back with a handwritten lists of therapists, what they specialize in, their addresses, and their phone numbers. She had done the work for me because she cared. She was an angel.
I went home and called every person on the list. Voicemail, voicemail, voicemail, not taking new patients, voicemail. Ok, I'll wait a couple days and try again.
December 1st I woke up and I knew I was done for. A feeling I couldn't even grasp at was bearing down on me. I didn't want to kill myself, but I didn't want to be alive. I wanted to lay down and it to be over.
For the past eleven years, Kirby has been the only thing that has consistently given me a reason to wake up in the morning. On December 1st it was hard to even hold onto that.
I called every therapist on the list to see if by some miracle they were willing to let someone who wasn't a patient come in that day. All of them said no. These are all 100% real answers that I got:
"I don't take insurance so you wouldn't be able to afford it"
"No one is taking new patients right now"
"I mean, you could but we'd have to do all the intake paperwork and I don't think either of us really feel like doing that"
I called my insurance company to see how much it would cost to go to the Emergency Room. I called one of those toll-free numbers that I found on the hospital website. It went to voicemail.
Every therapist I spoke to, every voicemail I got, told me to go to the ER. So I did.
My fiancee dropped me off (he wasn't allowed to come in, even though he wanted to), and I walked in alone. I went to the front desk, and said quietly so the PACKED waiting room couldn't hear, "I'm having some problems with depression".
"What?" The nurse asked.
I had to repeat myself 3 times, louder and louder each time, before she understood me. It was humiliating.
I went and found one of the few empty seats I could find. Social distancing be damned, this place was a mad house. We were packed in like sardines, with people coughing, moaning, screaming into their phones. A very elderly woman in a wheelchair behind me was straight up wailing that she was afraid to die.
I got called into triage and explained why I was there. They looked confused and asked me what I wanted them to do. I said I didn't know, all I knew is that I was depressed beyond repair and had been told over and over to go to the ER. The nurse sent me back out into the waiting room, then a few minutes later called me over and took me upstairs to a smaller waiting room that only had a couple of other people in there.
"You don't need to be around the sick people down there", she said.
I waited there for awhile and finally a young medical student came and brought me into the physical therapy room. He asked why I was there, I told him, and he wrote down some notes. Then he got a doctor who came in smiling, sat down across from me, and said, "So! How'd our boy do?"
After giving him a progress report about his student though tears, I explained to my 4th stranger that day why I was there. He said they didn't have a mental health unit. I said that their website said differently. He said, "Huh, strange".
He told me he could give me Xanax. I told him I didn't want Xanax. I'd been prescribed Xanax before and I hated it.
He told me there was nothing they could do for me. He handed me a small flyer the size of a post-it that had a suicide hotline number on it. He sent me home.
The next day I went to my mom's house and I can't even describe the state I was in. I was crying in decibels I didn't know I had in me.
She finally called my new GP, Dr. B, and explained what happened. Dr. B sent in a very small prescription of Lexapro for me and told me to take my first one the next day.
The next day I took my first pill and a sense of euphoria totally washed over me, I don't even care how cheesy that sounds. I was SO FUCKING PROUD of myself for taking a step towards...what- recovery? Happiness? A life worth living? SOMETHING. A step towards something.
That pill and Dr. B. saved my life. She had bi-weekly follow-ups with me until she ultimately retired this February. She encouraged me and kept me on track. I started therapy and kept taking that beautiful little medicinal miracle.
It kept me on track when my grandmother died in the middle of December.
It kept me on track when, after my beloved family vet of over 30 years passed away, I took Kirby in for routine ear drops and the vet that took over whisked him in the back, ran a bunch of tests and bloodwort without telling me, charged me $500, lied about the severity of his heart murmur, and then told me if I don't let her perform a $2,000 surgery Kirby would die and it would be my fault.
It kept me on track when I got an astronomical bill for my physical therapy that I wasn't expecting because my co-pay had already been so high, and it had been almost a year since I had therapy.
It kept me on track when I also got multiple bills for my useless ER visit which added up to thousands of dollars.
It kept me on track when it was time to get a new health insurance plan and things kept getting messed up because my last name is a nightmare for people to keep straight- something that normally would have caused me stress beyond belief.
It kept me on track when my old job called me back on part-time and for the first time in a year I was back working.
It kept me on track when the best man in the entire world asked me to be his wife and we then found ourself trying our best to plan a wedding during Covid.
It kept me on track to step out of my comfort zone and actually talk to people about what I went through, instead of holding it all in. And I realized that there are SO MANY MORE people than I thought that rely on a little extra somethin' to help them get through each day. And those people are smart and beautiful and talented and amazing.
My depression has cost me a lot, both figuratively and literally. But I will forever be thankful for hitting rock bottom because it allowed me to fill up a new balloon. Yeah, this balloon isn't perfect. It still has a couple of holes. But my god it already feels so much better.
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