Zinc, Magnesium, Vit D and Omega 3 are the big ones for depression.
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Here’s a little song I wrote
You don’t have to know if note by note
And just over the worst night of the six months.
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Sickness?
No thankfully.
Just woke up around 1am and roared his head off for an hour before eventually going back.
Tougher nights ahead so kid 
… could a little tooth be on the way?
2 year old had a temp last night so was up a few times with him. You just roll with that shit over time
He has two already.
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I think it’s evident what’s happening so… It’s the weekend and he’s marking your card.
I blame his mother.
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Lack of sleep is a huge factor in poor gut health apparently
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I think I will have to wait it out. That usually works.
I don’t usually get this down though. I’ve no idea what’s going on
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Best of luck with it. Michael Harding said something one time about his bouts of depression that stuck with me. He said when he was in the depths one thing that always kept him going was that he knew it would lift eventually and it always did
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Hang in there pal. Better days and times ahead.
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Would you consider getting a dog?
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This too will pass
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Have you tried dancing?
Better than anti depressants according to a recent study
Have you considered giving your depression a name and touring schools lecturing on mindfulness and charging a small fortune?
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There was another fella on Brendan O’Connor this morning who seems to be part of what I’d call the depression-industrial complex. A guy called Mark Mehigan. He was an alcoholic and cocaine addict. He’s also Doireann Garrihy’s boyfriend and has written a book. And he’s on the front cover of today’s Irish Times Magazine.
I’m glad for Mark Mehigan that he seems to have a handle on his problems now, but people using depression to get a leg up into the public eye and almost make a career out of it sticks in my craw.
I have PJ Gallagher’s book which I was given for Christmas staring back at me in my room but I’ll never open it.I don’t feel that any of these people in the public eye who go on about depression help me one iota. I don’t feel they have anything to say to me. Maybe they have something to say to other people, and that’s fair enough, but they don’t have anything to say to me, and neither does anybody in the entire fields of mental health and psychiatry. I can’t be medicated out of my problem, because my problem is a physical one. Severe depression is a symptom of that. You can’t treat the symptoms and not treat the cause. There is zero crossover between opthalmology and mental health.
I necked a load of pills there on Sunday morning about 11am. I had this thing I get frequently where I literally want to escape my body, I feel like I’m a prisoner in it. Often it gets too much. This episode was caused by three things. i) I had a lot to drink on the Friday, I was out from lunchtime and didn’t stop until 1am. ii) Our cat is ill and will probably die because it has kidney disease and possibly cancer. iii) I lost my extended wear blurry contact lens in the sink. I ended up finding it trapped in the stopper mechanism.
This set me off on a spiral. The pills I necked were Sertraline 100mg tablets. I can’t remember exactly how many I had, maybe 8, maybe 10, maybe more. I didn’t have any Sertraline left at the end of it anyway. I had a quetiapine 25mg tablet on top of that for good measure.
I had an ambulance called for me but I immediately left the house on foot. My mam found me walking down Thomas Hynes Road toward the hospital. An ambulance passed the other way about 20 seconds later and my Mam shouted out to the driver that she had me.
I was seen immediately in the hospital and spent the next 10 hours or so there and had an electrocardiogram and blood tests and whatever, but physically I wasn’t too bad except for mildly passing out and some low blood pressure. If you’re going to overdose, take anti-depressants. I’m pretty sure the fella in the booth across from me was involved in the machete wielding incident at the boxing in Castlerea. He was playing what sounded like videos of it. He was an awkward fucker, he was told he was alright and could go but he kept asking was he going to get sepsis, this went on for about three hours until he finally left.
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday in bed and much of the last week looking at YouTube videos of trains passing Sallins or Hazelhatch or Portarlington station at speed. I saw that somebody made themselves into a tragic incident at Clongriffin the other day. I note all these incidents with morbid interest. When I put the contact lens in again, it started to make my eye sore and red, so I’ve had it out since about Tuesday.
I had an eye consultation today, yes, Saturday. The consultant was a lovely woman - I think she’s Bulgarian but has been working in Scotland for years so she has a sort of Scottish accent - I can’t remember her name because it’s one of these very difficult to pronounce eastern European names and she’s only over working in Ireland for a short time I think so I couldn’t even look her name up on the website of the place I was at today.
She was easily the nicest and the best consultant I’ve seen so far, which actually means something as to be honest I feel that I’ve been chewed up, spat out and treated like a child right from when I presented initially at UHG in Galway. She showed me graphically how my retina has shifted position after being reattached - it has rotated about five degrees, which means my left eye vision is slumped and slanted. Then she showed me my epiretinal membrane, a sort of scar tissue that can grow on the retina, both in people who have had retinal detachment and those who have not had it. The nature of my distortion is consistent with epiretinal membrane but they won’t operate because apparently the membrane has to attain a sort of critical mass before it can be “peeled” off, if they operated now, it would sort of disintegrate. But at the same time the longer you wait, the worse the distortion tends to get. It’s already bad enough, and the membrane mightn’t even be the cause.
I don’t really know where I go from here - well I’m going to the Mater in two months to get another opinion, but I’m just so fucked off at all this. I’ll probably never read another book and I’ve scarcely read any substantial article in the last 17 months. Typing is different. You can type shite with this, but you can’t read a book with stuff dancing around in the background.
The consultant today says the brain is a very powerful tool and given time can eventually reconcile almost any two different images - and that is going on to an extent, but not near enough - but that sounds like the vision in my left eye will be fucked forever, and that’s a very hard thing to accept given it wouldn’t have been fucked had I gone to a doctor or to hospital or even to fucking Specsavers when I had the chance in August/September 2022. I blame myself for this massively and I revile myself for it and rage against myself for it and that will always be the case. I ask myself why, instead of watching Chelsea 2 Tottenham 2 in August 2022 - men at it - or a Dublin football quarter-final in September 2022, I wasn’t hotfooting it to the hospital, and I can give no serious answer.
Another problem is that the eye that the retina detached in was my dominant eye. “If you’d had the same detachment in your non-dominant eye, your overall vision would probably be back to normal now.” It isn’t.
If you ever get a detached retina, get a macula on one in your non-dominant eye, not a macula off one in your dominant eye, where your vision in that eye goes completely black overnight. Don’t get micropsia, which is where things appear smaller and further away in an eye, don’t get metamorphopsia, where lamp posts look like branches on trees, and don’t get slanted distorted double vision.
I’m supposed to be doing an anxiety course starting this week but I don’t even know what for. I may quit before it starts, I may not. It’s hard to adequately describe the feeling of being trapped that I have. It’s not mental illness, it’s depression. There’s a difference. Depression is often very rational.
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Do the course. Don’t be afraid to try anything that has the potential to change your mindset. You’re gonna have to forgive yourself for not getting it checked out. You did what any one of us would have. But it’s in the past now and can’t be revisited. You can control what your future actions are however. Don’t get too caught up in politics. It’s fine for a distraction but when you start seething reading about some case in Colorado, or the Irish rights stunning victory yesterday, its time to pop the earphones in and go for a walk.
You can’t read an article. But you can listen. And type. Start up a blog on Irish and UK sporting podcasts. Review them, rate them, criticise them.
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