Grateful

I know I’ve said this before but I’m so, so grateful for my amazing psychiatrist. She has a knack of just making everything feel better and more achievable.

We’ve been physically unwell lately with what seems to be a gynaecological issue but the thought of seeing the specialist has brought up a whole load of trauma related anxiety and some parts of us have been so terrified that we had pretty much resigned to the fact that it would either go away by itself or we’d eventually die rather than ask for help.

The pain has just gotten worse and worse over the last few months and it’s really impacting day to day life and quality of sleep and we need pain killers 24/7.

Our lovely friend T who is a naturopath has even prescribed us (the worlds worst tasting) concoctions of herbs to try and reduce pain and inflammation (while gently encouraging us to go to the gynaecologist) but sadly it hasn’t had a noticeable effect.

After discussing the issue in an online support group we agreed that we were going to have to bite the bullet and see someone or we would end up biting a less metaphorical bullet and we were given a few suggestions of how to go about it less triggeringly such as starting with a phone consultation, asking for external imaging techniques and so on.

We finally plucked up the courage to ring our GP for a referral to a gynaecologist but of course it turned out the GP is away for a few weeks. This was a pretty big blow and threw us back into the spiral of self doubt

What if it was all in our heads?

What if we just have low pain threshold and they’ll judge us for whining unnecessarily?

What if they do find something but can’t fix it anyway and we are destined to be in pain forever?

What if they find something and the fix involves triggering invasive procedures and/or anaesthesia?

“It’s so much worse than death,

the fear of living,

the fear of suffering.

the fear of being afraid.

So we plant our flag upon this hill,

Righteous to our end.

Here we’ll stay

Until the shadows fall,

our ashes cast to the wind.” – anon system member

I was really struggling this morning and wrote our psychiatrist a quick email just to connect because it’s been a long time between appointments (over a month) and was another two weeks til the next one. She replied straight away saying she had a cancellation in an hour and offered me a phone appointment, the timing was impeccable.

She called and not only was she kind and validating as always but she is able to write a referral to a gynaecologist she recommends straight away and explain our fears and mention that we have a trauma history and offered to advocate for us every step of the way.

We actually feel kind of hopeful now that we can get help and that they will work with our fears and let us be in control of how things go, now that brick of anxiety that was overwhelming us has melted away and I actually feel relieved and so so grateful for having such a good psychiatrist.