Autistic Hedgehog

Health and Blog Update

So, it’s been a really long time since I’ve updated. I’m sorry, my fellow hedgies. My health has not been good and I’ve been struggling to deal with it.

A couple years ago I received a fibromyalgia diagnosis. I’m treating it as best I can, in the ways I know how, but it’s not easy and sadly they don’t hand out instruction manuals with diagnoses. I am in fact currently in the middle of a bit of a fibro flare, which means that despite my best efforts, I’ve been able to do very little but sleep the last few days.

It turns out I also have type 2 bipolar disorder. It really came to a head last year and I was in an extremely bad place. It didn’t help that thanks to a snafu with my psychiatrist, it was six months before I got to try a mood stabilizer. I’ve been on seroquel now for a little over half a year and I’m doing better, but it’s still difficult to navigate. 

There’s quite a lot of other stuff I’ve been dealing with but getting into that will turn this post into a novel. Suffice it to say life has not been kind to me.

I have not removed Autistic Hedgehog in all this time because I’ve always hoped to be able to return to it. Submissions are open. If you wish to post a meme, just sent me the text you want and I’ll make the meme image for you. That way I can keep track easier of which ones were actually sent to me.

The inbox is now open again too but please be aware that answers to complicated questions will likely be slow in coming. I’ll do my best, but some of the questions I get are really hard to answer, and not something I can handle on bad days. And unfortunately, I do have other things I need to use my good days for. But I will try to answer at least one of any of the really big questions every week.

Believe me, I haven’t forgotten any of you. I’m still proud of being able to help people with this blog, and I’m very much still here. It’s just taken a long time to get some semblance of control over my health. It’s still in flux, but I’m going to try my best.

Still Alive. Kinda.

You may have noticed that I’ve answered a few questions today. Something that I said I was going to do quite a while ago. Well, I certainly thought I was going to.

The first two months of 2014 had other ideas. Very shortly after I started feeling better in December, I got worse again. I started having a great deal of back pain, which brought along depression and sleep deprivation. It was a pretty vicious cycle. The back pain causes both more depression and more sleep deprivation, the sleep deprivation caused more back pain, etc. etc.

Last month the sleep deprivation got really bad. We got a new pillow for me and that aspect, at least, is mostly sorted. I’m almost feeling human, but I’m still dealing with a lot of pain in my back and neck. We’ve tried every trick in the book, just about, and it won’t go away. I’m hoping my visit with the chiropractor tomorrow helps.

I will be answering questions as I can, but I don’t think it’s fair to promise any sort of consistency right now. I just have no idea what the year is going to throw at me next. It might be I’ll be fine, but there’s just no way of knowing. But AH is not dead. I know a lot of blogs of this sort have gone away or gotten very inactive, and I know we need a place where it’s safe for us to be prickly, and I’ll make AH that place for as long as I can.

Crawling Out from Under

I am still here. Still alive. I’ve just been struggling with depression a lot lately.

For a little while it seemed like I might be able to go off my depression meds. They weren’t helping that much and I thought maybe if I treated the fibro, that would be enough. Only the medicine change to treat the fibro didn’t work, and then I went off my depression meds, too. I kept trying to fight my low mood, because I didn’t want to accept that I needed to go back on meds. I’ve been on medication my entire life, literally, and I get so tired of it always hanging over me. The problems and the side effects and all of that.

Then something happened at the beginning of the week that sent me into a meltdown and I had no choice but to accept it. I’m on a new medication now, one that’s supposed to treat both fibro and depression, and I’m stabilizing somewhat. 

I hope to get back to AH next week. For the weekend I’ll be closing the inbox, and reopening once I get it cleared out. As well, I have an idea for April this year, that I’ll be sharing soon, so stay tuned.

Not Dead Yet

I am, in fact, alive. And I’m finally, slowly, beginning to recover.

Back in April I was hit very suddenly by a depression, and a damn bad one, too. So bad that I found myself crawling back into bed and sleeping for hours on end. Medication helped, but slowly, and in the meantime I was going through a pretty stressful situation.

Just when I was getting on my feet again, I was hit with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. I’m still coming to terms with this and learning to deal with it, but in the grand scheme of things I’m feeling much better and I have more good days than bad now. My stress levels are still somewhat high, and I’ll be fairly busy at times, but things have cleared up enough for me to reopen AH.

Starting Monday, I’ll be opening the inbox again. However, instead of keeping it open constantly, I’ll close it once it builds up to a certain point to give myself time to answer without more coming in. I’ll also go back to posting submissions, so feel free to send any Hedgehogs you might have. 

Guess you can’t keep a good hedgie down. :)

- Kaia