Under observation
Dec. 16th, 2022 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormIf I'm in this, I might as well try to document it. Note if I'm doing something outside, like carrying straw for the animals or splitting wood, none of this is an issue. At least, it happens in a lower-key way, and I have to be in a lot worse shape before it creates safety issues, for instance. Cataloguing it like this does seem to help a little. The context is several months into taking a low-dose back-to-back birth control pill to try to control the more intensely negative parts of my hormonal cycle, but that seem to be dumping me into, or close to, the bad part of it.
So what this looks like is:
Intense irritability
Difficulty with a sense of proportion, particularly with using context to impute meaning to hyberbole
Taking people literally, which is more of the same I guess?
Not assuming neutral intentions, though I'm not to the point of assuming fully malicious intentions yet
Inability to move my body, so I'll be sitting or standing and just feel that I have no control over my body and be stuck there awhile
"Gapping out": missing chunks of time in small regular pieces, so for instance every second minute or three minutes in a row with a 30 second presence, then out for three minutes again
Sense of inability to affect my environment, or at higher levels my experience. This isn't so much a higher-level conceptual thing, but just: a sound is hurting me, or something sharp is digging into my foot, but it doesn't occur to me that I could close the door to shut the sound out, or take the sharp object out of my shoe
Inability to think, that is, to link concepts together, to construct chains of logic, to step through reasonable consequences, to assign categories to different thoughts, and therefore to compare or decide
Loss of sense of time. Normally I have a sort of gantt chart in my head that includes the future and the past, in varying levels of detail. In my current state sometimes I startle from second to second, not knowing what's coming in the next one, and not able to anticipate what will happen later in the day
Tunnel vision, that is, my peripheral eyesight doesn't work as well
Kind of weird motor control, usually it's hitting keys in the wrong order but this time it's not being able to calibrate my force on the keys properly and so letters are getting left out. This was happening two days ago and I pulled a bunch of keys off the keyboard to make sure there was nothing under them, but it didn't help
Randomly being cold, but also not able to tell what clothing will be more comfortable/warmer
Inability to sleep: both to go to sleep, and to stay asleep
Night sweats (ugh)
No calibration on my filter: I can't let some things through and not others when I communicate, I can either be silent or communicate things that may be ill-advised
Lowered empathy
No ability to imagine someone else's experience, to think "why do I think they're doing this and what's a good course of action given that?"
No sense of connection to others
A general sense of loading screen when I'm trying to think: it feels like maybe things are going on back behind there, but nothing is actually happening
Sometimes kind of weird conspiracy/paranoia stuff, like "people don't actually like me but are for some reason pretending to"
A sense of "pain" where my emotions and thoughts belong, sometimes quite intense
Lightheadedness when changing position (like, standing up, or straightening)
Really low exercise tolerance, so I lift a bucket and carry it a few feet and feel ears ringing/hard to breathe/etc (but feel somewhat dissociated from that so it has less impact than it might)
Interestingly, today my memory feels a little bit better.
Appointment with the gyne is the 22nd, so I have to hang in there till then, and then until whatever she suggests kicks in (or doesn't, in which case I guess until the follow-up after that)
So what this looks like is:
Intense irritability
Difficulty with a sense of proportion, particularly with using context to impute meaning to hyberbole
Taking people literally, which is more of the same I guess?
Not assuming neutral intentions, though I'm not to the point of assuming fully malicious intentions yet
Inability to move my body, so I'll be sitting or standing and just feel that I have no control over my body and be stuck there awhile
"Gapping out": missing chunks of time in small regular pieces, so for instance every second minute or three minutes in a row with a 30 second presence, then out for three minutes again
Sense of inability to affect my environment, or at higher levels my experience. This isn't so much a higher-level conceptual thing, but just: a sound is hurting me, or something sharp is digging into my foot, but it doesn't occur to me that I could close the door to shut the sound out, or take the sharp object out of my shoe
Inability to think, that is, to link concepts together, to construct chains of logic, to step through reasonable consequences, to assign categories to different thoughts, and therefore to compare or decide
Loss of sense of time. Normally I have a sort of gantt chart in my head that includes the future and the past, in varying levels of detail. In my current state sometimes I startle from second to second, not knowing what's coming in the next one, and not able to anticipate what will happen later in the day
Tunnel vision, that is, my peripheral eyesight doesn't work as well
Kind of weird motor control, usually it's hitting keys in the wrong order but this time it's not being able to calibrate my force on the keys properly and so letters are getting left out. This was happening two days ago and I pulled a bunch of keys off the keyboard to make sure there was nothing under them, but it didn't help
Randomly being cold, but also not able to tell what clothing will be more comfortable/warmer
Inability to sleep: both to go to sleep, and to stay asleep
Night sweats (ugh)
No calibration on my filter: I can't let some things through and not others when I communicate, I can either be silent or communicate things that may be ill-advised
Lowered empathy
No ability to imagine someone else's experience, to think "why do I think they're doing this and what's a good course of action given that?"
No sense of connection to others
A general sense of loading screen when I'm trying to think: it feels like maybe things are going on back behind there, but nothing is actually happening
Sometimes kind of weird conspiracy/paranoia stuff, like "people don't actually like me but are for some reason pretending to"
A sense of "pain" where my emotions and thoughts belong, sometimes quite intense
Lightheadedness when changing position (like, standing up, or straightening)
Really low exercise tolerance, so I lift a bucket and carry it a few feet and feel ears ringing/hard to breathe/etc (but feel somewhat dissociated from that so it has less impact than it might)
Interestingly, today my memory feels a little bit better.
Appointment with the gyne is the 22nd, so I have to hang in there till then, and then until whatever she suggests kicks in (or doesn't, in which case I guess until the follow-up after that)
