One of the places where Catharine’s various diagnoses conflict is in making daily decisions about time.
Her bipolar/anxiety/PTSD mean that she needs to limit her expenditures of energy, lest she crash her mood. Her ADD, on the other hand, makes it really hard to remember that context and make reasonable judgements therein. So, in the interest of trying to prevent meltdowns before they happen, we’ve developed some rules.
- Self-care is the absolute priority, and that translates to eating three meals at reasonable times, taking all her meds, having at least one nap (two if necessary), and going to bed at a reasonable hour.
- We can collectively have, at most, three doctors appointments a week, lest I lose my mind. (I have to do all the driving, so….)
- No more than two appointments of any kind in a day, unless they’re both virtual, and then a third could be okay if everything else is generally stable (i.e., rock-bottom self-care has been good, mood isn’t wobbly, the appointments she has had and the work she’s done hasn’t been unduly emotionally stressful).
- The time between lunch and dinner is downtime for her, since she likes to work in the morning and evening. (And downtime doesn’t mean being on work email.) (She’s really bad at downtime.)
She’s working on doing things like listening to her body and responding with what it needs (nap if she’s tired, food if she’s hungry, etc.), but that’s pretty advanced and it’s easy for her to be disconnected when she’s eyeballs deep in People On The Internet. So we have rules.
And then there are the days when it all goes wrong.
Not only did she have three calls already scheduled on a day when she accidentally missed her morning anti-anxiety meds and was really tired from staying up reading, she added two more on the fly, one of them smack in the middle of what was supposed to be downtime.
Since one of the original ones was after lunch, there were two appointments fucking with her nap/downtime, despite my having suggested at breakfast, in light of the bad sleep, that she might consider two naps today. (In fact, at lunch she told me she was still considering two naps, and when I asked her when those two naps would take place, she realized she somehow thought they’d both happen between 3:30 and 5. Now and not now, I swear.)
She told me she was canceling one scheduled call, and I said great! Then you’ll only have four appointments instead of five! I wasn’t exactly sarcastic, but I wasn’t exactly not sarcastic, either.
She tilted her head and said, “Really, four?”
I counted them off on my fingers. “K, S, R, S again, and J would have been five! So much for that rule.”
And then she laughed and said, “I totally forgot that rule existed. It’s not that I disregarded it. I completely forgot it existed.”
Oh, ADD. You’re such a pain in the ass.
At least it made me laugh.
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