The fluoxetine is definitely kicking in now, which means that I'm somewhat better: specifically, I can sleep later than 6 am, I can then lie around on the bed and sofa without feeling too sick, and around 10 am I can actually start to get up and do stuff, with caution. I'm generally ok after lunchtime, though rather exhausted from all the tension in the morning -- which at this point is more physical than mental really.

The doctors say my great-aunt isn't going to wake up -- her first brain haemorrhage, which was operated on, was followed by more, and they can't operate any more. She's in intensive care, and she can't be sent home, but they expect it to be a question of days -- though apparently, you can never tell. In a way it is merciful, because she's always been such an independent woman, being bound to a bed for the rest of her days and having to depend on others was probably her worst nightmare. But I am sorry for this aunt who was born at the start of the last century, and whom I had come to appreciate only late.

My parents are staying in her house to be near the hospital (different city, different region). My mother isn't doing any better than me with anxiety, and this saddens me; but they are together and they can talk to each other and support each other. (I will be going down for most of September, which was already planned before any of this came up and it seems best to stick to the plan.)

It now seems that we won't have the results for my father's tests until the end of the month, which seems to be mostly due to August -- when everything in Italy shuts down, including some medical services. I'm rather angry. But mostly still anxious.

Yesterday and the day before were the worst for anxiety, and I was in a very bad state well past midday (until 7 and 5 pm respectively). Given that I could think of no special reason why I should be more anxious than before, I started to worry seriously about this getting out of control.

So I did some further research, looked at my options, and decided to go and see my doctor. Who gave me a prescription for Fluoxetine (Prozac) as I had asked, and also told me that if I only take it for one or two weeks I can then stop it suddenly without any ill effects -- it accumulates progressively, and so it is only after a longer use that it becomes necessary to come off it slowly. This was important for me because I expect that if the news from my father, when they finally arrive, are good, I will not need to keep taking this medication, but I thought I would have to keep taking it anyway for some time. So I feel happier about starting, knowing that I can stop soon if all is well.

Even so, I didn't take my first dose yesterday, because in the meantime I had come up with a possible reason for the increase in anxiety -- and it was a reason that was removed yesterday. So I thought I'd give it another day and see if it got better. Well, today is not really much better: maybe a tiny bit, but it seems to be worsening from early this morning, so I'll stop being all scientific and experimental about it and just start taking my fluoxetine tonight.

I'll have to give up grapefruit juice, which is a bit of a bummer because it's the only fresh fruit juice I really like and an important source of vitamins since I don't eat much fruit otherwise. In fact, it's not clear whether the effects on fluoxetine specifically are serious or negligible -- I've found contradictory information: but it seems prudent to err on the side of caution. Meh, ok.

I went to see Dark Knight last night: I have to confess that I expected better from the comments I'd seen online, but all the same, it was a fun movie and I enjoyed it a lot. The Joker was very Tim Curry-esque :-)

Well, the doctor did go to check my father after the operation and talk to him, but didn't say anything useful[1]. My father will be sent home on Wednesday (they need to do some post-op stuff tomorrow). And we're unlikely to find out anything further until the results of the biopsy arrive -- which isn't going to be less than 2 weeks, from all I know about such exams.

So now all that's left to do is hope.

(Ok, and try not to panic too much, because the past two days already took rather a lot out of me. And I can easily guess my mother is doing worse -- we're quite similar in this.)

[1] In the sense of helping to get a sense of where the polyp they removed would fall in the scale between "trivial, solved by the operation just done" to "incurable, will kill him quickly".

My father is out of the surgery. That went well, but there was no real doubt -- the operation was done via probe with partial anaesthetic only, so no big risks. However, the doctors haven't spoken to either of my parents yet, so we still have no idea how serious or not the thing is/was.

I think the surgeon who did the procedure must know, because from what I was able to find out, depth/superficiality of the polyp is a pretty strong indicator in these cases (though of course you'd still want the cytology afterwards), but at this point I don't know whether we'll be told anything at all before those lab results come back (which can take 1-2 weeks AFAIK). I hope we will be, and of course I hope it's going to be good. But my mother seems to think we shouldn't assume we will be. So.

I'll update further whenever I know more.

Haven't been updating for a while so I thought it's time to do so.

Mood very much up and down, this morning fairly bad anxiety. For which there are a number of reasons, but the main one is that my father has been in hospital for the past couple of days for a bladder polyp, and we don't know yet if it's a fairly trivial thing or a very bad thing. We should know something more tomorrow: that's when he should have the thing removed (via probe), at which point the doctors will know exactly how big and deep it was. As I understand it, that should give a fair guess as to its severity: but the details will have to wait for the results of the subsequent biopsy.

So, yeah, anxiety. He's feeling entirely well at the moment (the symptom that made him go to the A&E to be checked was blood in the urine, no other symptoms or pain): but whether he will remain well is entirely up in the air.

This would generate anxiety under any circumstances, never mind about 2 weeks after going to 2 funerals of people who died of cancer.

Anxiety is made worse by:
- The fact that I'm still not smoking. It probably doesn't cause anxiety by itself, but it does remove one of the main reactions I would normally have to it, and one which does have an effect -- whether directly by doing something chemical, indirectly by reducing nicotine-craving, or by pure psychological means (placebo, basically). Anyway, the net effect is that I'm wanting cigarettes more badly and more often now than I did a week ago when it should in theory have been worse.
- Two concurrent jobs to finish -- which I should manage ok without rushing, but I've missed two deadlines lately (partly because of working on concurrent jobs) and I really don't like doing so and therefore now I'm feeling anxious about this anyway.
- Having spent yesterday rushing one of the two jobs anyway, because I wanted to have it done so I could go to a mini-festival in the park today. In the end, the weather is uncertain and the job is still not quite finished and taking the two together I've decided to skip the festival -- but it did create stress yesterday both because of the rush work and because of having to decide whether to go or not (I had to coordinate with a friend who has tickets -- it's a free but ticketed event and I didn't get one in time, but she had a couple spare).
- Life in general.

Anyway. I wanted to update because it's been a while. I've disabled comments because I know all of you sympathise and wish me and my father well, but for some reason writing this feels to me like fishing for comments and putting an obligation on people -- unless I disable comments thereby removing the obligation. It's not that I don't appreciate it: it's more that in this case sympathy and well-wishing is really so natural and obvious that it can be taken for read, and actually having to state it in comments seems silly :-)

...well, and after what I wrote yesterday, this morning I did wake up with a sharp sense of anxiety (without a specific target). At 6 am, too (the alarm clock was for 8).

I am now officially on yellow alert -- which means, I do worry, but there are good grounds for hope.
- After the initial sharp pang (of the kind that lodges itself firmly under the sternum), the anxiety lessened. It's still there, but at a low level.
- I am travelling today (even if only a couple of hours by car and only for a week-end), and this does traditionally tend to make me anxious.
- I am going to spend a week-end away, completely breaking the routine and doing something I enjoy (choir workshop). This may well be enough to break whatever cycle was trying to get itself established.

So, good hopes that by the time I'm back home on Monday things well be fine. I really do not need (never mind want) another episode of depression.

For several days now a frequent (if not permanent) mood is unexplained anxiety. It feels a lot like the kind of anxiety I get with depression, but with 3 important differences: (a) it's less intense; (b) it's not every day; and most importantly (c) it's not there in the morning, it comes during the day. (With depression it was always worst in the morning, and then decreased and often disappeared some time after midday.)

The differences, especially (c), are clear enough that I'm not actually worrying -- though I'm keeping an eye on things. But it's still unpleasant, and I'm not sure where it comes from. It could be some chemical thing short of full-blown depression, or it could be circumstances.

Circumstances aren't actually that bad -- and no worse than they were 3 weeks ago, certainly. I'm being reasonably effective and productive (in fact, this year I'm being much more effective and productive than I've been in a long time, but maybe I'm getting a bit blasée about that). Of course the anxiety makes it very difficult to concentrate on anything and so makes me less effective and productive than I would be otherwise, but it's still pretty good. Nothing particularly bad has happened.

The only direct thing I can think of is my repeatedly failed attempt to re-write my CV. This is like a concentrate of several things that would each panic me or depress me by themselves, all rolled up into one two-page package -- I am sure that it's a contributing factor, but even so it seems unlikely to be the sole cause, or even the core cause.

Right now I can't afford to take the time to look into it properly though, because as well as being all efficient etc. I am also very uncharacteristically busy at the moment, between paid work, the next weekend away at the choir's annual residential workshop, and fielding some consequences of previous activity and productivity (following up on calls, sorting out queries, filling and sending in forms, stuff like that). I may have a lot of time next week though. Or I may have more busy-ness. Or it may have gone away by then. But for some reason I felt a need to blather about it here, if it's all I can do for the moment.

(In related and cryptic soap news, yesterday I ended up asking L a very important question-for-information that I'd been sitting on for a while, and getting the preferred answer. This did remove the obsession that had also settled in, and should mean I can now move on from the related stuckness once I have the time to stop and think about it; on the other hand, I was also hoping that the anxiety might disappear with it, and it hasn't, so scratch that as an explanation...)

Still feeling frantic, with a constant sense of "I should be doing something important and I'm not doing it". Also reasonably busy, but the frantic is still out of proportion.

In fact, it's looking quite definitely like the standard "generalised anxiety" that I feel sometimes and that for me is clearly linked to depression. So is this one of the "mood swings" that I was threatened with?

Anyway -- the current level is manageable: if it doesn't get worse, I can cope with it, even though it isn't pleasant. Especially since I can confidently repeat to myself at need that it is only a chemical thing and not due to actual anxiety-producing events. Of course the brain finds all kinds of external events -- real, predicted or outright imagined -- to attach the anxiety to, which is why the reminder is quite useful.

One thing the anxiety is latching on to is social interactions. Now, I'm not much good at them at the best of times, and the current feelings are in fact just an upgraded version of something that is pretty much baseline for me.

It's mostly retrospective anxiety, which can be summarized as "Have I said something wrong? Have I done something wrong? Surely I have said/done something wrong. I must have really disappointed them / they must think I'm horrible." Currently this happens with every interaction I have, FtF or online, from exchanging a few words with the checkout guy I see every day in the shop to having a 3-hour dinner with (very nice) complete strangers, and with a higher intensity than normal.

This is not good because (a) it isn't a nice feeling, and (b) I have little enough social interaction as it is, and this of course doesn't encourage me to make the (often considerable) effort to seek out more.

In most cases, I can stop and analyse things and see that the anxiety is not objectively justified -- I have not in fact said/done anything wrong and there is no reason to believe I have come across badly. Unfortunately, this makes no difference: the feeling is unchanged. (And then there are those cases where I suspect I have objectively said/done something wrong -- my social ineptness doesn't after all stop at the anxiety.)

Focusing on the present moment is of course the remedy. (It could also be called "stop obsessing!", but focusing on the present moment is a bit broader, plus it's positive instead of negative. It's almost always easier to think of a polka-dot crocodile than not to think of a pink rhinoceros.) When I succeed, I'm fine, except for some undesired side-effects, like completely losing the notion of time -- not good if you actually have things to do at specific times. And I do mean not knowing if it is morning or evening...

What I'm not getting is future-oriented anxiety. I'm not complaining, mind: but I'm noting it because I think it's interesting, given what I said about generalised anxiety latching on to pretty much anything within reach. Something to reflect on, maybe, but probably when I'm feeling a little less frantic :-)