livingwithablackdog

There are a lot of things I hate about Depression.  Take your pick – the effect it has on your self-worth, your energy levels, your mood, how sociable you feel and act, your self-image and presentation, that non-expression on your face … or the medication – weight gain, constipation, tremors, medication for the tremors … the constant need to micromanage your life to prevent relapse routine, exercise, diet, sleep, early warning signs, triggers, medications, appointments and to cap it all off there’s the increased incidence of things like diabetes and heart disease in people with depression.  Some of these are direct results of depression.  Some are spin-off effects from symptoms played out in the lifestyle.  Some are medication related.  But by far the effect that I loathe the most is the ‘fog’.

Thinking in ‘The Fog’ is like those movies where a character moves across a misty set barely able to see what is in front of them, working to make out the shadowy forms in the haze before them until the mist folds away just before they meet it to reveal what is there – yet the objective never quite within sight.  When I am not well my mind is in stupor.  Gears creak.  Cogs struggle to turn.  I forget things constantly.  I lose my place in what I am trying to communicate to someone.  These are things I was once very good at.  As I get better I can do all of the things that I used to do – but many of them I do more slowly than I once did.  It now takes me longer to process things in my head – arithmetic, deciding how to express something carefully, making a decision, figuring something out.  Some of this is because of medication – but not all of it.  Some is the Depression itself.  It has slowed my once quick mind.  Recent changes to medications have freed it up a little, but it is still not what it once was.

It is not obvious to everyone.  Mostly only to people who have known me for a long time before and after the Depression left its mark.  When talking with a friend and therapist with whom I once worked once told me that the difference had made her cry.  It was such a relief to know that another person was grieving too.

I had an ongoing dilemma with medications until recently that centred around a Lithium fog.  After years on a tricyclic that kept me well in tandem with Lithium, I eventually had to stop the Lithium so that I could use anti-inflammatory meds for chronic back pain that wasn’t responding to any other form of treatment.  The result was that the back pain settled reasonably quickly, but it was difficult to keep my mood stable on the tricyclic alone.  In the end, my Doctor suggested that a medication change was the way to go and I finished up on a combination of Lexapro and Edronax.  Beautiful.  I could think.  However, like the tricyclic (which I’d been on because SSRIs on their own didn’t work), in reality my mental state was still not really robust.  Finally, after much resistance on my part, I restarted Lithium as an augmenting medication to bolster the main ones – and, for stability I did need it.  But it really stank.  The fog was back.  Lithium, I find does slow me down – preferable to relapse and job loss – but still unpleasant.  My best news has come with the release of Valdoxan.  Given how much I hate and object to the use of Lithium, my doctor has trialled me on this in place of the Lithium as my augmenting drug and it is working beautifully and without fog.  So what is now left that is attributable to medication is as low as we can get it.

What has been affected is what I will call my ‘working memory’.  The part of the brain that is operating and pulling everything together at any moment so that I can think, move, find information that I know, solve problems, come up with ideas and take action of any kind.  It is where what is needed from my short & long-term memory, senses, visual-spatial understanding, communication and organisational understanding and my level and focus of attention are is pulled together and used to observe or interact with the cues, instructions or things in the environment around me to guide my actions in a certain way.  It is where, to a large extent I can regulate the speed of my actions also.  BUT here’s the thing.  When I’m not well my level of attention is affected so I miss information from the environment and not all of the information that my mind needs makes it in.  The speed of the working memory slows down, my memory is fuzzier and less accessible, I lose the flow of operations I am doing.  It’s like if there is a little man inside my memory coordinating all the information, he ages 100 years and can’t manage all of the information when I’m depressed.  When I’m well he returns to almost his original age and moves reasonably well; but he’s been left now with some injuries – back strains and a touch of arthritis that slow him down just a little on the fine and detailed work or when handling really heavy stuff.  He can handle it, but he’s not as fast as he was before the injuries that the sudden aging episode left on him.  And nor am I.

At times I think walking with a black dog is like walking through the high mountains where there is rarely a day unaffected by mist – not necessarily always pea-soup fog; yet always just a light haze.  Not enough to hamper most of the time, but enough to dampen the spirits and frustrate – especially one who is unaccustomed to fog.  But the moments when the fog lifts and the sun shines through – Oh my! They are glorious.