Tag: depression

Off work

Last week I basically hit rock bottom. On Tuesday (one week ago today) I had major problems and was pretty much non-functional and I somehow managed to get through the day without considering anything too drastic.

I’m not going to say anything about the text messages I got.. “Can you just phone us, we need to know something…”. Ill means Ill – not “I just can’t be arsed coming into the office”

I went into work on Wednesday – primarily because I wanted to talk to the HR director about the process for me going off sick.

My Boss works from the US and when he came on line at about 2pm he asked me if I was feeling any better. I said that no I wasn’t. He then said the most amazing thing:

“If you are sick you don’t need to come into work”

Wow – that’s pretty fucking decent of him isn’t it.

“If you are sick you can work from home”

Err WHAT? What the Fuck? If I’m ill I can work from home… well that’s so mighty damned generous of him isn’t it.

By about 3pm I was a wreck and knew I had to take the rest of the week off. Well that went down like a lead balloon I can tell you.

I saw the doc on Thursday (having moved my appointment back by a week) and he signed me off work for 2 weeks and told me to keep my mobile phone turned off . I logged onto my works email account to set and out of office reply and there were quite a few emails demanding that I let them know things.

I ignored them because I knew if I replied to any of them that they’d just snow me under.

So here I am – and I’m feeling a lot better surprisingly It didn’t help that we got a phone call early on Thursday morning letting us know that Kathy’s dad had died on Wednesday night. So Kathy spent most of Thursday getting a flight back to Maine sorted out and I took her down on Saturday morning.

So I’ve been out for too much beer and Vietnamese food on Saturday (Simon’s birthday) and then I fixed Simon’s Internet Connection for him on Sunday and then had a couple of beers as we listened to Señor Coconut and his Orchestra’s take on some Kraftwerk Classics – and until you’ve heard “Showroom Dummies” played in the Latin style you really have no idea what you are missing.

Talking to Simon and Richard and my brother Nick it’s good to know that people out there understand what its like and are all rooting for me to get better soon.

Facing up to Depression

For the past few months I’ve been suffering mood swings and often they kick in without notice or warning. I’ve also got disrupted sleep patterns and find my self getting annoyed very easily – both with myself and with others.

I booked an appointment at the doctors and went in and I didn’t say the D word once but described all my symptoms and filled in some paperwork.

Diagnosis is that I’m suffering from moderate depression… I’ve got another appointment in a couple of weeks when I’ll be re-assessed and he’ll then look at prescribing medication or other possible treatments.

So there hasn’t been much work done on the Canalblogs code – so sorry about that.

I’ve been building up a new server and Ubuntu is totally different from Suse so its complete learning curve for me (apache is totally different).

We’re also thinking of moving house – getting sick and fed up of how the neighbourhood is going. I’m married to a US citizen so going and living in the US is always a possibility but Maine really doesn’t have much call for Oracle DBAs….