I had a bit of a rude shock on Tuesday, in the form of a rather short, bespectacled, well dressed, over paid psychiatrist.  As many of you know, I’ve been in four nasty car accidents which (in a nut shell) have left me with some 10-15% residual spinal incapacity, chronic neuropathic back pain, many physical limitations and (fun! fun! fun!) prescription drug dependency.

“And what else have we got for Borys, Harry?”.  “Well, June, we have six free steak knives!”  But seriously, what it comes with is chronic depression, insomnia, memory and concentration issues, general irritability, mood swings, an anxiety thing when it comes to driving and getting in cars, and a generally less than ‘happy, happy, joy, joy’ demeanour all round.  But that’s okay… I resigned myself many years ago to embracing my inner bitch and having to make her my outer bitch and people who have found that hard to deal with have often decided I’m not worth the effort and have fallen by the wayside.  Either, by over trying what little patience I possess or by virtue of simply requiring too much of my precious energy to give a shit about their problems.  Yeah, sorry about that… but I quite literally don’t have energy for the delicate and fragile egos of people who can’t cope when they think their world is ending cos their dead shit boyfriend stands them up, they flunked their studies because they were partying too hard or some other banal and completely controllable crap happens to them…  Come talk to me when you’ve had 20+ years of constant pain, 12 years of infertility, 4 car accidents, 5 miscarriages, have lost count of how many surgeries you’ve had, years of forced unemployment, and you have a favourite anaesthetist!  Then we can discuss how much life sucks arse.

What was I talking about again (oh dear, point in case!)… another unwanted side effect of all this nonsense is diminished concentration and problems with memory.  I can honestly say that most of 2008 and 2009 have been totally lost to me in a drug fucked haze… I know I was there.  I get reminded of particulars all the time… but stuffed if I can tell you anything specific from those few years, in particular when the psychs were trying to drown me in everything from Endep to Doxepine to Cypramil to Cymbalta to so much shit I’ve forgotten the names of them all by now.  So many different medications all with the same effect – no change to pain levels but left me severely compromised in the mental faculties department.  And I kinda thought I had left most of that behind me now I’m not taking 300MG OF DOXEPINE EVERY NIGHT (NB: as little as 500mg can be a fatal dose in sensitive adults).

But it turns out I was wrong.  The little bespectacled shrink that I mentioned at the beginning of this pathetic story is one of those medico-legal guys… You turn up.  They spend a couple of hours dissecting your entire life.  They ask you about family history, traumas, medication, previous diagnoses…  They run a few shrinky tests on you. They then write a very long winded and expensive report to a bunch of lawyers who are determining just how fucked up your life is, and how much that is worth on their fancy scales of personal indemnity fucked-uped-ness.

If you’ve never been embroiled in a third party personal injury claim it is important to point out that these doctors who poke and prod at you do NOT give a shit about your well being, and are not there to offer you TREATMENT or ADVICE of any kind.  They are just there to poke around under the hood and report back to the plethora of vultures… err, sorry lawyers involved in the litigation. And I say ‘lawyers’ because there are always several… mine and theirs. And each have their own orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, occupational therapists, psychiatrists etc designed to refute the findings of the other sides’ medical experts.  Yeah barrel of laughs.

This guy gives me three words and says repeat them back to me and then I’m going to get you to do a few concentration tests.  Sure  “Flag.  Ball.  Tree.”  No problem she thinks, feeling like she’s suddenly in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy as one of Meredith Grey’s Alzheimer’s trial patients… He then puts me through a few word exercises and an alphanumeric connect the dots thing and then says “What were the three words I gave you earlier.  I answer “Flag.  Ball.  And (oh fuck!) I err… I umm, can’t remember the third one… was it Floor?”.  No shit.  Never felt so exposed, compromised, stupid and incompetent in my life.  After a few abortive attempts to recall the word, he says “That’s ok, it was ‘Tree'”.  Nope.  Tree didn’t ring any bells and we were talking a passage of time here of less than about ten minutes.

So moral of the story is that I have the demeanour of a Rottweiler and the memory of a Goldfish, such that my ability to concentrate and rely on my memory is even worse than I thought it was.  I left that appointment feeling more than a little bit shell shocked and certainly wondering if I was going crazy or something.  I mean REALLY, losing my mind kinda crazy.  Talk about a swift, reality check, kick to the head.  🙁

Sigh… on the upside, I’m no longer wondering why I’m finding it so hard to memorize all this fucking Latin!  I now KNOW why I can’t remember that shit!  :S