Loosing some battles, winning the war
Been a little while since I blogged so I thought it was time again. Long story short, things have been improving steadily since I first started treatment for psychosis.I am able to think now that someday in the future, my mental problems will be mostly or completely over.
My medicine regime these days consists of 800 mg of Seroquel, 45 mg of Truxal and 1,25-5 mg of Valium when needed.
The deal with those who treat me is that I use Valium when necessary, and I've heard that those who use Valium (mostly) fare worse than those who don't, but it is a very effective and useful tool that brings stability for me. Knowing I have it and that I can use it, and using it, makes me able to control my mental health with confidence.
We had a new kid that arrived on Wednesday (Theo) and up to birth and after the birth I've used more Valium than usual. And events like childbirth can trigger psychosis or a relapse into psychosis, and now 4 days later I still feel things are well under control, that's thanks to anti-psychotics, Valium and the cognitive therapy I've had with different therapists the last couple of years. I just made sure I ate enough, slept enough, didn't undertake anything particularly stressful and took Valium when I felt severe anxiety creeping up.
Now that I was able to deal with the birth of Theo I feel more confident about most things and that it will be possible to beat (or rather, manage) my mental health problems.
It's been a long and at times incredibly (insanely..) hard battle, but it's possible to go through things like these and have a normal happy life. I know that now. :)
FWIW, I now have the "2012 ICD-10-CM Diagnosis Code" main diagnosis F41.3 and a "side diagnosis" (?) of F29. It's kind of nice to have a diagnosis, but the important thing has been working away at whatever problem I felt most pressing at the time, and over the last ̃2.5 years it has been just that, as well as taking medicine. There's a lot of hurt in those diagnoses which is hard for someone who hasn't gone through similar things to understand (just some of the feelings alone would probably scare the bejesus out of a mentally well person), but at least it's somewhat understandable now.
[Permalink] [By morphex] [Health (Atom feed)] [1 comments] [05 May 15:53 GMT+1]
Minor setback, life in general improving
So, yesterday I had a minor setback, as I awoke after falling to sleep and had a pretty bad anxiety/fear attack.Thoughts about using more medicine and reacting badly to those (as in having dangerous side-effects) gave me a lot of anxiety and I had to rush to the local doctor that is open 24/7.
The anxiety lasted for about half an hour, most of it was pretty uncomfortable but when I got to the doctor and got to talk to someone things got better. After about 90 minutes of waiting I got to talk to a doctor about this anxiety and these concerns and I was calmed down by it.
The whole ordeal was pretty uncomfortable and I feel a bit tired today, but all in all it was OK. I managed to handle that situation as well. And did not even have to take a Valium to manage it.
These last months I feel things have greatly improved for my mental health, and incidents like these are more of a symptom of things that have been, not how they will be in the future. It is almost like I have gotten used to having it so bad, that feeling good feels a bit dangerous and I fall a bit back into feeling badly again.
Well, as far as medicine goes, I take and have always taken the medicines for psychosis regardless of how I feel about them and that other people are somewhat skeptical and some outright suggest that I stop taking them. That is something between me and those who give me treatment for (mental) health.
[Permalink] [By morphex] [Health (Atom feed)] [1 comments] [07 Apr 18:14 GMT+1]
Creating a relatively safe and portable Linux setup
So, over the last years I've become more aware and focused on security and doing things securely and "hygienic" so that different activities don't transfer security issues between different platforms.One trick I've been using is to have DVDs/CDs with some live Linux distro running, so that between activities the system is shut down and any contagion from one activity doesn't transfer over to another.
This approach works well, but it is a bit slow starting up and doing different things.. waiting for the disc reader to spin up or do its thing is so slow at times that it can become annoying. And if you're really paranoid, the risk of malware hiding in the firmware or some other part of the computer is always there.
So yesterday I bought myself a USB stick, so I can install Linux onto that.. I'm going to use the Ubuntu Linux Live disc and do an install to the USB stick with that. I installed a Live/Install disc to the USB stick first using UNetBootin, but when booting from the stick and trying to install to the stick from the stick, it didn't work.
Interestingly it didn't work because for some reason the installer had to modify the partition table on the stick and couldn't do that when the stick itself was mounted. [Edit: The stick already had a partition configured, so why should it modify?]
Then, when I boot up from the USB stick for the first time, I'll install VirtualBox onto the USB stick Linux, and could run different activities within virtualized machines. I think I'll setup a script that can cleanly initialize a virtual box image, and then startup that image, so that each "work session" within a specific area is contained to that virtual box, and it is never re-used again.
Some other things that will need to go onto the USB stick Linux is a setup for WiFi as well as removing certain standard services such as CUPS that is configured to startup automatically and listen to a port which can be accessed by users on the same network and effectively becomes a potential security hole.
With an installation of Ubuntu as the USB stick Linux, I feel fairly confident it'll be able to work on most computers' hardware it is plugged in to. WiFi can be an issue, but I guess the trick there is to keep the Ubuntu up-to-date.
Well, that's the plan for now. I'll keep you posted. [:)
[Permalink] [By morphex] [Technology (Atom feed)] [1 comments] [22 Mar 20:21 GMT+1]
PyPi - the giftconomy
So, I've added a page about my PyPi stuff here:blogologue.com/morten%20w.%20petersen%20-%20pypi%20pa...
It lists my published Python/Zope/Plone packages, and over 7000 downloads of them so far although I haven't prioritized PyPi until recently. Sweet deals all around!
[Permalink] [By morphex] [Python (Atom feed)] [Comments] [07 Mar 14:14 GMT+1]