Over Capacity

So… yeah…

I got a dog.

It’s been an extremely emotional process.

After my dog died (T-dog), I was grieving, obviously, but also, slowly but surely, my anxiety became worse and worse until about a month ago I was having anxiety attacks and panic attacks daily, and went through a 48 hour period where I had 7 full panic attacks.

I was reaching the point of literal emotional and physical exhaustion, and my body couldn’t stop.

I was considering suicide, purely out of the desperate inability to continue to live with the panic attacks.

It felt like drowning in the ocean and just being hit by wave after wave.  Some of them would be little waves and I’d brace myself, and get dunked a little, but manage, and some of them would be big waves that would tumble me and I barely survived… but I never got to rest.  Literally.  I was having panic attacks… in my sleep.  I would wake up in a panic attack in the middle of the night.

We were talking about hospitalization.

I was thinking about a permanent rest.

My therapist gently, determinedly, for weeks, suggested that I needed to get a new dog.

Now, in the back of my mind, I’ve always harbored a little negative thought about “emotional support animals.”  I’ve thought, hell, ALL animals are emotional support animals… that’s why we have animals.  But people who bring them on airplanes and into Walgreens are just milking the system.  I thought… yeah… some people with autism or something REALLY serious need an animal to help them regulate, but everyone else is just… milking it.

Then my dog died.

It was the first time in my life that I had no animal companions.  Even in my college dorm, I had a rabbit.

When I lived in an apartment that didn’t allow dogs, I got my cat.

I have never lived without an animal.

I didn’t realize that until the third time my therapist brought it up.

And I really didn’t want to think about it.  I was grieving for T-dog.  I didn’t want to think about another animal.  I didn’t want to think about losing him.  I didn’t want to deal with any of it.  It was too painful.  So I resisted.

And the anxiety slowly and steadily worked me towards death.  Literally.  No exaggeration.  Running the engine with the garage door closed became… not an occasional thought, but a multiple times a day serious battle with myself to resist.

I was losing the fight.

So… I painfully, with one eye closed, and with a lot of crying, looked at the website for the humane society.

I saw a dog that looked okay, and decided, on a Saturday morning, “That’s it.  I’ll just go adopt this dog.”

I hadn’t spoken with Sir or Sub Brother about it.  Hadn’t even told them I was considering it (I hadn’t been until that morning).  But I decided on the spot to just get it over with.

I took a shower, put on clothes, and by the time I was finished, reality had taken hold again and I changed my mind.  It was a terrible way to choose a dog, and I knew I wasn’t emotionally ready to care for a new dog.  The house wasn’t set up for a new dog.  It was just an impulse decision and I needed to rein myself in.

But it did prompt me to have the conversation with Sir and Sub Brother.

We discussed it for a long time that Saturday, and more on Sunday.  We basically decided we would start preparing for a dog to come into our lives, and when the right one showed up, we’d be ready.

I started reorganizing the house. I started grieving all over again for T-dog. I started checking the website for new dogs…  That Wednesday, a dog that fit all my criteria showed up.

I showed Sir and Sub Brother, they both agreed that he looked good.  I decided that if he was still in the shelter by Friday afternoon, I’d go after work and meet him.

Then I decided he was such a perfect dog, he wouldn’t BE at the shelter by Friday afternoon.

This shelter was in another town, a solid hour away from us, so I called my mom (who lives near that town) and asked her to go in and put a hold on the dog for me.  She did it on Thursday.  I arrived Friday afternoon – 12 other people had already gotten on the waiting list to adopt this dog, but my name was first (thanks, Mom!).  I met him, walked him, thought he was okay, and went with the adoption.

The guys went away skiing for the weekend so I could have the dog alone and he could get used to me and the house before he met them, too.

His name (not really) is R-dog.  He’s extremely sweet, learning his training, took a couple of weeks to stop being anxious every night… and ate two TV remotes and the shoelaces in Sir’s hiking boots (but hasn’t chewed up any furniture).

As far as a shelter dog, who is (we just found out) about 9 months old (shelter said he was 2) he’s doing amazingly well.

But he changed all my routines.  He changed my entire rhythm, he changed my emotional landscape.  He’s been a big change.

It’s been hard.

My anxiety dropped almost immediately (eating humble pie about that whole emotional support animal bias…) My stress went through the roof (yes, they’re different somehow.)

I worried constantly about leaving him when we were at work, about walking him, training him, and about HIS anxiety (he couldn’t settle at night… AT ALL).  I worried he might have hip problems or cancer, or some other horrible thing (Horrible Thing took T-dog without warning).

I worried about having the right food, the right toys… I worried that he didn’t know how to play with toys.  I worried about petting him too much, and not enough.  I worried about the guys liking him, I worried about him liking them more than me, I worried about him not liking them.  I worried about everything…

But the panic attacks were gone.

He’s been with us for just over 2 weeks now.

He’s adjusting.  His anxiety is getting better.  The vet says he’s healthy.  He loves the dog park, and me, and the guys.

I’m starting to find my routines again, though it’s still hard.  Bipolar means that any change in my environment… at all… (hello birthday celebration this afternoon throwing off my whole weekend!) disregulates everything.  I am struggling with my pills, with my eating routines, with sleeping routines, with getting out of the door in the morning, with coming home at night… every routine I have that gets me through every aspect of my day – getting ready for bed, making breakfast, taking a shower, eating lunch – all of them are mini-routines.  No one else would probably know it, most people don’t have to be conscious of their routines the way I do… but bipolar (or autism) makes you get really damn intentional about making everything a routine.  And the silliest, weirdest things that you’d think wouldn’t be a problem, get lost when something disrupts those routines.

In the past two weeks, I have gotten into bed 3 times still wearing my collar (I take it off at night), 4 times still wearing makeup, once still wearing one sock (not both), 6 times without taking my evening meds (5 times I’ve gotten back up to take them, the first time without them sucked too much to repeat).

Sir is now helping me get through bedtime routine, and he has to help CONSIDERABLY…  And bedtime routine is basically this – Get undressed, go into the bathroom, take off collar and glasses, put them in their spots, removed makeup, brush teeth, take evening pills, pee, wash hands, get in bed.

I’ve been doing that every night for… almost a year(when we moved into this house it took months to get that routine back again).

We got R-dog, and he doesn’t physically have any impact on my evening routine.  He’s pretty good at coming in the bedroom, finding his bed, and lying down.  So it would seem that there’s no logical reason for me to struggle with bedtime.  But my brain lost its grip on routines across the board, so now, I come upstairs, send R-dog to bed, take off my shoes (hopefully both at once, though sometimes I get distracted and end up wandering around wearing one shoe for fifteen minutes).  I sometimes get some of my clothes off before I wander into the bathroom, sometimes I stand in the bathroom and can’t focus on what to do next.  Other times I get sidetracked and start doing something else entirely (reorganizing the medicine cabinet, cleaning the toilet on a Tuesday night, scrubbing the shower…) Or, I think of something and wander back out of the bathroom, leaving the toothpaste open and the toothbrush wet but not yet used.  I can’t focus.

It requires significant mental energy to do all the steps that need to be done to get ready for bed, and even when I expend the energy, it is often not enough.

And I feel overwhelmed and anxious about even just getting ready for bed, because I have to expend mental energy to focus on EVERY SINGLE TASK, and still get lost.

Now, extrapolate that to the entire day.  Getting ready for work in the morning.  SO MANY TASKS!  Even taking a shower requires a huge number of steps.  Most people don’t think about it, because, for them, their brain can encapsulate the entire routine without even thinking about it and it becomes simply “take a shower”, and they can “take a shower” without much more mental energy than thinking they want to do so.  For me, “take a shower” is a bucket full of individual tasks –  take meds, turn on the water, turn on the shower head, close the curtain, let the water heat WHILE taking off clothes, put clothes in the hamper, step into the shower (without breaking toes on the edge of the tub), wet body and hair, get soap on hands, soap body (multiple individual steps), rinse body (multiple individual steps), wet hair again, get shampoo, wash hair, rinse hair, get conditioner, condition hair, rinse again, turn off shower, turn off water, squeeze out hair, step out of shower (without breaking toes on the edge of tub), dry body (multiple individual steps), wrap hair in towel, put on deodorant, put on makeup, put on collar, unwrap hair, hang up towel, brush hair, blow dry hair…

Freaking exhausting!

Now, with practice, I can become more automatic in that routine.  I can set myself on “take a shower” and mostly my brain can get through all of those steps without having to think overly much about each one.  But that’s only WITH PRACTICE!  It takes WEEKS to get that routine automatic… and any change in any part of my life makes it all go away.  The routine goes and everything is back to individual steps that I have to remember and think about.

And that’s just to take a shower in the morning.

Then there’s “getting dressed”, and “feeding the dog”, and “making breakfast” (I eat literally the same breakfast every morning because anything different is too hard to deal with), “packing lunch” (I organize the night before, but I have to put the pieces into my lunch bag with an ice pack in the morning), “putting on badge and jacket”, “carrying things to the car”, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Life is an extremely long list of individual steps.

When your brain doesn’t have to think about all of them, it doesn’t seem so complicated…

When your brain has to stop and think through the steps of starting your car and pulling out of the garage… EVERY SINGLE MORNING, life gets overwhelming.

While I was grieving for T-dog, and grief disrupted my routines for a while, I had gotten them back in the past few months.

Now I have R-dog and I am way over capacity, again.  If my life could consist solely of taking a shower and getting dressed every day, I’d probably be right at my capacity.  Since it is SO MUCH MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT… I’m struggling.  Badly.

Sir keeps reminding me it will come.

And the panic attacks have stopped.

But right now, it all feels like shit.  And failing to do basic living isn’t leaving any room to do advanced living techniques like… going shopping, hanging out with friends, paying bills…

The store opens at 10, Sir is taking me to do advanced life skills of buying a birthday present for my mom.  R-dog needs to run around the dog park before that.  I need to shower and dress before that.  So… I’m off to use my entire mental capacity on showering.

Happy Sunday!