Medicated depression, day #93
At the office, alone. Arrived really late and thought I'd meet colleagues, but none are present. Maybe they are tired from the weekends adventures, conference and the travel.
I slept really bad, 2.5 hours though my health band says I slept for 7 hours, my internal clock is wrecked, I'm gonna need lots of coffee today.
On Thursday I had a talk with my manager, he advised me to apply for a full or part sick leave through my doctor, as the company sees that I have amassed some 120+ hours of leave January-April, that is a bit above 14 work days, instead of doing this half-assed, my manager said as both a friend and my manager to "take some time off, to heal and get things in order", meaning sick leave where I would be full/100% off or part time off like 80% .. which would be 1 workday a week and then slowly increase the amount of work hours toward full depending how I can manage ..
I really don't look forward to being off work, it means less pay and lots of time I don't know what to do with .. therapy is just once every two weeks and I would maybe have lots of thoughts where some of the would be on the negative end of the scale .. it's just a large black lump of uncertainty, which I do not like.
Also, I'm 93 days into the medication, some observations;
- Mouth dryness, I try to drink more water but sometimes forget. When I forget I get really bad breath.
- Mood is flat and baseline, not happy nor sad, just "meh".
- Dark thoughts have decreased, I end up with them just a few times a day and try to break circle of thoughts by stating for myself that "I'm not as bad as I think, I know this shit and I know it well, stop minimizing yourself, NOW!"
I read through a list of symptoms of long-covid, I checked most of the boxes and I'll ask about it when I see the doctor next time, the things that worried me the most were the brain and memory-related things, I'm having trouble forming thoughts, keep thoughts and sometimes remembering things, like recalling what I did yesterday, or losing words, aphasia-like.
Tingling sensations in extremities, check on that too, last time health care services explained that with Sciatica, which is a nerve pinched causing pain and tingling .. it is also one of the symptoms of long-covid.
I'm not self-diagnosing, I'm just observing myself, adding up symptoms as I see them, it's up to the health care system to diagnose and evaluate my health.
With bottomed out serotonin-levels, on medication, having at least two days before meeting therapist and doctor (Wednesday) I need to try to focus to get things done (best effort, no guarantees it will work) and document stuff so I can hand over things to whomever is taking over if I'd be on sick leave, full or part.
Later: Meeting in a few minutes about progress on customer work, I have none, as I got stuck on itty bitty details last week and the end of the week got used up for conference.
Later: Explained what is happening to PL and my colleague about my depression and possible sick leave, got praise for being very open about it and it helps PL to arrange for more resources if I'm going on a full or partial sick leave, to no lose momentum and progress. Colleague is going to put an eye to the problem I've been struggling with the last couple of days, as adding fresh eyes and grey matter usually finds problems, while I as a developer become too familiar with code and "blind" to problematic passages.
Had a post-meeting talk with colleague where he asked about my depression and I told him about my angst, he understood. We looked at the gotcha and he'd check it later.
As I have more experience of the pipeline code and he has more experience of the actual application code, we take turns at looking at each others code to help each other improve by commenting or suggesting changes. Loosely pair-programming.
Later: I'm all outta thoughts now, brain is mush. Attempted untangling some mess but only managed to squash my brain.
Eyes are itchy, allergic reaction perhaps, even though still cold and winter-like outside, or just too little sleep the last couple of days .. eh, weeks, months. I just wanna crawl under the blanket, snuggle my wife, skin against skin, breathe, exist, fall asleep.
Later: I managed to gather and push through a few more thoughts, to get a few more attempts at solving the problem, which failed too. Blah, mushy brain.