Tag: Don’t be like me

Posted in My Life Now, Uncategorized

I don’t know if I can do this anymore

Posted on by Lizzie Gomez

A few weeks ago, my watch documented that I went on a walk and burned 330 calories in about an hour. I was actually sitting in the ICU doing chart reviews on my patients for the day. The following are my thoughts I wrote after this happened.

I know anxiety and other mental health and really even just mood and mentality in general are NOT just in people’s heads. These things have physical effects. And if anything, I have the evidence that I did have noticable physical effects from it just now. And yet…

Most of the time I still tell myself I’m exaggerating. Even now with data right in front of me I’m telling myself it’s a fluke and it really is just in my head and I’m fine. Or if the data isn’t a mistake, then there’s something physiologically wrong with me and that’s all it is.

When I say this job and current phase of my life is killing me. I do mean it literally. The amount of stress, anxiety, hopelessness, unhealthy eating, lack of sleep, and insufficient exercise and negative mental environment during the majority of my day are slowly killing me. I’ve seen it in my own medical labs, in my heart rate just now, and multiple times a week when I breakdown before succumbing to sleep and repeating the whole cycle all over again.

And I know there are steps that can be taken to get out of this vicious cycle. I continue doing what I can, but every setback makes it that much harder to get up the next time. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.

You know the worst part? My job is to go up to people, people just like me, stuck in ruts and their own devastating cycles and tell them to eat their vegetables, maybe not sit on the couch after work until bedtime stressing about everything there is to be stressed about, and instead go for a walk or meal prep some overnight oats. That’s what I don’t think I can do anymore.

How do you tell someone the truth, that by not prioritizing what they eat, how much they exercise, how much sleep they get, and how stressed out they allow themselves to be, they are killing themselves faster than the cancer, renal failure, diabetes, heart failure, etc? How do you tell that to someone who knows all that and wants to do better, desperately wants to help themself, but is homeless, in prison, barely able to provide for their children if they skip a few meals, or simply has so much else vying for their attention that they do not have the mental capacity to care about the food they consume?

I’ve seen and heard so much suffering. Yet, even when I am at my best, have all the energy and drive and positivity to give my patients the care they deserve, I feel like my efforts are pointless. At the end of the day I can only hope I’ve helped the people I’ve spoken to. I’ll never know for certain. The only people I know about after an interaction are the ones who come back a week or days later, often with the same problem, and often with the same nutritional/lifestyle solution that could, at the very least, lessen the severity of their illness. Or, I know of the ones who die at the hospital with or without my efforts.

I don’t know if I can do this anymore.

Posted in Uncategorized

My Experience with Self Harm (Don’t Worry, I’m a Wimp)

Posted on by Lizzie Gomez

It Started Again with a Zit

I had this monstrous zit, almost on the tip of my nose, this past week. I’m talking massive, like the size of a reasonable thumbtack. A zit that my roommate kept bugging me to pop. I have a bit of a problem with picking, so I’d been restraining myself from doing that. Plus, I know every time I’ve popped a zit in my life, it’s gotten worse and taken longer to heal than when I’ve left it alone and let it go away on its own.

He kept bugging me about it. I popped it while he was asleep. Pus oozed out. Then blood. A lot of blood. I felt there had to be more pus. Why was there so much blood? I wanted all of it out. Like when I pick at an ingrown hair with a needle until I manage to get it out. I needed all the pus out of this enormous zit. So, I told myself not to, but I got out my pack of needles. And I start stabbing holes into this blemish then squeezing out more blood.

Eventually, some clear liquid comes out, but it’s still mostly blood. I keep picking with the needle, going around this slow forming blood clot and squeezing until only the tiniest drop of clear liquid is struggling to come out. It was oddly satisfying to pick at my face with the needle. Sometimes it hurt, but at the tip of this zit I couldn’t feel anything and managed to essentially pierce from one side of the zit to the other. I pulled up, but the skin I’d pierced was too thick to rip apart. I was slightly paranoid my roommate would wake up and find me with a needle to my nose, and the two bloody tissues smeared with blots of blood. He was sleeping naught two feet away from me, but he didn’t wake.

I’d Wanted to Cut, At First, but I’m More of a Picker

I’ve always thought myself a pansy for not being brave enough to cut myself. The two times I’ve tried it, I couldn’t commit. I was too scared. But, I like seeing the blood when I’ve picked at ingrown hairs on my legs in the past. Now this with my nose. I had another instance where I got something stuck in the palm of my hand. I think I fell on the sidewalk or something which pushed some rock or metal into the palm of my hand.

Thing was, there was this diminutive, pathetic bit of something lodged in my palm and I was extremely stressed with the stuff in my life. This was last fall, by the way. So, it was my first semester of my nutrition internship.  That was awful. One day, my roommate, seeing how stressed out of my mind I was, asked if he could do anything to help and what did I want? I wanted to borrow his thin, precise tweezers to get this stupid thing out of my palm. I did manage to get it out. Or I thought I did.

A few days later I went in again, with his tweezers (and then my needle when that didn’t work) to get some black stuff out of the same spot where I swore I’d already taken out the foreign object. Looking back, I’m almost certain that second thing I agonized about, and near surgically removed with my needle, was a blood clot. It just bothered me so much. I didn’t want a marred palm! Especially from something as stupid as falling! It was deep. I thought I might be giving myself a scar with how far I drove that needle into my skin. But I couldn’t stop.

I needed the stuff out of my hand! At one point it did hurt, but I needed it out. My vision was laser focused on that one point in my palm and everything else was blurry. The world didn’t seem real when I turned away from my hand after the job was done. It felt… amazing. Satisfying. I get that way when picking at my legs. I’ve never picked without a purpose. Ingrown hair, thing jammed into my hand or, now, giant zit on my face. But… it worries me that I’ve found a way to make myself bleed that doesn’t scare me.

 

“We all do things”

I’ve been tempted by self harm for years, but like I said, I’m too much of a scardy cat for that. Also, I don’t like the concept of scars. I don’t want to be reminded of how much I hate myself everytime I look at my skin. I don’t like marks or imperfections on my skin, as you guys can probably tell from the hand picking story. So, cutting just never added up for me.

But, as a character in my favorite book, Cut by Patricia McCormick, says, “we all do things”.  Yes, we all find a way to cope with our miserable existence. Some people cut, some people drink, some people work even harder.  I binge eat, sing, and recently, sleep. As calming as picking is, I don’t want it to become a thing. It doesn’t bother me, but I know it’s understandably gruesome. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I just wanted to vent about having a big zit on my nose. And it turned into a whole post. Gosh. I suck.

 

Note:

Wow. Okay. It’s a day later, but it feels like much more than that. Sorry if that upset anyone. I am not promoting self harm, just sharing my not so disapproving personal experiences on the topic. I understand self harm isn’t ideal or a good coping strategy. I’m very stressed at the moment and find it hard to make sense. I’m not taking the post down, because it’s more of my story as jumbled and nonsensical as it was written. Also, I’m having a really hard time writing for this blog and a post is a post. Yeahh, sorry again.