I Will Not Suffer In Silence

Bold text is mine to emphasise where I have problems with this job.

Organizer: HR
To: me and the rest of the group scheduled to go on a certain day and time
Subject: [name omitted] Volunteer Event
Sent: Tue 3/20/2007 5:14 PM

Hi everyone,
We are partnering up with [name omitted] for our mandatory, companywide community service event.
…As volunteers we might be doing some of the following activities: compost making, mulching, planting, and irrigation work. This is an outdoor volunteer event, so you should wear clothes and shoes that can get dirty! It has been muddy on their grounds because of the recent rains too. Please wear closed-toe shoes, and I recommend dressing in layers. If it’s warm, you should also bring sunscreen and a hat.

…I hope you all enjoy this volunteer event!

I went on the outing and worked in the sun for two hours, coated in sunblock. After this event, I called the state and federal job boards to see if this is legal. It’s legal to send employees on company time to a charity event and it’s legal to fire them if they don’t comply, because the job and the state I live in are classified as “at-will” employment, which I’ve described before.
What isn’t legal is not paying me for mileage reimbursement, since I had to drive my own car to and from the event.

From: HR
Sent: Mon 4/2/2007 9:53 AM
To: the crew including myself designated to attend
Subject: [place omitted] Details!

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to remind you that you are signed up for tomorrow’s Hidden Villa event from 2pm – 4:30pm. As I mentioned before, this is an outdoor volunteer event, so you should wear clothes and shoes that can get dirty! Please wear closed-toe shoes, and I recommend dressing in layers. You should consider bringing sunscreen and a hat. The event will happen rain or shine.

…Don’t forget to bring the volunteer release form with you tomorrow too.

The release form stated that the company I work for is not responsible should I become harmed on this mandatory “volunteer” outing.

From: me
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:58 AM
To: senior management guy
Subject: Mileage reimbursement form

Hello [name omitted],

[HR] referred me to you – I’m looking for a mileage reimbursement form so I can turn in my mileage to and from [mandatory “volunteer” event].

From: senior management guy
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 9:45 AM
To: me
Subject: RE: Mileage reimbursement form

I checked it out and we don’t re-imburse mileage for this.

I wrote my boss and said that next time we have a mandatory “volunteer” event, I will want to drive the company car to and from the event.

In reality, I may be fired for non-compliance because I don’t want to attend another mandatory “volunteer” event.

From: my boss
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 10:18 AM
To: me
Subject: Dedicated Email Time

As we are in Code Red Status again with SLAs, we are going to need everyone on taking calls all day.

So, for the time being, we are going to be cancelling dedicated offline times for emails.

Once the new temp hires get ramped up, things should be back to normal. Though, eventually, I would like for your to be able to handle phones/emails at the same time.

Do you feel that you can handle phones and the email volume without dedicated time? I feel that you are fairly knowledgable with the programs now, that you can fit in emails during/between calls. Otherwise, OT on emails, is always available.

If you think you need help/tips, I would be glad to ridealong with you for a couple of hours and give you some pointers on how to get through emails/phones at once.

I have known this is expected of me since week one on the job, but I do not have the type of brain they are asking for – that is, I cannot be listening to a customer describe their problem on the phone and troubleshoot it while also researching another customer’s issue who has written in via email. This, if not my eventual attitude, will be the cause of my firing.

From: my boss
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 4:11 PM
To: the team I’m on
Subject: Code Red Meeting Notes

[one of the points taken from this email is]:

NO MORE “My manager is telling me to get off the phone.”

They used to be big on having us get customers off the phone by pushing them to email support. If a call lasted more than six minutes, the timer on the call turned red and after ten minutes, we’d have a manager messaging us to see if we needed help with the call.
So ok, I’m all about giving the customer the phone time they need to resolve their issue – some are better listeners than they would be following email instructions.

BUT, this was the same week that the company cut over from one customer service ticketing system to another, and the emails from the old system got duplicated – existing AND closed tickets. This flooded the new system with over 2000 emails. So the same week we’re encouraged to give the customers the phone time they need, we’re being told again that we need to push them to email.

From: my boss
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:17 AM
To: the team I’m on
Subject: Code-Red: Mandatory Overtime

Hi all –

We are still in a huge hole with the our current volume. We are fully staffed – 35 people – so we should be able to knock out the volume if everyone works at least 1 hour of OT each day.

We appreciate all of those who have been working OT these past few weeks, but now we need everyone’s help.

We have over 2000 unanswered tickets that need to be cleared. Our Queues should be zeroed out daily.

Our SLAs were at 33% yesterday.

Overtime can be done during lunch or before/after normal work hours.

I opted to work overtime on my lunch hour.

From: my boss
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 9:53 AM
To: the team I’m on
Subject: Mandatory OT: Can’t be Lunch

Hi guys –

Mandatory OT cannot be during lunch anymore since we are required by law to give everyone a 1/2 hour lunch.

From now on, all OT must be done before or after normal work hours.

That same day, I began seriously looking for a new job again, rather than every now and then looking at job leads. I signed back up on the job boards.

From: my boss
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 10:35 AM
To: the team I’m on
Subject: Work From Home – this weekend

Hello Guys –

We need to clear out our ticket backlog asap, so we are looking for volunteers to work on Tickets from home this weekend.

…Please let me know if you’re interested!!

I wasn’t interested. However, two hours later…and notice this falls on FRIDAY AFTERNOON…

From: my boss
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 12:54 PM
To: the team I’m on
Subject: RE: Work From Home – this weekend

Hi guys –

This is actually mandatory for everyone this weekend.

Please complete at least 25 tickets this weekend from home.

…If you have any conflicts, please let me know, so we can work something out.

Included in that mail were instructions on programs to download on one’s home machine. I noticed they were Microsoft Windows applications. I wrote back to say I have a windowless household – that is to say, I only use Macintosh and Linux at home. I got out of working the weekend from home, but it didn’t stop me from nearly having a panic attack from the job stress. I had to take a Lorazepam and walk away from my desk for several minutes to calm down and breathe.

When I got back to my desk, the managers began popping my screen. In case I didn’t explain that well enough before, popping one’s screen means that they are using remote viewing software to log into my machine and see every action on my desktop. I know when they are logging in because the WinVNC.exe application becomes active in the Task Manager, which I keep open in my system tray. This boiled my blood. I say no and they think I’m slacking off? I work on average 96 hours in my two-week pay period, every week. SO SCREW THEM!

So I typed what. into the ticketing system window instead of documenting a call, and let it sit there like that for about ten seconds. The manager who was popping my screen then left my computer. I’m sure a screenshot was taken and sent to my manager. That’s what they do to prove you were fecking off instead of working, in order to fire you.

So this coming week, I may be fired.

Instead of working from home, I opted to add another hour of overtime, on a Friday evening, to get through as many emails as I could. I got through 20, just five short of what they wanted. Hopefully this will appease them.

I’m about to have another panic attack, I swear. This place is now ranked as WORSE than Excite@Home. I had previously ranked that as the worst place I’d ever worked for. Now this job has the title.

I spent all of Friday evening and all of Saturday on Tylenol 3 and a heating pad for the pain – just like old times. I was ok Sunday until late afternoon and then I needed more Tylenol 3 for the pain. I went to bed with a heating pad.

I needed a total of 2 Ibuprofen 800mg pills to get through the workday yesterday, and I struggled through work today on 1 Ibuprofen 800mg pill because I ran out of my portable stash. As soon as I was on my way home, I popped a Tylenol 3. My arms and back felt like they were going to seize up on the way home, because I’d been steeling against the pain all day, so I popped *another* Tylenol 3 when I was just minutes from home.

Since Friday night, I’ve been bleeding like a stuck pig. Again, just like old times. I’ve even had the shooting anal pains.

I only had ONE month free of george since surgery.

I am NOT going to try out any other hormone pills. Call me stubborn if you like. I can’t go through the mental anguish again. In my heart I *know* all hormone pills will affect me the way Loestrin did in 1990 and the way Yasmin did in 2007.

I called my surgeon today to let her know I’m no longer suicidal, but that all the old pain is back. I asked if she would give consent for me to join the Oakland Cannabis Club for medical marijuana (you need doctor approval to join). She refused, citing she doesn’t know the long term effects of Cannabis or if it actually helps one with medical issues. Great, so she’s in that camp.
She recommended accupuncture. Ok, fine, I’ve been saying I’ll try that for the pain, too.

I’m so sick of this. I don’t want to be a hospital patient all my life. I’m tired of doctors. I’m tired of being sick and I’m tired of the whole world knowing when I’m on my period because I have to explain *why* I’m doubled over or missing work or having to go for surgery or can’t go out with friends or I’m stoned silly on Tylenol 3.

Many years ago, when I was still a teenager, I didn’t tell people I was on my period. I just told people I was in a lot of pain if they asked what was wrong. People to this day can’t see a physical reason for my pain – they just see me suddenly steeling against it. And to this day I don’t tell *everyone* the reason for my pain, because I feel some people are too easily squicked by details or are too Midwestern or Southern, if that makes sense. People who don’t want to know about it because females don’t talk about such things.
I can usually tell the type and adjust my reply accordingly if someone asks if I’m okay.

I’ve noticed though that whenever I *don’t* tell people I have a medical condition, that they get a look or an air about them that says I’m some kind of drama queen to be expressing pain in public without a physical open gaping wound of some sort. I’ve noticed the same judgemental reaction for years from people if, when they ask what’s wrong with me, I reply with something like, “I have pain – it’s too much to go in detail about.”
Instantly, I’m a drama queen.

But it IS too much to go into detail about.

General people on the street don’t want to hear a fecking story – most of them don’t have much of an attention span.

General people on the street also don’t want TMI. They don’t want to know that “it’s a girl thing”.

In all honesty, strangers and cow-orkers don’t ask if I’m okay because they care. They just want me to stop looking painful or unhappy and therefore causing drama.

If I sense someone actually does care, I’ll tell them about Endometriosis.

The director of the department I work in, for example, wanted to know the reason for my surgery, and expressed genuine concern. When I told him, I found out his wife also has Endometriosis. He asked how I was doing today and I was honest. He looked concerned. He understands because his wife goes though it. He told me to hang in there.

I’m not a terminal patient. I’m not in 24/7/365 pain. But once a month, I’m screwed for five to seven days at the least. I miss work for up to 3 days every month because of the pain. I get moderate pre-menstrual pain for up to a week before the actual bedridden pain. The pre-menstrual pain is not enough to make me miss work but it’s enough to have me take 600-800mg of Ibuprofen and be really uncomfortable.

My entire life is affected by this disease. I went on an exclusive women’s group 66-mile bicycle ride in 2002 and the disease hit me smack in the middle of the ride. I’ll be having a lovely intimate evening with my man, only to end up crying from pain associated with this disease, and it doesn’t matter what time of the month it is – the disease makes sex painful.
The disease is always with me, even if it only makes me bedridden for up to 3 days a month.

I am feeling very pessimistic about the next few months. I’m told that the first couple of months are or could be bad because I’m still healing from surgery. But I don’t believe anyone. I just think george is back. Although the surgery was hugely beneficial in providing me with a diagnosis, I don’t feel it SOLVED the problem even on a temporary basis.

I feel like the woman who felt relief for a short time after pressing charges on her abusive husband, because he was confined to jail. For a short time, she tasted sweet life again.

Now he’s out, and he’s just forced his way back into the house, and the wife is again being beaten.

I feel beat down by george. I feel like he’s won the game – that he’s not going anywhere. This disease is laughing at me and beating the shit out of me.

I mostly believe in reincarnation. I believe from time to time that I’ve given myself all this shit in life for a reason, and that I’ve got to survive it for that same reason in order to get to the next spiritual level – to have a better life next time around. Striving for that spiritual lottery jackpot as it were.

Today, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe I asked for this disease. I feel like a victim. I feel I do not deserve this. I feel angry. I feel powerless.

…but I keep fighting.

I’ve just asked my masseuse for accupuncture referrals.

I guess that’s the next step in pain management, along with getting off my ass and getting to a regular yoga class.

I want at least ten pain-free years before menopause sets in.

I created a new version of the george F.A.Q. today. You can also click on the “george” link at the top right of my journal to reach that page.

I spent all day yesterday on Tylenol 3 with a heating pad, just like old times. The pain was bad and then non-existant and now it’s bad again this morning and I’m about to take more Tylenol 3.

This is really depressing, but I must note that I’m no longer suicidal.

The Yasmin is still in my bloodstream, as is evidenced by my still-bouncing legs, but I don’t feel the rage anymore. I don’t feel like sobbing uncontrollably anymore. And as I said, I don’t feel like killing myself anymore.

I had a horrible nightmare that I was fired from my job and that I got so verbally violent about it that they decided to also withhold paying me my last paycheck.
Of course, that won’t happen in reality, but it was still a shitty nightmare to have, and reminds me that I still need to get the hell out of that place.

And now, I’m off to drug myself and start looking for a new job.

Nobody took care of the issue I left behind on Wednesday, so when I got in on Thursday, I called and left messages for the customer. I don’t know if she ever got back in touch with the company.

I was emotional and kept to myself all day. Both of my fellow disgruntled cow-orkers were not in, yesterday. Neither was my boss. But yesterday was supposed to be Mandatory Team Drinky Outing at a stupid restaurant/bar not unlike ChiChis in the movie Office Space.

Every hour that passed was grueling. Time dragged on forever. With nearly every call, I wanted to burst into tears. The only relief I had was that since my boss was not there, there was nobody to overload my inbox with email assignments. Still, I took seven from queue and worked on those.

By 3pm, I could stand it no more, and asked the director of the department if I could leave. He said I could. I called my boyfriend at work and asked if he could also come home. I knew I’d need babysitting.
All the way home, I thought of ways to kill myself again. The noise wouldn’t go away. It had been 27 hours at that point since my last Yasmin pill. I got home and began taking more Lorazepam and washing it down with brandy. My boyfriend came home and I talked crazy talk again, said I still couldn’t handle being in my head and wanted out. The Lorazepam made me sleepy, so we took a nap. My legs were still twitchy – it’s from the Yasmin, they’re always bouncy and twitchy to the point that it hurts. My boyfriend has been such a sweetheart – he’s been massaging my legs for me. So he did that as I laid in bed, and then he laid down next to me for awhile.

Finally, I couldn’t stand the leg twitching anymore. On top of it, I was getting more annoying george cramps. My man suggested we go for a walk. We’d done that on Thursday, too, and the sun felt very nice, and it helped calm my legs down. We’d walked 2 miles (3 km) round-trip. This time, the sun was setting. My man took me on a much longer walk inadvertently, and unfortunately, the cramps began to really set in. On top of that, I was very emotional this time around. I saw a woman with two young girls, all walking back from the store and each holding bags. There was a shopping cart abandoned at the end of the street, so the mom unloaded the bags of groceries from her young daughters (who looked to be around ages five and six) and put the bags into the cart. I got all teary-eyed because I remember being so poor that we didn’t have a car, and we’d have to help mom carry groceries a mile from the local store, too. And their clothes are old, so I know this family I was looking at is poor. The mom rushed past us with the shopping cart, probably embarrassed like my mom always was. The girls, oblivious to poverty yet, skipped along behind her. After they were out of sight, I began to cry. A block later, we passed an apartment complex called the Capri. This reminded me of the hotel by the same name that my father and his wife operated for about ten years after my dad retired from Ford Motor Company. Being reminded of my dad made me cry because I’m so ashamed to be so emotionally broken. I’m supposed to be strong like he is – a survivor. And what would he think of me planning to off myself? And the Capri – it’s no longer there – some big corporation handed my dad a lot of money to move off the property so they could demolish it and put in a bank. I only got to stay at the Capri once during the ten years my dad owned it.
Not half a block later, I looked down and saw some thistle. As soon as I had looked down and saw the thistle, I thought of Scotland, and of our honeymoon that we want to have in Scotland. I began to cry harder, realising that there never would be a wedding or a honeymoon in Scotland.
My man held onto me and we crossed the street towards the beach. This made me continue to cry, because the beach is exactly where I wanted to go so I could drown myself. The tide was in, too.
We sat on a bench and I cried and my man held me. I watched the waves roll onto the shore – it’s just the bay – not the actual ocean, but waves are waves and make a little crashing sound that’s nice to hear. The wind was up out on the bay, so it wasn’t like lake water lapping up onto the shoreline – there were little crashing waves.

After a time, I told my man about the three images that had made me cry. This in turn upset him. On top of this, my pelvic cramps were getting worse, and we were still a mile away from home. My man felt even worse, apologising for taking me “on a death march”. I told him my legs at least felt better for it. In all, we walked about 3.5 miles (5.6 km).

When we got home, we decided to meet some friends at the tiki bar. It wasn’t pissup night but two of our friends had said they’d be there last night. We decided to join them – we needed a distraction. However, I still wasn’t out of the mental health woods. I popped a Tylenol 3 on top of all the Lorazepam I’d been taking all day. My pelvic cramps weren’t that bad as to need Tylenol 3. But I took it, anyway. I knew too that I’d be drinking. I didn’t care.
We got to the tiki bar and it was packed. Our friends weren’t there. It was the first time it was just me and my man there. Eventually we got two stools at the bar to sit on, and we watched the master bartender do his magic. On top of it, he was chatty and funny, and we got to sit right in front of his work space. So that was a nice distraction. I had three drinks last night. As soon as I stood up to leave, the full weight of the drinking plus the Tylenol 3 hit me, and my man said I was “near slobbering drunk”.
Great.

I don’t remember a thing after my man paid the check so we could leave the bar. He tells me I staggered out to the car with his help, I staggered into the house, and passed out on the bed. He kept waking me to feed me water. I woke up with a mild hangover.
When I woke up, something had changed. I didn’t feel suicidal. I felt relieved that I didn’t have to work, that I have all day today and tomorrow to just chill the hell out.

Of course, that’s when george took his opportunity. I’m full on bleeding, now, and the cramps are just what they used to be before surgery. I’m on two Tylenol 3 for the pain, just like I always used to be. This alone makes me want to cry. I never get a break. I’ll always be broken. The surgery was a fecking waste of money.

My man told me that he’s been considering comments made by Kahleida to my April 5th post, wherein she wrote, “I would sugest somehow finding a part time job and also getting into a good therapy”. My man says he’ll help support me during that time and thinks it’s a good idea for me to consider. I still think of it as being a dependent, though. I guess that’s where the therapist part comes in, heh.

The drugs have finally kicked in, and the heating pad helped with the pain. So far today, I’ve had no Yasmin, no Lorazepam, and no suicidal thoughts. I’d wondered if the Lorazepam could also be exacerbating my mental health issues (a topic also raised by Kahleida in her comments to my April 5th post), but even well before the meltdown on Wednesday, I’d been taking Lorazepam during the week but not on weekends and I was fine. I really do think it was the Yasmin doing all the nasty work.

I am still very emotional today, and I’m very pissed off that I have pelvic pain. I do know that I just need to be patient – that perhaps it’s the sloughing off of the interior scarring and scabs this time around, plus going off the Yasmin, that has me in pain. I don’t see my surgeon again until June, so that’s two more periods I need to allow myself to have, to see if the pain lessens.

I’m just so tired of being in pain.

I know it could be so much worse. I know that. Some of my friends are in much worse physical health condition than I am, and they persevere.

So, enough of the feeling sorry for myself for a second. I have gossip!

My friend didn’t announce anything to me or our circle of friends but hops onto IRC and leaves a cryptic message about getting married. She set her nickname to ‘IEsherpa’ which makes us think she’s in Ireland. So I called her voicemail and apparently she’s left the country as of March 31 and won’t be back til April 15.

So now we’re all waiting anxiously for the next episode of “Days Of Our Sherpa”.

Sherpa, thank you for the distraction. NOW SPILL THE DETAILS! ;)

My surgeon called me back yesterday and sounded argumentive at first, because she thought I’d already quit taking the Yasmin in favour of the progestin-only pill called Micronor.
Whereas I had told her that I’d research the Micronor and decide if I wanted to take that, or stick with the Yasmin, or do nothing at all.
The surgeon got it in her head that it would be Micronor or nothing, and so thought for the past month I’ve been on nothing.

When I told her all that I’ve gone through on this latest mental breakdown, she changed her mind as to the culprit. Before this, she kept saying it was the synthetic estrogen component in the Yasmin that was making me so whacky. That’s precisely why she’d wanted me to try the progestin-only Micronor.

Well, after hearing about the loose cannon mouth and attitude and 5150 label, she told me it was the progestin in the pill that was making me this way. Now if ya’ll read several entries back in my journal, you’ll see that I was the one to pin this originally. But noooo. Once again, nobody ever listens to me. Even when I raised that question on an IRC channel, someone said, “are you sure it’s the estrogen?

But I digress.

Yesterday was spent being babysat by my boyfriend. In the evening, two more friends came over, and we went out to dinner. I was hungry but didn’t want anything to eat. My boyfriend fed me tidbits off his plate, and that’s all I had the stomach for. I really just wanted a bottle of vodka, but I drank water.
After dinner, we went and got dessert. I’d wanted a banana split and kept asking for that all afternoon. When I finally got it, I forced it down. I’m glad most everyone joined me, because otherwise, I’d have taken three bites and had been done with it. We all made a good stab but still didn’t finish it. I was happy to sit there with the guys in an ice cream palour, though.

The whole time we were out, I was super tired from all the anti-anxiety meds I was on. And my brain STILL wouldn’t shut up. I’d just stare off, brain still whirling, but not loud enough to make me wail and clutch my head like I’d been doing the night before.

Today I’m going to go in to work. I’ll see how long I can take it before I come home. If I need to come home, I am to call my man and he’ll come home, too.

I feel I somehow understand a comment one of my friends made months ago. She’s sick, too, but not with major depression or side effects from Yasmin. With her disease, she declared she’s only seeking help for the peace of her husband, but she doesn’t really want it. I didn’t understand that at the time.
I do, now.

I’m only trying to get better and get past being suicidal for my man, who still talks marriage with me even now. Even others – friends – family – don’t have the kind of sway my man has right now. I don’t mean to be cruel by that. I love my friends and family.

But given my own life, doing it for me alone, how I feel right now, I’d press the reset button.

I’m told the Yasmin takes like 48 hours to leech out of the body. We’ll be at the 24-hour mark around 11:30am today.

Last night I took 800mg Ibuprofen for george cramps. We’ll see how bad that gets, too. On a regular schedule, he wouldn’t have been due til the 12th.

Lastly, I wonder if anyone at work took care of the issue I requested when I called in sick, yesterday. I HIGHLY doubt they did. And I also wonder if I’ll be fired for absence or the one they love to use – performance issues. Even though, just last Friday, I was told the director of support loves me and doesn’t want me to go. That all changed on Monday when I didn’t get through my assigned mails in time and HR was still stewing over some comments a full week prior to that.
My boss is off work today, though. We’ll see.

Time for more Lorazepam.

A great gift to me would be to send me on a 100 day retreat to a Dzogchen camp.

i went to the doctor. i told him about my history w/ major depression. i told him about the yasmin. i told him about my night last night.

he said by law, he has to put me on a 51-50 hold – lock me up in a state hospital. i lost it and cried. he asked if i have anyone to help me. i brought in my man who was in the waiting room. the doctor had a chat with my man, who agreed to babysit me for the next 72 hours.

the doctor said i can get off the yasmin. he said it only takes about 48 hours before it’s out of my system. i don’t trust him but at the same time felt relieved.

he told me to keep taking the ativan and upped the dose; i’m to take 1mg every 3 hours for the next 72 hours.

i’ve missed my yasmin dose today. i already have cramps worse than last night. the dark brown coffee grounds stuff is coming out more. so on top of fighting the horrible effects of the yasmin, i may also get bad george pains again soon.

i still want out.

yesterday afternoon i became suicidal. very. suicidal. had several plans to choose from. also looked up one-way airfare to several countries.
i know within an hour of taking the yasmin of its effects on me. the hyperactivity and anxiety set right in.
two weeks after the incident by which a new temp was fired and i’d gotten empathic on her behalf and cried ‘bullshit’ and HR heard me… two weeks later i get in trouble for it. why so long? my boss had a talking to me yesterday.
so now i wait to also get in trouble for my ‘forced labor’ comments on tuesday. that could also take two weeks to get me in trouble for that, and who knows, maybe they’ll fire me.
i was so good when i was a temp. i kept myself in check.
i have an attitude and don’t respond well AT ALL to authority figures. i’ve always know that. but taking the yasmin helped all that rotten negativity spring out like a broken fire hydrant.

i also had a customer tell me “don’t EVER talk to me that way” when i suggested that she not have signed up for the software if she’d claimed repeatedly to me that she had no idea what the sales guy was selling her. she tried making it his fault. it’s not HER fault she didn’t understand! HE shouldn’t have sold it to her, then! what a crock of shit! so i told her that perhaps, not understanding things, she might have asked for details or not signed up at all. i’m sure she’ll report me and i’ll get in trouble for those comments, too.

it’s out of control, you see. my attitude mouth won’t shut up. it’s a loose cannon.

then i had to work an hour of overtime just to catch up on emails yesterday. my boss moved my email catchup time to the mornings. so when i finished most of my assigned emails, she piled another ten on me. this screwed me for the rest of the day because i have mail replies coming in, and escalation replies coming in, and i’m sending out mails to customers all day while talking to them on the phone – sending followup instructions and so forth. so she screwed me with more mail. then at one minute til quitting time i get an angry caller on the line that takes up 18 minutes of my precious email followup time.
so i stayed an hour.

there is, despite any yasmin medication, a direct correlation to my severe depression and the amount of overtime i work at the end of a business day. i’d had mental breakdowns well before surgery or yasmin medication because of the overtime stress.

but yesterday afternoon…

it’s the worst i’ve been since 2000 when i had the plan to off myself.
i informed my boyfriend that i was leaving and that i needed help packing my shit. you can imagine the terror and grief on his part. i was not in my right mind. i’m still not in my right mind. i cried and sobbed and grrrrr’d and rocked to and fro. i came very close to going to the emergency room but kept backing off of that. finally, at 10:30pm, i took 2mg of ativan and passed out.

we took today off work. i’ll be seeing a doctor today. despite what any doctor says, i’m getting off the yasmin. i know it won’t be a quick fix. the yasmin has to leech out of my body, now. i’m not out of the woods for awhile.

bottom line remains same as last night’s declaration: i’m tired of being trapped in this meatsack and i’d like to be released. it’s too stressful to be encased in this mess of a body with this broken brain. i want out.

So it finally happened. I’m all healed up inside. I know this because I finally got the “coffee grounds” falling out of me. It looked at first like george had paid me a visit, and I was about to get real pissed off, because I’ve been taking the Yasmin every day at the same time.
But then I looked closer and saw the color and the debris and realised that the scabs inside have finally sloughed off and have got to exit somewhere…so … there we go.

My incisions are still pinkish red and they’re shiny, so the scarring is going well there it seems, too.

And now, time for cozy soft warm bed. Mmmmm, bed…

Friday night after having a nice dinner, I was still filled with all kinds of energy. I thought I might be awake all night. This is a side effect of the Yasmin for me.
Other side effects that I’ve noticed, which are ‘known side effects‘, are:

• Changes in appetite (I get hungry but don’t want to eat anything)
• Changes in libido (initially for the better, but it tapered off)
• Dizziness
• Headache
• Nervousness (that’s putting it mildly)
• Breast Pain
• Depression
• Yeast Infection
• Edema
• Breakthrough bleeding
• Nausea
• Gastrointestinal symptoms

The main thing that I don’t see listed is the hyperactivity/mania. Perhaps that’s lumped in with ‘nervousness’, I dunno.
In any case, the last time I had to endure constant bouncing legs, having to get up and pace, and gritting my teeth was when I was on anti-depressant pills back in 2000-2002 or whenever I did recreational drugs.

This is where the Lorazepam comes in handy, but I only use it Sunday night through Friday mornings. I usually don’t need any anti-anxiety meds from Friday evening through Sunday morning because I’m on my own time away from work, and can constructively deal with the mania. So here’s what I did Friday and Saturday with it:

On Friday night, I bleached down the bathroom walls and ceiling.

On Saturday, I:

• Took my car to get new tires first thing in the morning (the tire place is a block away)
• Walked to the bank to cash my paycheck (1 mile round trip)
• Picked up my car and drove to my eye doctor for final contact lens followup (thankfully she’s noticed no ill side effects from the Yasmin on my eyes. So even though I feel like my eyes hurt more often, there’s no damage occurring from use of Yasmin)
• Vacuumed the entire house, including baseboards and the couch
• Moved all my photo album/scrapbooking stuff from a five-shelf bookshelf to storage until I can work on that crap again, and set decorative stuff on the shelves instead
• Rearranged the entire storage unit so everything is more easily accessible
• Cleaned off a three-shelf bookshelf in the bedroom and added different stuff to it
• Went grocery shopping
• Drove to two stores looking for a taller yet thin bookshelf for the bedroom – and failed to find what I wanted
• Emptied garbage and cleaned catbox
• Swept out the storage unit and the area by our front door
• Dusted the computer room
• Hefted a monitor back up onto the linux desktop machine (I was running it headless for awhile)
• Showered, dressed, and hosted a gathering that lasted til after 1am

As a result, this morning I feel like a Mac truck ran over me. So I’m being lazy for as long as I possibly can before I must get dishes and laundry done. Sadly, the muscle pain from all of yesterday’s work means I probably won’t enjoy my new roller skates today. So I plan to keep them in my trunk with some casual clothing so I can go right from work to the decommissioned navy base on the island this week. :)

And this is what Yasmin does to me, energy-wise. Aren’t you exhausted just from reading that list? I know I am. Lordy.

Friday I maintained all day at work, despite two cow-orkers whispering negativity to me all day about how much they hate that place and want to quit or worry about being fired.

In my weekly one-on-one meeting with my boss, she described why one of our cow-orkers was fired on Tuesday. Apparently, the woman was warned multiple times to stop being up to a half an hour late to work, and they caught her slacking off by popping her screen – they listened in on a call and discovered she was letting a customer go on about their life story (some customers are lonely and just call support to babble) while she in turn watched youtube videos.
Uh, that’s grounds enough for firing, yeah. So I didn’t feel mad about the firing at all after being told the reasons behind it. There is no purge going on, contrary to what the other cow-orkers think. They’re only worried about their own jobs because it wasn’t this locked down before and they’re revolting against the establishment. I understand this. I’ve been in places where the rules changed and I revolted so much that I got fired for it.

However, when I got to this place, things were already Big Brother, so I’m just following those rules as though they always existed. I’m not happy about it, but I’ve gained perspective where these people have not. In the last 12 months, I’ve worked for two shithole places for very shitty pay (four and a half dollars above the minimum wage of $6.75/hr, okay? When I was used to making $25/hr). And both places were ghetto neighborhoods, with screaming ambulances on a daily basis, and a battering happening right outside the doorstep in one instance.
So although miserable, I’m going to play ball. And these cow-orkers are starting to think I’m a Stepford person by all this smiling and nodding, now. But they don’t know where I’ve been recently or where I come from way back.

So Friday during the one-on-one with my boss, she told me yet again how happy she is with my performance, how I don’t have to worry about being on a call for more than 6 minutes because they know I resolve the issues, and how the director of support himself values me and doesn’t want to lose me.

Well! That’s the boost I needed. I’ll continue to play ball. I need the friggin paycheck. And now I’ve also inadvertently gained the appreciation of a few guy cow-orkers who stay very late on a regular basis to make sure the work is finished properly. They want to go out drinkin with me.

The friggin paycheck. Ugh. Lemme go into detail on that for a second, since during my last breakdown, I discussed going on disability. This would also mean living on my man’s paycheck. We had discussed this together, and he said he could do it if it was necessary. By that, he means he’d rather not, but compared to me causing harm to myself, he’d support me for a time until I was well again.
Now, just buying food and paying medical bills, utility bills and rent for me is one thing, but I’m also in debt (only $5K, which is far below the U.S. average per individual). My debt ain’t gonna pay itself. There’s no one gonna come take care of that for me. My man could support me if I wasn’t able to support myself but the debt part … that would take a financial toll on even his paycheck cuz he has his own debt. He’s not rich. He makes $17/hr more than I do currently, but he’s still not making six figures by any stretch.
Besides, as I told both my man and a group of friends recently, I’d rather kill myself than be dependent on someone financially. Hence my reference to ‘reset button’ back on March 26th.

So, by Friday my mood stabilised and I also got a morale boost by my boss. So that’s good. It tides me over. I think I’m going to continue taking the Yasmin at the new time because I’ve not had another breakdown since switching to taking it on lunch hour.

That same day, one of my cow-orkers begged me to meet her on break so she could talk to me. She laid out her plan to quit the job before another job was lined up – just like another one of our cow-orkers did the Friday before. I tried to talk her down but she’s got her mind made up and is willing to live off of a $25K credit card!!!! That’s a terrifying thought, to be in that much debt. That’s three times the U.S. citizen individual average debt. Not saying my cow-orker would let her card max out, but still – why entertain the thought?
Now, having said that, I myself have entertained the thought. I tried finding a card with more than $5K available on it just a few months ago and failed. I did however get a credit card with $2K available. This was my emergency credit card – in case I needed it to pay my medical bills. Thankfully, I’ve been able to pay my medical bills off (over $600 so far) relating to the surgery (the insurance covered most of the $19K surgery, but I still had my deductable and misc charges to pay).

But I digress. Going back to my cow-orker…I tried to talk her down but it won’t work. I fear she’ll quit before the end of this week. This will contribute to the downward spiral in morale already out on the floor. The other woman who’s been venting to me about job stress is likely to go ballistic. I mean, she’s already talking shit louder and louder and not caring – as evidenced by her bomb comment on Thursday.
I have to continue to maintain during the shakeup at this job… I have to continue my mantra that I came up with last year: “This does not belong to you. This is not yours. This is not your responsibility. This does not belong to you.” I have to keep remembering that their shit is their shit and to not take it on as my own.

I can do this.

To sum, in all, Friday was a good day for me at work.

I left work and went straight to a sporting goods store, and bought a pair of roller skates! YEAH! I’ve been talking about it for years and now I finally found the exact colour I’ve been looking for!
I got home and my man and I went out to dinner at a local Thai joint. Mmmm, pad thai with grilled shrimp…