As I sit here typing this I am feeling vaguely suicidal. I'm feeling quite a lot suicidal, actually. Let me tell you what has happened to me this past week.

Being a keen cyclist, I had agreed to go for a dawn ride up Primrose Hill in London with some friends of mine. I'd been looking forward to this for quite some time. However two weeks ago, after quite a few weeks of thinking I was getting better, I had a sudden and sharp relapse and I couldn't go. When the day came I was too weak and in too much pain and too emotionally fraught to be able to handle the pressure of London. I don't like big cities at the best of times.

The day of the Solstice, I spent mostly shaking on the floor of the living room, sweating and crying, because I was in absolute agony. My lower back, my coccyx felt like it was crumbling, I could almost see the bones disintegrating. At times it felt like the vertebrae were being snapped apart, the various joints being crushed. I had extraordinary pains elsewhere, stabbing and cramping, especially in my ribs, my head, my hips, my knees, my lower legs... well, everywhere really. All of this sharp, agonising pain on top of a deep, throbbing ache that was wearing enough by itself.

That Wednesday evening, at about 8pm, Andy dragged me to casualty because it was just too much. We spent....what. 8 and a half hours in there, roughly. It took 3 hours for them to see me, despite the triage nurse saying she'd put a rush on it because I couldn't sit down for very long without starting to have to squash the screams. When I did get seen it quickly became obvious that the registrar thought that I was (a) mentally ill and (b) a junkie. It's not my fault that I don't respond to standard painkillers, and I thought he might want to know that. Nor was it my fault that I have been bruising spontaneously and happened to have one in the crook of my right arm.

Having said that, he was quite nice. He prodded me in all sorts of places until I was yelping, listened to my heart, asked me if my spleen had been affected when I had glandular fever, examined me more thoroughly than my consultants have ever bothered to do, never mind my doctor. He then took a blood sample.

We went back out into the waiting room and I proceeded to spurt blood all over the floor, and then onto the walls and the floor of the examination room. By this time I was hysterical, basically, and my mood wasn't improved when he came out again after we'd stopped the bleeding to tell me he'd forgotten to take a sample for testing my clotting factor.

It was another 3 hours before my painkillers turned up, and I had agreed to take standard ones because I didn't want to push the issue. It was then a while longer before we were called back in to be told by a woman doctor that I most likely had a depressive type illness. She wasn't best pleased when I cut her off immediately. Apparently it is perfectly usual for depressed people to bruise spontaneously and bleed all over the place and be in constant extreme pain (psychosomatic, don't you know).

I want to know why it is so difficult for doctors to understand that it is possible to get depressed as a result of being ill all the time, rather than it necessarily being the cause. Yes, I am tearful a lot, yes I occasionally feel suicidal. Right now, if I even allow myself to acknowledge the fact that I am in complete agony, I start crying because it hurts so much. Imagine having someone pressuring your head in a vice at the same time as running you over with a steamroller fitted with spikes, while replacing your marrow with molten lead and hot sulphuric acid, and hammering a surgical spike up through your spine without anaesthetic and you might start to have some idea the sort of pain I am in. Add to that muscular cramping and vision problems and the tail end of a summer cold and life gets utterly miserable. No bloody wonder I'm feeling down.

Sometimes I want to grab a doctor and tell him "Of course I get fucking suicidal, you idiots keep telling me I'm depressed rather than trying to find out what is wrong with me. You are the people who make me feel suicidal."

I gave up going to the doctor in February. I got worse after every visit because every visit reduced me to the point of despair. This last experience has cemented that view. I was doing okay, I reckon. I changed my diet, started going to the gym. I wasn't going to go on long term antidepressants just because my neurologist couldn't be bothered spending the time finding out the physical cause of my illness when it was easier to put it down to me being an easily stressed, depressed female who is highly strung and suffering from extreme anxiety.

Right now I am stuck with the awful idea that there is no way out of this. I do what I can and most of the time it works. I'm fitter now than I was, stronger, but I've still been reduced to a bed-ridden wreck this week by a relapse with no obvious trigger that I can see and no obvious way to get over it quickly. And of course the junk, which I described before, tells me that this is what I have to look forward to for the next few months and that is a depressing thought.

I am depressed, I do not have depression. There is a difference. And if I ever do take that stupid, ridiculous, final way out, it won't be because I was suffering from depression, it will be because my pain has been ignored for so long I can't deal with it any more, and I hope someone thinks to tell the medical profession just that.