Post by Veritee on Dec 31, 2004 11:42:12 GMT
Dear all
To all you who are now experiencing swings of ups and downs.
I know that this may seem contradictory but when women say on here that they are starting to feel miserable again after thinking they were on the road to recovery and that now their mood swings from good/feeling 'normal' to feeling they are right back there at the beginning of PNI -
I do not regard this is a sign that you are going back wards - but that you are certainly getting better!
It was my experience and that of so many on here that it can not be a co-incidence - that there is a pattern to recovery from PNI which is similar for many.
It would be nice if at a certain point we just started to feel better and we built upon this until we could no longer say we had PNI.
However unfortunately this does not seem to be the case.
At first PNI is just such un-mitigating misery - day after day week after week, whereby
- depending on the person, the symptoms which cause the most grief are different, and we may have different symptoms -
we all share that feeling that this may go on for ever and there really is never a day we can say is totally a good one
It seems it will never end and there just is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Then we get a few good days or even weeks or just hours - this does not mean we feel well, but compared to the unrelenting misery of before - it is such a good experience to know you can have good days /weeks/hours and the tunnel seems shorter.
we can even suddenly find our mood swings from hour to hour through out a day - one moment feeling on top of the world - the other completely miserable
But even this ironically I think is a sign of recovery or at least the start of recovery! - it is very different from th total immersion in feeling awful 24/7 that most of us get at the start of PNI
so look upon these ups and downs , even when they happen in the same day , as a step forward!!
Then what happens to most is we then after a period of feeling better - get a bad day or two or three, and we crash!!
In my case I experienced despair that the recovery I thought I was gong through was an illusion - I had been fooling myself - and I would never get well!!
However if I thought about it on my bad days I did not feel any worse than before in fact probably better but after experiencing some lifting of the illness and days when I felt 'almost' but not quite 'normal' to go down again felt worse than being always down - it was such a disappointment.
After that - for me at least followed a period of time when I was on a bit of a roller coaster of moods - I could never know how I would wake up the next day, fine or really down.
For m, because I think I did not take medication and started to reach menopause during this time
( periods and other hormonal fluctuations for other reasons really do seem to have a drastic effect on this ie before a period you can feel absolutely down and desperate even suicidal , at least this was my experience- as someone pointed out the pill can do this too)
this period did last a very long time for me, but for others it has been only a couple of months or so.
During this time however the 'normal' days gradually started to supersede the 'bad' days,
This did not mean however that I was walking on air, totally happy on these days, I still had my issues and as I have said before - more issues due to having suffered PNI in the first place - but I more often felt well and 'normal' than ill and 'bad'.
I think it is important to distinguish between being happy and being well.
continued
To all you who are now experiencing swings of ups and downs.
I know that this may seem contradictory but when women say on here that they are starting to feel miserable again after thinking they were on the road to recovery and that now their mood swings from good/feeling 'normal' to feeling they are right back there at the beginning of PNI -
I do not regard this is a sign that you are going back wards - but that you are certainly getting better!
It was my experience and that of so many on here that it can not be a co-incidence - that there is a pattern to recovery from PNI which is similar for many.
It would be nice if at a certain point we just started to feel better and we built upon this until we could no longer say we had PNI.
However unfortunately this does not seem to be the case.
At first PNI is just such un-mitigating misery - day after day week after week, whereby
- depending on the person, the symptoms which cause the most grief are different, and we may have different symptoms -
we all share that feeling that this may go on for ever and there really is never a day we can say is totally a good one
It seems it will never end and there just is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Then we get a few good days or even weeks or just hours - this does not mean we feel well, but compared to the unrelenting misery of before - it is such a good experience to know you can have good days /weeks/hours and the tunnel seems shorter.
we can even suddenly find our mood swings from hour to hour through out a day - one moment feeling on top of the world - the other completely miserable
But even this ironically I think is a sign of recovery or at least the start of recovery! - it is very different from th total immersion in feeling awful 24/7 that most of us get at the start of PNI
so look upon these ups and downs , even when they happen in the same day , as a step forward!!
Then what happens to most is we then after a period of feeling better - get a bad day or two or three, and we crash!!
In my case I experienced despair that the recovery I thought I was gong through was an illusion - I had been fooling myself - and I would never get well!!
However if I thought about it on my bad days I did not feel any worse than before in fact probably better but after experiencing some lifting of the illness and days when I felt 'almost' but not quite 'normal' to go down again felt worse than being always down - it was such a disappointment.
After that - for me at least followed a period of time when I was on a bit of a roller coaster of moods - I could never know how I would wake up the next day, fine or really down.
For m, because I think I did not take medication and started to reach menopause during this time
( periods and other hormonal fluctuations for other reasons really do seem to have a drastic effect on this ie before a period you can feel absolutely down and desperate even suicidal , at least this was my experience- as someone pointed out the pill can do this too)
this period did last a very long time for me, but for others it has been only a couple of months or so.
During this time however the 'normal' days gradually started to supersede the 'bad' days,
This did not mean however that I was walking on air, totally happy on these days, I still had my issues and as I have said before - more issues due to having suffered PNI in the first place - but I more often felt well and 'normal' than ill and 'bad'.
I think it is important to distinguish between being happy and being well.
continued