Connected

After several months of sporadic Internet access requiring me to make my way to the library with my laptop to make use of the library's free wi-fi access, I have this afternoon bought myself a dongle and can blog whenever I want to again. This means that I shall be able to pass news on as soon as it happens and keep you up to date with my goings on.

When I had to leave the house and move into respite care, I had to start paying for this accommodation. Unfortunately, the sum that I have to pay on a weekly basis actually meant that I had little or no money to spend on things for myself. That is now no longer a problem as I decided to dip into some of the money that I invested after my husband died and now have a little spare cash, hence the purchase of the dongle and my return to the Internet.

I have lots to write about, some of which will appear under the "Tackling the Mental Health Minefield" banner as it relates to that area. This time it will not be about my being in hospital but about some of the other areas that those with mental health problems will find themselves interacting with.

This has been one of my shorter posts, but it is now time for me to head off to the dining room for my evening meal. Something like normal blogging will be back from tomorrow. You have no idea how happy saying that has made me.

Is It Blogger's Block Or Too Much Whirling About In My Mind?

I've managed to make it to the library again so that I can write something for the blog, though having now sat down to do so I find myself struggling for something to say. This is a somewhat unusual situation for me to be in because while I find it very difficult to talk to people, I usually have very little problem writing about whatever springs to mind.

I have been feeling really under the weather for the last few days. I have been very tearful much of the time, found it difficult to settle to do anything for longer than five minutes, and been in excruciating pain from the surgery that I underwent last week. the pain has been so intense that there have been times when it has brought me out in a cold sweat and caused overwhelming bouts of nausea.

And sleep has been difficult to come by even though the medication that I take at night often leaves me drowsy throughout much of the following day. For the last two days I have been eating breakfast and then going back to bed to try to catch up a little on what I seem to be missing at night, but I don't want to do this too much because I am afraid that I will get back to the cycle of nocturnal living that I was going through a few months ago.

While all of this is happening my mind seems to be constantly churning over stuff, much of it things that I don't want to think about at the moment. I know that I can't put everything off for ever, but I need to deal with things in manageable portions so that I don't become so overloaded that I implode again.

So, it's a strange post from me, but hopefully having actually sat down to write it has helped in some small way. I shall be back again tomorrow when I will hopefully have something more meaningful to say.

Psychotherapy And The Wonderful World Of Bloggers

Today I have been for my penultimate psychotherapy session with my current therapist. He is a lovely man and therapy with him has been good. We talked today about it being so near the end of our work together and he asked how I felt about that, especially in light of the disastrous termination of therapy that I experienced last year. There is no doubt that having a very experienced therapist makes a big difference, but as with all things people have to be trained and I am sure that in the future my previous therapist will be very much better at handling termination of therapy than he was with me.

I will miss my Tuesday sessions, not least because they have been responsible for a bit of structure and routine in my life for the last eight months. Today we talked about a wide range of subjects not all of them things that I would have considered as subjects for discussion during therapy. I said that I felt that while I still find it difficult to talk about my feelings when we are in a session, something that I don't think I will ever feel comfortable doing, one really positive thing to have come directly from this therapy was joining the knitting group.

It was as a result of one of our sessions that I made my first tentative steps into the world of the knitting group. My therapist encouraged me at a time when things were particularly difficult to take that first step and like blogging it has made a difference to my life. I haven't been for two weeks (the first week because of the trauma of becoming homeless and then last week because I really couldn't face it so soon after my surgery) but tomorrow I will be going and taking with me a finished item for all to see. I have just a few rows left to knit on the shawl/stole that I have been knitting for the last few weeks. I actually started it a day or two after my last visit to the knitting group and today I will finish the last of the 554 rows. It will still require blocking to show it off in all its glory but that is something for later.

I talked about going to the knitting group tomorrow and having this wonderful work of art to show to all. My therapist then asked why I had not talked more about my knitting in my sessions with him. His question was "Did I not think that he would be interested?" After thinking about this I suppose that I didn't think of it as being a subject for therapy, but following a complicated pattern and creating a work of art, as this shawl is, probably says quite a lot about me that I find impossible to express orally. One thing is certain, I will be taking it with me to next week's session to show him what I can do.

We also talked a little about my blogging. He has never asked for details of my blog and I have no idea whether I have given him enough information to be able to find it that easily, but one of his comments leads me to believe that he may have come across it at some time. He spoke of my ability to express myself in my blog in a way that I find very difficult, if not impossible, to do face to face. There is no doubt that blogging is a way of expressing my frustrations and pain and despair without having to burden someone with what I need to say. After all, you can carry on reading each post if it interests you but you don't need to continue to read if you find that what is being said is not interesting or thought provoking. I have always tried not to write post after post about how depressed that I am. There are only so many ways in which you can say it and I don't want to come across as someone who whines continually about how bad their life is. My life sucks; it's not how I thought it was going to turn out but it's a whole lot better than that of many other people out there.

This brings me nicely to what I wanted to say about bloggers. I know that it is something that I have said many times before, but it is worth saying again because I think that it is very important. There are some really nice people out there in the blogosphere and the supportive comments that I have received after my last few posts show how much we care for each other, even if we never actually meet. I may not be able to deal with comments as quickly as I would like owing to my limited Internet access at the moment, but logging in today as I have and finding six comments on my last post, all very supportive and kind, has reduced me to tears in the public library. As someone who hates showing emotion in public, I think you will understand just how much the sentiments expressed in these comments has moved me and saying thank you just doesn't seem to be enough, but it will have to do for the time being.

Once I am settled into some more permanent accommodation and have an Internet connection that I can access all the time, I will try to write most days again and to include photographs of whatever I am knitting so that you can keep up with how things are going. Once I have finished the shawl today, I need to head back to the socks so that I can get them all knitted and the patterns written ready for entry into the competition. I have five pairs to complete although socks grow a lot faster than the kind of lace knitting that I have been doing over the last few weeks, so while it may seem like a huge mountain of work, I think that I should be able to manage it without too much trouble.

Madsadgirl Is Two Today

Madsadgirl, my alter ego, is two years old today.

When I decided to start this blog one of the first things that I thought about was whether I wanted to be anonymous or to write under my real name. It didn't take me long to realise that I would probably be more honest in what I wrote if I was not easily recognizable. Yes, I would probably tell some people that I wrote a blog, but it would be my choice as to whether I told them the name of the blog, which was also the name that I adopted for myself.

I had been writing the blog for about three weeks when I told my GP that I had a blog. A few weeks later, while having lunch with Mr Smiley, I told him about the blog and he became a regular reader, and occasional commenter although always anonymously but I knew which were his comments nonetheless.

I thought that the blog might become a sort of therapy for me in my battle against depression. I was right. Originally meant as somewhere to write about how I was or wasn't coping with depression, it immediately became something more than that. I started writing about other things that were important to me and then about knitting, one of the things that has kept me going over the last few years.

I have tried to write every day, but sometimes the muse just wasn't there, and then there were the times that I was in hospital and therefore without my computer so the posts dried up. One of the things that I wanted to make sure I didn't do was write each day saying how awful I was feeling, so this led to posts about the strange, and sometimes funny, things that I saw around me. Writing about my experience of psychotherapy was another thing that found its way onto the blog, and was responsible for me being invited to give occasional lectures at one of our universities on the patient's perspective of therapy.

One of the biggest bonuses that I have derived from writing this blog is the array of virtual friends that I have made within the blogosphere. And some of them are not so virtual because I have actually met them and correspond with them outside of our blogs. And the support from other bloggers when things have not been going too well has meant a great deal to me too.

So, my third year of blogging is about to begin. Thank you for reading, and commenting. You have no idea how much it means to me.

Post 600

When I started this blog nearly two years ago I did wonder whether I would keep it up. There have been a few breaks in posting, the times that I was in hospital and again when I went through a really bad period of depression and just getting myself out of bed each day was a major achievement.

The blog was originally intended to document how I coped with depression, and to be fair it has continued to do this although I try not to make my posts depressing catalogues of how bad I am feeling. Instead I try to write about the things that I am doing to try to keep the depression at bay. And now I am writing the 600th post.

A number of posts continue to attract a lot of attention, even though they are now quite old. One is entitled 'Psychotherapy and Termination' (written in March 2009) and I can guarantee that there will be a couple of hits on this post each week. The post that is viewed most often however, is nothing to do with depression or psychotherapy. It is the post titled 'What is a Shetland Hap Shawl?' which was written as a result of a number of people asking me that question in comments to an earlier post that gave details of the Shetland hap shawl that I was knitting at the time. This post is viewed at least five times a week which is somewhat surprising considering its subject.

The posts that I am probably most proud of are those in the 'Tackling the Mental Health Minefield' series. Being admitted to a psychiatric hospital was never something that I had considered as being a thing that would happen to me. But it did, and I am just so relieved that I had enough sense to take myself off to see my GP when I started to do some really silly things that were putting me at risk. I tried to provide an objective overview of my time in hospital, the people that were supposed to be looking after me and the stupid rules that seemed to be there to make life easy for the staff with little regard to the effect that they may have had on the patients. Admission to a psychiatric hospital is never a nice thing but I hope that what I have written on the subject may help to give an idea of what to expect and how you can come out the other side without too much harm being done.

In eight days time the blog will be two years old. I think it is likely to continue to form an important part of my life for the foreseeable future, there are many things that I want to write about and I am sure that there will be more things that crop up as time passes. I hope that anyone who reads this blog will gain something from it, just as I gain something by writing it.

Lifelines

I'm sure that many of us have lifelines; things that help us to remember names, things that help us to remember important places or occasions, and for those suffering with mental illness things that are our coping strategies when things get really bad.

I have a number of lifelines that help me when I am feeling very depressed and I write about them often on this blog, another of my lifelines. Writing was an important part of my daily life when I was working, and when I was studying for my degree. As both work and studying stopped at about the same time (although I have continued to do the odd bit of studying in the intervening period) the loss of writing as everyday occupation impacted on me quite severely.

I don't know why I feel the need to write, nor am I always pleased with what I have written, but writing does help me to remain sane. When I started this blog, I had no clear idea where it would take me, nor what I hoped to achieve with it. I wasn't even sure that it was something that I would keep up. The loss of the ability to maintain an interest in things can be one of the first signs of depression and this might well mean that I would, like many other bloggers, fall by the wayside.

But I haven't fallen by the wayside. Yes, there have been periods when I found it very difficult to find the energy, or enthusiasm to write. Two periods being hospitalized meant that blogging stopped for a while. However, I have always returned and perhaps I am stronger for it.

This blog has always been a cornucopia of subjects. Originally envisaged as a forum for writing about how I dealt with depression, it has become much more than that. The need to write has meant that I would often write about the things that I have seen or heard, that I would describe some of my coping strategies so that others may also embrace them. I have written about the good times (not that there have been many) and the bad, about knitting, about psychotherapy, about strange things that I have seen, about places that I have visited and the blogging friends that I have met.

My blog was about a month old before I told anyone about it. It was about two months old when I mentioned it to Mr Smiley, who became a regular reader and commenter from that moment on and a great source of encouragement when I was finding it difficult to write for the blog. You won't find Mr Smiley's name on any of his comments; they were always made anonymously but because I knew his writing style I knew exactly which were his comments.

It is now more than six months since Mr Smiley's last comment on this blog. He was too ill to read it once he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, so he didn't know how well received the posts under the title Tackling the Mental Health Minefield had been, which is a shame because it was he who encouraged me to write about my experiences so that others might learn or derive support from them.

I guess that it would be true to say that Mr Smiley was another of my lifelines. I did wonder whether I would be able to continue without his support and encouragement. The fact that I am still blogging shows that I could, but it does grieve me that he is not here to read about my meetings with blogging friends, about the knitting group that I have joined (about which he would have been really pleased) and my new adventures in designing knitting patterns.

Lifelines are important to us and we should never underestimate the impact that they have on our lives or on what they allow us to achieve. I will continue to use my lifelines to help me keep my head above water and to make the most of every day that I have.

MadSadGirl Is One Year Old Today

I can't believe it. One year ago today I decided to create this blog. When I started the process I had absolutely no idea what I was going to blog about, whether I would be able to write something on a regular basis, whether anyone would read it, or whether it was going to be a long-term project or something that only lasted for a couple of weeks.

Finding a name for the blog was the first bit of creative thinking that I had to engage in. I wanted something that was catchy; something that would describe me and yet hide me at the same time. I'm still not sure how MadSadGirl came to mind, but it felt good so MadSadGirl it was. It wasn't long before someone had shortened it to MSG and that is how quite a number of commenters address me.

Writing the first post proved to be a bit difficult. I wanted to write enough that should anyone chance across it they would find it interesting enough to perhaps come back again, but I also wanted to make sure that I didn't give too much away so that it would be easy to find out who I really was. I didn't have to worry about what my employers might say because I couldn't work as a result of mental health problems. But I knew right from the start that it would be possible for someone who was truly determined to discover my identity to do so.

Amazingly, I had my first comment within hours of creating the blog. After a few weeks I had a number of regular readers. I wrote about whatever took my fancy. Sometimes it was something that was in the news and sometimes it was what I saw around me. Sometimes the blog was my place for writing down how I felt about things and how I was feeling.

Like many bloggers I diligently wrote something everyday, but I knew that it might not be possible for me to keep this up. I decided that it would be a good place for me to express how the discrimination and stigma associated with having mental health problems affects those of us who suffer in this way. The blog was only three weeks old when I wrote what I still believe to be one of my best posts. How To Deal With Meeting A Person With Depression was written from the heart and actually seemed to flow from my fingers with no effort at all. This post attracted four comments, not many when compared to other bloggers, but each of them complimented me on a well written post and that really did wonders for my self-esteem. The post was also linked by Jobbing Doctor and this linking led to a number of other doctors reading my blog on an occasional basis.

This blog has seen me through some difficult times. I have written about being in the depths of despair, I have written about holes in the ground, I have written about how hard it is to go through therapy, I have written about my experiences and worries relating to talking in front of strangers, I have written about my knitting and how it keeps me sane, I have written about the friendship that has developed between myself and another blogger, There and Back, and how much that friendship means to me. I have written about a life; my life.

I don't have a huge regular readership, I don't attract lots of comments, I don't write everyday, but I do try to make the posts that I write, entertaining, informative, and occasionally amusing. I try to celebrate my good times and I try not to dwell too much on my bad times. While I moderate comments, I have never refused to publish one. I hope that I write well enough for anyone who finds their way here to enjoy what they are reading. But most of all I write because it fulfils some inner need and helps me to keep focused on managing to live with depression.

Here's to a second year of blogging.

How Blogging And Psychotherapy Have Given Me A New Opportunity

As you know I don't look forward to Friday's very much. Friday is psychotherapy day and psychotherapy is hard. I can only speak about the type of psychotherapy that I receive, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and I can assure you that it can be very traumatic at times when looking into your long gone past.

However, I am aware that I am very lucky to be able to receive this sort of psychotherapy, and not on a short-term basis, because it is not that common on the NHS. Even though there have been times when I have needed a whole box of tissues to cope with the tears that have been shed in some of the sessions, I have learnt an incredible amount about myself and why I am the way that I am. I think the the worst of the digging into my past has been done, therefore psychotherapy sessions are a lot less emotional now, although there are still things that are discussed that are likely to lead to tears.

Yesterday's session required just one tissue; the tears were few, but I believe that a lot was achieved. I always have great difficulty in talking at the start of a session. I could probably count on one finger the number of times that I have actually been the first to talk at a session, but I usually manage quite well once I get started. Yesterday was no different to normal and my psychotherapist eventually got things going by commenting that I looked quite sad when he came to collect me from the reception area and wondered why this might be.

I wasn't aware that I looked sad, and I didn't feel particularly sad, for on Thursday I had an email that may well change my life. Well, it may give me the opportunity of doing something that will enable me to change my life. As a result of writing this blog, I have been approached to give a lecture and take part in a seminar entitled "The User's Experience of Therapy" as part of a postgraduate degree in Mental Health and Wellbeing at one of the London universities.

This blog really has changed my life. I have found a means of expressing my thoughts which avoids me having to have a conversation with myself; I have through a casual mention of the blog to my GP become involved in promoting patients' access to their medical records; and now the blog has been responsible for this new opportunity.

I am very nervous about doing this, and I have plenty of time to work myself into a real state of anxiety before it happens at the end of February, but I am also rather looking forward to it, because I believe it is very important that people understand what it is like to receive therapy and how it can do much to help, but how it can also, in the hands of an unsympathetic therapist, cause much damage.

Plenty of food for thought over the next couple of weeks.

Six Months Of Blogging - I Didn't Think It Would Last

Tomorrow it is six months since I started this blog. I'm still not sure what possessed me to do it, but I am glad that I did. There are times when that six months seems like a life time, and others when it has seemed to pass in a flash.

I wasn't really sure what I would write about when I first started, except that I felt that I needed to explain what it felt like, for me, to suffer with depression. My depression was not something new, I had been suffering for nearly 10 years, but because I live on my own it often feels as though there is no-one who I can talk to about how I feel, and even if nobody read the blog, I felt that I was at least speaking my thoughts out loud and not keeping it bottled up inside. I have been asked why I called myself Madsadgirl, and all I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not mad, although there are times when I have doubted my sanity, I am sad some of the time, but there are also times when I am quite happy, and at my age I am stretching a point to call myself a girl, but the name sounded catchy and I couldn't think of anything else.

Many of my early posts were about depression, but I was aware that this would make a pretty boring blog and may not attract much in the way of readership if everything that I wrote was negative, so I also included posts about being a student with the Open University, about things that I had seen in the news and that I had strong opinions about, about the way that members of the medical profession, particularly GPs, were being vilified by some members of the government, particularly as these men and women do a difficult job and rarely get the thanks that they deserve.

Sometimes I wrote about things that were happening around me, for example the dreaded roadworks that are a consequence of the replacement of London's Victorian water mains, and I wrote about the sometimes funny and sometimes beautiful things that I saw around me. Knitting has also been a subject of a great many posts, even if it was only to say that I was having to unpick what I was working on and start again because I had made a mess of it.

Of course, depression and the effect that it can have on a person still remains one of the main reasons that I write this blog. I have written about the discrimination and stigma that those with mental health problems face, and I write about them through experience. I have also written about what it is like to undergo psychotherapy, not short-term cognitive-behaviour therapy that many undergo, but long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy with the traumatic issues and feelings that this can raise, and the relief that it can bring in being able to understand why I am the way that I am.

Sometimes I write almost every day, sometimes more than once a day, and sometimes there can be days between posts. My aim has always been to write something meaningful and that will cause anybody reading it to think about what life can be like for other people. I hope that I have achieved this aim and that what I have written over the last six months has helped people to understand what life is like for someone with depression and that it has given hope to some who find themselves in a similar state.

All bloggers say that they are surprised that anyone reads what they write, but we would be liars if we did not admit that there is a hope that someone else will read what we have written. I will never have the following of some of the blogs that I read, but I am thrilled that I have managed to attract more than 4600 hits since the blog started. I am honoured that some of my posts have been considered of enough value to warrant such worthy bloggers as the Jobbing Doctor and Dr Grumble to select them as shared items on their blogs, and I know that each time they have done this I have experienced a marked increase in traffic to the blog. Thank you, Gentlemen; it has been much appreciated.

Like many bloggers I tend to see what leads people to read my blog. Obviously the word "depression" brings up many hits when a Google search is carried out, and this is a way that a few find their way to my blog. Another frequent search term is Open University, or OU, sometimes with the word "studying" sometimes without. Psychotherapy is another term that has appeared frequently, with or without other search terms. I have been amused by those studying with the OU who have found their way to my blog when trying to get ideas for the particular TMA that they are working on at the time. That has happened for both of the courses that I am studying at present, but I am afraid that they will have gained nothing from what I have written other than to learn that even after many years of studying with the OU, I still find it extremely difficult to sit down to write an essay for a TMA.

I have made a number of virtual friends through this blog, and I have met one blogger, with whom I now correspond on an almost daily basis outside of this blog and who is now much more than a virtual friend. I started to write this blog anonymously, and I still think that was a good idea. I didn't tell anyone that I was writing it until it had been going for almost a month, and even then I only told a couple of people. Six months of blogging and there are still only a handful of people who know my real name and anything about me, and I find that something of a comfort. This means that comments received on my blog mean that much more because they do not come from people who feel that they have to make a comment because they know me.

So here I am, six months on. Has writing a blog made any difference to me? The answer to that is definitely a resounding "Yes". I have written about the good times and the bad, I have written about the funny and the sad, and I have written sometimes when my heart was breaking but I knew that writing was the only way that I could carry on. And receiving comments when I have written at these difficult times has helped me through them and helped me to come out smiling on the other side.

To all of you who bother to read this blog I say a big "Thank You", you have made life worth living again, and to those who comment "Keep commenting, I love them", and to those of you who read and don't comment "Why don't you?"; although I moderate comments I have published every one that has been written.

4000

While I was writing my last post, the visit counter on my blog clicked onto 4000. I don't get masses of readers like many bloggers, but I do have my regulars, and of course I get those who only visit the once as a result of some strange Google search that has picked up my blog. I don't mind that my readership is only counted in the tens daily (the average is something around 30 at the moment), I am just amazed that anyone reads it at all.

What started off as a bit of a half-hearted experiment has become a way of life. I don't panic if I don't write a post every day, but I try to make sure that what I do write is informative, educational, or entertaining. I hope that I have succeeded. The mere fact that I get comments on a wide range of posts indicates that some people out there have been informed, educated or entertained.

I have two more landmarks coming up over the next few weeks. The first will be writing my 200th post, and at the end of the month I will have been writing this blog for 6 months. If you had asked me when I first started writing this blog if I would reach any of these landmarks, I would have said not a hope in hell's chance.

I'm rather glad that I was wrong.

Under The Clock At Waterloo

It was reminiscent of a 1940s film. A rendezvous had been made to meet under the clock at Waterloo at 10am this morning. The station was filled with people searching the boards to find out which platform their train was leaving from. There were greetings between those who had not seen each other for some time; there were partings as some set off on adventures or off to some far away place.

I was there, standing under the clock, waiting for someone who I had never met before. Someone with whom I had never spoken. Yet I did not feel as though I was meeting a stranger. I was meeting someone who over the last few months I had come to look upon as a friend. There was no newspaper under my arm, nor a carnation in my buttonhole. I had told the person that I was meeting that I would be wearing my new blue jumper; I hoped that they would recognize it.

This was going to be a first for me. I had never made such an assignation before, I was suddenly a little apprehensive and yet I was looking forward to this encounter. Thoughts went through my mind. Would we get on together? Would we find anything to talk about? We both had mental scars, yet this was perhaps what had drawn us together in the first place.

Today was the big day. Today, I was meeting There and Back.

I have to admit that we have been corresponding by email for some weeks now, and as she was making a visit to London we decided to meet and chose under the clock at Waterloo as our meeting place as so many must have done before us. We walked from the station to get away from the crowds and went to Starbucks for a mug of hot chocolate. And we talked, and talked and talked. For two hours we talked and covered a wide range of subjects, but the thing that we talked about most was our addiction. Yes, we are both addicted to studying with the Open University. We talked about courses we had done, and courses we were yet to take. We talked about families, and about other bloggers.

It is a strange thing, this blogging world. We often comment to each other about how we will never meet and yet we seem to have so many things in common. But for There and Back and I, we shall no longer wonder about the person whose blog we read, for we have met and we enjoyed each other's company. In fact, we enjoyed it so much we have already agreed to do it again some time. What was important about this meeting is that both of us find it difficult to meet new people and we are often uncomfortable in crowded places. Today, I think we both went some way to beating this fear and we have lived to tell the tale.

Just in case you may think I am speaking out of turn, one of the first things I asked There and Back was whether she would mind if I wrote about our meeting in a post. She said 'No', and that she had thought of doing the same thing. So look out for a post on her blog in the days to come.

Of Cabbages And Kings

I'm quite enjoying this blog lark. The only problem is that I am spending more time at the computer and less time with my books. That's a bit naughty. However, I don't really mind because this is actually helping to make me feel better than I have for a very long time.

When you have been in a very long depression finding your way out of it can be very difficult. You start to think that it will never get better as one bad day succeeds another, and then you get worse days and even worse days. When this starts happening to me my head and body no longer feel connected to each other and a good night's sleep becomes a distant memory. Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep, then manage a couple of hours of fitful sleep only to wake up and then not be able to get to sleep again. Sometimes I drop off to sleep very quickly, but again wake in the early hours of the morning being totally unable to get back to sleep. And sometimes I never get to sleep. A week or so of this and I am at the stage where I am hardly functioning at all.

Fortunately this doesn't happen too often and a slight change in my daily medication will enable me to get some proper sleep and after a few days of this I start to feel a bit more human again. Don't get me wrong, I'm still depressed but I don't look like a zombie any more. There is a problem though. The change in medication does allow me to sleep properly but if I continue it for too long I get to the stage where I am asleep, or would like to be, for 23 hours out of 24.

At the moment I think that I have managed to achieve an equilibrium. I am getting a reasonable amount of sleep at night while also managing to remain fairly active during the day. Hopefully a couple of weeks like this and the current depression will start to lift and life will be worth living again. If we could have some decent weather so it seemed a bit more like summer, I think that the recovery could be swifter. Whatever happened to those long hot summers of my childhood? Still there's no chance of a hosepipe ban this summer!