I had a nervous breakdown and did 14 days in a mental hospital. The anxiety was just too much to handle and I became suicidal, so on February 2, I called 911 and was taken to West Plains, MO where I was put on Cymbalta and Seroquel.
That's the nutshell version.
January 23rd I started having anxiety attacks. Everything was going fine, honestly, but they just started and I couldn't get them to stop. I stopped eating and sleeping. I looked awful and I just couldn't function. I went to work on the 26th and 27th of January, and the evening of the 27th I went to the doctor and described my attacks. She wanted me to get on Paxil and I said I didn't want to get on an antidepressant because I wasn't depressed, just randomly anxious. She prescribed Vistaril.
That night I had an anxiety attack so severe that I was hyperventilating. It was just about midnight. I took a Vistaril but it didn't even put a dent in the anxiety. I woke my mom up because she had never seen me have an actual anxiety attack before. In the past when I'd mentioned anxiety/attacks, she would tell me to suck it up or that I was feeling sorry for myself. Her seeing me like that really put things into perspective.
I didn't sleep that night and I tried to sleep on Saturday during the day but the neighbors had chainsaws going all day to cut up a tree that had fallen down. I did finally fall asleep that night. I still hadn't really eaten, though. Everything I ate was either being thrown up or was instant diarrhea.
The worst part is that I had absolutely no idea why I was panicking. Overall, things had been really good. A few bad things that weren't great but that's life, right?
I started to feel like I was slowly getting better when my mom was making me eat. Keeping my blood sugar reasonable helped take the edge off but it wasn't a cure. On Wednesday, the anxiety had gotten so out of control that I realized I needed to go back to the doctor. It was a different doctor in the clinic that day and she said she didn't think I needed Paxil, but that I needed a stronger anxiety medication. She prescribed Buspar, but first had me take a pregnancy test.
The test was negative and I cried my eyes out over that. Weird. Brendan went into Walmart for me to get my prescription and sat with me while I cried.
I drove home and took the Buspar around 9pm. By 1030 I was in bed and finally fell asleep.
2:30AM I wake up shaking violently. It's as if I'm drowning in pure terror. I started having a lot of suicidal thoughts. "I can't live this way. I need to end this." I was having very specific thoughts about how to kill myself. I texted my boss around 4am and said I wouldn't be in. The suicidal thoughts were so strong by 5am that I knew I had to call 911.
The police showed up, then the paramedics. Fortunately my uncle was one of the paramedics on duty so he gave me a big hug and helped calm me down a bit. When we got to the ER, they drew blood and my uncle called my mom to let her know what was going on. The hospital staff tried to get me to eat but I was just throwing it up. The head nurse was calling neuropsych units of various hospitals to see if there were any open beds.
My mom showed up just before 7am. I was mourning my own death. I started to say I wish I'd done more, I wish I'd accomplished more. I was certain nobody would be able to help me. The nurse was trying to find a hospital with room for another psych patient. She came in and told us that the facility in West Plains was probably our best hope, but she was waiting on their psychiatrist to call back. They were monitoring us because a lot of times people threaten suicide, it's for attention, so they wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be taking a bed from someone who actually needed it.
At noon, the psychiatrist called back and said they would take me. I was in an ambulance by 1:30pm. Being anxious, I was absolutely terrified, but once we were on the road for about 20 minutes I started to calm down and enjoy the ride.
I got to the West Plains neuropsych unit around 3pm, and I was on the 'acute side.' I was pretty freaked out seeing these people. A lot of them had really violent tendencies, and so that was the first thing the intake nurse asked me. "When you get fed up and angry, what do you do? Do you lash out?" I told her I don't really get angry like that. I get frustrated but not lashing-out angry. She said that the facility does use restraints if need be, I just needed to be aware.
She took me to my room and got me some stuff to shower. It felt great to shower. I actually couldn't remember the last time I really took care of myself. Once I was done, they said they'd evaluated me and I could be moved over to the 'step-down side,' which is for people who aren't acute, obviously.
Because I was on suicide watch, I was put in the room right next to the nurse's station. The first thing I noticed about that room was a book in the windowsill. It was The Knight by Steven James. It only took me 3 days to read it, but I digress. Dinner was at 5pm. I ate and called my mom. She had just worked a night shift so she was asleep around 5:30, so I left her a voice message telling her I had made it to the hospital okay and that so far everyone was super nice. I deliberately didn't give her the number because I was so exhausted that I just wanted to sleep.
But she got the number and called me around 9:30, waking me up. I was a little aggravated, but she was apologetic. She upset me though, because she said, "While you're down there, I'm going to move your bed to my house because I want you to move in with me." I was so... ugh. I said, "I don't really want to talk about this or think about this right now." She said she was sorry, we said our I loves yous an goodnights and I went back to bed.
At 5am a CNA came into the room to do my vitals. I got used to that quickly - 5am, 1pm and 8pm our vitals would be taken, and in my case, more than that if I was having an anxiety attack so I could be sedated. If my blood pressure was too low, I couldn't be sedated. Fortunately that was never an issue.
The nurses would come around twice a day to listen to our hearts and lungs. "Are you thinking about hurting yourself or someone else? Are you hearing voices or seeing shadows that aren't there?"
Just the hurting myself part.
Breakfast was served at 7am. I had to be forced to eat on more than one occasion, and forced to shower once. It was very difficult to get me out of my room at first. We had group therapy sessions at 9am-11am and from 1pm-3pm. The first group therapy session I attended, we discussed general anxiety disorder. I was reading over the checklist and I hit the mark on every single one. Then I suddenly had hellacious diarrhea. I raised my hand and asked if I could please go to the restroom. I was given permission and I scrambled back to my room where I sat on the toilet and cried. Not my finest moment.
Then I sat on my bed and tried to hold it together. I just sat there rocking and staring out the window, tears streaming down my face, missing work, missing my family, missing the life that vanished for no apparent reason.
A nurse came in to check on me just as I started hyperventilating. I started shaking uncontrollably. She brought me to the nurse's station and they did my vitals and gave me an Ativan. Then they brought me to a special chair where I got to sit and cry forever while a nurse talked to me about how I was feeling.
A little while later I saw the psychiatrist. He was really nice an said he wanted to start me on a low dose of Cymbalta.
The next day at the next group, we talked about major depressive disorder. Again, each one of those hit the mark and I burst into tears. Panic attack, another Ativan.
The doctor increased my Cymbalta from 20mg to 30mg after a couple days. The only way I would leave my room, though, was to be sedated. I couldn't function around people without being sedated. They were struggling to find an anxiety medication that was actually helping me. Gabapentin was absolutely amazing in that it completely killed my anxiety, but I was high as a kite. I was super talkative, couldn't stay focused on a single task, and was dizzy. Sad that it had that many side-effects because not being anxious was such a beautiful change.
They finally started me on Seroquel after I started crying after a couple days of not crying. I had said I felt like I slid backwards and so they thought Seroquel would help round out Cymbalta. It worked, but I had to be monitored for a few days.
In the meantime, I was a reading fiend. Any book I could get my hands on, I read. Two of the several were actually good.
I met some really interesting people. I was eventually assigned a roommate. Her name was Danise. She was really nice. She heard voices and sometimes saw shadows. I don't know the details of that. One day she was crying and I asked her if she was okay, and she said yes but she just really missed her dog. I felt bad for her because everytime it seemed like she was going to be released, something came up and they kept her.
There was a guy there named Jason. That guy, wow. While in group, we all heard a guy down the hall yelling expletives about the doctor, calling him The N Word(tm) and saying the doctor was out to kill him. He was demanding an Ativan, and from what I overheard, they were willing to give it to him so long as his vitals were okay - but he wouldn't let the CNA take his vitals. He started pounding on the glass and reaching through the slots to get at the nurses, and Jason happened to be walking by and jumped on this guy's back. Huge fight breaks out. Two CNAs and a nurse tried to separate them. I, at that point in my anxiety, get under a table.
The next day, Jason is in group. He has stitches in his head - several, actually. I think I'll just number the stories he told about those stitches.
He had stitches in his head...
1. From the fight with that guy.
2. Because he was giving his mom a hug and his dad thought he was trying to choke her so hit him over the head with an oxygen tank.
3. Because he was giving his mom a hug and his dad thought he was trying to choke her because his dad thinks he's a drug addict, but he's not.
4. Because his dad is a viking and his mom is Hebrew so he's a Viking Hebrew and his dad just wanted to make sure 'his boy could take it,' so hit him in the head with an oxygen tank.
5. Because his dad was trying to get his pills and he filled the pill bottle with water, destroying the pills, so his dad got mad and hit him over the head with an oxygen tank.
6. Because when he put the water in the pill bottle to destroy the pills, he realized he still needed those pills for pain, so he was just drinking the pill water, then realized that he didn't actually know how much he was taking, so his dad hit him over the head with an oxygen tank.
The truest story, from what I gleaned, is story #2. I believe it because I answered the phone one night and it was a woman asking for Jason. Because I was on suicide watch, the nurses had set up a little table for me outside their station and it was next to the phone. When he got on the phone, he kept saying he was sorry but he really was only trying to give her a hug, dad was wrong, he wasn't trying to strangle her.
He got to the point where he was always talking about how he was a viking Hebrew that the group leader nearly lost her temper because he'd hijack group with his crazy stories. "I'm Jason Starr Hagle - that's Starr with two Rs. That's my Hebrew name. I'm a Viking Hebrew."
I don't ever want to forget that, for some reason.
At another point during my stay, a nurse violated HIPAA and I got very upset about it. We were sitting in group and she says, "Mallory, Jessie here also goes to Missouri S&T! That's where you work, right? You two are from the same town!" I was so, so mad. Maybe mad isn't the best word but I got paranoid. Anxiety is a tricky thing in that it can manipulate things... and I was just convinced this Jessie girl was going to go tell everyone at S&T about my horrific panic attacks and how my hair was never brushed and how I looked like absolute hell. But after a couple days, I approached her and we had a really nice conversation.
During that bit, a guy I recognized from him working at the local Walmart appeared. His name was Benedict and we actually ended up becoming friends. We both live in Salem and drive to Rolla for work. He has a wife and three kids all under the age of 5. Hectic.
Overall the place was a good 50/50 mix of people who were there to have mental health medication adjusted or people who were there for a drug or alcohol abuse issue. I was there for 14 days because that's all my health insurance would cover. I was really nervous about coming home at first, but once I started packing, I became more excited about it. The drive home was rainy and yucky. I had messages from several people wondering where I was. Only about 5 people knew where I actually was and the whole time I was there, I only talked to my mom, Luke and Michael.
I did a lot of coloring, journaling reading and origami. One of the nurses saw me doing origami and said that her husband had loved origami too. He passed away a few years back and she said she never had the strength to go through his things, but if I wanted that kit, I could have it. I accepted and she brought it in, so I made her a bouquet or origami tulips and she cried.
It was decided that it would be best for me to move in with my mom, which means I have to find a home for or take three cats to the shelter. I hate to do that because I love them so much but I just can't live there anymore.
My senior desk assistant, Matthew, had messaged me saying, "When I said goodbye forever yesterday, I didn't mean it!" I laughed and texted him back saying he made me smile and he said, "You make me smile every day!!" It made me melty. I had thought of him a bit while I was in the hospital - wondering if he was handling the desk okay, worried perhaps I would never see him again. I knew I would miss the way he gets so excited about stuff and talks about it forever. Even when I don't understand it, I enjoy listening because he speaks so passionately. I love being around people like that.
The psychiatrist wanted me at home with my mom for a full week before I went back to work. I spent the weak dreading going back to work because i was so scared I was going to have a massive anxiety attack and lose everything. It was a constant feedback loop of anxiety.
I returned to work on February 20. The first couple hours the anxiety was hellish, but I took a couple of my as-needed pills and I got through the day. Tuesday and Wednesday were the same. But Thursday? Thursday was amazing. Friday was even better. As of Friday, I've not had to take anymore of my as-needed pills - just taking my assigned doses has done the trick.
But on Thursday there was drama. Matthew had been called into the office by Robert, who is our immediate supervisor. They were in the office for a really long time. When Matt finally came out, he sat on a chair in my office and was really quiet. I asked if he was okay and he said no, but he would tell me why later. Long story semi-short, he went to a party a couple weeks before (while I was in the hospital), got insanely drunk, and spilled a bunch of confidential information, including speculation about where I was. He was dropping hints like "Mallory is in the hospital because of stuff from her past." The hints he was dropping were meant to get other people in the room to inquire further, but they all work for the same department and they were uncomfortable about it, so they filed a report against him.
When I found out, I wasn't really mad - just kind of pitied Matt. He has a habit of blowing all his accomplishments up into huge exaggerations that make him out to be a big winner all the time. It's clearly a self-esteem issue. He apologized to me greatly, said he didn't even remember doing it but knows he did because how else would they have known? I told him I forgave him. It's not like I've never made a mistake.
So what made me snap? I would say it was a culmination of things. There's been a lot on my mind lately.
The presidency. The "Muslim ban." The fact that at 33 I have so little money even though I work full time that I still can't live alone - I often feel very left behind when I compare my life to my old high school classmates. I want kids some day but I'm not ready to even begin dating someone, so that clock is about to tick its last tick. Budget cuts in my line of work. My credit score is bad and the car I'm paying on isn't worth even a fraction of what I'm paying. I'm overweight and very unhappy about that.
Death by a thousand papercuts.
That's the nutshell version.
January 23rd I started having anxiety attacks. Everything was going fine, honestly, but they just started and I couldn't get them to stop. I stopped eating and sleeping. I looked awful and I just couldn't function. I went to work on the 26th and 27th of January, and the evening of the 27th I went to the doctor and described my attacks. She wanted me to get on Paxil and I said I didn't want to get on an antidepressant because I wasn't depressed, just randomly anxious. She prescribed Vistaril.
That night I had an anxiety attack so severe that I was hyperventilating. It was just about midnight. I took a Vistaril but it didn't even put a dent in the anxiety. I woke my mom up because she had never seen me have an actual anxiety attack before. In the past when I'd mentioned anxiety/attacks, she would tell me to suck it up or that I was feeling sorry for myself. Her seeing me like that really put things into perspective.
I didn't sleep that night and I tried to sleep on Saturday during the day but the neighbors had chainsaws going all day to cut up a tree that had fallen down. I did finally fall asleep that night. I still hadn't really eaten, though. Everything I ate was either being thrown up or was instant diarrhea.
The worst part is that I had absolutely no idea why I was panicking. Overall, things had been really good. A few bad things that weren't great but that's life, right?
I started to feel like I was slowly getting better when my mom was making me eat. Keeping my blood sugar reasonable helped take the edge off but it wasn't a cure. On Wednesday, the anxiety had gotten so out of control that I realized I needed to go back to the doctor. It was a different doctor in the clinic that day and she said she didn't think I needed Paxil, but that I needed a stronger anxiety medication. She prescribed Buspar, but first had me take a pregnancy test.
The test was negative and I cried my eyes out over that. Weird. Brendan went into Walmart for me to get my prescription and sat with me while I cried.
I drove home and took the Buspar around 9pm. By 1030 I was in bed and finally fell asleep.
2:30AM I wake up shaking violently. It's as if I'm drowning in pure terror. I started having a lot of suicidal thoughts. "I can't live this way. I need to end this." I was having very specific thoughts about how to kill myself. I texted my boss around 4am and said I wouldn't be in. The suicidal thoughts were so strong by 5am that I knew I had to call 911.
The police showed up, then the paramedics. Fortunately my uncle was one of the paramedics on duty so he gave me a big hug and helped calm me down a bit. When we got to the ER, they drew blood and my uncle called my mom to let her know what was going on. The hospital staff tried to get me to eat but I was just throwing it up. The head nurse was calling neuropsych units of various hospitals to see if there were any open beds.
My mom showed up just before 7am. I was mourning my own death. I started to say I wish I'd done more, I wish I'd accomplished more. I was certain nobody would be able to help me. The nurse was trying to find a hospital with room for another psych patient. She came in and told us that the facility in West Plains was probably our best hope, but she was waiting on their psychiatrist to call back. They were monitoring us because a lot of times people threaten suicide, it's for attention, so they wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be taking a bed from someone who actually needed it.
At noon, the psychiatrist called back and said they would take me. I was in an ambulance by 1:30pm. Being anxious, I was absolutely terrified, but once we were on the road for about 20 minutes I started to calm down and enjoy the ride.
I got to the West Plains neuropsych unit around 3pm, and I was on the 'acute side.' I was pretty freaked out seeing these people. A lot of them had really violent tendencies, and so that was the first thing the intake nurse asked me. "When you get fed up and angry, what do you do? Do you lash out?" I told her I don't really get angry like that. I get frustrated but not lashing-out angry. She said that the facility does use restraints if need be, I just needed to be aware.
She took me to my room and got me some stuff to shower. It felt great to shower. I actually couldn't remember the last time I really took care of myself. Once I was done, they said they'd evaluated me and I could be moved over to the 'step-down side,' which is for people who aren't acute, obviously.
Because I was on suicide watch, I was put in the room right next to the nurse's station. The first thing I noticed about that room was a book in the windowsill. It was The Knight by Steven James. It only took me 3 days to read it, but I digress. Dinner was at 5pm. I ate and called my mom. She had just worked a night shift so she was asleep around 5:30, so I left her a voice message telling her I had made it to the hospital okay and that so far everyone was super nice. I deliberately didn't give her the number because I was so exhausted that I just wanted to sleep.
But she got the number and called me around 9:30, waking me up. I was a little aggravated, but she was apologetic. She upset me though, because she said, "While you're down there, I'm going to move your bed to my house because I want you to move in with me." I was so... ugh. I said, "I don't really want to talk about this or think about this right now." She said she was sorry, we said our I loves yous an goodnights and I went back to bed.
At 5am a CNA came into the room to do my vitals. I got used to that quickly - 5am, 1pm and 8pm our vitals would be taken, and in my case, more than that if I was having an anxiety attack so I could be sedated. If my blood pressure was too low, I couldn't be sedated. Fortunately that was never an issue.
The nurses would come around twice a day to listen to our hearts and lungs. "Are you thinking about hurting yourself or someone else? Are you hearing voices or seeing shadows that aren't there?"
Just the hurting myself part.
Breakfast was served at 7am. I had to be forced to eat on more than one occasion, and forced to shower once. It was very difficult to get me out of my room at first. We had group therapy sessions at 9am-11am and from 1pm-3pm. The first group therapy session I attended, we discussed general anxiety disorder. I was reading over the checklist and I hit the mark on every single one. Then I suddenly had hellacious diarrhea. I raised my hand and asked if I could please go to the restroom. I was given permission and I scrambled back to my room where I sat on the toilet and cried. Not my finest moment.
Then I sat on my bed and tried to hold it together. I just sat there rocking and staring out the window, tears streaming down my face, missing work, missing my family, missing the life that vanished for no apparent reason.
A nurse came in to check on me just as I started hyperventilating. I started shaking uncontrollably. She brought me to the nurse's station and they did my vitals and gave me an Ativan. Then they brought me to a special chair where I got to sit and cry forever while a nurse talked to me about how I was feeling.
A little while later I saw the psychiatrist. He was really nice an said he wanted to start me on a low dose of Cymbalta.
The next day at the next group, we talked about major depressive disorder. Again, each one of those hit the mark and I burst into tears. Panic attack, another Ativan.
The doctor increased my Cymbalta from 20mg to 30mg after a couple days. The only way I would leave my room, though, was to be sedated. I couldn't function around people without being sedated. They were struggling to find an anxiety medication that was actually helping me. Gabapentin was absolutely amazing in that it completely killed my anxiety, but I was high as a kite. I was super talkative, couldn't stay focused on a single task, and was dizzy. Sad that it had that many side-effects because not being anxious was such a beautiful change.
They finally started me on Seroquel after I started crying after a couple days of not crying. I had said I felt like I slid backwards and so they thought Seroquel would help round out Cymbalta. It worked, but I had to be monitored for a few days.
In the meantime, I was a reading fiend. Any book I could get my hands on, I read. Two of the several were actually good.
I met some really interesting people. I was eventually assigned a roommate. Her name was Danise. She was really nice. She heard voices and sometimes saw shadows. I don't know the details of that. One day she was crying and I asked her if she was okay, and she said yes but she just really missed her dog. I felt bad for her because everytime it seemed like she was going to be released, something came up and they kept her.
There was a guy there named Jason. That guy, wow. While in group, we all heard a guy down the hall yelling expletives about the doctor, calling him The N Word(tm) and saying the doctor was out to kill him. He was demanding an Ativan, and from what I overheard, they were willing to give it to him so long as his vitals were okay - but he wouldn't let the CNA take his vitals. He started pounding on the glass and reaching through the slots to get at the nurses, and Jason happened to be walking by and jumped on this guy's back. Huge fight breaks out. Two CNAs and a nurse tried to separate them. I, at that point in my anxiety, get under a table.
The next day, Jason is in group. He has stitches in his head - several, actually. I think I'll just number the stories he told about those stitches.
He had stitches in his head...
1. From the fight with that guy.
2. Because he was giving his mom a hug and his dad thought he was trying to choke her so hit him over the head with an oxygen tank.
3. Because he was giving his mom a hug and his dad thought he was trying to choke her because his dad thinks he's a drug addict, but he's not.
4. Because his dad is a viking and his mom is Hebrew so he's a Viking Hebrew and his dad just wanted to make sure 'his boy could take it,' so hit him in the head with an oxygen tank.
5. Because his dad was trying to get his pills and he filled the pill bottle with water, destroying the pills, so his dad got mad and hit him over the head with an oxygen tank.
6. Because when he put the water in the pill bottle to destroy the pills, he realized he still needed those pills for pain, so he was just drinking the pill water, then realized that he didn't actually know how much he was taking, so his dad hit him over the head with an oxygen tank.
The truest story, from what I gleaned, is story #2. I believe it because I answered the phone one night and it was a woman asking for Jason. Because I was on suicide watch, the nurses had set up a little table for me outside their station and it was next to the phone. When he got on the phone, he kept saying he was sorry but he really was only trying to give her a hug, dad was wrong, he wasn't trying to strangle her.
He got to the point where he was always talking about how he was a viking Hebrew that the group leader nearly lost her temper because he'd hijack group with his crazy stories. "I'm Jason Starr Hagle - that's Starr with two Rs. That's my Hebrew name. I'm a Viking Hebrew."
I don't ever want to forget that, for some reason.
At another point during my stay, a nurse violated HIPAA and I got very upset about it. We were sitting in group and she says, "Mallory, Jessie here also goes to Missouri S&T! That's where you work, right? You two are from the same town!" I was so, so mad. Maybe mad isn't the best word but I got paranoid. Anxiety is a tricky thing in that it can manipulate things... and I was just convinced this Jessie girl was going to go tell everyone at S&T about my horrific panic attacks and how my hair was never brushed and how I looked like absolute hell. But after a couple days, I approached her and we had a really nice conversation.
During that bit, a guy I recognized from him working at the local Walmart appeared. His name was Benedict and we actually ended up becoming friends. We both live in Salem and drive to Rolla for work. He has a wife and three kids all under the age of 5. Hectic.
Overall the place was a good 50/50 mix of people who were there to have mental health medication adjusted or people who were there for a drug or alcohol abuse issue. I was there for 14 days because that's all my health insurance would cover. I was really nervous about coming home at first, but once I started packing, I became more excited about it. The drive home was rainy and yucky. I had messages from several people wondering where I was. Only about 5 people knew where I actually was and the whole time I was there, I only talked to my mom, Luke and Michael.
I did a lot of coloring, journaling reading and origami. One of the nurses saw me doing origami and said that her husband had loved origami too. He passed away a few years back and she said she never had the strength to go through his things, but if I wanted that kit, I could have it. I accepted and she brought it in, so I made her a bouquet or origami tulips and she cried.
It was decided that it would be best for me to move in with my mom, which means I have to find a home for or take three cats to the shelter. I hate to do that because I love them so much but I just can't live there anymore.
My senior desk assistant, Matthew, had messaged me saying, "When I said goodbye forever yesterday, I didn't mean it!" I laughed and texted him back saying he made me smile and he said, "You make me smile every day!!" It made me melty. I had thought of him a bit while I was in the hospital - wondering if he was handling the desk okay, worried perhaps I would never see him again. I knew I would miss the way he gets so excited about stuff and talks about it forever. Even when I don't understand it, I enjoy listening because he speaks so passionately. I love being around people like that.
The psychiatrist wanted me at home with my mom for a full week before I went back to work. I spent the weak dreading going back to work because i was so scared I was going to have a massive anxiety attack and lose everything. It was a constant feedback loop of anxiety.
I returned to work on February 20. The first couple hours the anxiety was hellish, but I took a couple of my as-needed pills and I got through the day. Tuesday and Wednesday were the same. But Thursday? Thursday was amazing. Friday was even better. As of Friday, I've not had to take anymore of my as-needed pills - just taking my assigned doses has done the trick.
But on Thursday there was drama. Matthew had been called into the office by Robert, who is our immediate supervisor. They were in the office for a really long time. When Matt finally came out, he sat on a chair in my office and was really quiet. I asked if he was okay and he said no, but he would tell me why later. Long story semi-short, he went to a party a couple weeks before (while I was in the hospital), got insanely drunk, and spilled a bunch of confidential information, including speculation about where I was. He was dropping hints like "Mallory is in the hospital because of stuff from her past." The hints he was dropping were meant to get other people in the room to inquire further, but they all work for the same department and they were uncomfortable about it, so they filed a report against him.
When I found out, I wasn't really mad - just kind of pitied Matt. He has a habit of blowing all his accomplishments up into huge exaggerations that make him out to be a big winner all the time. It's clearly a self-esteem issue. He apologized to me greatly, said he didn't even remember doing it but knows he did because how else would they have known? I told him I forgave him. It's not like I've never made a mistake.
So what made me snap? I would say it was a culmination of things. There's been a lot on my mind lately.
The presidency. The "Muslim ban." The fact that at 33 I have so little money even though I work full time that I still can't live alone - I often feel very left behind when I compare my life to my old high school classmates. I want kids some day but I'm not ready to even begin dating someone, so that clock is about to tick its last tick. Budget cuts in my line of work. My credit score is bad and the car I'm paying on isn't worth even a fraction of what I'm paying. I'm overweight and very unhappy about that.
Death by a thousand papercuts.