Hmm....it's been awhile. I am always as usual bad at keeping up with blogging. I guess I can blame the lack of posts on school, that would seem like the logical explanation and it may have some weight to bear, but I think life just kinda comes and goes, it ebbs and flows. I have finished my first term of nursing school and am now half way through term 2. Well, what do I think? How is it going perhaps is what you're wondering. Those are loaded questions with loaded answers so if you have the time, this may be long.
I did well in the first term, I studied a lot, not too much but I kept busy at school with classes labs, work and exams. I generally have gotten A's in my classes so I guess you can say that school was going really well. Wait, I said was.....yes, yes I did. Was because after christmas holidays (we went to calgrary, that was fun!) school started up again. I dont' know what happened, a lot of things I guess, but something in me almost just switched off. Like a button was switched and I started struggling. Not with the school work, homework type things, more with just being at school. I started skipping classes, lots of them and loosing interest in a lot of things. I stopped running and working out and I stopped doing a lot of house work and cleaning type things. The only thing I could get myself to do was read. And read was all I pretty much did. Unfortunately the reading was not school books, it was just novels. I gradually sunk deeper and deeper into a dark pit, one that gradually got darker and deeper as january went by I was barely going to school, maybe one or two days a week and even then not the whole day. I was supposed to be going to 6 classes and 3 labs and 1 day in the hospital a week. That is a lot. I found it overwhelming and I was unmotivated to try any longer.
I decided to start seeing a counsellor because I knew that this was not good. I was feeling terrible and I started crying a lot. I knew I hit rock bottom when I left school early one day and on my way home I got off the bus infront of our apartment and I was thinking about walking out in front of traffic. I was about two seconds away from leaving the curb when I realized that this wasn't me. I was depressed and not myself. I realized that i needed to seek additional help. I didn't go to school the next day and i called my naturopath to see if there was anything he could do. Turns out there was. I was very wacked out with my hormones for one thing, years of birth control is not good for you if you have any slight predisposition to depression. When you stop taking it, it basically causes your estrogen level to sky rocket and your projestrone stays low. This huge difference in hormones can cause major mood swings, depression, painful periods, enlarged walls of uterus, and other problems. I had been taking a projestrone cream the naturopath has perscribed before but stopped taking it because it was expensive and I couldn't figure out how to justify spending the money when I have so little of it. We discussed a lot of my issues and we came up with some plans to work through them. I am back on the projestron cream and it seems to be helping, I also am taking a B-50 complex vitamin and working to have 1 or 2 servings of dark green veggies everyday. I also go for craniosacral therapy once a week right now to try and release the sadness that I feel.
Once I started feeling a bit better I noticed a difference in me. I didn't mind going to school, as much, and I actually feel like exercising again. It has been about 2 1/2 weeks since I first saw Dr. Ceasar and so far it has been helpful. I am trying to avoid anti-depressants because they have not been very successful for me in the past. I don't always want to go to school anymore and sometimes I really struggle to stay there for the whole day. I am not crying everyday anymore though, and I see that as a really big stride in the right direction. I also dropped biology and am going to take a distance course through u of m in the summer to make up the science credit. Dropping that class helped a lot to lighten my load and clear away some of the clouds that loomed over my head. I still have a ton of homework that I could always be doing, but I am trying to only look ahead to the week that is here and see what do I have to do now, what I can do daily to stay on top of things, and what sort of exercise can I do and healthy food can I eat so that I can feel my best. I confess, it's not always perfect, nor what is the best options but it's better than it was.
Part of me is still sad and also terrified of school. It's hard to explain because if I do then I think about school and think too far ahead and then that gets me very upset so I think I won't explain. Day by day I do my homework and organize myself for the coming week. So far, it's okay. My marks will be lower this term, but who needs a's anyways. I sure don't. I can live with c's if I have to. No one asks you what you got in your classes in nursing school anyways, they just want to know that you passed the RN exam.
Such is life I guess for me. I will probably always struggle with depression, it will just be a matter of being aware of it and trying to realize that in the moment it's not really me, it's just right at that moment and that moment will pass.
