kaberett | hello Internet, you're my favourite (Reply)

sebastienne is a rock star, okay. (This is literal as well as metaphorical, which is why it's my favourite way to describe them being incredible. I mean, in part it's just a lot of fun to explain to people that they're having a bath LIKE A ROCK STAR but! also!)

-- right, so, today I had a GP appointment about whether a PTSD diagnosis might be appropriate. Upshot: hurrah my GP is awesome.

So I was incredibly panicky about everything in the run-up, and s. very kindly prompted me to talk in great and tedious detail about the guiltknitting and intarsia and so on. And we arrived at the appointment and my GP was lovely about me having brought moral support along, and I babbled something about it being because I'm mad rather than because I think he's awful and scary, only I do think he's scary because he's a doctor, and around this point he got a Look, and after a bit more babbling he very gently pointed out that it's okay, he can tell there's a problem, because normally in our appointments I'm extremely focussed and clear and to the point and don't have any difficulty explaining what I think the issue is.

He was fantastic about consent - checking whether a label is a thing I want, making explicit that the bit where he tends to be fairly pragmatic and I tend to be fairly theoretical in approaching my health doesn't mean I'm wrong and is something he's entirely happy to work with, asking if I'd be happy to be referred to the consultant psychiatrist who does one-morning-a-week clinics at my GP surgery, checking in as to whether I might be willing to consider a course of CBT, explicitly saying that I'd clearly need more than 6 sessions and there were ways to make this happen on the NHS. And so on. Really really good about me going "I don't actually want to train myself to just not notice warning signs because some of them I learned for really good reasons", etc.

So. Yes. Upshot: hour-long consult with psychiatrist on the 11th of Feb, follow-up appt with awesome GP after the fact a week or two later once he's had time to digest the report to discuss possible treatment plans, in the meantime keep doing what I'm doing.

s. was brilliant about letting me hold their hand & Just Dealing With It when I went "um, I'm really sorry, I can't unpack, can you explain what I mean by and then facesfriend pulled a face and Dan Was In My House?" and then letting me drag them around the Natural History Museum (new stegosaurus! an entire minerals gallery I'd been oblivious to because it's sociology-of-minerals not the scientific collection!) to calm myself down and then letting me feed them such that I ate dinner - housemate is off having dinner with my boything tonight, eyeroll ;) - and. yes. things? things happened.

And I got home and wrote a first draft of the sodding conference abstract; it will need lots of reworking BUT I HAVE WORDS DOWN ON PAPER. I win.