16:19 
I declare my tattoo officially scab free and completely healed.
14 days exactly.
OK, so it's still a bit grey, the sort of grey that black things go in the wash, and feels slightly odd, but there is no scab left. No white spots either. It did take 1 whole large and 1 whole small tube of Savlon, mind. Now I could go to the gym tonight, but I'm meeting Sarah at The Bear for the quiz, so I'll just have to go tomorrow instead.
11:07
Strange night. Woken up, or dragged out of whatever I was doing, at around 7 by an SMS from Mug, responding to one I sent him before going to bed last night. WL has been given prothiaden to combat a condition that produces chronic pain and is not best pleased. Not surprised. I wasn't best pleased either. I think, indeed, I refused to take them. There is such a massive stigma associated with being given anti-depressants. I didn't take them because I knew what they would do to me, because I don't like taking drugs. I don't like taking the pill and I avoid most medications, so it's not just an anti-depressant thing. The tricyclics are commonly used for conditions involving chronic pain, as they do have an analgesic effect but can be taken long-term, unlike most pain killers. They also stabilise sleep patterns, which can make things worse if the pain is disturbing your sleep. The logic of prescribing them to me was not something of which I was ignorant. I just knew that I react badly to them.
The other important thing I came to realise is the difference between primary and secondary depression. People ask if you are depressed, and you say "no", because you think they are going to treat you for depression, which is a mental disorder (although clinical depression is a biochemical imbalance and shouldn't be thought of as a failing or weakness). You don't have a mental disorder, you have a physical disorder. I never did sort out for myself how much of my emotional reaction to being prescribed the anti-depressants was because of the stigma, and how much was a result of the fear that what was actually wrong with me wouldn't be discovered because they were too busy treating depression. The idea of spending the rest of one's life in pain, but being on medication so that one isn't unhappy about this, is not a very comforting one. Depression as an illness causing all your symptoms is primary depression, and it's the illness that people assume doctors think they have when they are prescribed anti-depressants.
Secondary depression is something else completely. If you are in chronic pain you are going to get depressed. You may even suffer from bouts of acute depression. After all, if you look at the word in general terms it means dispirited, not psychotic. I found it very important to acknowledge the fact that I can and do get depressed. Otherwise I would have been just fooling myself and I would have found it nearly impossible to get through the days when I was depressed. It tends to coincide with feelings of being exhausted by the whole deal of coping with being ill all the time, so I'll go through phases where I get depressed and feel I can't cope with the pain and the frustration any more because I'm tired out by coping.
A good friend of mine, whom I love dearly, used to be a psychiatric nurse, and she pointed out to me that people who have depression tend to feel apathetic and don't want to get out and do stuff. I get depressed and frustrated because I can't get out and do the stuff I want to do. That observation helped more than any piece of advice the doctors have given me. It's something I keep coming back to when I feel particularly bad and start wondering if maybe it is all in my head. It's an observation that has kept me relatively sane, at times.
There's also the whole issue of "they're giving me these drugs because they don't think I can cope". There are limits to a person's ability to cope, and while those limits are very elastic, and one finds one can cope with a great deal more than one thought should one have to, coping with more and more stuff puts a great stress on a person. People are variable things. One's capacity for coping and achieving and just getting through each day will vary with one's hormonal cycle, with the weather, with whether Jonathon Creek had a good or a bad episode that week, and whether one's hamster is talking or not. There are loads of factors affecting one's mood and emotional state over which one has no control. External stressors, these are called.
Remember that saying "God give me the strength to accept the things I can't change and change the things I can't" ?
There's nothing you can do about external stressors. You can't change the weather (well, I've never managed to do so reliably), you can't demand that the BBC shows the episode with the nuclear bunker in it, and if little George has taken a dislike to sunflower seeds all you can do is treat him nicely and hope he comes around. You can't help being ill and you can't help your biochemistry, either, and there's no shame in getting depressed.
I think a lot of the stigma in my case comes from watching these dreadful 70s American shows in which highly strung women who were invariably "screamers" would swallow handfuls of valium because the world didn't live up to their expectations. These were not women I wanted to emulate, in any part of my life. I wasn't interested in being glamorous if that meant you had to wear shoes that made running impossible and tight blouses that gave a great cleavage but weren't much good in the winter. I always knew I wasn't ever going to be beautiful in that sense. The world will forgive you anything but bad skin, and I have pretty bad skin. But then, if being beautiful meant swallowing handfuls of pills with double shots of vodka, I wasn't much interested anyway.
Besides, depression is a condition frowned upon by my family.
A lot of the reaction to being prescribed drugs of a psychoactive nature is social conditioning. But I think it's terribly important to look at what they are being prescribed for, and see if that is warranted. If it isn't warranted - if they are being given to you because their current best guess is that you are depressed, not for any of their other effects, then you are free not to take them. Lie about how they make you feel, if that's what it takes. If they are being given to you for chronic pain, to rebalance the chemistry of the brain to ease some of those external stressors, then that's not so bad.
Except when they affect you the way they do me, anyway. My friends thought I'd gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson.
Monday, January 29, 2001
19:20
Yep. It's only 18:05 according to my clock.
19:19
That's it. The front page has gone live. Aargh. That's really very different. And I'm scaring myself with how many blogs I've got. Nearly all the tattoo scab has come away now. There are just a couple of bits left. I'm pretty sure 12 days must be some sort of record, especially given how long I can take to heal. It's still rather grey, which I'm assuming is just the appearance of the very, very new skin, and it will darken as that gets better. Kettle now seems to be working fine, despite its reluctance at first.
I'm now fed up with looking at this computer screen and I'm going to watch the Simpsons.
I wonder if the clock on this one is off as well?
14:47
The tattoo is really making a sprint for the finish line now. Bits are peeling off it all of the time, and of the entire process, this is the part that is really fucking with my head. I've had this thing on my back for almost two weeks now. I have to pamper it, watch it, make sure it's healthy and happy. That means looking at it, and I thought I'd become accustomed to it being there. But when the first piece of black scab peeled away to reveal the smooth skin underneath, complete with sensation and a black bird I nearly freaked. Somewhere, on some level, I had evidently been half-expecting the design to come away with the scab. Because it was raised and hard and bobbly, subconsciously it felt like it was just painted on and when it came off there would be nothing there. Seeing the black still there as the scab comes away is really mind-blowing, especially as the scab itself is black. There's some part of my head that still thinks it's impossible for a design to get under the skin like that, some part of me that still thinks it's just another shift that I can shift back out of.
The nights have been relatively quiet (although not entirely quiet) for the last couple of nights, although I was hit by a bad bout of insomnia coupled with restless panic last night, which is never a good combination. It is looking like there is something going on between our mob and the Otherkin mob, but I don't know what. I was more worried by the fact that I'm 28, not quite legally married, in debt, unable to get a job at present, no home, with a marriage under extreme stress, an ongoing illness that the medical establishment appears to have forgotten about, and not enough time to rack up a decent pension before retirement age even if I got a job tomorrow.
Mad, I know, but that woke me from my third hour of sleep last night at 6am, and led to me fretting until I got up 40 minutes later. Wrestled with the kettle for a while, and then went over to Sainsbury's, waited for it to open, then bought a new one so that I could make Frood some tea before he had to go to work. Of course, for some reason that didn't work either, not until it was too late for Frood to have tea.
Not a happy bunny. It's working now, though.
Then, to top it all off, while working through the updates for the Site Damage Database, I discovered that the reason I never get any further info on fire, flowers etc is that the goddamned script wasn't working and was eating anything put into those fields. Arse. All fixed now, but I am livid about losing all that potentially valuable data. I'm working through the updates for the front end of my part of Ravenfamily as well. I've been wrestling with the vagaries of CSS (you're not the only one, Wyrd) and discovering things like Top Style Lite assumes a border style of none if you don't specify, so your tables don't come out, and that I hate the term "deprecated". It makes me think of html as one of these kettles with the irremovable screws so you can't fix it when it breaks a little and you have to buy a new one.
Cycled up to Jarn Mound yesterday because I was desperate to get out. I didn't realise it was going to be uphill all the way for 4 miles. I thought I'd go because it was built by Sir Arthur Evans, who is famous for the excavations at Knossos. Also, because Laurence Main says that several leys converge there.
It wasn't worth the burning thighs and scary slippery ice, to be honest, or the necessity of navigating the main roundabout with the A34 on the way back, obviously giving the motorcyclist in the next lane a bit of a turn ("a cyclist? No engine? Mad!!!!") The very steep steps, each about half my size, were quite fun though, and I discovered what a toposcope is.
No, I'm not going to link that out anywhere. You'll have to find out for yourself.
I have an idea for a new set of art pictures, but I need some photos of naked people in odd positions to do them. In the meantime I have been practising sketching nudes. I'm more pleased with this 5 minute doodle than perhaps I ought to be, but I always have real trouble with people shapes, and can generally only draw decent people pictures from looking at photos of people so I'm not stuck on their "peopleness" and can look at the shapes involved. The flow of the lines is important, it's the only way I was able to think about this sketch at all.